The Shadow at the Gate (25 page)

He reached the door to see the blue dogs rise up out of the warded tiles around the wihht. Jaws gaped and teeth gleamed in the moonlight. The beasts lunged. But instead of torn limbs—how would one tear darkness and water?—the dogs passed harmlessly through the creature, as if the flesh they sought had become only vapor. The form of the wihht wavered in their passing; arms, legs, and torso eddied into a confusion of lines that no longer had much resemblance to a human shape. The dogs skidded on the tiles, scrabbling to gain purchase to turn and lunge again.

Three times the beasts passed through the wihht, jaws snapping futilely, until they learned from their disappointment and contented themselves with circling it, fur bristling across their hackles. It was an odd sight, for as the dogs and the wihht moved further away, they became insubstantial in the pale moonlight streaming through the windows. They looked like a swirl of shadows tinged with blue and flecked at intervals with flashes of white fangs and glaring eyes.

They disappeared into the gloom at the far end of the hall. After several minutes, the dogs came back. The beast in front sighted Nio standing at the door. Its ears pricked up and all the dogs quickened their pace as if their leader had silently communicated to them the prospect of a new quarry. But they had no chance to try their teeth, for they vanished, one by one, like candle flames flickering out. Where each dog had been, a blue vapor drifted down into the tiles below. The room stretched empty before Nio. When he came to the entrance hall, he found the wihht waiting.

“Come,” he said.

Outside the university, the city still thronged with people. Never before had Nio seen it so. Mioja Square swayed with movement, as if the sea had overthrown the shore and now flowed through every alley and street. These were not people and barrow carts and the pitched tents of the fair. No—rather, this was a strange tide, the peaks of waves made of sloping canvas angling down into troughs swirling with swaths of heads—white eyes and white teeth gleaming in the lamplight like foam. There—that was no fat, bearded merchant draped in brown velvet, but rather a whiskered seal diving in search of fish. This was no jeweled lady with her gauzy garments but some strange jellyfish glistening with watery colors and tentacles floating around her like a silken shawl.

The voices of the people no longer made sense to him. Words were only formless noises that lapped against each other. He blinked and tried to focus his attention but he still only heard a liquid babble of confusion. He was tired, he knew that, but perhaps he was even more tired than he thought.

And who is to say that this is not how language will end some day? A passage from a book drifted through his mind.
One language marked the beginning, before things began. One language did Anue speak from the house of dreams. From this one language did all languages descend. Do not listen to the fools who say that all things seen descended in this manner. Things seen are only the form of truth, but the one language is truth itself.

But for how long could languages evolve and further evolve until they lost all meaning? That was the curse of the wizards and scholars, and it only increased with each succeeding generation. As time passed, it became more difficult to discover words from the ancient languages and near impossible to find even a single syllable from the oldest language of all. Perhaps this meaningless wash around him, this inarticulate murmur of the sea that seemed to eddy from the mouths of the crowd around him was the fate of language?

Sharp in the air, he breathed the odor of brine and kelp and all the wet, hidden things of the sea. The scent startled him and the face of the girl floated up through his thoughts—the farmer’s daughter. Her name was lost to his memory, but the fifth name of darkness turned within his mind, and that one word was more valuable than all the names and all the words of a dozen lost languages. Her name did not matter anymore. The wihht walked behind him. It did not make a single sound and, for a while, Nio forgot its existence.

The instant the manor doors shut behind them, there was only silence. He could no longer smell the sea. The wihht did not wait for his command but turned and shambled away down the hall, to the kitchen beyond and, past that, to the cellar below. How odd. Not a word about its hunger. Not even a protest about the failed opportunity with Severan.

Nio paused for a moment. Absentmindedly, he commanded the sconces on the wall to light and they flickered into soft glows. I could use a bite myself, he thought. Half a loaf of stale bread sat on the kitchen table. He knew there were onions in the wicker basket in the corner, but the thought of food vanished as quickly as it had arrived. The door to the cellar was open. He tiptoed silently down the steps. Halfway down, he stopped.

The cellar was as dark as usual. Oddly enough, despite the lack of light, he could see quite well. Below, in the center of the floor, was the wihht. The creature was crouched by the drain hole with its head bent down. As Nio stood in silence, there came to his ears a faint sound—a muttering noise of strange words. It was a whisper, hissed in some unknown tongue. There was a tone of supplication in the sound, as if the wihht begged some favor of the darkness within the drain hole. The whisper paused, and Nio found himself straining to listen for an answer to the wihht, but there was nothing to hear except the beating of his own heart. After a moment, the creature whispered again, but the supplication was gone from its voice. Horror fell over Nio and he turned, blundering up the stairs and not caring if the wihht heard the clatter of his sudden retreat.

He fled, not thinking of anything except the dread choking his mind. The house was no longer familiar to him. Passages led in strange directions, angling back upon themselves so that he found himself stumbling through rooms he had just left. Staircases tilted underneath him, and more than once he found himself running down rather than up. He could not find the front door.

I’ll unmake this place, he thought savagely. I know the fifth name of darkness. Unmake it into shadow, these stones and wood and walls, until there is nothing here except darkness. There will not be even a memory of this place. I’ll walk away. Unmake the wihht. I’ll walk away from it all. North. Maybe she’s still alive.

He tried to smile. His face was a stiff mask of fear with bared teeth and wide eyes. The fifth name of darkness teetered on the edge of his thoughts. But his tongue would not remember the name. He clamped his mouth shut on the scream threatening to break forth instead, lurched down a hall, and pushed through a door.

