William’s steps through the dungeon were slow ones. The vague fear that had lived in him for months was deepening, and at last it was beginning to take sharper form.
His reign had known border squabbles and provincial uprisings, but it had escaped real war. On the surface, this affair with Saltmark seemed another such petty dispute, yet William felt as if he and the empire were balanced on the tip of a needle. His enemies were striking somehow into his very house—first Muriele and then Lesbeth. They were laughing at him, the impotent king of the most powerful empire in the world.
And while Robert spun dark webs to snare their troubles, William did nothing. Maybe Robert ought to be king.
William paused, suddenly realizing that his steps had not taken him nearer the stairway that led to the palace, but rather, deeper into the dungeons. Torches still flickered here, clouding the dank air with scorched oil, but the passage faded into darkness. He stood there a moment, peering into it. How many years since he had been that way? Twenty?
Yes, since the day his father first showed him what lay in the deepest dungeon of Eslen castle. He had never returned.
He knew a moment of panic, and checked himself from fleeing back up into the light. Then, with something at least pretending to be resolve, he continued on a bit, until he came to a small chamber that was not a cell, but that did have a small wooden door. Through it, William heard a faint, sweet music, a not-quite-familiar tune played on the strings of a theorbo. The key was minor and sad, with small trills like birdsong and full chords that reminded of the sea.
Hesitating, he waited for a break in the music, but the melody never quite seemed to find its end, teasing the ear with promise of closure but then wafting on like a capricious zephyr.
Finally, remembering who was king, he rapped on the wooden surface.
For long moments, nothing happened, but then the music stopped in midphrase, and the door swung inward, silently, on well-oiled hinges, and in the orange light a narrow wedge of ghost-pale face appeared. Eyes of milky white looked upon no world William knew, but the ancient Sefry smiled as if at a secret joke.
“Your Majesty,” he murmured, in a slight voice. “It has been many years.”
“How—?” William faltered again. How could those unsighted eyes know him?
“I know it is you,” the Sefry said, “because the Kept has been whispering for you. You were bound to come.”
Corpse fingers tickled William’s spine. The dead are speaking my name. He remembered that day in his chambers, the day Lesbeth returned. The day he’d first learned about Saltmark from Robert.
“You will want to speak to him,” the old one said.
“I don’t remember your name, sir,” William said.
The Sefry smiled, to reveal teeth still white but worn nearly to the gums. “I was never named, my liege. Those marked to keep the key are never named. You may call me Keeper.” He turned, and his silk robe shifted and pulled over what might have been a frame of bone. “I will fetch my key.”
He vanished into the darkness of his abode, and reappeared a moment later with an iron key gripped in his white fingers. In the other hand he carried a lantern.
“If you would but light this, Your Majesty,” he said. “Fire and I are not friendly.”
William took a torch from the wall and got the wick going.
“How long have you been down here?” William asked. “My father said you were the Keeper in his father’s time.” How long do Sefry live?
“I came with the first of the Dares,” the withered creature said, starting down the hall. “Your ancestors did not trust my predecessor, since he was a servant of the Reiksbaurgs.” He hissed a small laugh. “A wasted fear.”
“What do you mean?”
“That Keeper no more served the Reiksbaurgs than I serve you, my liege. My task is older by far than any line that ever sat this throne.”
“You serve the throne itself, then, without regard for who sits it?”
The Sefry’s soft footsteps scraped ten times on stone before he softly answered. “I serve this place and this land, without regard for thrones at all.”
They continued in silence, down a narrow stair that cut through stone in which the black bones of unknown beasts could be seen now and then—here a rib cage, there the empty eyes of a flat and alien skull. It was as if the stone had melted and flowed around them.
“These bones in the rock,” William asked. “Are they monsters imprisoned by my ancestress, or some older Skasloi sorcery?”
“There are sorceries more ancient than the Skasloi,” the Keeper murmured. “The world is very old.”
William imagined his own skull, gazing emptily from the stone across unimaginable gulfs of time. He felt suddenly dizzy, as if suspended over a great pit.
“We are below Eslen, now,” the Sefry informed him. “We are in all that remains of Ulheqelesh.”
“Do not speak that name,” William said, trying to control his breathing. Despite the narrowness of the stair, his strange vertigo persisted.
The Sefry shook his head. “Of all names that might be spoken here, that is the least powerful. Your ancestress destroyed not only the form of the citadel, but the very soul of it. The name is only a sound.”
“A dread sound.”
“I will not speak it again, if it bothers you,” the Sefry promised diffidently.
They continued without speaking, but the way was no longer silent. Along with the scraping of their shoes on the stone there was a hissing, a whispering. William could not make out the words, if indeed there were words, if it were not some movement of air or water in the deeps of the place. And as he drew nearer their destination, it began to sound familiar.
Was the old man right? Was the Kept calling his name? The words lisped, as if from some creature with no lips, Hriiyah. Hriiyah Darrrr …
“Why are his guardians never named?” William asked, to shut the voice from his head.
“You feel why, I think. Names give him a little power. Never fear. He is feeble, and what strength he has I will check.”
“You’re certain?”
“It is my only duty, Sire. Your grandfather did come here often, your father, as well. They trusted me.”
“Very well.” He stopped, staring at the door that appeared before them. It was iron, but despite the damp no rust marred its surface. In the lamplight it was black, and the curling characters that grooved its surface were blacker still. A faint smell hung in the air, a bit like burning resin.
The Keeper approached the door and placed his key in one of two locks. But he paused.
“You need not do this, Sire,” the Sefry said. “You may always turn back.”
He thinks me weaker than my father and grandfather, William thought, ashamed. He senses a lack of will.
“I think I must continue,” he said.
“Then it needs the other key.”
William nodded and reached beneath his doublet to the chain that hung there, and extracted the key he had worn since taking the throne, the key that every king of Crotheny had worn since the days of the elder Cavarum. William himself normally didn’t wear it; its weight felt cold against his breast, and most days it remained in a coffer near his bed. He had put it on that morning before descending to the dungeons.
Like the door it fitted, the key was black metal, and like the door, it seemed impervious to rust and all other marks of time’s scythe.
He placed the key in the lock and turned it. There was hardly any sound, just the faintest of snicks from somewhere within the great portal.
I am king, William thought. This is my prerogative. I am not afraid.
He grasped the handle of the door and tugged, and felt the amazing mass of it. Yet despite its inertia, it moved, almost as if it was the touch of his hand rather than the strength of his arm that moved it.