Silvermay (13 page)

An awkward silence followed until he realised that no one had moved.

‘Gabbet, where are you?' he said.

‘He hasn't come back yet, Master Dessar. You sent him to look for small caves hidden in the hillsides, remember?' The speaker was dressed in much the same style as the man we'd seen earlier. The other assistant, I guessed.

Arnou Dessar pondered this for a moment. ‘So I did. Well then, you get our guests some water, would you, Norling?'

It was time we offered our own names. Tamlyn began, once again calling himself Piet, then introducing Ryall and me and Lucien, who slept in the harness with his face slouched against my shoulder.

Arnou Dessar let his eyes play over us just long enough to be polite. But there was one name he was clearly impatient to know and his manners finally deserted him. ‘And this other young woman?'

‘Is Nerigold,' said Tamlyn.

‘Nerigold,' the scholar repeated, drawing out the sounds as though they made the finest poetry.

It was too much for Nerigold. ‘Why are you staring at me this way, every one of you?'

As soon as she said this, they forced their eyes to the ground, to the sky, towards one another. But, just as quickly, those eyes crept back to my friend's face.

‘I've never been to Nan Tocha before,' she told them hotly. ‘You've never seen me —'

Arnou Dessar spoke over her rising voice. ‘No, but we all feel that we have.'

‘That doesn't make sense,' I snapped.

Tamlyn had moved to Nerigold's side. ‘What are you talking about? You've either seen her before or you haven't.'

‘Perhaps it's better if I show you,' said the scholar.

After the assistant, Norling, had brought us water, Arnou Dessar called to the miners who still shuffled restlessly in a loose circle around us, ‘Four of you, bring torches.' Then he marched away towards the cave.

At the entrance, Tamlyn hesitated. ‘You have men waiting for us in the darkness.'

‘And women, too,' said Arnou Dessar, with a teasing smile. ‘But none that can harm you, despite the mighty weapons they hold in their hands.'

Tamlyn looked at me, a silent question in his eyes. Could we trust this man? He wasn't a skilled judge of such matters; the Wyrdborn simply killed those they couldn't be sure of.

I didn't sense any malice in this ageing scholar. Whatever game he was playing, his smile was as sincere as that man Gabbet's had been false. I nodded to Tamlyn and took three steps into the darkness, making the others follow. Arnou Dessar was quickly at my side to lead the way. The light of his torch made Lucien grimace in his sleep and, seeing this, he shifted the flame to his other hand.

‘You have a fine son, Silvermay,' he said kindly.

I should have corrected his mistake I suppose, but felt a strange pride in being taken for Lucien's mother and replied with a simple, ‘Thank you.'

‘How much do you know of what we're doing here?' he asked when Tamlyn joined us.

‘Very little,' Tamlyn confessed. ‘We were told to come here by … by a friend. She hoped there might be some clue to a mystery we're trying to solve.'

‘A clue, yes, your friend is right about that, but as for the mystery … well, that's why I'm here also, by order of the king.'

We had walked twenty paces into the cave by this time. Arnou Dessar fell silent and skirted the left-hand wall, holding his torch close to the rock, his movements so deliberate that I sensed he wanted us to watch carefully.

What was that on the wall? They looked like thin, dark lines traced over the rock. Were they made with the point of a burnt stick?

Tamlyn went nearer, until he could touch them. ‘They're grooves cut into the rock,' he said, surprised.

I saw it now. Arnou Dessar was holding his torch against the wall so its light was thrown onto the grooves at a sharp angle, creating shadow lines. The longer I looked, the more I saw they were not simply gouged into the surface at random.

‘Stand away a little distance,' the scholar said.

We backed away and with every step our wonder grew. It was the outline of a man, drawn as expertly as any I'd seen on paper, except this had been chiselled into solid rock. The figure was tensed for battle, a sword in his hand. The artist had even captured the grimace of a warrior seized by rage and fear in the moments before the fighting begins. He was no more than lines cut into stone but he could still force a gasp of terror from my throat.

