The Shadow at the Gate (20 page)

Ridiculous.

But he had to know for sure.

Nio made his way down through the house, down the long hallways, down the staircase into the gloomy parlor with its fine furniture and the fireplace yawning with its cold, ashen mouth. These days, there was never occasion to use the parlor, for the other scholars hunting in the ruins rarely came to the house anymore.

The kitchen door seemed to creak even before he pushed it open. Light sprang into life at a muttered word, and he was grateful for the warmth emanating from the small globe of fire. It floated over his shoulder as he walked down the stairs into the cellar. Shadows, but the place stank. It was much worse than before. A sweet, cloying taste of rotting flesh hung in the air, so strong that he could almost feel the greasiness of it on his tongue. He did not step down onto the muddy stone floor but remained on the bottom stair. The cellar looked empty, but the shadows gathered in the corners seemed to be hiding something.

“
Hie
,” he said. The cellar remained lifeless and there was only silence except for the water murmuring from the ugly black hole leading down into the storm sewers of the city.

“
Hie sona
,” he said, gritting his teeth and channeling the rush of anger into a focus of power. “
Sona
!”

And there, where nothing had been before, stood the wihht. It gazed at him expressionlessly. Moisture gleamed on the wihht’s skin, and the clothes it wore were damp with water. Nio wondered if the creature climbed down into the sewer and so crept about the city, shambling through the passageways and emerging to walk among the unsuspecting inhabitants of Hearne.

“I’ve a question for you,” said the man. “There’s a book in the library on the top floor of this house. A small book bound in brown leather, worn and cracked with age. On the front is an inscription in characters from no language known by man. The book’s missing. Did you take it?”

The wihht said nothing, but merely stared at him.

“
Cweoan
,” said the man.

The force in his command lashed at the creature and it blinked, shifting on its feet.

“I did not take this book,” said the wihht in its hoarse voice.

“You speak truth?” the man said.

“I did not take this book,” repeated the wihht. It paused and then opened its mouth as if to speak again, but nothing emerged except for a wet, gurgling sort of sound. For a moment, Nio thought that the creature was speaking in some horrible language peculiar to wihhts—yet another detail unknown to Fynden Fram and all the so-called learned scholars of the past. But then he realized the wihht was laughing, and that was even more horrible.

“I have no need to read,” said the wihht. It shuffled a step closer. “No need for books. No need. But sustenance I do need. That, I do need.”

“On my word and in my time, you will be given it,” said Nio coldly.

The wihht subsided into its habitual stillness. Nio eyed the creature and considered. According to the seven strictures of the spoken word, there were ways to test the truth of speech, particularly if one possessed some material of whoever spoke. And he possessed the best of materials—blood—his own blood had been provided to the wihht.

But I’m missing something here.

He gnawed his lip in distracted thought and then he blinked. Perhaps it was due to being so tired—the broken sleep certainly was taking its toll—but it looked as if the wihht was a little closer to him now. It hadn’t taken a step, but it definitely looked closer. Or maybe the cellar seemed somehow smaller than before, the walls crowding in and the ceiling lowering, pressing down. The wihht stood as silent and as immobile as ever. It wasn’t even looking at him. It was staring down at the floor. He hadn’t noticed before, but it seemed as if the creature’s arms were slightly too long for its body. They hung down at its sides. The thing’s fingers twitched slightly.

Nio turned and hastily made his way back up the stairs. The little globe of fire drifted behind him. When he reached the top step, he looked back down but there was nothing to see. The wihht had vanished, and there was only shadow thickening to darkness. He locked the door and then placed such a binding spell on it that sweat sprang from his forehead. A great weariness took hold of him.

He stood for a moment, irresolute, but then he went upstairs to the library. It was his favorite room in the house and it afforded him more rest than his bed. He sat down in a chair. His head ached terribly.

Perhaps I should not have created the wihht.

What use would a wihht have with a book? The boy could have stolen the book when he stole the box, except he didn’t. Whoever knew about the box might have known about the book as well. I wonder what old Eald Gelaeran would say if he knew I was shaping wihhts? It was his fault in the first place—that book he kept on his desk, the book of Willan Run. Too many ideas. Stone and shadow, but I still don’t know who wrote the damn thing. Are the anbeorun gods, overseeing the affairs of men as a master puppeteer oversees the strings of his little creatures, or are they men such as myself and, as such, capable of death? The wihht. Fynden Fram was wrong in what he wrote. If he was wrong then who is to say that the little book I found in Lascol is wrong as well? Which words are true and which are false?

The library was lit by a lamp on a table beside Nio’s chair. It cast a muted glow around his feet and pooled on the carpet. The warmth of it was comforting. But in the rest of the library, high up in the arches of the ceiling, within the nooks of the shelves and in the corners of the room, shadows grew as the night deepened outside. In particular, the shadows seemed oddly heavy in the alcove on the opposite side of the room. Nio found his eyes returning again and again to that spot. An old painting hung there on the wall. It was of the wizard Scuadimnes, the former senior archivist at the university and advisor to Dol Cynehad, the last king of Hearne. The painting always made him uneasy. The wizard’s piercing green eyes always seemed on the verge of blinking to life.

Nio had found the painting the first month the scholars had begun digging in the university ruins. It had been locked away in a vault buried under rubble and bound with such a subtle ward that the vault was all but invisible to the casual eye. Severan had frowned when Nio had uncovered the painting.

