‘Well?’ called Gorm. ‘Heads or tails?’
Yilling gave a burst of high laughter. ‘I’m not sure, it rolled away! So it goes sometimes, eh, Breaker of Swords?’
‘Aye,’ grunted Gorm, somewhat annoyed. ‘So it goes.’
‘Let’s leave it till tomorrow. I’ve a feeling you’ll still be here!’
The High King’s champion turned, the smile still on his soft, smooth face, and sauntered back towards his lines. At twice bowshot from the walls they’d started hammering stakes into ground.
A circle of thorns, facing in.
The Forbidden City
No fevered imagining, no night-time foreboding, no madman’s nightmare could have come close to the reality of Strokom.
The South Wind crawled across a vast circle of still water. A secret sea miles across, ringed by islands, some mere splinters of rock, some stretching out of sight, all sprouting with buildings. With torn cubes and broken towers and twisted fingers of crumbling elf-stone and still-shining elf-glass. More jutted half-drowned from the dark waters. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of empty windows glowered down and Koll tried to reckon up how many elves might have lived and died in this colossal wreck, but could not find the numbers to begin.
‘Quite a sight,’ murmured Father Yarvi in the greatest understatement ever uttered.
All was silent. No birds circled overhead. No fish flickered in their wake. Only the creaking of the rowlocks and the muttered prayers of the crew. Long-tested oarsmen missed their strokes and tangled their oars with each other for gazing about in awestruck horror, and Koll didn’t doubt he was the most awestruck and horrified of the whole crowd.
The gods knew, he’d never laid claim to being a brave man. But it seemed cowardice could land you in more trouble than courage.
‘She Who Sings the Wind is angry,’ murmured Mother Scaer as she peered up at the tortured sky, a giant spiral of bruised purples and wounded reds and midnight blacks where no star would ever show. A weight of cloud to crush the world.
‘Here the wind is just the wind.’ Skifr took off the tangle of holy signs, talismans, blessed medallions and lucky teeth she always wore and tossed them aside. ‘Here there are no gods.’
Koll far preferred the notion of angry gods to the notion of none at all. ‘What do you mean?’
Skifr stood tall by the prow and spread her arms, her ragged cloak flapping as if she was some huge, unnatural bird, some madman’s prow-beast pointing the way to doom.
‘This is Strokom!’ she shrieked. ‘Greatest ruin of the elves! You can cease your prayers, for here even the gods fear to tread!’
‘I’m not sure you’re helping,’ growled Father Yarvi.
The crew gazed up at her, some hunching as though they could vanish into their own shoulders. Tough and desperate warriors, every one, but there was no battle, no hardship, no loss that could prepare a man for this.
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ grunted one old oarsman with a squinting eye.
‘This place is cursed,’ said another. ‘Folk who tread here sicken and die.’
Father Yarvi stepped in front of Skifr, as calm as a man at his own firepit. ‘One stroke at a time, my friends! I understand your fears but they are empty! The money-boxes Queen Laithlin will give you when you return, on the other hand, will be brimming full. The elves are thousands of years gone, and we have the Walker in the Ruins to show us the safe path. There is no danger. Trust me. Have I ever steered you wrong?’ The warnings withered to grumbles, but even the promise of riches couldn’t coax out a single smile.
‘There!’ called Skifr, pointing towards a set of slanted steps rising from the water, big enough to have been made for the feet of giants. ‘Put us ashore.’
Rulf called for slow strokes, and leant upon the steering oar, and brought them smoothly in, gravel grating against the keel. ‘How can the waters be so calm?’ Koll heard him mutter.
‘Because all things here are dead,’ said Skifr. ‘Even the waters.’ And she sprang across to the steps.
As Father Yarvi put one hand on the rail, Mother Scaer caught his withered wrist. ‘It is not too late to give up on this madness. One foot on this cursed ground and we break the most sacred law of the Ministry.’
Yarvi twisted free. ‘Any law that cannot bend in a storm is destined to be broken.’ And he leapt down.
Koll took a deep breath and held it as he vaulted over the side. He was much relieved not to be instantly struck down when his boots hit the stone. It seemed, in fact, just ground like any other. Ahead, in the shadowy valleys between the mountainous buildings nothing moved, except maybe some loose panel or dangling cable shifting in the ceaseless wind.
‘No moss,’ he said, squatting at the water’s edge. ‘No weed, no barnacle.’
‘Nothing grows in these seas but dreams,’ said Skifr. She fished something from inside her cloak of rags. A strange little bottle, and when she tipped it out five things lay on her pink palm. They looked like grubby beans, one half white, the other red, and peering closely Koll could see a faded inscription written upon each in tiny letters. Elf-letters, it hardly needed to be said, and Koll was about to make a holy sign over his chest when he remembered the gods were elsewhere, and settled for pressing gently at the weights under his shirt. That was some small comfort.
‘Each of us must eat a bean,’ said Skifr, and tossing her head back flicked one into her mouth and swallowed it.
Mother Scaer frowned down at them with even more than her usual scorn. ‘What if I do not?’
Skifr shrugged. ‘I have never been foolish enough to refuse my teachers’ solemn instruction always to eat one when I pass through elf-ruins.’
‘This could be poison.’
Skifr leaned close. ‘If I wanted to kill you I would simply cut your throat and give your corpse to Mother Sea. Believe me when I say I have often considered it. Perhaps there is poison all around us, and this is the cure?’
Father Yarvi snatched his from Skifr’s palm and swallowed it. ‘Stop moaning and eat the bean,’ he said, frowning off inland. ‘We have chosen our path and it winds long ahead of us. Keep the men calm while we are gone, Rulf.’
The old helmsman finished tying off the prow-rope to a great boulder and swallowed his bean. ‘Calm might be too much to ask.’
‘Then just keep them here,’ said Skifr, thrusting her palm and the thing upon it towards Koll. ‘We will hope to be back within five days.’
‘Five days out there?’ asked Koll, the bean frozen halfway to his mouth.
‘If we are lucky. These ruins go on for miles and the ways are not easy to find.’
‘How do you know them?’ asked Scaer.
Skifr let her head drop on one side. ‘How does anyone know anything? By listening to those who went before. By following in their footsteps. Then, in time, by walking your own path.’
Scaer’s lip wrinkled. ‘Is there more to you than smoke and riddles, witch?’
‘Perhaps, when the time is right, I will show you more. There is nothing to fear. Nothing but Death, anyway.’ She leaned close to Mother Scaer, and whispered. ‘And is she not always at your shoulder?’
The bean was uncomfortable sliding down Koll’s throat, but it tasted of nothing and left him feeling no different. Plainly it was no cure for soreness, guilt, and a crushing sense of doom.
‘What about the rest of the crew?’ he whispered, frowning back towards the ship.
Skifr shrugged. ‘I have only five beans,’ and she turned towards the ruins with the ministers of Gettland and Vansterland at her heels.
Gods, Koll wished now he’d stayed with Rin. All the things he loved about her came up in a needy surge. He felt then he’d rather have faced ten of the High King’s armies by her side than walked into the cursed silence of Strokom.
But, as Brand always used to say, you’ll buy nothing with wishes.