“But if we can’t use that one, there must be others!”
“A few. Some had already been discovered by accident before Crooked learned the great secrets from the old woman. In fact the gods built many of their houses so that they could use those which had already been found.”
“Then we can use them, too, can’t we? You said that Southmarch is on top of—in front of, whatever you said—the palace of Kernios. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? One of those doors?”
“Any of the roads that served Kernios would be banned to us,” she said. “Even with the dark one deep in his long slumber. It is a good idea, Barrick Manchild, but it will not serve.”
“What am I supposed to do, then, just… pray? My people will be killed! And so will the rest of yours!” He threw himself down on the steps of the pavilion at her feet and slapped the stone in frustration. “I used to think the gods didn’t even exist—now you’re telling me they’re blocking my way every direction I turn. And they’re not even awake!”
Saqri raised one eyebrow at this display but did not speak. After a moment she rose and drifted down the steps past him. She raised her hand as she passed, clearly bidding him to follow her.
“Where are we going now?” Barrick asked.
“There is another source of help that remains to us,” she said without slowing.
Barrick scrambled after her as she made her way back across the chiming, singing garden into the timeless halls of Qul-na-Qar.
There was a point at which the stairs they had been descending for so long became a level floor, but he could not quite remember when that happened; there was another point at which the inconstant, watery light of the palace dwindled and at last died, but he could not exactly remember when that had happened, either. Lastly, even the stone floor beneath his feet had ended; now he felt the give of loam beneath his feet, as though they had gone so deep beneath the castle they had left even the foundations behind. In fact, they had been walking in darkness so long now that it seemed no matter what Saqri might claim of the distance, they must have walked most of the way from Qul-na-Qar to Southmarch.
The silence of this endless dark place was of course not truly silent, at least not in Barrick’s teeming skull, but with the help of what Ynnir had told him and the feeling that the blind king himself was not too far away, Barrick was able to rise above the chaotic knowledge of the Fireflower and concentrate on staying close to Saqri, who led him not like a mother leading a child through an unfamiliar place, but like someone leading another family member through a place in which they had both lived their entire lives.
Is it confidence in me she’s showing, or contempt? It did no good to wonder, of course, because they probably meant the same thing to a Qar, somehow. Still, the voices in his head did not feel nearly as alien as they had before. He almost thought he could live with them.
At last, and only because of the deep, awesome darkness through which they had been traveling, he finally saw the light: it was such a faint change that he would never have recognized it otherwise—more the memory of light than light itself. Although it grew steadily stronger as he walked, it was still a hundred paces or more before it even brightened his surroundings enough that he could finally make out the silvery outline of Saqri before him, then another hundred more before he could see the sides of the narrow, dirt-and-stone passage through which they walked, something that looked as if it had been crudely cut from the living earth in a single day’s work.
Where… ? he wondered, but felt Saqri’s thoughts settle gently over his, urging him to silence.
Soon enough.
The dim radiance ahead began to grow until it became a pearly cylinder of light, its base round and shiny as a coin. As they grew closer, he saw that the cylinder was a single large beam from a hole in the top of the tunnel, and the circle on the floor was the surface of a circular pool not much larger than a writing table but just wide enough to catch all the beam of light from above. Saqri stopped and he stopped beside her.
The Deep Library, she said.
Barrick had no idea what he was supposed to think. He had heard the name more than a few times from Ynnir. He had supposed it some deep vault in the lower part of the castle, or even a massive hall, filled with old scrolls and decaying volumes, a little (at least in his mind’s eye) like the library in Chaven’s observatory or his father’s rooms in the Tower of Summer.
The queen reached out without warning and took his hand in hers, then lifted her other hand into the light and gestured for him to do the same. Barrick had to take a step forward to reach, and as he did so he could see up the vertical tunnel toward the gleam’s source, a hole in the darkness that seemed impossibly distant, at its center a single point of white light.
Yes, Saqri told him. It is Yah’stah’s Eye, the hopeful star. It always shines above the Deep Library.
Barrick was astonished. But… but I haven’t seen a star in months… ! The Mantle—the word came to him unbidden, handed up by the Fireflower as if it had been a small object he had dropped—the Mantle covers the whole land… !
But the Deep Library does not see the Mantle, Saqri told him. It sees things as they are, or at least as they were. And the Eye is always above it. Now give me your thoughts and your silence.
It takes both of the heirs to the Fireflower to open the Deep Library, the voices told him—or was it Ynnir’s voice somehow braiding all the other voices together into one? That is another reason why losing you or Saqri now would cripple the People forever.
For a long time he only stood, listening to the murmur of the Fireflower, feeling the broad shapes of Saqri’s thoughts as she wove the summons, a chain of questions almost like children’s riddles:
He began to feel the presences gathering even before he saw the first of the silvery strands start to form in the radiance like bubbles clinging to the weeds in a pond. They came from nowhere—they came from nothing—but by the time they floated in the beam of light, they were something. They lived, at least a little, they thought, they remembered.
“We honor the summoners. We honor Crooked’s House. We honor the Fireflower.” The voices washed through his head like the sound of water dripping in a dark place. As each voice spoke, though it could be heard only inside Barrick’s thoughts, the pond or well at his feet spawned a little circular ripple. Soon the circles were crisscrossing. “Ask us and we shall give you what is in us to give.”
“The House of the People and the Last Hour of the Ancestor no longer share any of Crooked’s Roads,” Saqri said, her silent words seeming to drift up into the beam of light like motes of dust. “How can the distance be crossed? How can the gap be bridged?”
“In the elder days, one of the brightest could ride to the Ancestor in three days—fewer if his mount was not earthbound.”
“Yes,” said Saqri with a touch of asperity in her voice, “and the gods could make scented oils appear from the air then, too, and cause stones to blossom. Those days are gone. The great steeds have broken their traces years ago and fled to far lands. Those who traveled Grandmother Void’s roads can only go where the way is not barred—and the place we wish to go is barred to us.”