Raven's Ladder (45 page)

“Rescue.” Astonished, Cal-raven embraced the boy. “Jordam told me you were here.”

The boy began to cry softly, and his small hand patted Cal-raven’s back.

“I hardly recognize you, boy. And here you are, working to save Abascar all over again.” He found it difficult to raise his eyes to that radiant figure who stood still in the center of the chamber.

“We’re ready.” The boy stepped away, wiping his hands on his filthy trousers. “Our plan’s in place. We’ve got boats.”

Cal-raven glanced to the beastmen, who were still looking from him to the statue’s ruin in disbelief. “It’s too dangerous. The river is difficult. And there are beastmen out there.”

“Cal-raven, come away from him,” said Jaralaine. Her voice, stern and fearful, was also familiar.

“She means me,” the boy sighed. He turned to the woman. “Queen Jaralaine,” he said. “I told you this would happen. You know it’s true. I’m not your son. Here is Cal-raven.” He took her hand and led her forward. Her hand-stitched leather slippers shuffled in small, reluctant steps.

Cal-raven’s whole body began to quake.

“Some kind of.” The woman would not meet his gaze but stared beyond him. “Some kind of trick. He looks nothing like…” She stood stiffly, blinking as if sleepy.

Cal-raven stepped forward and drew his mother gently to him. She kept her arms at her sides for a while, then raised her hands awkwardly as if to test him in an embrace.

Crouched in a row across the chamber, the beastmen watched, uncomprehending. Then, one by one, they rose and returned to their work.

Through the shining cloth, Cal-raven could feel a brittle, bony figure, like a wooden frame the Abascar tailors had built to display new garments. “How can you be so small?” he murmured into her ears. He had not known what to expect. He had feared finding her senseless or maimed. But no, this was his mother—aged more by ordeal than by time. Through that mask of hardship, he glimpsed the face he remembered. Through her fear and confusion, he heard the voice that had comforted him after bad dreams and taught him the names of flowers and the lineage of his house.

For a moment he felt warm.

Then she hissed as if stung and broke free of the embrace. “No.” She turned away. “No, this is not my son.” She flattened her hand at about the height of the ale boy’s head. “He is not grown yet. I still…” Her voice became faint. She looked around. “I cannot let…” She pressed her hands against her head. “What’s happening? Time. Time. Did you tell me, my son?” She reached out for the ale boy. “Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten. I need to walk in my garden. But the garden is dead. Cal-marcus. He’s so worried about me. He sent me this, you know.” She bundled the colors tightly around her as if the chamber had gone cold.

“My lady, you should put something on your feet,” the boy said. “We will go now to the boats.”

Cal-raven’s mother hesitated. He thought she might turn back to him and change her mind. But she did not. She walked slowly to the other side of the chamber and knelt in a corner to sort through a pile of rags.

The boy took Cal-raven’s hand. “Give her time, master. She’s broken. But she’s alive.”

Cal-raven pressed his hand against his chest. “Isn’t that…the cloak…”

“Auralia’s colors, yes. Don’t ask me how it got here.” The ale boy squeezed the king’s hand. “Forgive me, master, but perhaps it would help if we cleaned you up a bit.”

Cal-raven felt the knots within him tightening as his mother approached the beastmen and surveyed their work. “Good,” she said. “The arrows are ready. Now the shields. Where are the shields?”

“Those beastmen, they’re gonna help. Weak in the legs, but strong arms. They’ll row us upriver.”

“They won’t hurt her?”

“None of the beastmen will hurt her. The chieftain made them swear to protect her. She’s his greatest prize.”

“Yes, but Skell Wra’s been overthrown.”

The sound of someone rapidly descending the stairs drew their attention to the dark beyond the barred gate. A beastman lunged into view. His breath was ragged, and a wound on his left shoulder bled down his arm.

“rrMust…hurry.”

“Jordam!” The ale boy ran to the bars.

“They know,” Jordam groaned. “rrCouldn’t catch them all. They’ll tell.” He looked down at the boy. “It hurts. Hurts to kill.” Cal-raven ran to the bars. “What do we do?”

