The Keep of Fire (36 page)

“Darkness falls, Master Wilder,” Larad said. “The chorus awaits.”

Evidently the Runespeakers took their singing seriously. Travis nodded, drew a breath into his withered lungs for strength, and moved to the door. Larad reached for the handle to open the way.

“You’re not glad I’m here, are you, Larad?” Travis said to the runespeaker.

Larad froze, then raised an eyebrow that was made a black lightning bolt by its intersection with a thin scar. “All-master Oragien believes you have the power to aid the Runespeakers in their time of need.”

Travis tried not to laugh at the absurdity of that thought. He could hardly even stand up. “But that’s not what you think, is it?”

Larad shrugged, his gaze impenetrable as smoked glass. “What I think is not important.”

But it should be
, Travis added the unspoken implication. Short hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Every instinct told him this man was intelligent. And dangerous.

Travis licked his lips. “This isn’t … my world, Larad.”

The master studied him, then nodded. “We are aware of all the facts concerning you, Master Wilder.”

“Then tell me—how was I summoned here? To Eldh.”

Larad’s nose wrinkled, etching white scars deeper into his flesh. “Oragien sought help in the matter.”

“From who?”

For the first time the angular pieces of Larad’s face rearranged themselves into a readable emotion: anger. “From a source I do not care for. And were he not All-master, some might even dare to speak the word heresy.”

As you just did
, Travis wanted to say. However, Larad’s visage was already calm again, a funeral mask of alabaster in an ancient tomb: shattered and serene. He opened the door of the little room.

“Come, Master Wilder, it is time to go.”

The Gray Tower of the Runespeakers was seven centuries old—that much Travis knew from the stories Falken Blackhand had told him. If he shut his eyes, he could still hear the bard telling tales of the three towers that were raised after the fall of Malachor: bastions of learning founded to preserve the knowledge of the Runelords.

However, as he followed after Master Larad, Travis did not need Falken’s tales to remind him that this tower was ancient. The stones themselves bespoke an archaic and alien viewpoint. All around he saw triangular arches, twisted columns, and unsettling curves molded by a lost craft to please eyes long since dimmed with dust. The gray stone itself was smooth and without seam, ledge, or crack. Nothing he had seen on Eldh—certainly not the crude keeps and castles—looked like this place.

Except that wasn’t true, was it? It had been a ruin when Travis had set foot within it, but he had seen these same polished walls, these same queer lines and angles inside the White Tower of the Runebinders. Only the color of the walls had been different there—bone instead of fog. However, the White Tower had fallen centuries ago, its foundation corrupted by the folly of its builders, and the Black Tower had fallen as well. This tower was the last of the three.

Despite Travis’s recent illness, Master Larad set a swift pace. Travis followed down a wide flight of steps that spiraled through the heart of the tower. There was no railing on the inside edge, and in the center of the staircase was a hollow shaft about a dozen feet across. When Travis looked up, he saw twilight filtering through slits in the dome a hundred
feet above, adding a tincture of violet to the gray walls.

Every few steps the two men passed a wooden door set into the outside wall. Travis guessed each led to a small, trapezoidal cell like the one he had awakened in, all of them arranged around the staircase like vertically offset wedges from a wheel of gray cheese.

As he descended, Travis’s foot caught the hem of his gray robe, and he stumbled toward the edge of the inner shaft. A hard hand clamped around his arm, pulling him back.

“I would not recommend falling, runelord. Not unless you know how to speak the rune of flying. It is a long way down.”

Travis swallowed hard, eyes round behind his spectacles, and gave the runespeaker a nod. Larad grinned. However, it was not an expression of humor. He turned to continue the descent; Travis frowned as he followed. That was at least the third time now that Larad had called him
runelord
. But why?

Travis wasn’t certain who the Runelords were or where they had come from. He did know they were the greatest wizards Eldh had ever known, and that they had guarded the Imsari after the three Great Stones were won in the war with the Pale King over a thousand years ago. Then, a few hundred years later, just after the fall of the ancient kingdom of Malachor, the Runelords had vanished along with the three Imsari.

