EIGHTEEN

OMEN

“But that makes no sense.”

“I don’t dispute that,” Neythan said. “But it was the chamberlain I saw.”

He and Arianna sat on a bench opposite Caleb in the small room.

Caleb stared flat-eyed at him and grunted, rubbing his wrists. They’d removed the bindings only an hour ago, shortly after Neythan and Arianna had arrived back in Jaffra to visit with the elders following their release from the Sayensí’s shrine. Not that any of that mattered to Caleb. Since being ushered into this room to sit with him whilst the elders conferred regarding Neythan and Arianna’s findings, Caleb had been alternating between levelling Neythan with a cold, grumpy stare and gazing off to one of the featureless corners.

“Look,” Neythan said. “I’m sorry about leaving you here to wait.”

“Against my advice, I might add,” Arianna put in.

Neythan glanced sidelong at her beside him on the bench.

“What? It was.”

He sighed and returned his attention to Caleb. “Thing was, I thought it better to take Nyomi so she could guide us. She knows these lands better than any of us can.”

Another monosyllabic grunt, then, “And where is she now?”

“We don’t know.”

“Don’t know? What, she get bored of your company? Decide to make use of her superior knowledge of these lands and take herself off for a stroll?”

“We were separated, in the shrine,” Neythan explained. “Whole place was like some kind of maze or trap. When we came out, she couldn’t be found.”

“So, what’s the plan now? Wait here for her? See if she’ll return to visit Filani?”

“You’re sure Filani’s alive?” Arianna said.

Caleb shrugged, scratching at the old wrinkled scar tissue that covered his face. His brief captivity had aged him somehow, made the burns on his cheeks and neck seem more pronounced. “She was the last time I asked about her. She breathes, and little more than that, so they tell me. She has not woken since they stoned her in the street.”

A pause. The chatter from the street outside filled in the gap. They were in an enclosure of wood, rectilinear walls of thick pine beams lined one atop the other and welded fast with some kind of daub. The warm air wafted out through an opening above where the cabin tunnelled up into some sort of spout, leaving a bright patch of sunlight in the middle of the room’s dirt floor. A cookhouse of some kind perhaps.

“So… what’s the plan?” Caleb asked again.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh?” Caleb’s eyebrows hopped up – exaggerated, sardonic – his gaze switching between them. “No plan this time? No blind quest to this place or that, to discover some obscure and futile truth?”

“Caleb.”

He looked at Arianna. “What? You don’t tire of it? Well, let him leave you imprisoned and alone in a foreign land, bound hand and foot, see if it dampens your enthusiasm somewhat.”

“He didn’t choose this, Caleb.”

“And neither did I, Arianna. Neither did I. Shall I tell you what I did choose? I chose to make a bargain with him. To find you. And in return he was to find the people who murdered my family. A simple agreement, no? And yet lo, here we are – you are found, yet my family’s killers are not. Instead I’m left to rot in a Summerland shack while the pair of you go off searching for ‘truths’. So, if you’re expecting me to slap my thigh and ready for another trek to wherever he says next with nothing but a wink and a smile, then perhaps that fever of his has gone to your head too.”

Neythan’s hand twitched again, as if triggered by Caleb’s mention of the fever. The wound was healing well at least, ever since Teju had treated it with ointments as he and a few others from the Sayensí sat in the boat with them on the way back, but the other symptoms had continued to prove more stubborn – the sudden bouts of fatigue, and, more recently, even melancholy, a deep cold shadow creeping across his sha. Then there was the struggle to concentrate sometimes, his thoughts foggy, trailing off on tangents like fluff snagged by a breeze.

“What would you have me do, Caleb?” Neythan asked. “Go back north, to the Sovereignty, where we are likely still being hunted by whatever remains of the Brotherhood?”

“Be better than staying in this dung hole.”

“It’s not as simple as that, not anymore.”

“What do you mean, not anymore? Why the bones not?”

“Because he has family here,” Arianna interrupted.

Caleb balked. His mouth opened again, shaping on a response, and then folded as he just sat there, frowning in puzzlement.

“Yeah,” Arianna continued. “Nyomi dropped that one on us before we reached the shrine. Neythan is the grandson of that priestess out there, the one who set the city to stone Filani.”

“Sulari?”

“One and the same.”

“That madwoman is your grandmother?” He stared at Neythan, then nodded as he looked him over. “Then again I suppose I shouldn’t be all that surprised.”

“Glad to see you’ve retained your sense of humour,” Neythan replied drily.

“You think I’m joking; the stunts you’ve pulled? And why do we only discover this now? Nyomi couldn’t see fit to mention this little detail before?”

“Believe me,” Arianna replied. “I let my thoughts be known on that too.”

“You believe her?”

