When Bran had healed, and warriors from other clans of the forest folk began to arrive in small bands from elsewhere, I turned south again, my hands empty. I had been unable to secure the ritual knife, and I had decided, for better or worse, not to try to take it with me back to Deinaros’ tower. I had contended with gods before, and on occasion even emerged victorious, but I did not wish to confront the god of the grove. The knife belonged to the people of the forest, whether it was being kept from them within the silver tree or not. It was their choice and their duty to take it by force, if they saw the need, and not mine.
My duty was to confront Deinaros. He had lied to me about the knife—it did not belong to him, and by all evidence, it was not the creation of his teacher Maponos. It was a gift of the god of the grove, to be given and taken away as his divine whim dictated. What other falsehoods had he told me? I had been so eager to follow his orders, to finally have someone to give me a heading on this directionless journey I had undertaken these past years, that I had swallowed his word whole. I had even received a warning from Ashoka, champion of Phyreios, reappeared after all this time. He had said not to trust Deinaros. I had dismissed him. Having been deceived by his gods, I thought, Ashoka was too wary and too willing to believe frightening stories told by superstitious townsfolk. I thought myself wiser, having seen more of the world. I had been wrong.
So I took the long road over hills and through valleys, across the long rivers of the continent, walking from one waning moon to another until the sea appeared at last in the distance. The salt air smelled like home.
I shook my head and squared my shoulders, holding Bran’s halter close as I approached the city of Gallia. I was not returning home. I was not yet Deinaros’ enemy, but he would not be pleased that I had returned without the knife. I steeled myself for what his retribution might be.
After that, what could I do? Could I retrieve the book and the Sage’s Mirror and flee the city? Would his magics pursue me, even across the sea or over the mountains?
His tower stood upon the cliff, watching the sea and the city at the same time, the eyes of its windows dark. The door in its base was shut.
I brought Bran up to the door. “Wait for me,” I told him. “We may need to run.”
He turned one great black eye to me. One hoof dug at the dusty ground. The scar left by the arrow in his flank shone stark and white in the midday sun, the only pale spot on his raven-black hide. I could not say if he understood me, but he remained where he was, waiting beside the door.
It was locked. I raised a fist and struck it above its iron handle, shaking it in its frame. From the way it shuddered, it was barred as well, a measure I had never seen Deinaros take in all the days I had sheltered here, waiting for my next assignment.
I tried the latch again, though I expected no change. The sorcerer was absorbed in his books, or staring into a magic mirror, or whatever else he did to pass the time. Cricket would soon be returning from the market, and she would grant me entry. I took a piece of dry bread from my saddlebag and sat on the ground against the door to eat it. I was looking forward to better rations, if nothing else.
I felt, rather than heard, the door unlock and the bar slip from its brackets and fall to the stone floor. With a great creaking of hinges, the door open, spilling me into the entry hall. The spiral staircase ascended above me, diminishing as it climbed into the tower’s height.
I got to my feet. The odor of old rot hung in the air, mixed with the smell of dusty parchment and drying herbs. The herbs themselves were conspicuously absent. Bits of knotted string dangled from the bottom of the stairs.
It was dark. The windows had been blackened with what looked like soot. I took a cold torch from the walls and lit it with my flint, and it cast a wavering pool on the floor and illuminated an eyeless, grinning skull at the base of the stairs.
“That wasn’t here last time,” I said aloud. The silence had become oppressive, a physical weight on my skin and pressure in my ears. The torch revealed a ribcage, turned ochre brown from decay and age and caved in on itself. On the other side of the staircase, a broken pelvis lay upright on the tiled stone like a dropped ceramic vessel. More bones, thin and brittle, were scattered across the floor, crumbling to dust as I failed to avoid them, picking my way over to the skull.
Had Deinaros been keeping an ancient skeleton somewhere in the tower? Cricket would be furious, I thought, when she returns from her errands to see someone has made a mess of the place. She would have to sweep up the bones and scrub the dark stains they left on the tiles.
“Deinaros!” I called out. “I’ve returned from the lands to the north, and I would speak with you.”
The tower answered with more silence.
My torch raised, I climbed the stairs, leaving dusty footprints as I went. Sunlight streamed through the windows of the second floor. Here, the floor was strewn with not bones but books—unfurled scrolls, heavy tomes spilling crumbling pages from broken spines, and thin volumes in leaning stacks. The contents of Deinaros’ storied library had been torn from its shelves and thrown here, with no regard for sorting or the monsters that Cricket had told me were contained in their pages. Intricate geometric diagrams and illustrations of cadavers stared up at me from between my boots.
Where was Cricket? Had something become of her, for the tower to be in such a state? How long had she been away from her duties?
“Deinaros!” I called again. “Cricket? Is anyone there?”
I climbed another flight of stairs. Here, on the floor where I had slept many a fitful night as Deinaros paced the floor above me, the rooms had disappeared. The doors were gone, and only flat walls studded with narrow windows greeted me as I stepped out on the landing. The sea was bright as a jewel, and a ship with high, white sails scudded like a cloud on the far horizon. My borrowed bed was nowhere to be seen.
