“What?”
“He poisoned your entire family, Caliph. He had to. For the house. For the crown.”
“I thought . . . it was bad food.”
“It was very bad food.”
“But . . .” Caliph tried to sort time. Things he remembered and things he had been told combined in an indistinguishable pile of maybe-facts. “I get the chronology confused. It’s like I don’t even know who I am.” He had so many questions he wanted to ask. He picked one at random, a particular day that jumped out. “I remember a winter morning; we left on a trip. Where did we go?”
“That was the Year of the Crow,” said Cameron. “The morning we left for Greymoor. I woke your uncle and he made a dash for the fireplace. Incontinence forced him to use whatever was close at hand. We were going to Desdae which seemed ridiculous to me. Heading for a library in the Kingdom of Greymoor just to reach some old books in the dead of winter. But Nathaniel was compensating me for the danger.
“That was also the morning I told him I was going to quit. Stop being your tutor. His thin lips always puckered when he got annoyed. Looked like a cat’s ass just above his chin.”
“I don’t remember the trip. What happened? Something went wrong . . .”
Cameron nodded. “Yes. Something went wrong.” His eyes glazed with what looked like a uniquely dire memory. “We should save that story. I’ll tell you . . . but let me fill in the holes first.”
Caliph nodded. “We could start with you coming to the house. Uncle . . . hired you as my tutor, right?”
“After a manner. Do you remember the day he introduced me to you? You were a downcast little boy then. Standing near that enormous black fireplace decorated with Niloran carvings. And your uncle talking. ‘Cameron, this is Caliph. Chin up, Caliph. Fools look at their shoes.’
“Time was muddy for me back then. We used to play on the lawn.”
“Fly kites,” said Caliph.
“Yes. You got one stuck in a tree once.”
“I remember.”
“That was the same afternoon you took me where you used to play. Do you remember that as well?”
Caliph had a vague recollection of sculptures behind the arms of trees, filing away. They burnt pale pink in a sinking sun. So bright. More like molten glass than stone.
“UMM—” Caliph pauses. “You want to see?” and after Cameron’s affirmative nod, “Come on, I’ll show you.”
His eight-year-old legs begin a mad dash for the statue-marked trail and Cameron hurries to keep up.
A formerly well-kept path shows disuse and overgrowth. Saplings spring up in the middle of the trail.
“Doesn’t anyone come here?”
Caliph shrugs. “No one ever has. Sometimes I play down here with Marco.”
“Marco? Who’s he?”
“My friend.”
“Does he live in the city?”
“No. He lives out here.”
“Out where?” Cameron looks around. There are no houses, roads or signs of habitation. Just forest and fallen leaves.
“I don’t know.” Caliph bounces along, stopping to overturn rocks and tug at leaves. “He shows up when I want to play.”
The dappled sway of woodland shadows grows faintly chill. The darkness pulls more closely beneath venerable elms. Caliph can tell that Cameron feels unsettled.
Ahead, gleams of white polished stone lean this way and that, moved by shifts in the ground.
The area is not very large. Only a score of markers jut from uneven soil.
“You come here to play? Do you know what this place is?”
Caliph smiles and regards Cameron with obvious amusement. “Are you scared?”
Cameron clamps his hands together.
“It’s just not the normal place to play. That’s all.”
Caliph climbs a hillock and surveys the sleeping kingdom with sly reverence.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Oh, nothing. So this Marco, he comes to play with you here?”
“Sometimes.”
Caliph leaps from the hillock and runs briefly toward a pair of doors set into a nearby hillside.
“Wait! Don’t!”
But Caliph doesn’t listen. He climbs the vines over the façade, smiles and looks back out of the corner of his eye, expecting Cameron to give chase.
Instead, Cameron shrugs and begins to walk between the stones. It looks like he is reading.
Suddenly Cameron falls to his knees. He seems frightened. He begins to scream. “Where is a spade?” He is shrieking, whirling. “Get me a spade!” He begins tearing at the clay.
“I remember.” Caliph nodded. “I remember you started digging with your hands. I think I ran away.”
Cameron didn’t smile. “Think I’m crazy yet?”
“No. I want to hear. I want to remember.”
Cameron eased back into the cushions. The shadows seemed to take him in and make it easier for him to talk.
“I studied your uncle. Even after he died. His name pops up a lot in places you might and might not expect. I had to . . . study him. Sort out what happened in that house.”
“I have dreams of that house.”
Cameron nodded. “So do I.”
Suddenly Caliph wasn’t alone in the house on Isca Hill. Someone else had been there, with him, seen things, dreamt terrifying dreams. “Tell me what you dreamt.”
Cameron didn’t answer right away and when he did, he took the long way. The slow way. The same way he must have come to Stonehold, with every word prepared.
“I’ll get to that. First let me tell you about your uncle.”
“Filling in holes—”
Cameron nodded. “Nathaniel planned his ascension to the High King’s throne for a reason I still don’t fully understand. Something more than simple ego . . . more than power. He was almost successful at doing something I think might have sealed the Duchy’s fate.
“At seventy-three years, most of his life had been spent in preparation.
“He was born in Stonehold. Left his family in the Duchy and traveled to Greymoor to study. After his graduation, he made a solitary trip to Twyrloch and when he came back—alone and nearly dead—he was carrying a book.
“Apparently its latch required a loathsome bargain to unlock. He had just accepted a position as professor at the High College when he took a sudden leave of absence.
“He traveled back to Stonehold. Lived in the house on Isca Hill while his sister’s family went away on holiday to the south.
“While they were gone he charmed a girl. Told her the house was his.
“He used her blood to open a holomorphic lock on the tome.”
Caliph blanched. “How do you know this? It doesn’t sound like something you read in a book.”
“Because he told me. He bragged about it. The old man was a letch. Anyway, after that, he said he went back to the High College and contented himself to study—for a time.
“Seems the older he grew, the more frenetic he became. Sensed his time was running out. He took sabbatical in the west-most hills of Stonehold, following a wisp of legend.
“He found something in the hills. In the mountains around the Lost Dale. Something he jotted in his notes. Notes I saw while I lived at the house.
“Something about the Navels of the World.
“It was a place he could go. A place that would let him live until Yacob’s Roll ran out. But it was also hidden. Cut off. Nathaniel could never hope to access it. It was a place he would have to commit murder to enter. Someplace close at hand.”