weber

And where is Strangyeard? A thought suddenly came to him. "Prince Josua?" The prince looked up. "Yes, Tiamak?" "Forgive me. This is not my place, and I do not know all the customs ..'." he hesitated, "but you Aedonites have a tradition of confession, do you not?" Josua nodded. "Yes." He Who Always Steps on Sand, Tiamak prayed silently, let me walk the right path now! The Wrannaman turned to Camaris. The old knight, for all his dignified bearing, looked back at him with the eyes of a hunted animal. "Could you not tell your story to a priest," Tiamak asked him, "—perhaps Father Strangyeard, if he is the proper kind of holy man? That way, if I understand things rightly, your story would be between you and God. But also, Strangyeard knows as much about the Great Swords and our struggle as any man living. He could at least tell the rest of us whether we should truly look elsewhere for answers." Josua slapped his hand on his knee. "You are indeed a Scrollbearer, Tiamak. You have a subtle mind." Tiamak stored Josua's compliment away to be appreciated later and kept his gaze on the old knight. Camaris stared. "I do not know," he said slowly. His chest rose and fell as he took a long breath. "I have not told this story, even in the confessional. That is part of my shame—but not the greatest part." "Everyone has shame, everyone has done wrong." Isgrimnur was obviously growing a little impatient. "We do not want to drag this out of you, Camaris. We only wish to know whether any dealings you might have had with the Sithi can answer some of our questions. Damn it!" he added as an afterthought. A wintry smile moved across Camaris' face. "You were always admirably forward, Isgrimnur." The smile fell away, revealing a terrible, trapped emptiness. "Very well. Send for the priest." "Thank you, Camaris." Josua stood up. "Thank you. He is praying at young Leieth's bedside.

I will fetch him myself." Camaris and Strangyeard had walked far down the hill together. Tiamak stood in the doorway of Josua's tent and watched them, wondering despite the praise of his cleverness if he had done the right thing. Perhaps something he had heard Miriamele say was correct: they might have done Camaris no favor by waking him from his witless state. And forcing him to dredge up such obviously painful memories seemed no kinder. The pair, the tall knight and the priest, stood for a long time on the windy hillside—long enough for a long bank of clouds to roll past and finally reveal the pale afternoon sun. At last Strangyeard turned and started back up the hill; Camaris remained, staring out across the valley to the gray mirror of Lake Clodu. The knight seemed carved in stone, something that might wear away to a featureless post but would still be standing in that spot a century from now. Tiamak leaned into the tent. "Father Strangyeard is coming." The priest struggled up the hill hunched over, whether against the cold or because he now bore the burden of Camaris' secrets, Tiamak could not guess. Certainly the look on his face as he made his way up the last few ells bespoke a man who had heard things he would have been happier not knowing. "Everyone is waiting for you. Father Strangyeard," Tiamak told him. The archivist nodded his head distractedly. His eye was cast down, as though he could not walk without watching where he set his feet. Tiamak let him pass, then followed him into the comparative warmth of the tent. "Welcome back, Strangyeard," said Josua. "Before you begin, tell me: how is Camaris? Should we send someone to him?" The priest looked up in startlement, as though it was a surprise to hear a human voice. The look he gave Josua was curiously fearful, even for the timid archivist. "I ... I do not know. Prince Josua. I do not know much… much of anything at this moment." "I'll go see to him," Isgrimnur grumbled, levering himself up off the stool.

