CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

‘RIDE,’ THE DEVIL told Cyprian, ‘with your right eye closed.’

They had set out at dawn, mounting up with a small cavalcade of hungover bandits. Cyprian had consulted briefly with Will, then swung up onto his horse, avoiding James. He would have been happy to avoid James for the rest of his life. The same went for the Devil. But when they started to ascend the mountain, he found himself riding between them.

It wasn’t long before the Devil’s words made sense: their path through the mountains had a sharp drop to the right, and as they rode, it narrowed until it was no more than the whisper of a thin shelf. Stones kicked by horses rattled downward. Even the grass tufts and shrubs barely seemed to cling to the slopes. Looking down into the beetling crevasse to his right, Cyprian saw with a little shock the remains of other travellers at its base.

‘Let me guess, they didn’t take your advice,’ said James.

‘You could say that,’ the Devil called back over his shoulder cheerfully. ‘We ambushed them.’

Cyprian felt a rush of disgust. ‘So you just kill people for money.’

‘That’s right,’ said the Devil. ‘What’s the matter, Twinkles? Don’t like money?’

‘“Twinkles”,’ said James, considering the word dryly.

Cyprian said nothing. Of course James had befriended the Devil, two Steward killers getting on splendidly together. He kept his own eyes fixed ahead of him. There, the Devil had said, pointing to the top of a nearby mountain this morning. That’s where your friend Ettore was mooning about. Not that it will do you any good. The place is empty.

They were riding to the place where Ettore had died. Cyprian had braced himself to look over the edge of a drop and see a rusted armour set, a collection of bones. That would be a manageable pain, after witnessing the deaths in the Hall. But the Devil was wrong that the place would be empty. A Steward wouldn’t have come all the way out here without a mission.

They rode single file, with bandits fore and aft. The Steward horses sprang lightly upward with the grace of ibex on impossible rock. The bandits all had scrappy mountain ponies slung with packs that seemed to have endless stamina. Will’s heavier horse, Valdithar, did not like trudging up the thin rocky paths, and was struggling.

‘You said Ettore was supposed to be the one to help stop a war or something?’ the Devil called back to him. Cyprian kept his breathing calm.

‘He was.’

‘If he’s so important,’ said the Devil, with a snort, ‘why’d your people send a kid to find him?’

I’m not a kid, Cyprian didn’t say. I was five weeks away from my test. He didn’t say, By now, I’d be a Steward.

‘Because they’re dead,’ said Cyprian. ‘They’re all dead.’

The Devil was casual in his seat on the horse. ‘Oh? How’d they die?’

‘I killed them,’ said James. ‘So don’t get fancy.’

More ridge than peak, the mountain had stomach-swooping views of the surrounding rises and valleys. At its crest, a clearing opened up, long dry grass and a beech tree growing at a strange angle, as if it was grabbing on to the hillside with its roots.

‘Here,’ said the Devil with little enthusiasm as they summited. ‘This is what your friend found. An empty mountaintop.’

He was right; there was nothing but height and sky. Near the descending slope, Cyprian saw a few strewn stones. But when he dismounted and stood among them, they were no more than parts of the mountain. Trying to make the best of it, Grace said, ‘They might have been a cairn, or—’

It should have been him or Grace who thought of it, but Will was the one who said, ‘Could there be something here hidden by Steward wards?’

‘What do you mean, “Steward wards”?’ said the Devil. He was looking at the scattered stones with a frown.

‘The Stewards use wards to hide their strongholds,’ said Will. ‘What looks like an old archway or a broken piece of stone could hide an entrance to a whole citadel—’

Cyprian was calling out, ‘Clean it out! Clear out everything here!’

The Hand gestured, and her men hurried to do the work, ripping up grasses and scraping thick dirt. Under a layer of soil and moss were two smooth stone slabs, spaced like the pillars on each side of a door.

Cyprian drew in a breath, and stepped through them.

Nothing happened.

In vain he waited for an effect, waited for a hidden space to show itself just as the Hall of the Stewards had always done. He turned back helplessly to the others.

‘Grace, why don’t you try?’ said Will.

Grace rose and came forward to stand beside him. Nothing appeared to them on the hillside.

Cyprian was opening his mouth to say that Will was mistaken when he saw the carving on the slab.

‘“Only a Steward may enter”,’ read Will, his fingers passing over it.

Grace had moved forward to examine the script more closely. ‘That word is older than the word Steward. It’s more like guardian.’

‘Then why won’t it open?’ said Cyprian.

Grace was looking back at him with a strange, sad look in her eyes, as if she knew the answer – and as if he did too, if only he would see it. Denial rose in him sharply.

‘No,’ said Cyprian.