“There’s a knowing look to him,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d be happier burning the thing. Who can tell what happier fate Tormay would’ve found if he’d never lived?”

“Perhaps,” returned Nio, not wanting his find disparaged. “Though I think fate might very well be inexorable. It doesn’t alter for the likes of us. If so, then what Scuadimnes did won’t matter. The end of the game will always be the same.”

“Then we might as well all go home and be done with it. Curse this painting of yours, Nio,” the other had said. “And curse its subject. Scuadimnes destroyed this university and the monarchy of Hearne, not to mention utterly disgracing wizardry. No small feat for one man.”

“But he possessed more knowledge than any other wizard who has lived, save, perhaps, Staer Gemyndes. And knowledge is merely knowledge, whether it be used for good or for ill.”

Severan scowled and did not answer. The painting had gone home with Nio, even though, if he had been forced to be honest, he would have admitted his unease as well. The face was too alive. Light slid greasily over the oil paint and seemed to lend warmth to the flesh. The eyes gleamed. But Nio had hung it in the library. After all, Scuadimnes had been the greatest archivist the university had ever known, despite his treachery.

Something stirred in the shadows in the alcove. The darkness within the alcove was impenetrable, but Nio had the oddest sensation that, if he could see through that dark, he would find the eyes of the painting fixed on him. He shook his head and yawned.

I’ll find that boy and I’ll wring his neck.

What was in the box?

I wish I could remember her face. She was always smiling.

Nio fell asleep in his chair and dreamed.

There was darkness all around him. The library was gone. He stood up and the chair vanished. He could not see much of anything, but there was an airy noise of wind rushing by him that hinted at a great depth and space. As he stood there, the darkness began to relent, though he could detect no light. The gloom resolved into planes and lines. Before him was a stone wall. It was almost close enough to touch.

The stone of the wall was black and polished to such an impossible degree that it seemed to possess depth just as the darkness of the night sky possesses an almost limitless depth. Nio looked up and saw that the wall rose far above him. It grew into battlements. It mounted up into spires and towers that stood on each others’ stone shoulders, higher and higher until they could no longer be seen. The darkness and enormity of the thing seemed vaster than the night itself.

Something drew his eyes back down to the wall directly before him. What had once been unbroken stone now revealed a small, dark opening. The darkness of the hole pulled at his sight, so that he was unable to look away. The shadows around it seemed to bend and slip into the hole. He knew with a sudden, terrible certainty that the hole in the wall reached for a tremendous distance. The wind hushed and the cold deepened. The hole dragged at him. At the far end of it, something stirred. And then whispered.

Nio.

He could not answer.

Thou art welcome in this the third hour.

He could feel the blood in his veins thicken and slow. His heart labored. It seemed as if he had somehow moved closer to the hole. He stared into its darkness.

Once upon a time, there was a jewel that fell from the heights. Its light quenched and it shattered into five shards. The shards fell still, tumbling through a night so long that it hath yet to find its end and they to find their rest.

The hole sighed. There was something of regret in the tone, as if remembering things gone by and long irretrievable. And there was hunger in the sound as well.

“Where is this place?” asked Nio hoarsely.

Here, there are no such things as where. There is only here. All things drift into this night. All dreams wander to these walls. Thy own dreams brought thee here.

“Is this the house of dreams?”

He could not tear his gaze from the black hole cut in the stone wall. Somehow, he knew that the depth of it was so great that, if he fell through, he would fall forever. Tumbling like the five shards in their endless night.

Aye
, said the voice.

Aye. Thou hast found the house of dreams. My house of dreams.

Somewhere far away, stars strayed from their paths into unknown ways. Light slowed and dimmed until it was no longer light, but a cold, pallid thing, no longer able to burst forth on its joyous, eternal race across the boundless reaches of space. The light fell, chill and heavy with the sudden awareness of self.

I would have thee accomplish a thing for me.

And he could only say yes.

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

Come closer, Nio, for I would speak with thee.

The night pressed against him and he drifted toward the hole. Closer he came, until the thing was a great, yawning gulf without edge or boundary. It was a glooming abyss and, in its impossible black depths, the quiet voice whispered again.

Come closer.

He came closer.

I would have thee accomplish a thing for me.

The voice whispered and whispered until he knew all that it wanted him to do. A small part of him thought to question the thing—some tiny spark still kindled by memories, perhaps, of the stone tower far up on the Thule coast, the grasses that waved on the moors there, and the forgotten face of a girl—but the shadows strangled him into silence with their weight as they rushed past into the abyss.

In return
, said the voice,
I will give thee a gift.

A light winked into being in the darkness before him. It was no stronger than the weakest candle flame, but such was the blackness around it that the light seemed oddly bright. It approached him, steadily growing in size, until there, hanging before him in the mouth of the hole, was a shard of stone, about the length of his finger. The thing was sharp-edged and gleamed with cold light.

Take it.

He could not have stopped himself at that point for anything in the world, for the sight of that light filled him with such a hunger that he had to possess the thing, to grasp the stone in his hand and know it was his.

Take it.

He reached out and took the stone. It burned in his palm with a flare of agony and he closed his fingers around it. Even the pain was beautiful. It bloomed between his fingers like a flower that sought some strange, dark sun. He opened his hand and the stone was gone.

The stone is within thee.

“What is it?” he said.

It is the fifth name of darkness. It is my gift to thee. Use it well, or it shall be taken from thee.