Raven's Ladder (6 page)

“Remind me one more time about how he saved us from the siege, and I’ll knock out your teeth.” Brevolo dug an elbow in just below his ribs. “His stonemastery’s a gift. We’re all grateful for it. But it’s still a mad gamble to follow him.”

He said he saw the Keeper. Right here
.

A prickling crept up the captain’s spine, a sense that he would never see his friend riding back toward Barnashum.

“He still hasn’t told me how he knew the beastmen were coming or how he knew exactly when they would charge. I wish he would. He carries burdens he needn’t bear alone.”

“Come inside.” Brevolo took his hand and pulled him toward the tunnel. “Tomorrow will be a busy day. We’ve overstayed our welcome here. Don’t you think Abascar should get ready to leave before Barnashum gives us another warning?”

He shivered and cursed, trudging after her. This would not be the night he had wanted it to be. A wedding would certainly raise the people’s spirits. But this was not a good time to ask Brevolo to join him in burning tattoos on the backs of their hands. It was an old fireside rumor that promises made in stormy weather would never last in sunlight.

Very well, maybe I am a bit superstitious
.

It was lonely out here. And Brevolo was as beautiful when she took off her armor as she was frightening when she put it on. When he sparred with her in swordplay, he came away with scars, just as he did when she kissed him. He would postpone his plan awhile longer. But only as long as he could stand it.

“If there is a Keeper,” he said as they stepped into the corridor, “I hope it brings the king back safe. I’m tired of surviving. I want to start living.”

She kissed him. They watched the storm worsen. Beneath the sky’s flickering canopy, the thrashing trees of the Cragavar danced—dark, wild, out of control.

T
he touch of tiny fingertips on her forearm, light and cool as snow-flakes, woke Say-ressa to orange candleglow. Three pairs of tearful eyes gleamed down at her where she lay in the healing cave. She was accustomed to seeing worry and grief here, but not for her.

“Luci, Madi, Margi,” she whispered through the cobwebs of her illness.

“Can’t you make yourself better?” Margi mumbled.

“Healers need strength,” she sighed. “It will take time for mine to return. But don’t be afraid. The king’s gone to find chillseed. I’ll be back on my feet soon.”

The triplets were clad in their handmade animal costumes—a cat, a rabbit, and an owl. They exchanged worried glances, then bowed so that their long yellow hair veiled some unspoken shame.

Behind them, a familiar silhouette towered in the doorway.

“Is that you, my love?” she asked.

Her husband, Ark-robin, was not as he had appeared so many times in her dreams, draped in a mantle of dust and rubble from House Abascar’s collapse. This time he was a silhouette illuminated through a shroud. Diamonds fell from his eyes.

“Release me,” she said to him, “or give me something to do. I’m useless here. A burden.”

She felt that touch on her arm again. Lifting her head from the pillows, she gasped as if rising to the surface of a dark lake.

The glowing figure in the door faded.

She had been mistaken. These girls had not come to comfort her.

“I’m listening.”

“We’re scared,” said Madi, her cloth rabbit ears flopping beside her face.

“Tell the guards what scares you. They’ll put your minds at ease.”

“We’re scared to tell the guards,” said Luci, eyes wide in the large painted circles of an owl’s watchful face.

The feline, Margi, only nodded, fingering the curling stone claws of her costume.

“I have to stay in bed,” Say-ressa whispered, “until my fever is gone.” Even as she said it, she knew the fever had worsened. Chillseed might not be enough now. “I must get well, for there are others in worse condition than I am. They need my help.”

“We know,” said Madi. “That’s why we’re here. Their voices are.” She raised the tip of one rabbit ear. “They’ve stopped calling for help.”

“Calling for help?” Say-ressa winced as a groan rose from the darkness at the edge of the cave. She extended her hand toward the sound. The others lay in stiff bandages while bones began their slow reunion.

Luci drew wild pictures in the air. “We didn’t mean to do it, but Wynn said we’d save the king. I didn’t want to—”

“I didn’t want to either,” Madi asserted, tears blurring the painted whiskers around her nose.