The library. This place was familiar. The shelves rose around him in confirmation of all he had studied, all he had learned, all he knew and was. The precious books bought, stolen, begged, traded, and hunted down in every corner of Tormay. The histories written by his predecessors, anthologies of lore and suspect tales, dissertations on arcane subjects and even stranger minutiae, collections of words of power, of dubious power, of no power at all—the works of men and women long dead, fallen to the shadow or safely sleeping within the house of dreams. All of this was his strength.

His breathing slowed.

Nio found himself standing in the alcove, staring at the painting of Scuadimnes, the treacherous archivist of the university. The old wizard’s eyes stared back at him.

“Why did you do it?” Nio said aloud.

Why did you?

“It was never a question of why. There was no single moment. It was a progression of events. The little things. They happened.”

Ahh. The little things.

“You think a man wakes up one morning and turns his mind to the Dark?”

No. But he wakes up one morning and knows.

“And how did you know?”

The painting smiled.

You would not know the words.

And at that—at that thought of ‘word’—the fifth name of darkness sprang back into Nio’s mind, as complete as eyes closed in the dead of night.

“I have it!” he said triumphantly.

The painting said nothing but only nodded.

Behind him, a door opened. Nio turned. The wihht stood there. It spoke in a voice that sounded like his own.

“One wizard will do just as well as another.”
     

“I made you,” said Nio coldly, unafraid with the name trembling and jittering and shuddering in his mind as if it were impatient for its own articulation. “I can unmake you.”

“No.” And the creature reached for him with one, impossibly long arm.

The man quickly stepped back and spoke the fifth name of darkness. He spoke it with relief, glad to have the weight of it taken from him, fiercely glad to see the wihht unmade. But the wihht continued to reach for him, still made, still composed of too solid flesh. Its hand reached him and took him by the throat. He spoke the name one more time. Shouted it desperately.

“You will be unmade! This is the fifth name of darkness!”

The wihht smiled and spoke, its grip tightening.

“Yes, but it is also my name.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE HAWK AND THE OLD MEN

Severan hurried along. A glimmer of light floated above his shoulder, illuminating the corridor. Dust rose in the wake of his passing. As he neared a door, a ward spelled into the handle became aware of him, the invisible strands weaving themselves into defensive readiness. Absentmindedly, he negated the spell without even thinking of the fire that would have met an unwary intruder.

“
Foro
.”

Be still.

Be still. I have no quarrel with this place or the dreams of your long-dead masters. Be still.

He opened the door and passed through. Stairs rose before him, fashioned of once-elegant marble but now so riven by time that each step was a hazard. His attendant light threw his shadow hard against the wall. After some time, he reached what looked like the top of the stairs. If so, it was a sorry destination, for the last stair met a wall of stone that rose up until it passed into shadow and out of sight. The wall was scorched black with the marks of ancient fire, as if many men had sought to pass that way, trying their wizardry and skill upon the façade, and had been turned back by the implacable stone.

Severan passed a hand across his brow and tried to still the thoughts in his mind. His hand shook. He was getting old.

Damn the boy. The rascal was gone again. The city was not safe for him. A whole day and half the night gone and no sign of Jute except for a bed unslept in and the fading awareness of his presence in the ruins.

It’s my fault, Severan thought miserably. Over the last week, there had been so much promise in discovering the whereabouts of the
Gerecednes
. The discovery of that one single book might prove—it
would
prove—the key to unlocking the past and the designs of the Dark. They were so close. The thought was intoxicating.

But he had neglected the boy. And the mosaic deep below the ruins revealed only a murky shadow when the name of Jute was uttered. He was hidden.

And now Nio had shown his hand beyond doubt.

Severan carefully cleared these troubling thoughts from his mind. Distractions could prove fatal when unlocking the ward before him. He placed his hands against the stone wall and concentrated on a single name.

Scuadimnes.

He ignored the distaste welling up within him at the thought of that name. The wizard who had caused the destruction of the university and the death of so many of his peers was despised by everyone who studied history. His name was anathema.

But here it was the key to a door and so must be uttered with concentrated thought.

He shaped the word in his mind. Scuadimnes.

Silently, the wall dissolved. The marble stairs mounted up, and Severan had a sensation of a yawning gulf on either side that fell away into darkness and the dust of old bones lying an impossible distance below, further than the foundations of the university. He hurried up the steps and passed through another door. Three faces glanced up at him. Gerade, Ablendan, and old Adlig, all hunched over their books and manuscripts. The room was a small rotunda lined with shelves and interspersed with windows looking down from a great height upon the university ruins sprawling below.

“You don’t seem to fancy our attendant ward, Severan,” said Gerade. His nose twitched in amusement.

“What’s that?” said Severan sharply.

“The face on you. It’s as if you’d been sucking lemons.”

“I don’t like saying his name. He’s the evilest man in all the known history of Tormay, and yet we’re forced to parrot his damned name every time we want to get into this chamber.”

“None of us are delighted at the thought of him,” said Adlig mildly. “But none of these books open outside of this room. If you’ve another way to do it, let’s hear. If I had my druthers, his memory’d perish from the earth.”

“I disagree,” said Severan. “Despite who he was. Knowledge of the past is the best defense we have.”

“Which is why we must find the
Gerecednes
. Imagine what’s contained in that book.” Ablendan stuck his head out from an alcove in the shelves. “I think we’re getting closer, Severan. This evening we found three different references to the book indicating that the university possessed a copy during the time of Scuadimnes. Perhaps the only copy in existence. We have to locate that blasted book—it must be our only objective. Crystal orbs, enchanted keys, and the lost crown of Dol Cynehad? Rubbish. The book must be all.”