So why did Larad keep referring to him as
runelord?
Travis was neither a wizard nor seven hundred years old. Unless the runespeaker meant it as mockery. And the more Travis thought of the harsh look on Larad’s scarred face, the more he thought that was the likely explanation.

The staircase ended in a small, egg-shaped chamber, although the shaft continued down through the
floor into some open space below. Travis did not have time to peer in and see as Larad took his arm.

“This way, Master Wilder.”

Three corridors led from the heart of the tower. He followed Larad down the nearest; then they came to one of the odd triangular arches. On the other side of this was another, smaller spiral staircase. The stone felt thick and heavy here, and although his sense of direction had been muddled by his fever and the twisting descent, Travis had the sensation this staircase lay within the tower’s outer wall. After fifty steps, the staircase ended. Pale light welled through a second archway, along with the hiss of whispers off stone.

Now Larad moved behind Travis and propelled him along in front. As Travis stepped through the archway, a gasp rushed from his lungs. So this was the space he had glimpsed through the shaft of the stairwell.

The chorus chamber of the Runespeakers filled the entire base of the Gray Tower. However,
filled
was certainly the wrong word, for the chamber seemed not forged of rock but rather conjured of air and pearlgray light. Its design was simple, but this made it all the more wonderful, leaving one to marvel how so vast a space could be defined with so few lines.

The chorus chamber was neither a circle nor a triangle, but something in between. Stone benches lined the walls, rising in seven tiers, surrounding a dais in the center. Rows of vertical slits pierced the walls, and while each of these was too thin to see anything meaningful through, if Travis moved his head he could see—like blurred images through a spinning zoetrope—the shapes of mountains fading to black against a charcoal sky.

While there were benches enough for several hundred runespeakers, Travis saw no more than a hundred men in gray robes sitting on only the lowest
tiers. But that wasn’t really a surprise. Hadn’t Falken said the Runespeakers were not as popular as they once had been?

A constant susurration wove a soft tapestry of sound upon the air, almost like the voice of an ocean caught within a shell. Then words rose above the background murmur.

“Good eventide, Master Wilder.”

The greeting was not uttered in anything above a normal speaking voice, but Travis heard it clearly, and in that moment he understood the true purpose of this chamber’s design: Everything about this place had been fashioned to carry and amplify the faintest sound.

But that makes sense, Travis. To speak a rune without invoking it, you have to say it quietly, without any force or feeling. So in this place a master could whisper a rune, and the apprentices would still be able to hear it
.

The words of the greeting faded, but they did not vanish, instead merging with the gently modulating backdrop of sound. If Travis concentrated, he could still pick them out from among the sea of whispers.

Another whisper—this one sharp and directed—spoke in Travis’s ear. “You are above answering the All-master’s greeting then, runelord?”

Travis winced, then blinked and saw that Oragien indeed stood before the central dais, blue eyes gazing in his direction. Travis nodded at the All-master.

“Hello,” he said, then winced again at the way the loudly spoken word ricocheted around the chamber. Larad glared at him, and even Oragien pressed his lips into a white line. Travis bit his tongue.

Larad directed Travis toward one of the front rows of benches. As Travis walked, he was aware of a hundred pairs of eyes on him. He concentrated on not tripping on his robe, then let out a breath of relief as he sank onto the bench.

“Well, you’re looking considerably better,” a reedy voice said beside him. “If you don’t mind my saying, the last time I saw you, Master Wilder, you looked like a joint of meat that Sky had forgotten to turn on the spit.”

Focused on just getting to his seat without winning more glares from Larad, Travis had not noticed the runespeaker he had sat down next to. Now he turned and found himself looking at a short, plump, middle-aged man whose otherwise neat gray robe was spotted here and there with bits of food and wine. Despite the lines around his mouth and eyes, and his thinning hair, his face had a boyish quality. For some reason, the runespeaker seemed vaguely familiar. Had Travis seen him somewhere before?

“This is Master Eriaun,” Larad said, speaking in a voice that seemed low by exaggeration, no doubt for Travis’s benefit. “He helped attend to you while you were ill.”