Margi glared at them. “It wasn’t wrong. We saved the king.”

Say-ressa sensed something else between their words, like a charge in the air during a lightning storm.
They’re thoughtspeakers. I can feel it. Doubly gifted
. “What,” she asked, “did Wynn tell you to do?”

“Wynn’s like my sisters,” sighed Madi. “Always sneakin’ around. He’s the one who found them.”

“He did what was necessary,” muttered Luci. “He showed us the cave where they were hiding, and we sealed it.”

“How many hours ago?”

The girls looked at one another.

“Last night.” Madi flinched as she said it.

“Get me crutches.” Say-ressa turned to prop herself up on an elbow. “You’ll have to take me there.”

“We’re scared,” whispered Luci.

“I’m not.” Margi folded her furry sleeves before her like a shield. “They deserved it.”

“Say-ressa!” Tabor Jan entered the room in a bluster, crouched, and laid a hand on the healer’s shoulder. “My lady, you’re to remain still.” He turned to the girls and growled in suspicion. “Why aren’t you having supper with the others?”

Say-ressa grasped the captain’s arm. The girls shrank together like baby mice in a burrow.

To any other eyes it was an ordinary patch of wall, textured by heat and storm, cooling in the dusk.

But to Tabor Jan, who had patrolled the ledges of Barnashum’s cliffs, it was a terrible confirmation. A cave’s mouth had vanished.

He unsheathed his sword and stepped back but not too far back. The precipice was near, and the dizzying space below made his stomach turn. He hated heights.

“Open the cave,” he said to the triplets.

Placing hands one beside the other across the center of the stone face, the girls set the stone to rippling, then running.

A breeze gusted out through the widening crevasse, cold and foul. Tabor Jan felt his muscles pull taut as the bowstrings of the defenders on either side.

No one emerged.

Tabor Jan stepped forward.

A voice, then—like evening dove song.

Tabor Jan peered into the dark, then strode through. His archers came behind him.

Blinking into the wedge of dusklight as if it were bright sun, a grey-haired soldier lay against the cave’s far wall, heaving for breath in a pool of blood gone cold. His right arm was a bloodied stump, ending where the elbow should be. He smacked his lips dryly together. And then that voice again. “Coming through the floor,” he cooed. “It’s got me. It won’t let go.”

“Dokkens, where are the others?” Tabor Jan’s feet were sticky, for bloody lines crisscrossed the floor like ribbons from an opened package. “My arm first. Then the rest of them.”

Black lines led to a corner of the cave and a break, the source of the chill. That burrow was far too small to have provided an escape. But the floor before it was littered with spots of gore and fragments of bone. Tabor Jan sank to his knees.

“The rest of them,” sighed the dying man. “Left me alone. For hours and hours.”

Hearing a faint cry, Tabor Jan turned in time to see the triplets flee from the entrance. He grabbed an archer’s wrist. “Go after them. Don’t let them say a word to anyone.”

The archer stood paralyzed by the horror of the spectacle. It took a shout to send him staggering away.

Tabor Jan took hold of the grudger’s remaining hand and winced at his desperate grip. “What happened?”

“Came through the floor,” Dokkens groaned, eyes wide and staring at the ceiling.

“What came through?”

“Branches. Or roots. So fast we couldn’t…” The man gestured toward the crack. “The smell. Do you remember?”

Tabor Jan’s nostrils flared, and a long-sealed door in the back of his memory opened. “The abyss beneath the Underkeep.” He looked at the crack again. He could not bring himself to ask any more questions. “The rumors are true. But the rumors spoke only of some terror in the Cragavar. Has it come so far?”

“The quake,” Dokkens whispered. “If this thing caused the quake, it’s coming through. Could be anywhere.”

Tabor Jan stood up. “The quake.” Pieces were fitting together in his mind to reveal an unexpected trouble.