Father Strangyeard raised his hand. "He ... wishes to be alone, I think." He fidgeted with his eye-patch for a moment, then ran his fingers through his sparse hair. "Oh, merciful Usires. Poor souls." "Poor souls?" said Josua. "What are you saying, Strangyeard? Can you tell us anything?" The archivist wrung his hands. "Camaris was in Jao e-Tinukai'i. That much ... oh, my ... that much he told me before he asked for the seal of confession, knowing that I would tell you. But the reason, and what happened there, are locked behind the Door of the Ransomer." His stare wandered around the room as if it hurt him to look at anything too long. Then his eye fell on Vorzheva, and for some reason lingered there as he talked. "But this much I can say, I believe: I do not think that his experiences have aught to do with the present situation, nor is there anything to be learned from them about the Storm King, or the Three Great Swords, or any of the other things you need to know to fight this war. Oh, merciful Usires. Oh, dear." He patted at his thin red hair again. "Forgive me. Sometimes it is hard to remember that I am merely the doorkeeper of the Ransomer, and that the burden is not mine to bear, but God's. Ah, but it is hard right now." Tiamak stared. His fellow Scrollbearer looked as though he had been visited by vengeful spirits. The Wrannaman moved closer to Strangyeard. "Is that all?" Josua seemed disappointed. "Are you certain that the things he knows cannot help us?" "I am not certain of anything but pain, Prince Josua," the archivist said quietly but with surprising firmness. "But I truly think it unlikely, and I know for certain that to force anything more from that man would be cruel beyond belief, and not just to him." "Not just to him?" Isgrimnur said. "What does that mean?" "Enough, please." Strangyeard seemed almost angry—something Tiamak had not imagined possible. "I have told you what you needed to know. Now I would like to leave." Josua was taken aback. "Of course, Father Strangyeard." The priest nodded. "May God watch over us all." Tiamak followed Strangyeard out through the tent door. "Is there something I can do?" he asked. "Perhaps just walk with you?" The archivist hesitated, then nodded. "Yes. That would be kind." Camaris was gone from the spot where he had stood; Tiamak looked for him, but saw no sign. When they had traveled some way down the hill, Strangyeard spoke in a musing voice. "I understand now... why a man would wish to drink himself into oblivion. I find it tempting myself at this moment." Tiamak raised an eyebrow but said nothing. "Perhaps drunkenness and sleep are the only ways God has given us to forget," Strangyeard continued. "And sometimes forgetting is the only cure for pain." Tiamak considered. "In a way, Camaris was as one asleep for two score years." "And we awakened him." Strangyeard smiled sadly. "Or, I should say, God allowed us to awaken him. Perhaps there is a reason for all this. Perhaps there will be some result beside sorrow after all." He did not, the Wrannaman thought, sound as though he believed it. Guthwulf paused and let the air wash over him, trying to decide which of the passageways led upward—for it was upward that the sword-song was leading him.

His nostrils twitched, sniffing for the faintest indication from the damp tunnel air as to which way he should go. His fingers traveled back and forth along the stone walls on either side, questing like eyeless crabs. Disembodied, alien speech washed over him once more, words that he did not hear so much as feel. He shook his head, trying to drive them from his brain. They were ghosts, he knew, but he had learned that they could not harm him, could not touch him. The cluttering voices only interfered with what he truly wanted to hear. They were not real. The sword was real, and it was calling. He had first felt the pull return several days before. As he awakened into the confusion of blind solitude, as he had so many times, a thread of compelling melody had followed him up out of sleep into his waking blackness. It was more than just another of his pitiful dreams: this was a powerful feeling, frightful and yet comfortably familiar, a song without words or melody that rang in his head and wrapped him with tendrils of longing. It tugged at him so strongly that he scrambled clumsily to his feet, eager as a young swain called by his beloved. The sword! It was back, it was near! Only as the last clinging remnants of his slumbers left him did he remember that the sword was not alone. It was never alone. It belonged to Elias, his once-friend, now bitter enemy. Much as Guthwulf ached to be near it, to bask in its song as he would the warmth of a fire, he knew he would have to approach cautiously. Miserable as his current life was, he preferred it to what Elias would do to him if he was captured—or worse, what Elias would let that serpent Pryrates do to him. It never occurred to him that it would be even better simply to leave the sword alone. The song of it was like the splash of a stream to a traveler dying of thirst. It drew him, and he had no choice but to follow its call. Still, some animal cunning remained. As he felt his way through the well-learned tunnels, he knew he needed not only to find Elias and the sword, but also to approach them in such a way so as to avoid discovery and capture, as he had managed once before to spy on the king from a shelf of rock above the foundry floor.

To this end, he followed the sword's compelling summons but remained at as great a distance as he could, like a hawk circling its master on a long trace. But trying to resist the complete pull was maddening. The first day he followed the sword, Guthwulf forgot completely to go to the spot where the woman regularly left food for him. By the second day—which, to the blind Earl of Utanyeat, was whatever came between one sleep and the next—the sword's call beating within him like a second heartbeat had almost dissolved the memory that such a spot even existed. He ate what crawling things his groping hands encountered, and drank from any moving trickle of water he could find. He had learned in his first weeks in the tunnels what happened when he drank from standing pools. Now, after three sleeps full of sword-dreams, he had wandered far beyond any of the passageways familiar to him. The stones he felt beneath his hands had never met his touch before; the tunnels themselves, but for the always-present phantom voices and the equally constant pull of the Great Sword, seemed completely alien. He had some small idea of how long he had been searching for the sword this time, and, in a rare moment of clear thinking, he wondered what the king was doing down in the hidden places beneath the castle for such a long time. A moment later, a wild, glorious thought came to him. He's lost the sword. He's lost it down here somewhere, and it's just sitting, waiting for whoever finds it! Waiting for me! Me! He did not even realize that he was slavering in his dusty beard. The thought of having the sword all to himself—to touch, to listen to, to love and to worship—was so horrifyingly pleasurable that he took a few steps and then fell to the floor, where he lay quivering until darkness took his remaining senses. After he had regained his wits, Guthwulf rose and wandered, then slept once more. Now he was awake again, and standing before the branching of two tunnels, trying to decide which one was most likely to lead him upward.