Crown of Stars Read online

  As usual.

  “I’m sorry, Ivar,” Baldwin whispered at last. “I love you best of all, I truly do, If … well … if there was something else you … I mean, peace is all I’ve ever really sought to be left alone. I hate being pestered all the time.”

  “Never mind it,” said Ivar hastily, surprised to find himself both relieved and disappointed by this confession. “Peace you shall have, if I can get it for you. Although I doubt I can.”

  “But you’re so brave! You always know just what to do!”

  These words made Ivar smile bitterly, although Baldwin wasn’t looking at him. “You never answered me. Why did Biscop Constance send you after me?”

  Baldwin sighed, and slumped to sit back to back with Ivar, shoulders and heads touching like comrades who, having no secrets, are entirely easy and trusting each with the other. “She told me that I, at least, must not be captured.”

  “Captured! Are they going to be captured? Killed?”

  Dreamily, Baldwin went on. “She thinks I am something I am not. That’s why she wanted to save me. I don’t know how to say ‘no.’”

  Ivar wiped his eyes. Certainly it was true that, with Baldwin as his traveling companion, he did not have the luxury for panic or indecision.

  “Never mind it, Baldwin. You did your best. We’ll stay quiet here, and hope for a little sleep. Do you want to take first watch?”

  They were, after all, both too tired to watch and too wound up to do more than doze. They huddled in darkness, with no fire, off the road under the canopy of trees. Late at night a wind roared up out of the southeast, rattling branches and brush. Later still they heard voices and the clopping of horses and saw a torch bobbing in time to a man’s swinging walk. Too afraid to move, they held their breaths and prayed that the horses would stay quiet. The party passed by, moving east along the road, away from Autun. The night wind sighed and the forest creaked and muttered around them.

  Of Biscop Constance and the others there was no sign.

  3

  HANNA dreamed.

  Liath walks in darkness, her path illuminated by the merest dull red spark glowing from her fingers. The void that surrounds her is a pit of darkness so black that Liath herself can be seen glowing with a faint aura that seems like breath moving around her form. Out in the darkness, eyes gleam, and she calls to them, but they wink out, and no one answers.

  She calls, and she listens, and where she hears the scattering of footsteps and sees the shadow of distant movement, she follows, although she does not know where she is going.

  “Liath!”

  Hanna bolted upright, heart hammering and a hand caught at her own throat. She turned to see Sorgatani weeping on her bed. Hanna sat on the carpets, wrapped in her cloak. Brother Breschius snored softly beside the threshold, his body blocking the entrance.

  “What is it?” Hanna untangled the blankets and shuffled on her knees to the bed.

  “She is lost,” said Sorgatani into her hands. “I dreamed her.”

  “Liath? I saw her, too. Wandering in darkness.”

  Sorgatani raised her head to stare at Hanna. The dark line that rimmed her eyes was smudged and runny from the tears. Her shift was twisted around her hips. “You dreamed it, too?” she whispered. Hanna nodded. “Then it is a true dream! What you and I dream, together, is a true dream. Did you see my teacher?”

  “Li’at’dano? The centaur shaman? I did not.”

  Sorgatani’s shoulders shook as she fought off another convulsion of grief. “Neither did I. I sense in my heart that she is gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead. Devoured. Gone utterly.”

  Hanna choked, finding no words. She pressed her hands into the thick carpet to steady herself. The air lay cold within the chamber. A curl of smoke from the altar fire spun upward and out the smoke hole into the hazy gray sameness of the Other Side, a place Hanna could never walk but which all Kerayit shamans had visited in their spirit trance—or so Breschius had told her. Sorgatani never spoke of it.

  “I am cold,” said Sorgatani.

  Hanna sat beside her on the bed and held her. Although they sat this way for a long time, and night passed, Sorgatani did not sleep.

  In the morning, stepping outside, Hanna covered her eyes against the brightness. The clouds seemed higher and thinner and whiter than before.

