Chapter One
The Gullet
The barley was short again.
Archas De Sangre knew it before he’d cleared the first row, because the stalks came up to his hip where they should have come up to his ribs, and the heads were light in his fist. Half of them were husk and wind. He crushed one between thumb and finger and blew, and what was left in his palm would not have fed a sparrow.
“Don’t,” his father said from three rows over, without looking up.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
That was fair. Archas bent back to it. The sickle went shhk through the stems, and the stems went down in a wet green sigh, and the red dust came up off the clay and settled in the creases of his knuckles where it would stay until Lowsun. Reaping month on the Red Acres. Sun like a hand on the back of his neck. The whole field smelled of hot straw and his own shirt, which had been sour since Highsun and was now something worse, something with a personality.
Behind him Mirelle gleaned in a hat three sizes too big, stooping and rising like a heron, her sack fatter than it should have been. She was stealing from the sheaves when she thought no one was watching. Archas watched, and said nothing, because the sheaves went to Sir Gauvain and the sack went to their mother’s oven, and he had known which side of that line he stood on since he was old enough to be hungry.
By midday the sweat had run into his eyes enough times that the field had gone blurry at the edges, and he stopped to drink from the skin hanging on the hedge. The water was warm and tasted of goat. From here you could see down the long slope to Aurèze — the yellow walls, the river’s green wrinkle, the Sunspire pricking up out of the middle of it all like a needle someone had lost in a haystack. On the far horizon the Girdle stood up out of the haze, a chalk line ruled across the sky, faint by day as a scar on a wrist.
Six weeks to the Dimming. You could feel it already, the way you could feel weather. The light had a tiredness in it.
“Owl!”
He turned. Reeve Jorin Tallow was coming along the hedge-track on the manor’s grey cob, tally-sticks rattling at his belt, his face the shade of undercooked pork it always went when he’d ridden further than the alehouse.
“Reeve.”
“Where’s your father?”
Tomás De Sangre straightened, which took a while — the Salt War lived in his left knee and had never paid rent — and came over with the sickle held loose at his side. Not threatening. Just holding it.
Tallow looked at the field. Tallow looked at the sheaves, and at the height of them, and did the sum in his head that every man in Vireille had already done. He had the grace not to say it.
“Lord’s third is due at Ember’s start,” he said instead. “Same as always.”
“Same as always,” Tomás agreed.
“That’s — well.” Tallow cleared his throat. “Here’s a thing. Sir Gauvain’s flock got up the hills three days back. Some dog got in among them at the Sisters and the lot scattered. Shepherd’s brought most down. Six ewes still up there, past the stones.” He looked at Archas. Then at the field. Then back at Archas, as if he’d found the two facts and was fitting them together for them. “Two obols the head, brought back living. Skin and fleece if they’re dead, one obol.”
“No,” said Tomás.
“I haven’t asked yet.”
“You’re looking at my son. No.”
Tallow spread his hands. The cob shifted under him. “It’s six sheep, Tomás. It’s not the Rot.”
“It’s past the Sisters,” Tomás said, and that was the whole argument, and everyone present knew it. He turned back to his row. After a moment Tallow shrugged and nudged the cob on toward the Vautrins’ field, where he’d get a different answer, and Archas stood with the sickle in one hand and the sum in the other.
Twelve obols was a denier. A denier was a month of salt, or a new blade for the plough, or the difference between Mirelle eating in Deepwinter and Mirelle looking at the pot the way she’d looked at it in ’45.
He went back to work. The sickle said shhk. His father didn’t look at him again all afternoon, which was its own kind of looking.
Supper was pottage — barley, onion, the ghost of a chicken — and the good oil their neighbors found alarming, and bread that was half Mirelle’s stolen gleanings and tasted better for it. The house was one room and a loft and the smell of it was smoke and wool and the sharp green of the herbs Abuela hung from the beams to keep the flies confused.
Abuela Inés sat nearest the fire because she was always cold, a small dark heap of shawls with two black eyes at the top of it that had gone milky in the last three years and missed nothing anyway.
“Dimming’s coming,” she said, in Castrenne, to no one.
“Six weeks, Abuela,” Archas said.
“I know when it’s coming, pálido. I’ve seen more of them than you’ve seen breakfasts.” She was the only one who called him that. Pale one. Everyone else in Vireille called him Owl, on account of the hair, which had come in white as gull-down the day he was born and had stayed that way for seventeen years while the rest of him went brown and lean and Castrenne around it. The Aurelian mothers had made the Sunmark over their own babies when they saw him. Father Anselm had said a prayer. Abuela had said it was an omen, and when asked of what, had said we’ll see, and had been saying it since.
“I’ll want a thumb tomorrow,” she said now.
“You can have mine,” said Mirelle.
“I’ll have your brother’s. Yours is too small; it’d take all night.”
The red sill. Every Dimming, Abuela pricked a thumb and drew the line across the threshold stone with her own blood, mumbling something under her breath that wasn’t a Sunfaith prayer. Their mother pretended not to see it. Father Anselm pretended not to know. It was one of the things about the De Sangres that the village filed under Castrenne and left alone.
“Why my thumb?”
“Because you live here,” Abuela said, as if that settled it. To her it did.
Across the table their mother was doing the sum too. Aline De Sangre had the accounts in her head the way other women had songs, and Archas could see her turning the pages, the third to the manor, the tithe to the Church, what was left, how many mouths, how many weeks. Her lips moved very slightly. She caught him watching and stopped.