“She said it was why she and Filani brought us here,” Neythan said. “She explained many things, said my bloodline is one of only a few that may be able to withstand what the scroll warns of.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Not yet. But it apparently means I have kin in this very city.”

Caleb thought on that, staring at the sunlit patch of dirt in the middle of the room between them before looking up at Neythan. For a moment his gaze even seemed to soften a little. He knew what it could mean for Neythan.

“Still,” Arianna said. “Caleb is right.”

“I often am… Right about what though?”

“Going north, to the Five Lands. If what Neythan saw in the scroll is true then Elias is something more than just an old man.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we already know he is involved in all this. If he happens to somehow be more than three centuries old too then we need to get to him, understand what he knows, understand what he is. He could be the root of it all.”

Caleb sat back and muttered a curse under his breath. “So, now you are infected with his madness too.”

“Oh, I take it you’d rather stay here then,” Arianna replied. “Since you’ve enjoyed the hospitality so much?”

Caleb offered her a wan smile. “Take it you’d rather eat cow dung, since you’re so used to being full of it?”

“Look,” Neythan said. “The reality is we cannot stay here, and we cannot be safe if we go north. But the bigger reality is that none of this ends until we end it – the Brotherhood, the Watcher’s prophecy, all of it. We need to find the chamberlain.” He looked at Arianna, who nodded back, and then back to Caleb sitting hunched opposite him on the bench.

“What? You want to pretend you care for my opinion on the matter? Please. You stopped caring what I thought a long time ago.”

A day later they were travelling north, journeying toward the Havilah and back into the Sovereignty despite Caleb’s reluctance, equipped with fresh provisions by Jaffra’s elders – three strong horses, a packhorse, enough food and water to cross the sands of the Havilah, along with tools, weapons and utensils. Apparently, although the priesthood remained split on the veracity of Neythan’s lineage, there were enough among them who believed him to be who Filani had claimed to warrant their aiding him with supplies. Especially since he’d managed to read the scroll – a fact Teju, who’d returned to the city with them to debate with the elders, had been more than happy to confirm. Before leaving, Neythan had visited with Filani and stood over her as she lay unconscious on a bed within the cool shade of a mudbrick hut. Gazing down on her, he suddenly saw it all; the past half year laid out clearly before him as every conversation they’d shared took on fresh meaning, became whole, pieces of a puzzle clacking snugly into place. The way she’d watch him sometimes, the way he’d look up from some chore or sundry task – packing their victuals, feeding the mule, preparing wood for a fire – to find her steady watery gaze on him, probably wondering inwardly, he now realised, whether he truly was what the faint nagging sense within her had suggested. All along, her every glance in his direction had been the scratching of an itch, a contemplating of their shared blood.

He’d stood in the mudbrick hut for close to an hour in the end, just thinking about it, until Sulari, his apparent grandmother, had come in to stand beside him, pleading tearfully for him not to leave. For a moment he’d even thought about it – probably he had cousins in Jaffra he was yet to meet, maybe great-aunts or uncles too. But in the end what would it all mean if he left what needed to be done undone? The darkness the Watcher had warned of was coming, preparing to usurp them all: the Sovereignty, then Súnam, and perhaps even the whole world. He alone was the one who had discovered a Magi scroll, and it was to him the Watcher had come to warn of the approaching darkness. If Nyomi was to be believed, the answers of how to stop it all lay in his blood. There would be no hiding place if he failed to go, not even for his as yet unknown kin.

They travelled for nearly a week seeing no one, first through the jungled forests of the Summerlands’ northern borders and then on into the rocky plains of the Desert Pass, south of the Narrow Sea, before heading north into the Havilah, skirting along the dry plains and bluffs bordering its sands to the west. Only the occasional crop of rock formations interrupted the arid calm – a sea of endless dry land, pale and wide, stretching out beneath the silent and cloudless blue above.

They were beginning to run low on water when they finally reached the Straight, a long slim river that split the Havilah from the Salt Plains north of it. A boatman could sit in the Straight and traverse the entire breadth of the land from here, let the current carry him east to Qalqaliman and Hikramesh, then continue north to Sippar and Qareb and eventually the crown city itself. But Neythan and the others would not have time for that, or even the means. They had the horses after all, each of which would be strong and swift once watered.

They filled their skins and the wooden cask they’d been given back in Jaffra, and then continued on to the river’s narrow to cross the brief bridge onto the other side before continuing east along the riverbank in search of whatever fishing villages inevitably lined it.

“What allows a man to live for more than three hundred years anyway?”

Neythan glanced at Arianna on her horse beside him as they resumed their journey. “You been pondering that the whole way here?”

“You haven’t?”

“For the first day or so maybe. After that, I realised, what does it matter? We’re going to have to find him either way, and likely won’t know the answer until we do.”