‘What is this place?' I asked. ‘Why have you come here to dig now, when those ruins outside must have been here for years?'

‘We have no name for it yet,' Arnou Dessar replied. ‘But your second question is easier to answer. No one knew a city had once existed in Nan Tocha. There are no books that speak of it, no maps. The only mention comes in ancient tales of gods and monsters, no more than myths told by storytellers to amuse us all around a warm fire at night.'

‘Those walls looked real enough to me. The tribes who mine for silver and tin here must have seen it. And this warrior, too,' I said.

‘Not if it was all hidden beneath the ground,' Arnou Dessar said. ‘Everything you see outside has been freed from the soil that swallowed it up. A landslide, perhaps. That's one of the things we are trying to work out. But what we're more sure of is that this was a sizable town, with great halls and temples, and it's been hidden since before anyone began mining Nan Tocha for silver or tin. Even the opening to this cave was choked off.'

‘Who would build such a place and then abandon it?' I asked.

‘I have no answer for that, either. Not yet. No ordinary people could have built stone walls like those you saw outside. And these exquisite figures …' We had moved deeper into the cave as he explained and with each step we saw more of them. ‘There is magic in their
design and the smooth bore of the grooves. This cave has yielded some secrets, no matter how grudging it is to give them up.'

‘You have some idea who lived here, though, don't you,' Tamlyn prompted him cautiously.

‘My ideas keep changing,' Arnou Dessar said, mocking himself. ‘It looked to me like the early Wyrdborn lived here, at first. Why and what made them leave is the mystery King Chatiny sent me here to solve. Now I'm not sure the Wyrdborn had anything to do with this place at all.'

With the one word I dreaded still echoing along the shadow-daubed walls of the cave, Arnou Dessar came to a halt at last. His torch showed a small opening to the right. Instead of the irregular lines of a natural cave, this was shaped by the hand of man into a doorway.

‘Let my men go first with their torches,' he said.

He seemed as eager to enter the space, and the last man had barely squeezed through before he followed, inviting us to do the same.

Ryall went first, then Tamlyn and Nerigold, leaving me in sudden darkness, except for the doorway outlined by the light from within. At last I entered a room the size of my home in Haywode. It had been hewn out of the rock just as the passageway had been, forming perfectly smooth walls and a domed ceiling. Arnou Dessar's men
held their torches high so that the light fell brightest onto the far wall.

What greeted us was more than a drawing grooved into the rock. This was something I had never seen before. The figure that stared back at us was created from tiny pieces of glass and stone, thousands of them in more colours than I could count. Each had been placed on the wall carefully to create a picture of a woman in far more detail than a craftsman could achieve with hammer and chisel. The colours of the stone helped me pick out her pale cheeks, her lips, even her blue eyes. A plaited rope of dark brown hair curved forward over her shoulder and fell to disappear behind the bundle she held in her arms. I took this much in, but only just, for my eyes didn't want to leave the woman's face.

‘I don't believe it,' I whispered.

Where was Nerigold? I moved to her side and reached my arm around her shoulders, tugging her to me gently. Since Lucien lay asleep in his harness on my back, this embrace meant she was able to wrap her arms around him, too. Nerigold needed the touch of those she loved at that moment, because the face on the wall was hers.

‘H
ow can there be a picture of me in this cave?' said Nerigold.

She'd been angry when everyone stared at her so shamelessly, yet now her own eyes locked onto the image before her and wouldn't let go.

I did the same. With the first shock washing out of me, I took in the whole picture and was startled all over again. The bundle I'd noticed in the woman's arms was a newborn baby wrapped tightly in a sheet, just as I'd first seen Lucien. To find Nerigold's face copied so perfectly in the tiny stones was astounding enough, but a child as well! I knew now why Arnou Dessar's missing assistant had known Lucien was Nerigold's baby, not mine, and why his wonder had doubled when she took him in her arms.