  “I believe the sun will break through,” said Rosvita, coming up beside her. They watched as horses and wagons were made ready in the courtyard of Goslar. The nuns of St. Valeria mustered under the cold eye of Sister Acella, who had laid a vow of silence on every sister under her command in protest of their removal from the convent. Lions waited patiently in marching order. Sergeant Ingo signaled to Rosvita that his troops were ready to go.

  Servants loaded provisions, and the steward handed a cache of medicinal herbs to Sister Diocletia. The wagon holding Mother Obligatia had been repaired and refitted. It now held two pallets stretched lengthwise, one for the old abbess and the other for Captain Thiadbold, who was feverish and weak, sometimes delirious, but still among the living.

  Rosvita sighed as the horses were led out of the stables. “In another time, we would send you ahead with the news of our coming. But any traveler alone on the road is not safe.”

  “It was never safe for Eagles,” said Hanna.

  “Less so now. It is those darts I fear. As you must, Eagle.”

  “As I do,” murmured Hanna, looking toward Thiadbold. His eyes were shut. Sister Diocletia had shaved off his red hair to reduce lice and fleas whose presence might pester him to distraction as he healed. If he healed.

  “Be patient,” said Rosvita.

  “I’m a coward, Sister,” said Hanna. “I fear to be the one who must tell Prince Sanglant this news.”

  “Do not fear.” Rosvita’s smile had a hard edge. “I will tell him what has passed on our journey. It is my duty and my right. There is a great deal he must know. I have a good many questions as well.” Like Liath before her, like Hugh of Austra, Rosvita carried The Book of Secrets everywhere she went. She held it now in a leather case slung across her back.

  “The steward here says that Mother Scholastica anointed and crowned him, but now regrets that she acted.”

  “It is difficult to know what to think,” agreed Rosvita. “Yet we have such treasures in our possession! This book compiled by Bernard of Bodfeld. The Vita of St. Radegundis. A copy of the chronicle of St. Ekatarina’s Convent. Annals from St. Valeria’s.”

  “Books of sorcery!”

  “Those, too.”

  “And your history, that the others speak of.”

  “A small thing, compared to the rest, although naturally I am pleased it survived the storm. There is truth to be found in these books. I know it in my heart. Yet what if the truth is a truth we do not want to hear?” Her expression darkened as she glanced up at the sky. When she looked back at Hanna, her gaze was so stern that Hanna took a step back.

  “What could be wrong with the truth?”

  Rosvita shook her head and, without replying, touched Hanna on the elbow and went to find her mount.

  4

  IN the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning coils a labyrinth as intricate and bewildering as the configuration of the human heart. Down deep, and deeper yet, the stairs descend. To find answers, or release from its prison, the questing soul must plunge into what seems all that is darkest but which is in fact a world of its own far below the outer world of light and air.

  It was not her world, the land she knew well, nor yet was it the world of the upper spheres, where she had briefly journeyed and glimpsed her soul’s true home. Here beneath the weight of the earth lay a fastness whose existence she had never truly suspected.

  At the base of the stairs she found herself in a circular chamber whose polished walls bore a strange manner of ornamentation: they were carved and jabbed with tiny ridges and holes detectable most easily by touch. Eight corridors opened off at even angles; one looked the same as anothe
r, all of them smoothly paved and wide enough that four horsemen might ride abreast in procession and still have room to clear their heads and have a groom walk alongside.

  These were the spokes of a wheel. She chose a direction at random, and walked into a maze, where she soon became lost. She sensed as much as heard that creatures were following her at a distance.

  At first, pausing, she listened; then at length called; then, receiving no answer, walked down a corridor whose walls reflected back the ruddy glow of the smoldering rope she carried. In the next chamber, which was also the next branching, she waited, but no one and nothing came into view.

  Yet she did feel them. She knew they were there. She knew what they were, because her grandmother had told her the tale.