‘I’m a janissary,’ said Grace, ‘and you’re a novitiate.’

‘No,’ said Cyprian.

‘The Hall opened for anyone of Steward blood. This needs a Steward. One who has completed the tests and made the vows.’

‘No,’ said Cyprian.

‘Ettore,’ said Will.

Cyprian stared at the bare rock, still dark with wet soil. He thought of that scrap of white fabric he had taken from the bandits, the remains of a man who might have helped them. The Stewards were gone, and without them there was no one to open this door, which would now remain closed forever.

A wave of feeling rose up in him, from an ocean of despair. The end of his Order, not just his family and friends, but of sacred places and traditions. He had known that he and Grace could not carry on the Steward ways alone. Now he saw Steward workings already lost to them, nothing here but an empty mountainside.

He heard the scuff of footsteps behind him.

The Devil coming to stand beside him, an odd, wry expression on his face. Furious at the intrusion, Cyprian moved to stop him, unable to bear this final sacrilege. He wouldn’t have the Devil trample this site, or speak whatever sarcastic, dismissive words would spill out of his lips.

But the Devil ignored him. ‘You need a Steward, don’t you?’

He stepped between the stones, and the ancient pillars began to glow with light.

A pavilion swam into view between the pillars, a held aloft by four high columns, with steps leading to an altar carved into the rock. It was like watching the entrance to the Hall open on the marsh, the same magic. It was here, and it wasn’t, a structure high on the mountain, hidden by Steward wards.

Cyprian stared in wonder at what must once have appeared as a soaring lookout, a beacon to the valleys below, a white star atop the mountain.

There was only one man who could have opened those wards: the man they had searched for and had believed murdered. Cyprian turned to the Devil.

‘You’re Ettore,’ Cyprian said, in utter shock and disbelief.

The Devil stood in front of it, the light reflecting on his unshaven cheeks, his dirt-streaked, greasy clothing, his poorly kept sword.

How? How could this man be the last Steward? It had to be a mistake, didn’t it? It had to be some kind of cruel joke.

‘I’ve opened your room for you,’ the Devil said with a cursory look around the pavilion. ‘Take what you need, then my men clear the place out.’

‘Wait.’ Cyprian stepped hurriedly forward and took his arm. ‘You – you’re a Steward – you—’

The cold eyes of a bandit stared down at him. The words dried up in Cyprian’s mouth.

The Devil had said he had killed Ettore. Was this what he had meant? That he had forsaken his vows? Forsaken his shieldmate? Forsaken the Hall? Become a mercenary, venal bandit with nothing of a Steward left in him?

‘Cyprian!’ called Grace.

It jerked him out of his thoughts, though he still felt hollow with shock as he turned towards her, and it took him a moment to see what she was seeing. Grace was staring down at a long-dead figure. A skull, and a skeleton, and rotting robes, it seemed oddly intact, as if nothing had broken the stillness of the years. It was posed in front of the pavilion’s altar, kneeling. Its robes resembled Steward robes, but were long to the ground like a janissary’s, not cut off like a Steward’s tunic at mid-thigh. They were rotted and blotched, but it was still possible in patches to see the colour, not white or blue, but the dark red of spilled, rotting wine.

‘Looks like you missed your rendezvous with him,’ said the Devil with a snort. ‘By a few hundred years.’

‘Longer than that,’ said Grace. ‘These remains are thousands of years old … preserved … perhaps because this place was closed up.’

‘Then how can he tell us how to stop the army?’ said Cyprian.

Will had walked past all of them. He seemed once again to have made the deductive leap that Cyprian ought to have made himself.

‘The altar. It’s white quartz. Just like—’

‘The Elder Stone,’ said Grace.

The altar did have the same white, milky consistency as the Elder Stone. His heart began to beat faster at the idea that the stone might talk to them from the past – might contain a message from the Stewards.

‘It can’t be a coincidence.’ Will turned to the Devil. ‘Touch it.’

The Devil’s brows rose sceptically. ‘The Elder what?’

‘Touch the altar,’ said Will.

‘You touch it,’ said the Devil mulishly.

Will put his hand on the altar, as if to say, It’s safe. And then lifted his brows at the Devil.

The little air of challenge worked where a request didn’t. With a returning arch of his brow, the Devil – Ettore – put his hand on the altar.

Cyprian gasped in wonder as the scene in front of him suddenly shimmered and changed.

The pavilion was restored to its former glory of high marble columns sparking with gold and silver and a high domed roof upflung to the stars. He’d always thought the Hall beautiful, but as he looked at this pavilion, he realised that the Hall was a ruin, and that he’d never seen Steward architecture at its height.