“Cricket?” I called out again, my voice thin and wavering. I took my harpoon from my shoulder and held it in two hands. I almost wished one of the escaped monsters from Deinaros’ books would appear, so I had something to contend with other than a shift in space and a sense of foreboding. No such creatures appeared. The tower was silent. Even the echo of my questioning call in this empty space returned once and then fell quiet.
Looking below me to ensure that my escape was unimpeded, I climbed again.
The fourth floor was the highest I had ever ascended; there were at least four more above, though I knew the tower to possess interior dimensions that did not match its exterior. It had been some time since Deinaros summoned me here.
Instead of the sorcerer, however, I found Cricket, wrapped in a cloak of midnight blue and seated atop a tall stool, its four spindly legs draped in the fabric and bending just slightly as she shifted her weight. In her lap sat an open book—the book I had carried here from the southern seas, with the illustration of the flayed man gazing out from its pages.
“Eske,” she said. “I thought you’d died out on the road.”
I had been gone for months. Deinaros had expected me not to return for some time, but Cricket was a child. I could not expect her to wait so long. “I’m not dead yet,” I said.
She closed the book and set it on the shelf beside her, a full arm’s reach above my head. The stool rocked, two of its legs lifting off the floor and coming back down with a loud crack.
“What happened here, Cricket?” I asked. “Where is Deinaros?”
“Deinaros is dead,” she answered.
“What happened to him?”
One slender arm emerged from the cloak, and she pushed a strand of dark hair out of her face. The trinkets that normally dangled from her neck and wrists were gone, leaving fading, pale rings. “You’d have seen him on the first floor,” she said.
Had I? Could the ancient, decaying skeleton lying in pieces at the bottom of the stairs really have been a living man only a few months ago? “What happened to him?” I asked again, fear tinging my words. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m fine,” Cricket said. “Deinaros was weak, and he had lived too long. I proved stronger.”
Slowly, I returned my harpoon to my back, keeping my hands in view of her perch. “I don’t understand. Did you kill Deinaros?”
“Yes.” A grim smile flickered across her face.
A series of images flashed through my mind—an explosion of magic, like the incantation that had summoned the worm under Phyreios, confined to this small space; Deinaros’ ageless, spidery hands and the liberties he might have taken that drove Cricket to retaliate; the tome she had been reading, with or without her master’s permission.
“I’ve been busy since you’ve been gone,” Cricket said, dispelling the vision. “I am the sorcerer of the tower, now. Deinaros was weak, and he thought he could keep all his knowledge from me forever. I cast him down.”
“I…I understand,” I began, taking one step away from the stairs. I had no desire to follow Deinaros’ likely descent down several floors. “I had no love for the sorcerer. I only worked for him because he had promised to help me in my quest.”
“I know,” Cricket said.
I felt a small measure of relief ease the tension in my shoulders.
Her eyes darted toward the book lying flat upon the shelf. “He was lying to you, you know. Once you had brought back the knife, he’d send you for another artifact, and another, until you were dead. He meant to send you to the far East, next, to fetch a sword from the Temple of the Dragon. He was going to tell you it was essential to clear the way to the other world.”
Surely, she lied. She had to, or all the months I had spent on the road and upon the sea, the dangers I had faced and the people I had endangered in turn, had all been for nothing. I was no closer to finding Khalim than I had been when I had taken the book from the temple in Salmacha so long ago.
“The Sage’s Mirror,” I said. Panic and confusion were like a hand around my throat, and my voice was barely above a whisper. “The knife. He said it would open the way.”
“He lied.” Cricket stood, her feet on the strut between the legs of her stool, and the cloak spilled around her like a waterfall. “He lied to you, just as he lied to me about making me his apprentice. He was never going to teach me.”
“Is that why you killed him?” I asked.
“No.” For the first time, a shadow of sorrow fell across her face, and she was no longer the robed sorcerer in the tower, but the child that she truly was. “I didn’t mean to harm him. He tried to wrench the book from my hands, and lightning crackled in his fingers. I thought he was going to kill me.”
She had turned Deinaros’ magic against him, and he had fallen through his tower until the long years he had spent cheating death had at last caught up to him, and he had turned to rotted bones and dust.
It mattered not whether Cricket had intended to kill him, nor if Deinaros deserved death. He was gone, and Cricket was the master of the tower.
“Even if he did tell me the truth,” I said, “I could not recover the ritual knife. I’ll have to find another way.”
But I already knew the way. I had to cross the river of memory, deep as the sea, and breach the gate of bone on a day without a sun. I only wished I knew where to find this place.
I needed a ship.
Forward to Chapter LXII: Farther Shores
I’ve just started my reread, and OH BOY is this draft a mess. Thanks for following along as I figure this out.
I was considering having Cricket put Deinaros into some kind of confinement or stasis, like Merlin in the crystal cave, but went with all his stolen years catching up with him at once instead. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them! Comments are open.
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