For the miners who held the torches, the comparison was too much to resist. Their heads turned continually from the wall to Nerigold's face and back again. Some began to murmur to their companions and, in such a space, their voices swelled and echoed.

‘Quiet!' their master called to his men. When this had little effect, he made them hand the torches to Tamlyn and Ryall and wait for us outside.

Birdie had always told me that the best antidote to fear is knowledge.

‘How did Nerigold's face turn up in this cave?' I asked, repeating her question.

‘Is it a trick of some kind?' said Tamlyn.

‘How could it be a trick?' Master Dessar responded calmly. ‘You arrived here only minutes ago. Until today, we had no idea there was a real woman who matched this likeness.'

‘Then explain the picture,' Tamlyn demanded.

‘I can't. All I can tell you is what I've learned and you may not want to hear it.'

‘Tell us!' snapped Nerigold, fixing him with a glare that seemed too strong for such a frail body.

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, as though suddenly more tired than he'd wanted to admit. ‘We were sent here after some miners found the carvings in the rock that I've already shown you. They were
looking for places to mine for silver and thought they might save themselves sweat and toil if King Chatiny rewarded them for what they'd found instead. No one knew this chamber was here until we uncovered it three months ago. Most of what you see outside has been buried for centuries; how many I can only guess. Five hundred years, perhaps a thousand, certainly more than we guessed at first. Whoever created this picture lived a long time ago. As for who they were, I simply don't know. There is magic here, I'm sure of it, but the carvings and these pictures are mystical more than magical. I wish I could tell you more …'

There was real regret in his voice. Even Tamlyn fell silent and Master Dessar took advantage of this to ask questions of his own.

‘Who are you, young lady?' he said to Nerigold. ‘I know your name, but where do you come from? Who is your father?'

‘A shopkeeper, nothing more,' she answered. ‘Our village is ten miles from Vonne and no different from a hundred others.'

‘Do you have any idea why your face is drawn so perfectly on this wall?'

Nerigold shook her head. ‘I'm as surprised as anyone else.'

‘Your father is a shopkeeper, you say. Tell me,
Nerigold …' He hesitated, making his question all the more unsettling before it had even been asked. ‘Is there … magic in your family? A grandfather, an aunt?'

We all knew what he was asking and why he had paused at the crucial moment. He wanted to know if there was Wyrdborn blood in her veins.

‘No, none at all,' Nerigold answered quickly and he seemed relieved.

Ryall had grown restless and, using the torch given to him by one of the miners, had begun to explore the rest of the chamber. Nerigold's image wasn't the only picture adorning the walls, it seemed. As the light from Ryall's torch played along the rock, I saw that every inch was decorated in the same coloured fragments.

Then Ryall stopped and recoiled a step towards the centre of the chamber.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘Dead people, lots of them.'

Tamlyn and I went to see for ourselves. Nerigold didn't join us. She needed to rest and lowered herself gingerly to sit with her back against the wall, the same wall that showed her own face. It was the only place in the entire room where she didn't have to look at it.

Ryall hadn't been exaggerating. He held the torch so that it shed as much light as possible on the scene he'd found and there they were: seven, eight, a dozen bodies
lying in a tangled heap, the blood-red stones placed haphazardly into the design leaving no doubt how they had died. Near the corpses, others stood wailing, their bodies unnaturally thin and their clothing no more than rags.

With his own torch Tamlyn began to examine the rest of the wall. More scenes of death and misery emerged from the darkness: fierce fighting and a figure calling down lightning bolts to set a village ablaze. Further still, strange and terrible beasts threatened a huddled band of commonfolk.

‘Sorcery,' I gasped.

‘Of the worst kind,' Tamlyn added. ‘An evil magic. Look what it's done to the countryside.'

He stood back to give the torch's dancing flame a wider scope. Though this weakened the light, we could see enough to recognise an age of suffering and despair.

