Alica Kendeth turns at the top of the stairs and looks back at him. “We can’t allow them to gain the outer towers. Bring me five hundred and order that the towers be held. If that means surrendering the walls between-so be it.”
Contaph pales, as if the edge of a terrible thought has sliced him, and more deeply than the blade that ruined his face.
I follow my grandmother down the steps that coil through the heart of the tower, a thick-bodied construction, packed with many floors. Down past staterooms, barracks chambers, armouries, storerooms, down through a second skin, this of poured stone, a smaller and more ancient tower housed within the thickness of the newer construction. The spiral stair broadens to a zig-zag flight arching on poured buttresses. Seemingly insubstantial, even as a ghost I am nervous to test my weight against it. Each stair is just a slab-you can see beneath them, through the stairway to the flight beneath. . Even so, it has stood a thousand years and more and does not now crumble beneath the weight of my imagination. We descend through the Builder-tower, past iron doors, past doors of timber bound with steel, past a trio of Red March palace guards, and come to a chamber, a plain cube, in which sits a machine larger than a royal carriage, cast in silver steel, alive with dim light, and trembling with a faint but undeniable vibration as if deep within it some great beast draws breath in slumber.
Alica sets a hand to the silver metal. She bends, as if allowing herself to be weary in the solitude of this place, her forehead pressed to the coldness of the Builder-steel, hair, dark and red, falling about her face, eyes closed.
A moment later and she strides with purpose out of the chamber, a nod to the guards who set to sealing the door. A long corridor leads us to the main tower gates.
I follow her out through the exit. Men bow on every side. A detachment of six soldiers leave their duty at the tower to escort her. We take a broad thoroughfare through the town that crowds between the outer and inner wall of the castle. These are the homes of the castle folk, the labour force that keeps this castle running, that keeps food on the table, clothes on the defenders’ backs, mortar between the stones, oil on the cogs of the war-engines. Here and there I see damage caused by the rocks thrown from without, but this place is built to last. Sturdy. Obstinate. The people show these characteristics too. There is no despair here, not yet. Thin cheers go up as Princess Alica passes by. At one point market stalls line the street and we slow to pass through the crowd. Some instinct turns the castle-dwellers aside when our paths cross. They can’t see or hear me, but a sixth sense prevents them from contact.
The gatehouse at the second wall is pierced by a tunnel that can be sealed with four portcullises. All of them stand open. The escort is exchanged and we enter the killing-ground between the keep and the second wall. The bare flagstones echo beneath our feet. Well, not mine, I’m just dreaming.
The keep door stands on the side opposite to the four-fold gate in the inner wall, tall enough for a mounted man but small enough to be strong as the walls themselves. We pass through a smaller iron door set to one side. This is the Tower of Ameroth, reaching for the sky just as it did on my childhood visit. Though it stands now without the strange scars that lay etched into the Builder-stone when I saw it as a boy-and of course surrounded by a castle. I’m starting to wonder how I could be ignorant of whatever story explains how fifty years later no stone of that castle remained in place. Did it simply get hauled away block by block, stolen by locals decades after the war to build a castle elsewhere, or homes? There’s enough stone here for a city.
We pass by more palace guards, elite soldiers from the personal guard of Gholloth, second of that name. Why these men aren’t with my great-grandfather in his palace in Vermillion I can’t guess.
Alica pauses before a captain who stands beside an inner door. “Bring the chosen within the second wall, John.”
“Yes, princess.” Heels click together, a curt bow of the head.
“Artisans only, John. Skilled labour. Allow them their children if it eases progress. Pack them tight.”
“Yes, princess.” No emotion in his voice.
We pass through the door he guarded and a man seals it behind us. A short corridor leads to a domed chamber. A spiral staircase penetrates a remarkable thickness of Builder-stone. The ends of reinforcing iron bars gleam with a dull light where they protrude into the stairwell that has been cut down through them. This stairway must have consumed years of labour. The lamps flicker as Alica sweeps past, her armour clanking at each step.
We emerge into a room maybe ten yards square. A silver-steel ring, three yards across, is set into the stone floor and rises to about waist height, the upper surface sloping toward us. Dim lights glow there, the pattern shifting slowly between three configurations. In the middle of the ring a strange blue star burns, without heat but with a light that captures the eye. It rests a man’s height above the stone, as unsupported as any other star. I find myself staring at the thing, losing all sense of passing time. They say time is the fire in which we burn. Now I know what time looks like when it burns.
• • •
Alica walks through me-an unpleasant sensation but one that breaks me free of the star’s entrancement. Without my grandmother’s intervention I doubt I would ever have looked away. I’m careful not to look at it again. I have no idea if moments have passed, or hours.
The lights on the slanted top of the steel wall that forms a ring below the star now shine with a brightness that owes nothing to fire. The patterns have become more complex, more numerous, and shorter lived. Alica moves quickly here and there, touching one light as it glows, then another. I become aware that we are not alone. The room has few shadows but what shadows there are seem to gather in the far corner. A woman stands there, clad in grey, her robe wrinkled around her. She is almost as tall as Alica, but with a slight stoop, and looks no more than thirty-five but her hair is grey, falling lank about her face. She lifts her gaze-and finds me.
“How?” Any further questions die upon my lips. The woman’s left eye has a pearly cast to it. She raises a pale finger to her lips as if to shush me. When she lowers her hand the slightest of smiles lies behind it.
“I’m ready,” says Alica. “Are the people in place? The soldiers assembled?”
There’s nobody here but me and her silent sister, and neither of us answer.
She raises her voice. “I said-”
“Optics indicate the stasis zone fully occupied.”
Surprise nearly tears me from the dream. There’s a ghost standing before my grandmother. It wasn’t there a moment ago. A pale, see-through, honest-to-God ghost. A damned odd-looking ghost it has to be said-its face like a Greek marble, statued perfection that couldn’t ever be mistaken for life.
Alica bows her head. “Begin the event.”
“I have explained that stasis is not possible. Extensive repairs would be required before the generators could provide a sufficient pulse of energy. Generators seven and three are functioning at thirty percent, the remainder at less than ten percent. A failed stasis will result in a quickening. All that might be achieved is a bubble of quick-time, and at a peak ratio of thirty to one.”
“And I have acknowledged this. You will run the reactors beyond failsafe.”
“You do not understand the consequences of such action. The generators will fail catastrophically. Estimates place the devastation radius at-”
“Even so, you will do it.” Alica keeps her gaze on the pulsing lights.
The ghost shows no expression, its tone unwavering. It seems even less human than Captain John at the keep door, and the palace guard practise hard at looking impassive.
“I am afraid User that as a Guest you do not have such authority. This algorithm will-”