The Book of the Burning

IN DREAMS

The slender man’s black robe was blowing about him. His hands were behind his back and he stood on a rampart. The sky was deep blue and a white crescent moon hung heavy in the sky. There was the long, low sound of a trumpet. Beyond him were the spires of the Temple, and the grey white smoke rising up, into the night.

This scene passed and now there was a wide, long hall. On either side, spaced broadly, were the little lights of torches. Like the sea on a sullen night of few stars, the floor poorly reflected the torch light. A black swayed. He felt himself coming nearer, and knew before he had come to this place willingly. Now he pulled back and something—not a hand—but something, pushed him forward. He was touching the Curtain and it was like hands, not fabric, but many fingers brushing his own, reaching out to pull him in, and then he shot up out of bed.

There was a crack of light as the door opened and Kenneth looked up.

“Are you all right?” Arvad came forward with the lamp.

“Was I… did you hear me?”

“What’s going on?” Dissenbark’s voice could be heard down the hall.

“You screamed,” Arvad said.

“It was only a dream.”

Dissenbark appeared in the door frame with Birch, and Kenneth repeated: “It was only a dream. “I’m fine now.”

Dissenbark nodded and, not wishing to impose, said, “Sleep well now, Kenneth,” and then disappeared.

“I could make you something,” Birch offered.

“No Birch, go to bed,” Kenneth said. “I will be fine.”

She looked as if she did not believe it, but Birch nodded, and turned to go.

Arvad said, “Are you sure you’re alright? You’re sweating. You look terrible.”

“I was… I think it was about the past,” Kenneth said. “My past.”

“That you can’t remember?”

“I think I’m remembering bits of it,” Kenneth said.

Arvad thought a minute, and then said, “Would you like me to stay for a while? I could just sit here if you like?”

“Yes,” Kenneth discovered, “I would like that a great deal.”

Arvad nodded, pulled a chair out beside the bed and sat down. 

THE

TEMPLE

On the parapet of the Takarand Palace overlooking the Temple, Phineas walked back and forth with the note clenched in his fist. That night he had arrived at Takarand Palace and was surprised to receive a new letter from the hand of Prince Rendan.

“It came from a…” Rendan decided on the most vague description he could, “young man. He handed it to us in the garden and said to give it to you.”

Over the music, Rendan added, “He said we could look at it too. If we pleased.”

Rendan watched the sorcerer, waiting for some expression. Rendan smiled sharply, turned around and left.

Phineas, hiding the letter in his robes, decided against opening it then. He waited until the dinner was over, until everyone had been seen out of the palace, and then he went to his chambers to read the missive.

So they were here…. So Cythenfay joined him. So they were all around him. Even, at last, the Hero. So, it was certainly them and not someone like a Prince Ethan. They were here to do what Ethan had come to do. They were here to take the Stone.

He had poured out so much of himself over this long, high, great building with the smoky incense rising up from its crown. He clenched his fist without knowing it, until the note was crumpled, and then he turned around, decending into the tower room.

There he beat a brass cymbal, and a moment later three of his priests were before him.

“Prepare the sacrifice. Prepare the Blue Fire. Cut the Circles. Raise the Stones, Begin the Chants.”

At each decree a man left and just now Urzad arrived.

 “Tonight, we prepare to defend the Temple,” Phineas said. “Tonight we lift up the Stone.”

The Temple was surrounded by three concentric circular walls, and as one entered, each wall was higher than the one before. One came through a great gate and then walked a pace before finding the next gate, and then walked for a while to the left before entering the last and greatest gate where a fire blazed before the steps into the great Temple door. The Gates opened in the day, though few entered, but tonight it was open as well. Since Phineas had come and the banners were put up, all the gates had been opened. Beyond the Great Gate was the great Hall of the Curtain, and beyond this was where only the Initiates went. Below this were the Binding Rooms, a twisting labyrinth of stone rooms descending deeper and deeper where the Rituals were performed and, right here, in the midst of this descending tunnel now, a stone in the wall began to shift, and then another one and then another one and the stones fell out, leaving a black, gaping opening.

Stepping delicately over the stones in battered dungarees and an old tunic came Ohean, and next Anson, then Theone, now Conn and lastly, bewildered and brushing her skirts, Mehta.

“So this is it?” Mehta murmured. “We are under the dragon’s lair.”

“Should we put the stones back?” Theone asked Ohean.

But Anson shook his head. “This is the way we will escape.”

“I was thinking it was also the way we could be followed.”

“She has a point,” Ohean said. “But we can’t think about being caught. Right now we have to find the Stone. Which is at the bottom of this chamber. So let’s go.”

The passage was nearly dark. Now and again white torches shone, enough to make the place barely visible. Ohean walked before them, and the lights became increasingly scarce until Conn murmured, “We are in darkness.”

“Hold me up?” Anson heard a woman’s voice.