‘What do these pictures mean?' I called to Master Dessar. ‘Is this what happened to the abandoned city you're digging out of the earth?'

‘That might be what it shows,' he answered, but there was no conviction in his voice.

‘You don't think so yourself, do you?'

‘Pictures made with stones like these are called mosaics. They are used when the artists want their images to last a long time, thousands of years in fact,
because the colours never fade. They even survive floods and fires. It's what you would do if your images depicted the future and you wanted generations not yet born to see them,' he said.

Tamlyn backed away from the wall and turned his torch onto the man's face. ‘No one can know what hasn't happened yet.'

Arnou Dessar shrugged and said coolly, ‘Not without magic, no.'

‘Wyrdborn magic,' I whispered, although in this chamber a whisper was as good as a shout.

‘No, Silvermay,' Tamlyn insisted. ‘The Wyrdborn don't have such a gift.'

Master Dessar eyed Tamlyn with the interest of a scholar. ‘Quite right, but there was magic before the Wyrdborn, young man. There are whole books written about it in the ancient tales.'

‘The same ancient tales you called myths only a few minutes ago.'

‘Myths that somehow knew this city existed,' he replied.

Tamlyn went back to the worst of the images we'd found and, horrible though they were, I followed.

‘It's time we left,' said Master Dessar.

When we didn't move towards the passage, he called to us again. He didn't want us to see any more, I realised.
He'd been honest so far, I was sure of it, but that didn't mean he had told us all he could.

‘Why is Nerigold's face here among so much death and misery?' I asked him.

‘That question has troubled me from the beginning, Silvermay. Her face is out of place here; the only beauty and innocence you'll find anywhere in this room. That mystery is just one of a hundred I don't understand about this cave — and now this young woman appears out of nowhere.' He nodded briefly towards Nerigold sitting quietly beneath her own portrait. ‘You've brought me more questions but no answers.'

Lucien stirred on my back. He was waking from his long sleep and I knew what that meant. It would be best to get Nerigold out into the fresh air before she fed him. But another idea came to me. Arnou Dessar thought Lucien was mine. I'd let him think as much to please myself, but what would he say when he knew the truth?

‘Nerigold,' I called. ‘Lucien needs you.'

She stood up as quickly as her weariness would allow and took him from me. With the stone picture so close behind her, the similarity could not be mistaken, and one glance at Arnou Dessar showed me he hadn't missed it.

‘But I thought … You mean this baby is yours?' he said to Nerigold. ‘Lucien. Your child is a boy!'

When Gabbet had taken in Nerigold and Lucien together, there had been a glow of excitement to his wonder. Not so with the old scholar. He was dumbfounded, there was no doubt about that, but mixed in amongst it wasn't the joy of discovery but a heavy dose of dread.

‘What is it, Master Dessar?' said Tamlyn, who saw the change in him as much as I did. ‘You look frightened.'

‘No, no, it's nothing,' he said, desperately trying to recover.

‘You're lying,' I said. ‘Everything you've told us up till now has been true, but you're a poor liar.'

‘Yes, I suppose I am,' he admitted. ‘There's more I should tell you, it's true; something there was no need for you to know before. But I can't tell you with this young woman present.' He nodded again at Nerigold.

‘I'm not leaving,' she snapped at him. ‘This wall shows my face. I have more right to know than any of you.'

‘Even if it brings you pain? More pain than you can imagine?'

Nerigold stood clutching Lucien tightly to her chest. She'd known nothing but pain since the day he was born, yet she hadn't yielded for a moment. And she wouldn't now.

‘Tell me,' she said in a voice stiffened with steel. ‘Evil men want my son. I won't let them have him, but we can't
stop them unless we know why Lucien is so important. There's nothing you can say that will hurt me more than to lose my son. Tell me, Master Dessar; tell us all.'