The figure in red was restored as well, his robes rich velvet and his dark hair loose and flowing down to his waist. He was rising from where he knelt, and as he came forward to greet them, Cyprian was shocked to find that it was a young man not much older than he was himself.

‘I am Nathaniel, Steward guardian of Undahar, and I speak to you now at our darkest hour.’

The figure – Nathaniel – had a gold star on his chest, but his robes were not white or blue, they were a deep crimson red. They fell to the floor like a long tunic in a style Cyprian didn’t recognise.

‘Our order is overrun. Of twelve hundred woman and men, I am all that is left. Let my words be both call and warning, for what has happened to us must never be allowed to happen again.’

He seemed to look right at Cyprian as he spoke, though that was surely impossible. Nathaniel was not really here, Cyprian had to remind himself, just as the Elder Steward hadn’t really been in the Hall when she had returned in her ghostly form. He was only a vision held in the stone.

‘It began only six days ago. The throne room has always been sealed and off limits, but one of our number opened the doors. Immediately after, he fell victim to a strange affliction. His skin turned white, and his blood hardened until it was like black stone. We had never seen an illness like it. By the evening the affliction had befallen six others.’

‘The white death,’ said Cyprian, turning to the others behind him, his pulse racing. ‘It’s struck here before.’ It was a sign they really had come to the right place. Even if Ettore himself – the Devil – was standing with his arms crossed, frowning.

‘The High Steward feared a plague,’ said Nathaniel, his face pinched with remembered anxiety, ‘or worse, some unnatural magic of the old world. We drew back to hold vigil over our fallen brethren, and to discuss ways to cleanse and restore the throne room, where the first of the deaths had occurred.’

It reminded Cyprian of the hushed conversations of the Stewards as they gathered in groups and whispered uneasily about Marcus. Worried, yet unaware of the sheer calamity about to befall them.

At the same time, his mind raced with questions. Who were these Stewards who had once guarded the Dark Palace? Why had he never heard of them, or of the white death?

‘There was nothing like this plague in any of our texts,’ Nathaniel continued. ‘Falling back to the outer chambers, we set our guards to stand watch.

‘They saw nothing. But in the morning we woke to find white bodies among the sleeping that did not arise. Fear began to spread. Some said that we should leave the palace, though that would mean forsaking our sacred duty as guardians of Undahar. Others said that we must stay and that we might ourselves be a danger, if we carried the plague out with us.

‘We ought not to have gathered. In the midst of a plague, we were vulnerable. As we argued, I saw a terrible sight. My brothers and sisters of the order collapsed, each of them turning white before they fell as if a white ocean rolled over the hall. We fled that white wave amid panicked screams, barring the doors behind us. Yet from behind the door we heard a dreadful sound, shrieks and cries that curdled my blood.

‘“We cannot hold,” said the High Steward. “What lies in Undahar is waking up. It will unleash a terror on this land worse than any plague. Our only hope is to seal it in, and to bury this place so deep it will never be found.”

‘“How can that be done!” one of our number cried.

‘“It can be done,” she said. “But it will take our lives.”

‘“Very well.” I stepped forward, knowing she meant us to bury ourselves inside the palace. I was ready to do it.

‘But the High Steward held me back. “One Steward must survive. You must get word to the Hall of the Stewards. And if we fail to hold back the darkness of Undahar, you must Call for the King.”

‘“Ouxanas,” I said to her, calling the High Steward by her name. “Do not make me leave you.”

‘“It is as it must be, Nathaniel. You know what lies under the palace.”

‘As the High Steward spoke, the doors burst open.

‘Through the doors I saw the white fallen bodies of my brethren, and above them something else that seemed to whirl and rail at the burst of light that came from the ward stone on the High Steward’s staff, as the very palace began shaking.

‘I ran. From the eastern pavilion, I watched as Undahar sank beneath the earth, and in its place rose the displaced earth and stone, creating a mountain and valley where there had once been a bountiful plain. The sacrifice of the Stewards had stemmed the eruption from the depths of the palace, and buried Undahar where it would not be found.

‘Perhaps the tale should have ended there. I wish it had.

‘I stayed in that lonely place for two days and two nights, sending word by messenger bird to the Hall of the Stewards, and waiting for their reply, recovering my strength, with the new mountain looming over me.

‘On the third day, as I woke and looked out for the rock dove to return with word from the Hall, I saw the High Steward emerging alive from the valley.

‘“Ouxanas!” I called. But she did not seem to recognise her name. “Ouxanas – you’re alive! I thought you had fallen to the white death!”

‘She was bewildered, confused, but she showed no sign of the white plague that had befallen the others. Yet I saw when she came closer that her arms and fingers were scraped and scratched and smeared with dirt, as if she had dug herself out from the mountain with her bare hands.