  For a while she stood, motionless, and felt the weight of the earth, the weight of family, resting as on her entire body. To think of having a living grandmother still stunned her. She could not quite grasp that even knowing it was true.

  The whispers—not of voices but of muted, skittering movement—ceased. They were waiting, as she was waiting.

  Because she could not go back, she walked on.

  The chief thing she learned after some hours of wandering: The knife edge of the spell woven in ancient days had severed this hidden world into two. On one side of that cut stretched tunnels and branching corridors whose walls were planed as by an adze; she emerged into spacious chambers, each proportioned with geometric precision, or happened upon narrow waterfalls pouring over sheer walls into fathomless pools.

  Yet the other side, crossed into with a single step, had sustained immense damage: here a rockfall, there a ceiling collapsed that blocked the passage, and in another place a chasm where the ground had actually split apart to leave a gash far wider than she dared leap.

  Pausing on this lip, she dropped a fragment of rock into the darkness and listened, but she could not hear the splinter strike bottom. A distant burning odor welling up from the deeps, a sour taste on the palate.

  Up to now, the creatures had continued to track her at a distance, heard but never seen. They had kept a strict and precise distance from her except in this one case. They had not followed her down this particular branch, even though the corridor split by the chasm was large—a thoroughfare like the regnant’s road—and must surely once have seen heavy traffic.

  She had made the detour because of that strange taste in the air wafting from one of the tunnel openings. Backtracking to the last chamber she had paused in, she halted to lick dust off her lips and consider her choices.

  Mother Obligatia had called the creatures living in the tunnels beneath St. Ekatarina’s Convent “the Ancient Ones.” Liath had heard other tales as well, speaking of goblins, small people, who lived in caverns deep underground, who mined the mother lodes, and who, perhaps, nourished themselves on human flesh. Diggers and hewers of stone, the folk who scuttled in the earth and in the rock, where darkness reigned.

  Ancient Ones had spoken to her before, when she lay entombed in rock beneath the central crown, waiting for the night when the Crown of Stars crowned the heavens. But these did not feel the same as those slow voices. These felt restless, skittish, sharp, metallic.

  She blew hard on the glowing end of the rope, and put it out. Now she saw them—not their bodies, but a faint gleam, as though their recent presence left its trace as a phosphorescent glow. Any true human would not have been able to distinguish them at all, but of course, Liath herself had more than once been told that she emanated a breath like light off her own body.

  Was there some aetherical connection between her and these earth people? It was hard to imagine there might be.

  Of the six corridors that branched off this chamber, only one had in its dark mouth that scantling blush, the luminous trace of their retreating presence. Of course, they were leading her; they had been all along, and she had missed it because of her dependence on the lamp she had made of her coil of rope.

  It was, really, the only choice left to her. She would never find her way back to the cavern in which Kansi had imprisoned her, nor did she want to return there.

  On she went, walking, trudging as she tired, on down a broad tunnel that shot straight—with perhaps the slightest curve to its trajectory—as though an arrow had bored this passage. On and on, until even the trace glow faded and she had perforce to call fire to the rope. She had learned to finesse the fiber, burning it at such an ebb that the smoldering ends gave her just enough light to see the ground, so that she might not step unwittingly into a chasm.

  But walking with no break, no light, no known destination, and in solitude, demanded its cost in the end. Just ahead, the tunnel branched like a forked stick, splitting into two corridors each one the same as the other. Nothing to choose between them. No hint of where to go next. No light but her own.

  Her guides had vanished.

  Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She sank down and sat against the wall, snuffed out the red sparks on the fraying end of the rope. In complete darkness she rested, and ate, and considered her situation. If she kept her mind busy, she would not panic.