His shoulders slumped, making him seem suddenly older. ‘Every child should have a mother as brave as you,' he said. ‘You'll need every part of your courage, too.'

He raised his torch and moved towards Nerigold, making her back away a step. ‘The pictures you've already seen are part of a story,' he said in a heavy tone. ‘This entire chamber was hollowed out of the rock to tell it. That much was clear the first time I saw it. Bring your torch here,' he called to Ryall. With both lights trained on Nerigold's stony image, he went on. ‘The story begins here and continues round the chamber. See for yourselves what it shows.'

I followed the images with my eyes and saw that the child, no longer a newborn, was being handed from one person to another, like a prize offered and received. There were words above the images, but I had never been taught my letters.

‘What do those words say?' I asked Tamlyn.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘It's not a language I recognise.'

We looked towards Arnou Dessar, who shook his head. ‘I don't know it, either.'

He moved to the right, illuminating the next group of pictures.

‘It's the same child, now a boy of about ten years old,' I said once I'd taken in the first scene. There was no mistaking the connection.

Arnou nodded and held his torch closer. A sword was being offered to the young boy whose hand stretched to take hold of it. My own hand flew to my mouth. In the next scene, he had used the sword to fell a fully grown man. More than that, he'd butchered him savagely.

As we moved along the wall, the boy grew to be a man. And the savagery continued, sometimes caused by the blade of his sword, sometimes by more sinister means. The dark magic we'd seen already began here. There was no doubt the man was a Wyrdborn. He wore armour now, topped by an elaborate helmet that kept his face hidden.

A second figure appeared in many of the scenes, watching the destruction. I looked back and saw it was he who had first handed the boy his sword. Now he seemed to command the fierce warrior. But once we turned the corner and made our way slowly along the second wall, I didn't think of the armoured figure as a warrior any longer.

‘He's a marauding beast in the body of a man,' I said.

No one disagreed.

It was on the last wall that my fear and horror became unbearable. We saw again the scenes of bloodshed
and senseless destruction; villages burned, commonfolk cowered before the faceless monster. Finally, he had utter dominion over a land of misery and starvation.

Tamlyn broke his silence. ‘Everything till now has been done against commonfolk. But these are Wyrdborn, I'm sure of it,' he said, touching the stones that depicted the tangled corpses. ‘And that's impossible. A Wyrdborn can defeat one of his own kind, yes, but never two. They are all born too evenly matched in their powers.'

I knew this, too. It was the first thing my father had told me about the Wyrdborn. It was how they were kept in check. As long as commonfolk played one Wyrdborn off against another, their own jealousies and suspicions kept them working only for themselves and so none rose above the rest.

‘This Wyrdborn is different,' I said. ‘He fights alone, yet none can stand against him.'

The result was plain enough, set out in the intricate mosaics of coloured stone.

 

I have little memory of how we left that macabre chamber and found our way into the daylight. It is a time my mind doesn't want to recall. Nerigold could hardly place one foot in front of another but she refused to surrender Lucien into my care. I doubt Tamlyn or even a hundred of his kind could have pried her arms from
around him. I remember a firm grip on my own arm, part support, part guide, until we were outside. It must have been Ryall's. I shouldn't have been so hard on him.

The miners slept in tents close by the cave entrance but Arnou Dessar had his cosy cabin, where he kept his books, his drawings and his notes dry, and his old bones too, he said with a laugh at himself that none of us could share. He generously turned the hut over to Nerigold. Just as well because clouds were gathering. I stayed with her while she fed Lucien; and when it was done, she simply fell on her side and wept until sleep swallowed up her pain.

I envied her. Sleep meant escape from what we'd seen.

I looked down at Lucien, who seemed entirely content now that his mother had given him all she had to offer. He kicked his legs and waved his sausage arms. A burp brought bubbles of milk to the corner of his mouth. It was a sight that should melt any woman's heart and, until only an hour before, mine would have dripped helplessly inside my chest as it had done so many times before.