“Theone?”

“I said nothing,” her voice came back in the dark.

“Hold me up,” the woman said again.

“Am I mad?” Anson demanded.

“If you’re talking to yourself, then yes,” Mehta answered.

But in the dark Ohean said, “He is not talking to himself.”

“Hold me up,” the voice said again.

Who are you?

Who do you think I am?

I think…. You are my sword…. Talking to me.

Then hold me up, fool!

Not daring to think much about it, Anson pulled his scabbarded sword from his back, and now a golden light spread out, and Anson was holding Callasyl aloft as the stone at the base of its pommel glowing.

“Did you know it could do this?” Anson turned to Ohean.

“Glow?” Ohean asked. “Or talk?”

“The latter,” Anson said as they went on. “But the talking part…”

“I suspected,” was all Ohean said.

I am Callasyl. I am the sword forged in moon fire from the tooth of the dragon. I am the dragon’s scale.

Is there anything else you wish to say?

Silence.

After a while the voice of the sword thrummed in his mind.

I am not a woman inside of a sword. I am sword. Swords really do not have much to say, and it would be unbearable if I did. I am a living sword and should you call upon my advice I will lend it. In the moment of need I will offer it.

“Would that most people could be so convenient,” Anson murmured.

I have many questions, he said, looking to the walls, and not just for you.

He stared at Ohean’s back.

But not right now.

For now they had work to do.

Rendan had followed Ethan to the parapet, and they watched as one by one, the spired towers of the Temple came to brilliant light, and then floodlights shone over its surface, and torches in the Circle burned high. Now the Durgenhorn sounded, and Ethan squeezed the crenel of the parapet and then slammed it.

“I’ve got to go. I’ve to go there,” he insisted, turning and running across the roof.

“Now you want to escape?” Rendan said.

“Well, now it doesn’t matter if I stay.”

“In that case,” Rendan decided. “I want to come with you.”

Ethan looked at him incredulously. He had opened his mouth to object, and then simply said:

“Well, all right. Let’s go. Get what you need and Gods curse us, let’s go.”

They raced down the steps and back into Rendan’s apartments. Ethan took out two sacks and Rendan, with more efficiency than one would have given him credit for, rolled up shirts and pants and underthings and began snatching up food.

“I don’t suppose there’s time to go to the kitchen?”

“We might, I suppose,” Ethan considered.

What they needed they gathered, and Ethan set about turning out the lights while Rendan opened the door and gasped.

“Rendan,” Ethan said. “Rendan, what—?”

Ethan’s voice died as he saw Rendan had been greeted by several men in black, faces hidden, Black Stars sealed on their wrist and at the head of them was Urzad who murmured: “Princes, we’re so glad you packed. It makes things easier. So,” a small sharp blade was at Ethan’s throat, “Please be so kind as to come with us. Now.”

What she began to feel was crushed. It had been a long trip through the underground passes coming here, but Theone had never felt oppressed until they began the spiraling descent down into the earth beneath the Temple. She no longer looked forward to the taking of the Jewel, but to how good it would be break back into the air above ground.

“Tell yourself good things,” she said. “Tell yourself how this is what you have waited for. Tell yourself how soon you will see Ethan.”

 And then she thought, “But will I see Ethan? How will he know what has happened?”

 And she wondered how she could have ever gotten in here without Ohean, without Yarrow, without Anson’s light? Conn was a mystery to her, still. And she was thinking of Orem, back at their hold, who could not come.

She wanted to ask how long they had been traveling, not that it mattered. But it seemed there was no end to the long, long walking. And then she wondered if they would ever have the strength to travel back up and get out. Presently, by the increasing light of Callasyl. Theone saw the ceiling rise higher, while the space they trod widened until now they were in a small, pale walled hall ending in a black door which reminded Conn of the Black Door in the Blue Temple, the door through which all devotees entered.

“I bet,” Anson said, looking to either side of the wide, gold lit hall, “in another circumstance this could be an interesting place.”

“It’s interesting enough as it is,” Mehta said, pulling her cloak tighter about her.

“Why did I want to come with you?”

Ohean looked back at her and smiled.

“Because you are an extraordinary woman, Mehta.”

“I’m just a housemaid,” she said.

“And I was a scullery boy,” Ohean said, “and I kept the chickens on the Rootless Isle. Does that make me less extraordinary?”

And then they stopped.

“This is it?” Theone stepped forward.

The ground was flat, and there was a long, high black doorway before them. Anson asked the light of Callasyl to dull, and Ohean began walking forward. He passed through the door first, and then, as they came through, the light increased and Theone, putting her hand to her mouth looked down.

They stood on a dais overlooking a dim, cavernous space with no visible ceiling, and the dais steps made a long descent into the beginning of a great, writhing stone maze, and in the distant center of this, they saw a white light in the blackness.

“The Stone,” said Anson.