Jordam shrugged. “Prisoners…not all where they should be. rrMust find the rest. Up there, somewhere.”

Cal-raven shook his head. “Let’s take who we have and go. I have to get her…get them out of here.”

“I’ll go get the others,” said the ale boy.

“No,” shouted Jaralaine. She walked to the bars and clasped Jordam’s hand as assuredly as if he were family. “I’ll go. I promised Abascar’s people I would get them out of here. All of them. Nothing will stand in my way. This is how I pay my debt.”

Cal-raven reached for Jaralaine’s arm, but the room began to spin. He opened his mouth to object, but the words he spoke were slurred.

“He’s bleeding,” said the ale boy. “His head.”

“The statue,” Jordam growled. He held out a vawnskin flask to the ale boy. Cal-raven blinked at it, then realized how thirsty he was.

The voices faded. All he could see were Auralia’s colors, and then nothing.

He awoke to the sound of Abascar’s Early Morning Verse and to the sight of red lines rippling across the ceiling of a vast cavern.

He recognized another sound—the echo of the river. He was lying on the stone plate, his head on a warm pillow wet with water. Its scent was familiar.

The well water
.

Someone caressed his brow, saying, “Shhhhhh.”

He turned his head slightly to see her, but she touched his cheek and said, “Don’t move. Rest, King of Abascar.”

He tried to rise, and his head came up dripping from the pillow. “Where’s my mother?”

“The queen has gone to get the rest of us. Lie down, master. Your head’s a bruised apple. I’m Nella Bye. I was a Gatherer. I am here with your people.”

My people
. Turning his head, Cal-raven could see more than a hundred sitting on the stone plate, clustered together in groups as if for warmth. Their clothes were mere rags, their faces dark, and all of them looked at him, even as they sang softly.

The river here broadened into a vast lake under a high ceiling. The recesses above were alive with chattering cave bats. On the far side, Cal-raven could see a rocky bank and a deep passage that continued under a low ceiling. Behind him, the wall of rock was solid save for the tunnel where he and Jordam had ventured into the labyrinth.

“The boats are ready.”

“But we can’t go out there.”

“The new chieftain is on the move,” said a voice. Cal-raven turned his head and saw an old man braiding a long, grey, filthy beard and rocking back and forth, his naked shoulders jutting forward. “Jordam said the conquerors are scouring the Core, destroying Skell Wra’s faithful. But they won’t find many. Beastmen are fickle.”

“Irimus Rain!” Cal-raven had never before been happy to see the old Abascar strategist.

“Lie down,” said Nella Bye sternly. “Listen to the song. Soon we’ll rise and sing it together in the sunlight. Sunlight, master. We haven’t seen it in so long.”

Pushing her arm away, Cal-raven got shakily to his feet and gazed into the faces of the crowd.
It’s like I’m surrounded by ghosts
.

They sang on, but as they did, they came to their feet one by one. Some stood quickly, hands placed over their hearts. Others needed help. They moved to encircle him. He began to recognize faces he had carved in the Hall of the Lost, people he had not seen since they passed him on the avenue in House Abascar.

“Tell me, my lord—have you seen my sister, Chalis?”

“And me, my lord—my grandfather Jak!”

Like a spark that catches a runnel of oil, the questions began and spread, and Cal-raven had to raise his hands as the people pressed in. It was old, cranky Irimus Rain who shouted down the clamor.

“The time for stories will come,” Cal-raven said when the people quieted. “Have patience.”

One child Cal-raven recognized as Owen-mark—a tough upstart of a Gatherer who had ventured beyond the bounds set for harvesters. Cal-raven’s patrol had rescued him from the coils of a ravenous squeezer-tooth. “Rescue asked us all to call out for the Keeper,” the boy said.

“Rescue was right. The Keeper’s been leading me.” But even as Cal-raven said this, he felt a pang of doubt.

