Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Vagabond Paladin
I think we are close to the end now, my girl, and there are so many things I have not told you.
I was starting to realize how much he’d protected me from that I’d never understood.
It hadn’t seemed like it when we were shivering in blasts of cold, drifting from village to village eating scraps, huddled in barns, dealing with the kinds of perversion the villagers shied away from.
It had not felt it when we wrestled demons in the dark and prayed our way through the twisting turns of evil men.
But the world had been simpler then than it was right now, under the ground.
What Sir Branson had protected me from had not been evil, but it had been the understanding that even those who represent good can be evil, or foster evil, or fight on the side of evil.
I had harbored doubts before, even in that protected state.
He had stood like a shield in front of me and protected me from the worst of it.
I had not realized.
When he taught me to give thanks over scraps, he had not told me it was because greed, when rooted deep, drove the hearts of men to regard murder as a mild inconvenience.
When he taught me to welcome beggars and those who were abandoned by others, he had not told me that they were kings compared to those who wore white and rode in the name of the God.
I also failed to tell you that you were a great comfort to me. A daughter not of my body, but mine to protect, mine to train, mine to love. I loved you, my girl, as a father loves a child. I want you to know that.
I had loved him, too.
The God says you must bury me with honor. Let the honor be that you remember and let the remembrance shine light into the doubts that still endarken your heart.
I swallowed down a desire to dismiss what he was saying just so I could protect myself from what was coming next. I didn’t want him to go. And yet I needed him to go and to go soon. Time was ticking down and every demon in this arcanery must be dealt with somehow — including the one in my dog.
Sir Coriand turned and led us into the light of the trial ahead, seeming almost swallowed by it, and then his golems were swallowed next, and then those in front of me one by one.
There is a story from the ancient past of Corinna the Martyr.
Corinna — by faith alone — left her family and her home, and dressed in flowing white robes — which, frankly, is a very impractical choice for travel and made me doubt the sanity of her other choices — and walked to the center of a cult of the Heart of the Bull, and there, in their underground lair, she had knelt in prayer and asked the God to vanquish her enemies, and he had shown her the one weak spot in the structure.
Filled with his power, she had struck it a mighty blow, and the temple had collapsed, killing her and hundreds of worshipers.
It had always struck me as odd that we told this tale, because if everyone died, then who could tell what Corinna had done?
The God knew and he told his faithful. Abernicus saw Corinna in her Saintly form and made for her a great statue that graces the narthex of the Cathedral of the Three Peaks in Shannamara.
Or, the demon added wickedly. Or, your pretty girl dressed in pristine white and she ventured out willingly and partook eagerly in the cult’s worship, and when the place came down — due, no doubt, to poor human construction methods — the collapse took her with it.
And then her credulous friends and family painted her as a martyr rather than a cultist and you fools pray now to a Saint as twisted as the ones that garnish this place.
He spun out into raucous laughter in my mind.
And I couldn’t have said if his story was true. It had the unfortunate ring of truth about it.
I felt Adalbrand’s finger slip free of mine and then he was lost to brightness, and I stepped through behind him, blinking in such light as I had not seen in days. My eyes were no longer accustomed to it.
What if Corinna had gone to worship false gods?
What if at the last moment, she had changed her mind and called on the God and he had both vanquished her enemies and swept her away in the tumult with them, and she was neither Saint nor sinner but merely one more soul in a sea of the broken, the foolish, the uncertain?
Just like me.
Not like you. You, my girl, are destined for better things. Now, shed this doubt once and for all. Walk with me into trouble and let our deeds wash away the tarnish of distrust.
When my eyes finally cleared and I could see, I stood and stared with everyone else.
I should have known by now to expect the rooms of this place to be built to an unimaginable scale.
The ceiling towered high above us and was so crisscrossed with light coming down that the room seemed brightly lit.
Perhaps it would have felt dull if I had come directly down from above, but I had not.
I had been walking in darkness for so long that this light felt blinding.
How had we not seen so many holes drilled from above?
We must have walked over these places again and again.
Down one wall, water trickled against the flat white marble, growing mold and moss on the wall there in virulent greens and chartreuses.
This must be where that stream above had disappeared.
And perhaps it explained why the gears squealed when the room twisted.
Had the stream of melting Rim water rusted them?
Or did it, perhaps, power them somehow? I was not familiar with water workings, though I was sure the Engineers were.
I would not ask them for clarification. I no longer trusted them with anything.
The room was less stark than the others had been. It took me a moment to realize why. There were white statues lining the walls, of course, but these statues were partially crumbled and foliage threaded through them. Vines and shrubs and small trees grew here, stilted and stunted, yes, but alive.
Just the scent of them made my heart feel wistful, longing for the plants above I may never see again. I ran fingers over the leaves closest to me as we slowly made our way into the room, turning to look at everything.
All around the edge of the vault were stone benches set to watch the center, and between the benches were lecterns and small writing desks, piled with books and scattered with parchment and ink.
Two hundred scholars could easily fit in this room, moving from desk to bench to lectern, and still the room would feel too large.
The wall behind us, besides one pillar leading from floor to ceiling — which undoubtedly contained the glass slider puzzle and faced the mesh window — was open to the moveable wall.
It was a bit of a relief to see that was so, what with the clock slowly ticking and turning the central room.
We would have a chance to escape this room for as long as the door ticked along that open stone wall.
Far more time than the mere hour that it would have taken to tick past a single door space.
That established, I turned back to the main room and to the white sand floor in the center. It was clearly placed there intentionally and it was surrounded by a rim of marble carved to look like a swirling line of snakes tangled in on one another.
And above the sand, on pulleys and ropes, were three of the strangest contraptions I thought I’d ever seen. Already, Sir Sorken was lowering one from a short platform where it was anchored.
“And now, we test!” his voice boomed out.
He could test all he wanted. I felt none of his enthusiasm.
Sir Coriand hurried over. He passed a book, a pot of ink, and a quill to Sir Sorken, who fitted them on a small wooden board just large enough for all three.
The two of them fussed over it, arranging the red leather-bound book just so and then smoothing their brown tabards and hoary locks as if they were about to present themselves to a bishop.
“You chose the Exclusia Prima, I think?” Sir Coriand said formally, scrawling a note in a second book. I didn’t bother questioning how there was still ink in these pots. It was no stranger than that the pages of the books had not disintegrated to dust.
“I did. A fine sample of a great work.”
“Blessings on your work,” Sir Coriand said, raising two fingers formally.
Having settled his book in place, Sir Sorken eased himself into the leather harnesses — belly down, to my surprise, legs spread out and arms in front to where they could easily reach both the straps of the pulley system and the writing board.
With a tightening of his aged muscles, he gave a quick tug, and the contraption released from the platform, swung into the center of the room over the sand, and began to ascend as he tugged the ropes.
The light from above caught him and that was when I finally saw the point of this strange rig that left him helpless and vulnerable, spread-eagle under the ominous ceiling, for beneath him, his shadow built and swirled, seeming blacker and fuller than it had been before he pinned it beneath him to the sand.
We all watched as he ascended to the height he wanted, and then opened his book and began to write.
I thought my mouth might drop open when the shadow beneath him altered, billowing here and slimming there, and began to take shape to look almost just like Cleft — his golem creation — but formed entirely of shadow.
“Written,” Sir Owalan gasped with wide eyes. “They do say the world was created by a single word, don’t they?”
Without uttering a syllable — and no wonder, with his voice gone forever — the High Saint snatched up a book and ink pot of his own and hustled to the second of the three rigs.
He must have been watching with care, for he was rigged and flying out over the sand in moments, ascending quickly into the air.