Raven's Ladder (12 page)

It was a man, bearded and broad shouldered. He was clad in layers of rags, twigs, feathers, and fur, a costume made of all that had been she’d on the Cragavar’s forest floor. He was lifting a bucket from the well.

Surely
, Cal-raven thought,
there can’t be water in this pit of ash
. But when the man placed the cover back over the well, Cal-raven saw a spill wash a dark line down the side of the bucket.

The stranger strode away slowly, bracing huge hands on both sides of the bucket to keep from spilling another drop. But for a prodigious nose, his face was hidden in a thick, filthy mane. His ponderous progress was almost comical, his steps uneven, as if his body were a burdensome suit. As he turned and disappeared up another path, Cal-raven glimpsed an unnatural bulge at the back of his neck that caused his robe to swell between the shoulders.

Cal-raven hurried to the clearing, his hand ablaze. Kneeling, he picked a few of the blue flowers.
I’ll have to ask Krawg and Warney about these
. They surrendered without resistance, and he wrapped them in another span of clean bandage.

The mist’s rising scent was sweet, promising water as pure as a mountain spring. He leaned over the well and inhaled deeply and thought he heard water flowing steadily below. His whole body tensed, demanding a drink. He had to fight the urge to climb down into the well’s mouth to submerge himself. “Bring back the bucket, Ragman,” he murmured.

And so he pursued the stranger, following the footprints until they ended at a solid wall of intertwining boughs. But as he paused, the branches untangled and opened for him. Ravens, gathering along the top of the hedge, clucked and muttered approvingly.

I’m getting close, Teacher
.

The hunchback was not far ahead, ascending to a small dome encrusted with the same moon-pale grains that dusted the landscape. He climbed a
stairway up the side, past glowing windows, the wooden steps groaning beneath his considerable weight. Someone opened a door for him.

Put the bucket down
. Cal-raven almost spoke the wish aloud.

But the man ducked to push through the door, his effort casting a spray of dust and debris out onto the doorstep. The door swung almost closed, leaving a narrow line of golden lanternlight.

Cal-raven heard quiet, happy laughter, like musical gusts from the old wheeze-box Obsidia Dram used to play in the breweries.

The birds were behind Cal-raven now. And they were noisy. “Cal, rava. Cal, rava.”

This isn’t the way
.

His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His throat felt coated with dust.

“Give me a moment.” He gripped the stair’s rail and moved up to the door.

But as he leaned to peer into this strange abode, the whole flock flew at him, greatly distressed. As he turned to hiss at them, the door burst open. His bandaged hand was seized in a cold, hard grip. He was pulled, stumbling, inside. The door slammed behind him.

He found himself face to face with a woman wrapped in a winding white shroud.

She seemed all bone and blue skin, withered and wretched. Wisps of long black curls fell down around her skull of a face. The lids of her eyes drew all the way back into her head so that her blazing, bloodshot gaze was impossible to meet. While one hand was fastened around his forearm, mean as a mousetrap, the other caged a bird’s broken, wing-splayed body.

She madly cackled through a thin-lipped grin, “We hope-hope-hoped you’d come.”

She shoved him down onto a rickety bench. “Help yourself to the wah…to the water,” the withered woman wheezed. The bucket steamed on the round table in a ring of three misshapen clay goblets.

As if new to walking, the woman staggered and collapsed onto another bench, then spidered her open hand across the tabletop to pick a few stray crumbs from an unwashed plate. She kept the other hand closed around the
bird’s crushed body. “It’s what you’ve come for, isn’t it? Folks get thir-thir-thirsty out there. Out there in the Mawrn.”

“I’m in the wrong place,” he stammered. “I’m lost.”

“Haven’t we heard the same-same-same story from every strange-strange-stranger who visits us here?” She lifted her empty hand high over her head and let it fall back with a sharp
crack!
“Welcome to Panner Xa’s prison. What’ll we call you?”

Now it was Cal-raven’s turn to stammer. “P-prison?”