In the distance someone sounded a horn, sonorous and urgent. An alarm. Tabor Jan looked to the second archer, who nodded and flew from the cave as if he’d been waiting for an excuse.

Tabor Jan was alone with Dokkens. There was no one here to guard the cave. But he was captain of the guard, and this horn was a summons he could not refuse.

He shouted in surprise as a hand grasped his shoulder. “You’d better answer that summons,” said Scharr ben Fray. “What are you doing here?” Tabor Jan looked past the mage. “Is Cal-raven with you?”

“He’s far from here. It’s for the best. I’m here to help.” Scharr ben Fray moved forward, put his hands to the wall, and melted shut that bloodied break. Then he turned and put his hand on Dokkens’ forehead. “Go, Captain. Get the people out, and arm them with torches. I’ll do what I can for this one.”

Another urgent horn blast spun Tabor Jan around and drew him out so that quickly he was running along the ledge, afraid of so much more than the open space alongside him.

He followed the shouts to the armory, where Brevolo readied an arrow and her sister Bryndei held a torch. Before them great tendrils like roots were thrashing, powerful as the tails of oceandragons. Limbs bashed at piles of armor, denting shields, crushing breastplates, bending and snapping spears. The break in the ground from which they lashed cracked and expanded under the pressure of their advance. From within that pile of empty, battered armor came a shrill scream.

“Who’s there?” he cried.

“Cortie!” said Brevolo in a voice unlike any he’d heard. “We’ve been trying to get to her. Tabor Jan, what in the name of Har-baron’s host are we fighting?”

Bryndei lunged and waved her torch, and the tendrils jerked back like spider legs.

The ground rumbled. New lines spread like veins through the stone.

Brevolo fired arrows into one of the writhing roots. But another slithered across it, snapping the shafts as casually as one might brush off biting flies. Only fire sent the branches recoiling.

The ground’s become Abascar’s enemy again. We’ve got to get out in the open
.

As three soldiers ran up to him, Tabor Jan shouted, “More torches!

Fast!”

He heard a gasp, and he turned just in time to see Bryndei caught by the ankle. She dropped her torch. One of the tendrils snatched a shield and smashed it down on the flame to crush out the light.

In darkness the clamor intensified. Tabor Jan called for Brevolo. Brevolo called for her sister. Bryndei screamed.

The shield came free of the torch, and in its failing glimmer he saw Cortie, unconscious, limp as a rag doll, suspended in the coils of a root. Bryndei was nowhere to be seen. And then the light went out again.

L
ike shards of stained glass, scraps of Auralia’s weaving glimmered, reflecting light that had no discernible source. Beside a blue river of reedcloth, Lesyl knelt, considering the collection—useful crafts like scarves and stockings alongside mysterious patches that blazed just for color. “Leave whatever can be spared,” Tabor Jan had said. She folded the reedcloth, gathering the colors until the whole span was bundled like a bedroll.
Cal-raven would never spare these
. She tried to bind the roll with leather straps, but her hands trembled, and the knots collapsed.

Softly she hummed a memory—a summer’s evening on Deep Lake’s glassy surface with her father’s hands on the oars and her mother’s lips to a claywhistle. She could barely hear her own melody, for the tunnel roared with the tumult of change. But she sang anyway. The song slowed her breathing and stilled her frantic heartbeat until she could bind the straps fast.

“Have you seen Wynn this morning?” It was one of the triplets, dressed as an owl. “We can’t find him anywhere.”

Lesyl folded the girl’s cold fingers into her own. “No one’s found him yet, Madi. I’m sorry.”

“I’m Luci,” sighed the girl. “Madi’s asking other folks. A horse went missing, you know.”

“Yes. We think he fled after the king’s departure.”

“He didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”

“Luci.” Lesyl took the girl by the shoulders. “Wynn meant well. So did you. We all make mistakes with good intentions.”

“What if the king’s dragged him off to punish him?”

She laughed bitterly. “The king has more important things to do.”

“Did he tell you that?”