He ran a hand through his white beard. “Like a marriage between two royal houses, in order to produce an heir.”
“I am no princess,” she said, more amused by the idea than otherwise.
“Are you not? But the Master Wizards rule on Leal. And your Pendawer prince—does he not view you as an equal?” he asked with a sly smile.
That sobered her. She had never considered whether Prince Ruan’s intentions were honorable or not, she had been so busy rejecting him: first out of loyalty to Cailltin, later because she knew that encouraging him would be selfish, even cruel.
“It is a very small island,” she said with a frown. “And the children of wizards must make their own way in the world. We inherit nothing by right of birth.”
“I think you are wrong,” he replied. “Like all the children of Men you have inherited a harvest of grief. Ill days are coming; what will you do to avert them?”
She almost said: What will you do? But she swallowed the words. What right had she to challenge him, when Men had brought their world—and his—to the brink of ruin?
“I will do all that I can,” she said fiercely, knotting her hands into fists. “I will do whatever it is in me to do, no matter the cost.”
Afterward, she spent a restless night—if night it was—unable to sleep, trying to fathom the true purpose behind her lengthy audience with the King. He was old and he was subtle. Had he meant to learn something from her, or to convey some wisdom she was too young and too ignorant to comprehend? If Faolein, who had listened to the entire conversation, knew what it meant, he did not choose to enlighten her.
She rose, heavy eyed and out of sorts, as soon as she heard the servants moving around in the room outside the bed, the sound of firewood being stacked on the hearth.
Over breakfast in the adjoining chamber, she told the men a little of her conversation with King Yri. They had naturally been surprised to see her come in with the owl on her arm and had pelted her with questions.
“It seems you were right when you told us not to attempt to deceive him,” Prince Ruan said. “With every bird—and probably every beast—on the mountain spying on us…”
“We might have guessed when we saw how Prince Tyr and the others controlled our horses,” said Skerry. “How many of them, I wonder, have this affinity for creatures feathered and furred? But at least we know now why the birds failed to warn Faolein that the dwarves were near.”
“And I know how King Yri exchanges news with the Ni-Féa,” said Ruan, his silvery eyebrows drawing together. “For my grandmother also talks to birds.”
There was no time to say more, for a pair of dwarves entered the room, announcing King Yri. Appetites fled and everyone rose at once. No one doubted that the King had finally reached a decision, or that they would soon learn his intentions.
Four stout dwarves carried him in in a chair and put him down by the hearth, where the firelight lent a ruddy glow to his normally waxen features. “It could be said with some justice that the quarrels of wizards and magicians affect us all,” he began. “Nevertheless, I have decided not to involve myself in yours. Your arrival on my doorstep was unfortunate, and perhaps I was not wise to summon you here, but it is too late to undo that, much as I might wish it.”
His pale eyes moved grimly from one fallen face to the next. “You are to leave at once, and my son and his servants will take you to the surface. From there, it is up to you where you go and what you do.”
Sindérian was sorely disappointed. She had hoped for more; she had believed it was well within King Yri’s power to do more. And if this was to be his decision, he might have reached it sooner, she thought bitterly. The time she and her fellow travellers had spent in the dwarf realm would surely cost them dearly.
25
When he died, they buried him deep. He had thought that death would be balm to his troubled spirit. He had thought that in dying he would leave behind the terrors and humiliations of the flesh. But in the necrotic darkness of the grave he experienced torments unspeakable.
In the darkness and silence, it seemed that his perceptions had expanded to take on horrifying new sensations. Thus, with organs that were not eyes he “saw” through the lid of his coffin the relentless march of the worms; with organs that were not ears he “heard” the hideous workings of thousands of tiny insect jaws. His skin, in particular, had become wonderfully sensitive, capable of receiving impressions similar to taste and smell, and through these he experienced his own dissolution—the loosening sinews and decaying brain, the swift reduction of flesh into liquid corruption. And not once, but again, and again, and again, as his bones were continually reclothed in flesh, then sloughed it off again.
At last he broke free from the torpor that held him. In a sudden burst of agitated writhing, he cracked open the lid of his stone coffin and struggled up through infinities of earth—only to be thrust down deeper than before as soon as he broke the surface.
Someone gripped Cuillioc’s shoulder and raised him up from his sweaty pillow. Where was he? His entire body was clothed in a chill perspiration; more was pouring off of him. When a damp tendril of hair fell across his face, a rough hand brushed it away. He felt these things but he could not see them, for darkness still pressed heavily on his eyelids.
The hard rim of a cup was pressed against his lips; a bitter liquid dribbled into his mouth. The odor was familiar but not the taste, which was unbelievably foul. He gagged and retched and brought it up again.
“If he will not take the medicine he will surely die,” said an angry voice.
“It will be your misfortune if he does die,” said another, cool, dispassionate; Cuillioc did not know to whom it belonged, but he disliked it instinctively. “Lord Vaz would not be pleased.”
“I can only do so much.” Blind as he was, the Prince sensed a seething resentment. “He will not take the medicine, and you know it is death to refuse it.”
He lay in a tomb-chamber inside one of their obelisks, his body wrapped in bands of silk, preserved in musty spices. So the Mirazhites honored the deities of their bizarre mystery cults: the two-headed calves, dog-faced women, and other abortions of nature.
The spices had mummified him, tightening the skin, causing his eyes to bulge out from their sockets and his lips to draw back, baring his teeth. Silent laughter racked him, for his leather tongue and constricted windpipe would not produce the tiniest whisper of sound. He had hoped to become a hero; they had made him instead one of their thousand blasphemous gods. Was that better or worse?
Somewhere a granite slab scraped against sand, letting a gust of humid air into his tomb. Men came in with flaring torches; he could smell the smoke even before he saw the fire. When they came to his couch of stone, one of the intruders stooped down to look at him. “This one is none of ours. How did he come here?”
Someone thrust his torch so near, Cuillioc could smell the musty perfume of the spices rising from the silken bindings. Then the wrappings ignited; he felt the flames licking at his dried skin. Finally his entire body went up in a white-hot conflagration.
And he burned and he burned. For centuries he burned, and all the while he could smell his own flesh scorching,
A foul taste filled his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but a hard hand kept his jaws clamped shut, and for all his struggles he could not pull away. Weak. He was far too weak, and they could do what they liked with him.
“I had the inspiration, you see, to put the leaves under his tongue,” said the voice he had come to associate with his worst moments. “In that way, even though he will not swallow them, he still absorbs some of the virtue.”
“He does not wake?” There was a sound like the scrape of a chair against a stone floor.