Under a ceiling of redbrown reeds tightly aligned, the walls curved to the floor, rugged with the crater’s crumbling pearl. Everything within that circumference—counters, basins, benches, tables, chairs—seemed crooked and badly made, broken in some small but distracting way. Skeletal wooden devices, each equipped with gleaming metal teeth, and pans holding portions of dust spoke of their work breaking down the crater’s crystal shards for mysterious purposes.

Moving among the tables, barrels, and chairs, the ragged giant carried plates and bowls in a teetering stack to something resembling a kitchen. He set them down, and the stack fell over, fragments of clay clattering and scattering. When he came back to the table, he stopped.

The woman had released the bird from her hand’s bony cage, and now Cal-raven could see it clearly. It was a common shrillow, lying on its back with sparsely feathered wings cast open, eyes closed, tiny yellow feet jutting into the air.

“Found it while I cleared webs from the tower’s tun-tun-tunnel,” she whispered to the hunchback. Her gestures seemed to direct his attention to a large, barred, black gate against the north wall.

The old man surrounded the bird with his heavy hands as if to warm it. Then he reached into the thick thatch of his coppery hair and drew out two long pins, which he gripped together as tightly as a dagger for a fight. He puffed a weary sigh. Scooping the bird up, he carried it across the room and tiptoed clumsily up a short stair and through an open door to a balcony.

“Old Soro fixes everything,” the woman muttered as Cal-raven watched for the giant to return. “The water. It’s what every-every-everyone needs. What else is worth a sideways spit in this graveyard? Hey!” As if slapped
awake from a dream, she seized a goblet and plunged it into the bucket, then presented it to Cal-raven. “Drink up, young man. This-this-this is our only bit of joy today.”

When he didn’t obey, she planted it hard on the table before him and a splash spattered out. She poked at the drops and sucked her fingertips noisily. “Old Soro, he put out this cup for you. Drink it. The Seer returns. We’ll have to hide the bucket.”

Panner Xa. A Bel Amican Seer
.

His obvious dismay set the woman laughing darkly. “Overseer of the Mawrnash Mine. Panner Xa.” She filled her own goblet and drained it in a rapid sequence of gulps that rocked her whole fragile frame. “That’s better,” she sighed, and her voice was softer.

The hunchback tiptoed back into the chamber, murmuring like Hagah when gnawing on bones. He marched to the table, filled the third goblet, and returned to the balcony.

“Be quick,” the woman hissed, “and you might get out of here without a beating. Not long until moonrise.”

“You called this a prison,” Cal-raven remarked. “How can I leave?”

“Oh, Panner’s not yet got her hooks in you. Stay clear of her potions. Stick to the well water. And then it’s up, up, up Tammos Raak’s tower for you!”

He stood, knocking the bench down behind him. “How do you know?”

“I was right?” she gasped. “Old Soro! He’s come for the tower! Oh, you’ve come to the right place, young man. The Seer won’t let anyone near it. Forbidden to anybody except her monstrous ilk. Can’t say why. Don’t know why. Who are you, anyway? You speak like you’re from Abascar.”

“Abascar is gone.” Cal-raven set the bench right, sat down again cautiously, ready to run if necessary. “My purpose is my own. Why are you so eager to help me?”

“Because I’m getting stronger,” she said, lowering her voice. “The Seer doesn’t know it yet. But Old Soro’s helping me.”

Cal-raven lifted the goblet and sniffed the water. He was so terribly thirsty. “The two of you are slaves?”

“Captives. Let me see your injury.” Before he could devise a polite refusal, she stood, grabbed his arm with her cold fingers, and thrust his hand into the bucket.

“Oh.”

The water was warm at first, soaking through the bandage and stinging his wound. But then something like heat and cold spread from his hand into his arm. His thirst faded even though he hadn’t tasted a drop. He choked.

“Captives,” she said. “Me, ten years now. ’Twas the Seers’ potions did it.”

Dark tears were filling his eyes, as if his body were drawing water from the bucket and flushing some corruption from his head. He wiped them on his sleeve, a dark smear. The colors of the room brightened. “Is this a potion?”

“No,” she exclaimed, and he followed her bitter gaze toward uneven shelves on the wall. They were lined with jars of murky sludge. He realized he could smell the concoctions across the room.