Of course. That was why the other looked familiar; Travis must have seen him during his delirium. “Thank you for helping me,” Travis said.

Master Eriaun smiled, dimples forming in his cheeks. “Why, you’re welcome. I’m simply glad to see you well. Your fever was quite dire. For a time I feared it to be the burning sickness.”

These words sent a chill through Travis. Once again he saw the sharp words of the newspaper headline:
One Doctor Calls It “a New Black Death.”
He opened his mouth to ask Eriaun more.

“This chorus has begun,” a voice intoned before Travis could speak. “Let our words join together as one word, and our thoughts as one thought.”

He looked up and saw that Oragien had ascended the dais. The All-master leaned on his staff, but somehow he looked anything but frail. His eyes were as piercing as a hawk’s, and his white hair and beard shone in the colorless light that drifted from above.
Except there were no torches or candles in sight. How was the chamber being lit?

On instinct Travis cocked his head, listening. Then he caught it: a single word amid the ceaseless tide of murmurs that ebbed and flowed, faint yet still distinct.
Lir
.

He sighed, amazed anew. How long would the rune linger on the air, filling the chorus chamber with gentle light? Travis wasn’t certain. Most likely it would last until someone spoke the rune
Bri
, dropping a curtain of darkness over the chamber again.

Travis leaned toward Master Eriaun. “So, is this when you all start singing?”

“Singing?” A frown crossed the runespeaker’s plump face. “Why, there’s to be no singing, Master Wilder.”

Now it was Travis’s turn to frown. “But I thought this was supposed to be a chorus.”

“And so it is—a time when all may speak, and when all voices become one.”

Before Travis could question further, Oragien spoke again, each of his words reverberating before it joined the thrumming background. “As all of you can see, Master Wilder has awakened from the illness that gripped him since he came to us. Now it is time for us to tell him why we summoned him from his homeland far away.”

Nods and murmurs of assent traveled around the chamber at Oragien’s words. The All-master turned on the dais, directing his gaze and his words directly at Travis.

“Master Wilder, I know you studied for a time with Master Jemis at Calavere, but I do not know what he taught you. I was never able to speak with Master Jemis before … before he passed from this world.”

Travis clenched his jaw.
You mean before Jemis was strangled by his student, Rin, who had been
made into an ironheart and a servant of the Pale King
. But he did not interrupt.

“The Runespeakers have a history that goes back many centuries,” Oragien said. “It is a proud tale. However, it is also one that most have forgotten. I do not know if Jemis imparted this knowledge to you, but the Runespeakers are not as … favored as they once were.”

A harsh laugh sounded beside Travis. Master Larad. “We are not many things we once were.”

Oragien cast a disapproving glance at Larad. The black-haired runespeaker did not retract his words, but he did clamp his mouth shut.

“Of late,” Oragien went on, “that dislike has grown into hatred on the part of some. As I fear you encountered in the town below.”

Travis shook his head. “But why? Why do people dislike the Runespeakers so much?”

Oragien shrugged. “It is a question we have asked ourselves many times. Once nearly all noble lords sent a younger son to study at the tower. So many came that only those with the greatest talent were accepted. Now few come willingly up the road to our tower, and we take in whoever fate sends our way. As you see, there are not many young men among us.”

Travis gazed around the chamber. There was one small knot of a half-dozen boys, and a few men here and there who looked to be in their twenties, but nearly all the others in the chamber were older than Travis.

“Now the common folk have new reason to mislike us,” Oragien said, “although their fear is misplaced.”

“The burning sickness,” Travis said before he even really thought about it.

Oragien gave a solemn nod. “They came in the spring of the year, along with the terrible heat that has withered the land. The Burnt Ones. No one
knows their origin or their purpose. But we do know their touch induces a plague that causes the afflicted to burn from within and die.”

“Or to become like them,” a runespeaker across the chamber—one of the few younger men—said.

Oragien glanced at him. “We do not know that, Temris. Not for certain. There are only stories, and ones spoken by peasants at that.”