Tinwright didn’t like graveyards. His childhood years living next to one in Wharfside had given him many bad dreams—the stone crypts like little houses always made him think about their invisible residents, and his father’s stories about a time when heavy rains had washed bones out of the graveyard right into Wharfside’s main street had only made the nightmares worse. Still, he had no choice but to follow.
Tinwright couldn’t help wondering why they were entering the vault from outside, through its ceremonial entrance instead of through the narrow stairwell that wound down from the Erivor Chapel itself, so that the family might lay flowers or otherwise commune with their departed ancestors.
“Give me the torch.” Hendon Tolly reached out and took the burning brand from one of the guards. “Poet, you carry the mirror.”
A guard handed him the heavy bundle—rather eagerly, Tinwright thought. The stairway down into the vault was narrow and surprisingly steep; he had to concentrate just to keep his balance. As he reached the bottom, he avoided looking as long as he could at the spot where Okros had lain, but that was precisely where Tolly was headed. To his relief, the physician’s body was gone.
Tolly slid the torch into a bracket, then took the bundle from Tinwright and began to unwrap it.
Matt Tinwright had been far too frightened to examine the vault the last time he’d been inside it. The stonework was spare but graceful, the walls honeycombed with niches, each filled with its own stone sarcophagus. Beside the stairwell up to the Eddon family chapel there was at least one door that led back from the chamber in which they stood, presumably to other catacombs.
Tinwright’s father had once told him that the royal vault of the Broadhall Palace in Tessis was so famous for its size and grandeur that people called it “The Palace Below.” It was even a popular trysting-place for courting couples because it had so many quiet nooks and corners. Tinwright could no more imagine a couple choosing to bill and coo in the Eddon vault than in a butcher shop. This place took its spirit from the ruling family’s gloomy, Connordic side; in this dark stone chamber, death was not the beginning of a glorious afterlife; it was simply the end of this life.
“There.” Tolly had unwrapped the mirror and set it on top of a monument, letting it lean slightly against the wall. It was obviously an unusual object. For one thing, it had a slight but unmistakable outward curve from left to right. Also, the frame itself had been painted over so many times in so many dark shades that whatever carvings were underneath had been obscured and the frame had the look of something grown, not built. ““Now it is time for you to play your part, poet.”
“But… but what is my part?” Was there any chance he could simply run for it? Quick as Hendon Tolly was, it would still take him a moment to draw his sword—how far up the steps could Tinwright get by then? And would the guards be ready to stop him? What if Tolly called to them? He realized with a very uncomfortable looseness in his bowels and tightness in his chest that he didn’t dare to risk it. Maybe Okros had been unlucky. Maybe something would happen that would take the lord protector’s attention and allow Tinwright a better chance to escape.
Tolly took a step toward him, and even though Tinwright was taller than the lord protector, he felt as though he were looking up at Hendon’s glare from the bottom of a hole. “Listen carefully, you witless blatherskite. I must know if you can take that dead fool Okros’ place for the summoning ritual—Midsummer is only short days away. If you cannot help open the way to the land of the gods, I’ll have to find someone who can. You would then be useless to me, of course, so if you want to last a little longer, I suggest you serve me well.” Hendon Tolly passed him a book covered in tanned leather. Tinwright looked at it with horror. “Just open it, you white-livered fool,” Tolly growled. “That is cowhide that binds it, not human flesh. It is Ximander’s book—even you must have heard of that. Open it!”
Reluctantly, Tinwright did. He had not read ancient Hierosoline in years, but his schoolteacher father had made certain his son could read the old, great books. If he had not been so terrified, it might have been an interesting experience—he had heard of Ximander’s famous book and its strange predictions and tales, but he had never seen it. The actual title appeared to be, “A Diversitie of Truthfull Thinges, from the pen of Ximandros Tetramakos.”
“Here,” Tolly said. “I will show you the page. You will read, and only read, until I tell you to do something different.”
“Read out loud?”
“Yes, fool. You are not reading for your pleasure, you are invoking a goddess.”
“A goddess… ?” Tinwright swallowed. Was Tolly serious? Did he truly think he could speak to the gods as though he were one of the Oniri, the sacred oracles that carried the gods’ words to a waiting world? But the oracles were blessed folk, beloved of the gods, men and women of such purity and piousness that they could touch the will of Heaven itself. Hendon Tolly was a murderer, a rapist, and usurper.
Tinwright did not, however, point any of this out.
“Read this, Lord?” To his dismay, the language was nothing so ordinary as ancient Hiersoline, but instead some strange, unreadable tongue he had never seen before. “I do not know these words. ...”
“Stop sniveling and get to it,” Tolly said. “Make the best sense of it you can. You are not charming empty-headed women here, but speaking words of power.”
Tinwright cleared his throat. He could feel the stone walls looming close around him, and perhaps even the souls of the royal family’s dead watching him with dislike, but there was nothing to be done but to read Hendon Tolly’s nonsense aloud.
“Vea shen goarubilir sheyyer gelameian o goh en duyak paraasala in ichinde ionet gizhli, vea SYA yeldi goh buk vea shen goarmelimiş vea bagh! O buk iscah bir goabegi…”
As Tinwright read, a strange thing began to happen. The words of Ximander’s incantation, couched in some awkward, antique desert tongue, began to seem more and more familiar, like a melody from childhood, until Matthias Tinwright began to understand what it was saying, as though the language of the book had somehow changed to his own tongue even as he read it.
“… And You commanded that visible things should come from invisible in the very lowest parts, and SYA came into all that was and You beheld it all and there! From her belly there shone a great radiance ...”
The light from the torch dimmed abruptly, as if someone had plucked it from its sconce and was walking away. Tinwright felt himself falling forward, not into the mirror that still stood before him like a window frame, but falling nonetheless, his body almost completely lost to him, his thoughts drawn into the reflection of his own face in the mirror’s dark surface.
Except that the reflection was changing, Tinwright realized. Fear dug at him. Somehow the walls of the crypt had all but vanished, although he thought he could still dimly see them. The floor was entirely gone, replaced by a carpet of green grass and the gnarled but slender gray trunk of a tree. It was an almond tree, branches festooned with white blossoms like small stars.
By all of Heaven, it’s Zoria, he realized. We’re invoking Zoria! Only his fear had kept him from understanding for so long. The almond blossom is hers, first flower of the spring—the year’s dawn.
But why? What lunatic sacrilege did Hendon Tolly have in mind? Tolly had said something about marrying a goddess, but could even such a madman believe he might woo and even wed Perin’s virgin daughter? Blasphemy!