Arianna shrugged, riding tall on her horse, those green feline eyes of hers glinting like twin emeralds from beneath her dark hair as she squinted back at him. “Doesn’t make it any less worth wondering about. Three centuries. Think how many trees he’s outlived. Even bloodtrees.”

“To live that long would be a curse,” Caleb put in grumpily, and then shrugged when the others turned to look at him. “Think about it. Everyone you’ve known or loved, dying, while you persist. Cities changing, others being built, nothing being the way you can remember it once was.” He shook his head. “You ask me, it’d be about as eerie a feeling as you can have, like the world is conspiring around you, without anyone else being able to see it but you. You’d be a living ghost.”

No one spoke for a while after that, continuing east along the river in silence as they passed a pair of large stone figures, upended and lying face down in the dust, buried in the crest of the slope opposite the river like murdered bodies in a shallow grave. Adramelec and Armaros probably, Neythan thought. The twin gods, and the only ones he remained able to consistently remember from Jaleem’s lessons in Ilysia, and that purely because of how Daneel and Josef would pretend to be them when they were all small.

“You’ve a dark mind, Caleb,” Arianna eventually said, still thinking on the little man’s previous remark.

“So I’ve been told.”

“Except there’s nothing to say the chamberlain’s the only one though is there,” she added.

“What?”

“He could just be one of many other ancient ones couldn’t he, all three centuries old or more.”

“Thanks, Ari,” Neythan said. “I was beginning to feel bored, as if we didn’t have enough problems to consider as is.”

“Pleasure.”

“Do you two see that?” Caleb was pointing toward a short column of stone ahead of them by the river. It was sculpted, Neythan realised as they neared, a block of rock about the height of his horse, shaped into the form of a man’s head, like a smaller and less dramatic version of the massive stone mound they’d come across when journeying to the Sayensí. Cruder workmanship, the facial features blunt and undefined, the likeness vague, unlike the bizarrely precise rendering they’d witnessed in the Summerlands. It faced inland, away from the river.

Neythan climbed down from his horse to examine the horizontal grooves cutting across its base and traversing the neck area and jaw.

“Almost looks Súnamite,” Caleb decided.

Neythan could see the likeness too – the thickened lips, the small ears.

“Look,” Caleb said. “Over there.”

Beyond the rise in the land opposite the river, smoke was wafting up.

Neythan climbed back onto his horse and rode up the dusty slope to see what was on the other side.

“So, there’s the settlement,” Caleb said, coming to a stop on the crest beside him.

The land dropped down into a shallow basin with a brief smattering of houses and sheds, wooden mostly, a marker of how far south they were. The trend in most parts of the Sovereignty was to build in stone, but here, by the Straight where the weather was warmer – as with the territories of Harán further east – wood was often thought to be the more suitable material.

“The rains must be heavy here in their season,” Caleb suggested as they looked down on the settlement at the bottom of the slope before them. “To have built so far from the river I mean, and on this side of the hill. Probably what the grooves were for at the base of that head back there: to mark off where the water level can come to, so they know how to build.”

“Fountain of knowledge, aren’t you,” Arianna said.

“Well, it’s not that hard to look like one opposite the pair of you, is it.”

Once they’d descended the hill into the settlement it wasn’t hard to see the merits of Caleb’s words. Most of the houses were built on logwood perches, propped atop thick stilts like cabins on a pier. More stone heads stood amid the relatively large village like watching sentries, stationed at corners and crossroads, each scarred by the same fine grooves along the base to mark the seasonal waterlines. Caleb wandered a few paces ahead on his horse, scrutinising the streets for somewhere to stable the horses and perhaps settle for the night.

“So, are you going to talk to me about it then?”

Neythan turned to Arianna riding beside him and frowned. “About what?”

“The fever. Your fever. You’ve said almost nothing about it the entire journey.”

“And yet you never cease to ask,” Neythan answered, scanning the surroundings as they continued along the street. The way the platforms exaggerated the heights of the houses made him feel like he was wandering through a city built for giants. And then there were the stilts themselves, dug into holes and anchored in place by the boulders that had been nestled around the foot of each one.

“Neythan?”

He shrugged. “I’ll be fine. What does it matter?”

“It matters if you’re going to put me or Caleb in danger because you’re too stubborn to admit how weakened you might be. Just tell me, Neythan.”

Neythan thought about it, trying to find a way to explain as the horses continued to walk them on down the main thoroughfare. “What I told you back in the shrine is part of it,” he said. “It’s like, sometimes… I maybe see something, but it might not be there. Or not fully there maybe. Like a piece of a dream, but in the day.”

“Like those fungi Jaleem would offer sometimes, back in Ilysia.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never took any.”

“You didn’t?”

“Did you?”

“Felt rude to refuse.”

An amused grunt. “Well, maybe it is like that. I wouldn’t know. It’s only in moments though, the rest of the time I’m fine… And, well…”

“Well, what?”