“I’ve been here the whole time,” Owen boasted. “Some of us only been here a while.” The boy described the filthy, exhausting work of clearing the stone and soil so that feelers could push their way faster and farther. He told of how the slaves collected in carts what had been dragged down by the monstrosity’s wide-reaching arms—bodies, broken people, animals, trees.

“Why do the feelers drag the living into the Core? Animals can’t be slaves.”

“Some can,” said Irimus. “But those that can’t are carried down deeper.

No one knows what happens. We suspect it has something to do with the Essence.”

As he spoke, the crowd parted, and Nella Bye came forward. And this time Cal-raven choked in disbelief. For in the woman’s arms lay a child asleep—a girl with golden hair.

“Cortie.”

“You know her?” asked Owen in surprise. “The feelers dragged her in.”

Cal-raven looked up as the five bear-beasts marched in a sullen line into the cavern. Each carried rolled bundles of arrows under one arm and a pile of shields under the other.

“Perhaps it’s time we show them,” he said, “that there are powers greater than claw and curse.” Behind his eyes, the cliffs of Barnashum were coming alive with light, and the very stones that the beastmen climbed were turning against them. “We’ve surprised them once. We’ll surprise them again.”

“We’ll ask the Keeper to fight for us,” said Owen.

Cal-raven reached down and mussed the boy’s hair.

The five beastmen knelt along the edge of the stone plate. Paw over paw, the bear-beasts drew on ropes that disappeared under the edge of the platform. As they did, Cal-raven felt a faint vibration beneath his feet.

Broad, misshapen boats of oiltree bark scraped under the stone until they were out and rocking on the slow, filthy water like dry, curling leaves.

“Here they come,” said Nella Bye, and Cal-raven beheld a small crowd emerging from the corridor, led by the ale boy and his mother. Jordam brought up the rear, walking backward, a spear in each hand.

“This is it,” said the ale boy. “We’ve gathered all the Abascar prisoners. But there are more.”

Plosh
, said something ahead in the murky waters.

Jordam leaned forward from his perch at the front of the foremost boat. It might have been a gator.

These boats are like turtles
, he thought as the three chains of rafts lurched, stroke by stroke, against the current.

Each boat was packed with survivors. Passengers around the edges held up dark, reflective shields facing outward, giving each raft the look of a domed shell. He thought of Goreth; his twin brother had been strangely fond of turtles.

Jordam had watched these survivors, fascinated by how much they risked in order to stay together. He was beginning to understand. His thoughts, like his body, were shedding the curse as well. He felt as if he were moving into new territory—sunlit, open, colorful.

It was all so different from what went on in the Core among beastmen.

There had been a frenzied battle in the throne room as the new chieftain took control. The Strongbreed had torn the paltry resistance to shreds. Jordam had slaughtered many of his own kind in the past, just as the Old Dog had taught him. But now he felt an ache every time one beastman turned upon another.

Laying his shield across his lap, he brushed bogflies from it and stared at his reflection. His mane was falling away. His forehead, where a browbone had once protruded, was now grown over with rugged flesh. He looked the way he felt—like a lonely creature stranded between two worlds.

But these people cared about him. Especially the ale boy.

Jordam stood up and looked back across the line of boats. The ale boy sat next to Owen at the back of the boat just behind this one. Seeing Jordam’s attention, his countenance brightened. As if he knew what the beastman was thinking, the boy spoke quietly, for he knew that Jordam would hear him even if others with their weaker ears could not. “You’ve grown so much.”

Jordam laughed, a strange gruff cough. And there it was again, that tickle of water in his eyes.

He turned to look up the tunnel, reminding himself of the need for vigilance, and he raised his shield. “rrNot free yet.”

Cal-raven, sitting beside him, glanced back down the dark tunnel. Jordam could hear the man’s heart pounding as rapidly as prey in flight from a predator. “I should seal the passage behind us,” Cal-raven said. “It would prevent them from following.”

“But the tunnel, my lord,” said Irimus. “The river’s flowing in. It would fill the tunnel.”

Cal-raven grimaced. “Perhaps I should just raise a reef beneath the water then, something boats can’t cross.”

“rrDon’t get into the water,” Jordam growled.