‘Hurriedly, I took a flask from my pack, thinking to offer her the healing waters of Oridhes. But when I turned back she was standing with a broken tree branch raised behind me. Before I could stop her she struck me on the head with it. I stumbled back, almost falling. She lunged with both her hands for my throat. I cried her name, but she did not hear me. She was shouting at me to release the army beneath the mountain. She said that she would force me to do it.

‘We grappled on the cliff. I was weak and wounded from her blow to my head. She was changed, different from the Ouxanas who I knew. On the edge, we wavered, but it was she who fell.

‘I was left on the new mountain, alone.

‘Some evil inside Undahar had infected Ouxanas. I knew it, yet it felt as though I had killed my kindly mentor. I wept, knowing I had killed the last of my brethren with my own hands.

‘It was in that moment that a rock dove landed near my feet. I stared at it, and only after long moments understood that it bore the reply I had been awaiting from the Stewards in the Hall.

‘The message I received shocked me. They said that the palace must remain buried. That the army and the plague it brought with it must stay lost. The Sun Gate would be closed forever. Even the knowledge of this place must be forgotten. Only the Elder Steward would remember Undahar, and even the Elder Steward would take an oath never to speak to any but their successor of what lay beneath the mountain.

‘As for me, I might be infected with the white death. I must shut myself into the watchtower and let the wards close and hide me forever.

‘And so I did. And so you find me … or so I hope you find me … I hope I keep to my vow and do not leave, though the temptation when I run out of food or drink will be very strong. But I will use my will to stay in place.

‘To the Steward who hears this message, heed my warning. Do not seek what lies beneath the mountain. Do not enter Undahar, or break the sealed doors. We thought we could stop what was coming. We were wrong. When evil came, we did not defeat it. We only buried it. And told ourselves to forget.

‘But what is buried is never gone. It lies beneath, waiting to return.’

The figure began to fade as it spoke the final words, until it was gone completely, and Cyprian was left staring at the skeletal remains and the disintegrated red robes of a forgotten sect of the Stewards. He had knelt to the very end, through hunger and thirst, devoting himself to his duty.

‘All right, let’s start cleaning this place out,’ said the Devil, stepping towards the robed skeleton as if he intended to strip it for parts.

Cyprian blocked him. ‘You can’t. You can’t just rob his grave.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m here to do.’

‘He was a person,’ said Cyprian.

‘That was the deal, Twinkles. You get the information, we get the loot. I’d say you got the best of it. There’s not much here but the dregs … even his robe’s likely rotted. But his belt and adornments might be worth something.’

Cyprian felt the frustration crest. ‘Stop it! Can’t you respect the dead!’

‘What’s to respect?’ The Devil’s face darkened. ‘These fools messed around with forces they didn’t understand, and it went badly. Typical Stewards.’

The unfairness of it rose in him, brittle-edged and painful. Cyprian looked at the kneeling figure and remembered kneeling himself, morning after morning. He remembered hours spent in meditations, perfecting the forms, strong in the belief that what he was doing mattered.

‘He saved you! If it wasn’t for his sacrifice, the world would be overrun!’ said Cyprian. ‘We don’t leave him here to be picked over. We burn his body. Send him into the flame.’

‘There isn’t time,’ said Will. Cyprian rounded on him, only to find Will with an implacable look on his face. ‘Didn’t you hear his warning? The throne room is open, Sinclair’s on his way, and we don’t have a way to stop that army.’

Cyprian felt the urgency of it. But he couldn’t turn his back on the figure kneeling before the altar. Not knowing that he was the last, and that he’d kept his lonely vigil here with only his Steward rituals to accompany him.

‘We make time,’ said Cyprian.

It wasn’t like the great blaze at the Hall of the Stewards. He and Grace gathered sticks and dried grasses from further down the slope, taking a tinderbox from one of the bandits. When the kindling was ready, Cyprian placed Nathaniel’s bones at the centre, knelt and struck steel to stone. He thought – it should be a giant pyre burning atop the peak like a beacon. But there was only coldness on the mountain, and the fire was small.

‘Nathaniel.’ It felt important to say his name. He thought – true death is to pass out of memory. It doesn’t come when you die. It comes when your name is spoken for the last time.

‘I have heard your message, and I will take up your mission. I will stop the army from issuing forth from Undahar.’

The day would come when Nathaniel’s name would be forgotten, as everyone’s name must be forgotten, but Cyprian wanted to say, Not yet.

‘Let this place be Nathaniel’s Rest. For your work at last is done.’

He looked up to see the Devil – Ettore – staring at him, something wide and open in his dark eyes, as if he glimpsed just for a moment something he had believed was lost.

Cyprian rose from where he knelt.

‘Take what you like,’ he said, walking past Ettore back down the rock.