“I don’t know. It feels like they mean something, these things I see… Like some kind of message. Like I’m being told something.”

“Being told what? By who?”

“I don’t know, Ari. It’s just how it feels. But like I said, they don’t happen often… and I’m not always sure if they’re happening when they do. It’s hard to be certain.”

Arianna digested that without answering.

There were people in the next street, villagers ambling along the road: a man dressed in a pale ankle length shift and, incredibly, the skin of a bear’s head, hanging from his own like a hood as the rest of its hide dangled down his back and dragged in the dust. He was herding a toddler along ahead of him as he clutched a second child in one arm, and what appeared to be some kind of cutting utensil or trowel in the other. An older man moved along the road in the other direction, wheeling a basket of logs on a small cart, and passed by the man without comment, whilst others milled around, chatting, or perched on the raised wooden porches supporting every house, letting their feet dangle over the open space beneath. One or two woodmen, carrying measured lengths of timber for some kind of scaffolding, glanced disinterestedly at the visitors.

“Wonder where they’re getting all the wood from?” Arianna said. “I haven’t seen that many trees.”

She was right: there were no trees in sight and even the grass was sparse, mostly limited to random tufts of dry weed or brierbush sprouting from between the rocks that footed the houses’ stilts and scanty rushes like thinning hair along the sides of the roads. Meanwhile someone somewhere was playing a stringed instrument, plucking softly to a familiar melody.

“You hear that?” Neythan asked.

Arianna nodded and glanced around. “I feel like I’ve heard the song before.”

“Jaleem used to play it sometimes, back in Ilysia, at evening when the herders were bringing the flocks back in.”

“I remember.”

“I think I’ve found somewhere,” Caleb said, trotting back toward them from up ahead on his horse. After their lack of reaction he added. “You know. For us to stay?”

“Sounds good,” Arianna replied. “Neythan?”

But Neythan wasn’t listening. The music was strange. The melody disjointed, its rhythm erratic, as though the strings were being plucked by the hands of a drunkard.

“You hear that?” he said again to Arianna.

“Yes, I told you I heard it.”

“No, I mean the words. I never knew the song had words.”

“What words?”

But Neythan was already turning, flicking his reins to move along the road in the direction of the music as the verses continued to bounce along to the choppy rhythm of the strings.

“There’s a season for the sun, and a season for the rain, a season to have fun, and a season to feel pain.
But as the seasons turn, and wintry nights rob the days, there’s a music to their churn, and a rhythm to their ways…”

The road curved, bending away from the river beyond the crest behind them to accommodate the shape of the land. It seemed to be leading up toward a hill. Neythan could see a cluster of houses on a crest ahead of him, surrounded by a fortified wall and gate.

“If a man should turn his ear, beyond the clamour of the waves, he’ll hear secrets of the earth, and the paths of hidden ways, the dancing of the fool, the quiet thoughts of the sage, one is made from the two, in the turning season’s maze…”

“Neythan, where are you going?”

Neythan ignored her, continuing forward on his horse. The song was growing louder now – a man’s voice, but strange, twisted somehow, almost a growl.

“So cast your sheets to the wind, turn your troubles into play, let the song of madness sing, let the storm have its way.”

He turned off the road, moving through the shadows as he passed along one of the slim gaps between the houses. He was close now, very close, the singer likely just around the next corner.

“For a man is only a man, a day is only a day, neither shall last forever, nothing remains the same.”

He came to the end of the passage into a space on the other side. More thin grass sprouting from the gravelled earth beneath like whiskers. The music and singing had stopped, abruptly. A smallish child stood by one of the stilts on the far side, facing away from Neythan. Copper skin. Black cropped hair. Scrawny shoulders and back, his ribs showing through the skin of his bare gaunt torso. “Who was singing here just now?” Neythan asked. “Where was the music coming from?”

When the boy didn’t respond Neythan climbed down from his horse.

“Boy. The music,” he said, walking toward the child who stood motionless, apparently captivated by whatever was on the ground by the foot of the nearest stilt.

Neythan was a few paces away and about to call out to the child again when the boy turned around. Neythan froze.

The face. The boy’s face.

It was covered. Encased in the dirty pale bone of a goat skull.

“Neythan, what are you doing?” Arianna had followed him through the gap between the houses to the yard. “Neythan!”

Neythan glanced behind toward her, and pointed at the boy.

“What? What is it?”

But when Neythan turned back the boy was gone, only the skull was there, its blank hollow sockets staring up at him where it lay on the ground, nestled in the thin patch of grass beneath the stilt-propped porch of the wooden house.

“How did you know?” Caleb said, coming around the corner of the gap behind Arianna.

“What?”

Caleb nodded at the building ahead of them, standing on the porch above the stilt where the goat skull lay. “This is the place,” he said, “the inn I found. This is where we’ll stay.”