Olin and Vash could only stare in amazement and horror, although of course the Paramount Minister did his best to hide his feelings.
A good part of an hour had passed as they sat motionless in the middle of the coast road. Olin had fallen into silence and the autarch seemed more interested in drinking wine and dandling one of his young female servants while he whispered in her ear. Vash was using the delay to look through his records—he would be hideously busy the moment they reached the place to make camp—when one of the autarch’s generals came to the platform and asked for a word with him. After an exchange in which the general did not raise his voice above a whisper, the autarch sent him away. For a moment he was silent, then he began to laugh.
“What is it, Golden One?” Vash asked. “Is everything well?”
“Never better,” said the autarch. “This will be even easier than I planned.” He waved his gold-tipped fingers and the platform lurched into movement once more, the slaves carrying it groaning quietly as they began to walk. “You will see.”
It was some time before Vash learned what his master meant. As they reached a bend in the road the slaves got up and pulled back the curtains, giving Vash a moment of panicky vulnerability, but a moment later he saw why they had done it.
On the coast side of Brenn’s Bay, the mainland city of Southmarch was deserted. Much of it had been burned, or was still burning, but the smoke and the dancing flames gave the scene its only movement. There was not a living creature in sight anywhere nearby, and even the castle across the water looked empty, although Vash did not doubt that plenty of Olin’s countrymen lurked inside, sharpening their weapons to shed Xixian blood.
“See?” the autarch said in triumph. “The shore is ours—the Qar have gone. They had no wish to be caught between our army and the bay. They have given up their claim to the Shining Man!”
Vash was distracted by a noise behind him, but the autarch paid it no attention. Sulepis was gazing over the scene with obvious satisfaction, as though this were not Olin’s long-lost home but his own.
The noise, Pinimmon Vash realized after a moment, was King Olin praying as he stared out across the water toward the silent castle.
39. Another Bend in the River of Time
“Some claim that the Qar are immortal, others that their lives are only of greater length than those of mortal men. But which of these things is true, or what happens to fairies when they die, no man can say.”
All his life Barrick Eddon had prayed the things that made him different from others, his crippled arm, his night-terrors and storms of inexplicable grief, all the terrible legacy of his father’s madness, would prove to have some meaning—that the truth of him was something more than simply a botched and meaningless life. Now his prayer had been answered and it terrified him.
I didn’t save the queen. What if I fail with the king’s Fireflower, too? What if it will not have me?
He stood on the balcony of the king’s retiring room. A shower had just passed over the castle; the towers and pitched roofs jutted like tombstones in a crowded cemetery, dozens of different shades of damp, shiny black. In the short time since he had come the skies over Qul-na-Qar had always been wet, shifting back and forth between mist, drizzle, and downpour as though the ancient stronghold were a ship sailing through the storms.
Still, there was something peaceful about the place, and not just its near emptiness: the seemingly endless maze of halls had the quiet air of a graveyard, but one in which the ghosts had been dead too long to trouble the living. He knew things lurked in the shadows that should have terrified him, but instead he felt at home in this god’s house full of uncanny strangers. In fact, it was odd just how little he missed anything that had been his before—his home in the sunlands, his sister, the dark-haired girl in his dreams. They all seemed very distant now. Was there anything worth going back for?
Barrick grew impatient at last with the shimmer of wet roofs and his own circling thoughts. He left the room and made his way down a steep stairway of cracked white stone and out into the covered colonnade beside a dripping, empty garden. Even the strange plants seemed muted in color, their greens almost gray, their blossoms so pale that their pinks and yellows could only be seen from nearby, as though the rain had leached most of their color. From down here the castle’s many towers looked less like cemetery stones and more like the complexity of nature, full of abstract, repeating shapes—pillars and bars and chevrons of the sort human nobles used as heraldic symbols to mark their family name, but which were repeated here in endless patterns like the scales of a snake. The profusion of these basic shapes both lulled and confused the eye, and after walking for a while Barrick found even his thoughts growing weary.
Why have you given me a choice, Ynnir? he thought. I’ve never chosen well…
As if coming to answer him, a swirl of rustling leaves blew around the corner then eddied back as the king in his tattered robes stepped into the colonnade in front of Barrick, appearing from nowhere as though he had walked out of a fold in the air.
I can no longer bear to hear the weeping of the Celebrants, Ynnir told him, his thoughts fluttering to Barrick like the leaves falling on the path, so I have brought my sister—my beloved—out of the Deathwatch Chamber. Whatever you choose, Barrick Eddon, I must give her my strength soon if I am to preserve her life. I sense that the Artificer has failed at last. My own strength is fading. Soon the gift of the glass will fail Saqri too and it will no longer matter what we do.
Walk with me.
Barrick accompanied the tall king in silence as they made their way out of the wet garden and back into the echoing halls. As they walked, some of Ynnir’s servants came whispering out of the shadows, creatures of many different shapes and sizes who fell in behind them and followed at a respectful distance. The strange faces peering at him made Barrick uncomfortable, but only because he knew they belonged here and he didn’t.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said at last. “I don’t know what will happen.”
If you did, you would only be making a selection, not a choice. Ynnir stopped and turned to him. Here, child. Let me show you something. He reached up to the rag covering his eyes, touched it delicately with his long fingers. As the years of my life passed and our people’s plight became more and more grim, I turned farther and farther inward in search of anything that might save us. I lived almost every moment with my ancestors, with the Fireflower and the Deep Library, and traveled in my thoughts to places that have no names you would understand. I dove so deeply into what might be and what had been that I lost sight of what was before me. A century passed before I noticed that my wife, my beloved sister, was dying. He undid the knot at the back of the blindfold, let the piece of cloth slide free. His eyes were white as milk. Eventually I lost my sight in truth. I have not seen my beloved’s face except in memory for longer than I can remember. I will never know your face, boy, except for how you look in the minds of others. All from trying to know all that will happen. All from trying not to make any mistakes.