  A labyrinth lay beneath the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning, as complex a network of pathways as the ones woken within any woven crown. It was, she supposed, like the earth’s equivalent to the network that existed in some manner in the aether, to which she had had access when she had walked through the burning stone, which was both crossroads and gateway. Somehow, when it existed in exile in the aether, the Ashioi land had become intertwined within these aetherical pathways; that was why, when she had wandered in the mist of the borderlands with Eldest Uncle’s rope tied around her, she had emerged on distant hills and in unknown marshlands in the far regions of Ashioi country, places she might otherwise only reach by many days or weeks travel on foot.

  Yet this world below the world was not simply a trap of closed tunnels. The air she breathed was not stale, although it was a little dusty and sometimes flavored with a tang. There was nothing here she could recognize, nothing familiar, nothing to grasp, not even grandmothers. The sides of the tunnels ran slick beneath her hand; she could not imagine what kind of stone this was, or how these roads had been carved out of the rock. Where the knife’s edge had cut off the land in ancient days she found debris. That was the old side, the lands that had remained on Earth after the first cataclysm. Where the creatures led her, beneath Ashioi country, the labyrinth was revealed as a sterile place seemingly untouched by the passage of time.

  Rapping sounded behind her, a warning or a welcome. She scooted up, breathed fire onto the end of the rope, and turned as the air around her lightened from an unseen source. She waited; she even held her breath, not meaning to.

  A creature shuffled into view. Its skin shone with the glamour of pewter, mottled here and there by crusty growths very like the stunted stalagmites she had seen years ago in a cave in Andalla where she had plumbed the depths with a careless guide and her inquisitive father. Had they descended farther, in that Andallan cave, would they have found a long-forgotten entrance to the great labyrinth? Did the maze weave its interlace below the entire land of Novaria?

  Bulges marked the creature’s face where eyes should be. Movement shifted within those bulges like the gathering and shredding of clouds. It wore a necklace of metal scraps that rang lightly when it halted. Wound around one arm, a copper armband gleamed brightly.

  “I am called Liath,” she said. “I pray you, friend, help me find my way out of here. I intend no harm to you and your people.”

  It shuffled past as if it had not seen or heard her, but as she turned to follow, she realized her mistake: it had avoided her, shifting sideways.

  She followed it down the right-hand branching, which proved no easy task. Despite its awkward gait it covered the ground efficiently. She walked briskly to keep up. Fortunately, the floor remained so level that even in blackness she would not have fallen. The ceiling was too high for her to touch, but Sanglant might have been able to brush it with the
tips of his fingers. Four or five women could walk abreast. Any wagon master would adore such a road, plain and wide and only gently curved where it did not push straight on.

  Stairs opened beneath her feet, spanning half the corridor while the other half continued a level course onward. Following Pewter Skin, she descended. The creature took a turning and came into a triangular chamber that three corridors opened off. She paused to lay a marker of rock slivers so she could, if necessary, find her way back to that second set of stairs. Although she hurried to catch up, this new tunnel branched at sudden and awkward intervals, without benefit of geometric chambers, and by the seventh or eighth branching she lost track of her guide except for the fading nimbus trailing behind it.

  Then even the memory of that light dissolved.

  She was alone, trapped, lost. Abandoned.

  She padded forward with a sick feeling in her stomach and cold fear along her skin. Deep in the earth, with no way out, no recourse. She could never find a way home.

  Maybe the only way out is through.

  The tunnel jinked three times within a short stretch. She blinked in surprise as she emerged into a broad, oval cave with an uncomfortably low ceiling, not quite so low that she had to stoop but low enough that she kept ducking anyway.

  The walls of the chamber were pricked with holes that had a diameter as thick as her leg and, between collections of holes, were riddled with alcoves stuck off at odd angles. The floor extended, on the level and on all sides, about ten steps inward before sinking steeply into a large, central hollow. A still pool marked the center of the hollow. This basin was filled with what might have been water but which seemed to her eye too brilliant and too hard, for it cast outward a blue incandescence as if a strong light burned in its depths.

  A dozen of the creatures inhabited this chamber, crouched on their haunches, arms moving side to side as though they were obsessively polishing the floor.