“Panner Xa won my loyalty with those. I wanted to be beautiful. And, oh, they did the trick. I enjoyed some fame for a while. My sister wouldn’t walk with me through the market anymore. Jealous, you see. So I tried to quit the potions, and the headaches almost killed me. Then I ran out of money. I begged the Seers to give me more. But I couldn’t pay. So Panner Xa brought me here. Potions, if I’d help.” She pointed at the jars as if blaming criminals. “Years. They’ve taken years from me.”

He pulled his hand from the bucket. Colors brightened steadily all around him. He noticed bright ribbons on a workshop table—gold, red, and green—and something that looked like an enormous purple kite. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really must leave.”

“Yes,” she hissed. “Yes, you must. The Mawrn has told her you’re here. She’ll be angry.” She closed her eyes, and through her frail eyelids, she still seemed to be staring. “There will be beatings tonight.”

He flexed his hand. The pain was gone, drawn out like the thorn itself. He looked at the bucket. He looked at the woman. The drink had quieted her quaking. Her voice, still shrill and birdlike, was no longer broken into stammers. He looked at the cup she had filled for him.

“There.” She pointed to the northern wall, to the dark, barred gate. “That’s what you want.”

“How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

She swiped her hand across the table. Dust billowed into the air. “Mawrnash is a trap. The dust is all over you. When it gets its tiny claws into your skin, your lungs, your mind, all the Seer has to do is close her eyes. It’s their power, man of Abascar. She sees you clearly.”

He had heard such rumors before. This time they did not make him laugh.

“That is why I never escape,” she sighed.

He reached for her this time. When he took hold of her arm—such a fragile bone within that sleeve—he felt heat and something more. The humming pulse of resilient life. “What is your name?”

“Call me Gretyl.”

“I’ll help you, Gretyl,” he said. “I hate the Seers as much as you do.”

“No,” she laughed, looking toward the balcony door. “You won’t. But Old Soro’s here with me. Panner Xa thinks he’s just another servant. But he’s going to rescue me. He told me so. He went out one day and came back with water. Strange water from deep beneath Mawrnash. It helps. Soon I’ll be strong enough.”

“What is he?”

“Soro? He’s a kite-maker. Wandered in here, just like you, one night while Panner Xa was gone. Said he came down from a mountain workshop to look for his family. Said they’d been taken from him. There’s more, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Cal-raven picked up one of the stray shrillow feathers from the tabletop. It was hot as a candlewick, and he dropped it.
The water. What has it done to me?

“I asked him to take me back with him,” Gretyl sighed. “Told him I could help him make his kites. He won’t do it. Says it’s against the rules, whatever that means.” She shook her head. “He’ll have new scars tonight.”

“I’ve got to get you both out of here.” He dusted off his sleeves and shoulders. “But first I must do what I came to do.”

Gretyl took up a crooked walking stick, awkward as a newborn fawn on her spindly legs. “Let me show you something.”

On the balcony, under a night sky newly brushed with crimson, Cal-raven watched Old Soro raise his cupped hands as if in prayer to the rising red moon. His head was bowed, hair falling over his face, and he breathed deeply and heavily through his nose, just as Cal-raven’s father had when deeply asleep in his chair before the fire.

“Now,” said Gretyl, seeming unconcerned at how the platform groaned beneath their weight, “we are standing at the top of Tammos Raak’s tower. The very starcrown tree he climbed.”

Cal-raven laughed, for they were not far from the ground. He searched the dark, straining to discern the reddening contours of the landscape. “I don’t think you understand. I’m supposed to
climb
a starcrown tree. All the way to the crown.”

“And this is where you start. Look. The Seer has built her house into the top of Tammos Raak’s tree.” Gretyl gestured to the dark ridge from which this white dome, this crystal shell, emerged like a skull at the end of a spine. The ridge ran off into the dark, then rose up the curving incline of the crater all the way to the rim. “That’s it. What’s left of Tammos Raak’s famous starcrown tree,” said Gretyl, “lying where it fell.” She pointed up to the crater’s northern edge. “There, the tree’s very roots, right on the bowl’s brim. When the trouble came and the forest was destroyed, the tallest star-crown was the last to fall. It fell inward, across the rest of the ruined forest.”