“Any word?” he asked, which was the question nobody asked, and so it was his turn.
She shook her head. Rodric had marched north with the levy in Sowing, handsome and stupid and glad of the coin, and had written twice — once from the muster at Vesse with a boast about a Gallenish girl, once in March about mud. Nothing since. Nothing was probably nothing. The levy didn’t have scribes to spare for farm boys. That was what you told yourself, and it worked about as well as the red sill.
His father ate. His father looked at the fire. His father said, “Bed,” and they went.
He was up before the sun, which was easy, because he hadn’t really slept.
The sickle stayed on its hook. He took the knife, the long one with the horn handle that had been his grandfather’s; a candle-stub and flint and the little tin of char-cloth; a coil of the good hemp rope from the byre, because you didn’t go into old quarry country without it; bread, and a hard end of cheese, and the water-skin. Boots. His brother’s old cloak, which still smelled faintly of Rodric, which was a reason to take it and a reason not to.
At the door he stopped and looked at the threshold stone. The old line from Ashen was still there — brown now, nearly gone, a stain in the grain of the rock. He stepped over it and went out into the grey.
Vireille slept. Smoke from a few banked hearths. The Cracked Bell’s bell, hanging black over the alehouse door, the one that had rung the Rot dead into the ground and had never been rung since. Someone’s cock trying out the morning and thinking better of it. He went up the lane past Widow Cassel’s cottage — dark; she’d know he’d gone before anyone else did, she always knew — and the lane became a track and the track became the hills.
The Cinder Hills were red. Not the red of the Acres, which was a rust-brown you could plough; a raw, ferrous, meat-coloured red, the colour of the inside of something. Scrub oak and thyme and gorse held the lower slopes together, and the first hour was almost pleasant, the sun coming up behind him and laying his shadow out long and thin ahead like a road, kestrels hanging in the updraft with their tails fanned, the thyme crushing under his boots and making the whole morning smell like his mother’s kitchen. A hare went off through the gorse. He thought about the knife and thought about the time it would take and let it go.
The quarries started in the second hour. Two hundred years of men had bitten mouths out of the hills here, hauling iron down to Aurèze until the iron ran thin and the men went elsewhere, and what they’d left were pits and shafts and terraces gone to weed, rusted tracks, the bones of a wooden crane lying in the heather like the ribs of a horse. He found the flock’s droppings along the old haul-road and followed them up.
The Three Sisters stood at the top of the last terrace where the haul-road gave out.
He’d seen them before, from below, and had never come this close. Three standing stones, taller than a man, leaning in toward each other like women sharing something not meant for the road. Grey, not red. Wrong for the hills. No one had erected them, or if someone had, no one remembered, and the moss had grown up their north faces and nothing had grown on their south faces at all.
Past them, the hills went quiet.
It wasn’t a thing you could point to. The kestrels were still there. The wind still moved. But the wind moved without saying anything, and his boots came down on the thyme without the thyme answering back, and his own breath was suddenly the loudest thing on the slope. He stood between the Sisters with the sun on his shoulders and felt seventeen and stupid and very far from the field, and then he thought of Mirelle looking at the pot, and went on.
He found the first ewe within a hundred paces. Alive, wedged in a gorse thicket, bleating with a kind of exhausted outrage when she saw him. He cut her out and she stood there trembling and let him rope her. The second and third were together in the lee of a boulder further up, and came when the first one called, sheep being sheep. Six obols, he thought, and felt something in his chest unclench a notch. Two more and it’d be worth the walk. Four more and it’d be worth the look on his father’s face.
He found the fourth at the lip of the Gullet.
Old Pell said there was a door at the bottom of the Gullet. Old Pell was a drunk.
The Gullet was the sinkhole at the head of the highest quarry — a throat of red rock, fifteen paces across at the top, that dropped away into a dark the sun didn’t bother with. Boys threw stones into it and listened for the bottom and didn’t hear one. The shepherds gave it a wide berth, and had since before the wyvern, and the wyvern had roosted in the crags above it in ’45 as if it liked the company.
The ewe lay on her side a stride from the edge.
She’d been opened.
Not by a wolf. A wolf went for the throat and the haunch and ate what it took, and left a mess that was a meal, that you could read. This was — her belly had been unzipped from ribs to udder, one long clean parting, and the lights had been drawn out and laid on the stone beside her in a heap. Coiled. Almost neat. Grey-blue loops of gut with the morning sun on them, and a swarm of flies going up off them as he came close like a held breath let go.
Nothing had been eaten.
And there was no blood.
That was the thing that turned him cold, standing over her with the rope of living sheep bleating at his back. A ewe held a bucket of blood, and a wound like that should have painted the rock for a yard around, should have run and pooled and gone black and tacky in the sun. There was nothing. The rock was clean. The edges of the wound were clean, pale, puckered, like something had —
Licked.
He stepped back. His boot slid on scree and he grabbed for nothing and stood there with his pulse in his ears, looking at the ewe, and then, because he couldn’t not, looking past her at the Gullet.
The rains had been at it.
He saw it now. The whole eastern side of the sinkhole had come away sometime in Greening — a great slump of red clay and stone, a fresh wound on the old one, sliding down into the dark. And where it had come away, where the red rock had been, there was something underneath the red rock that wasn’t red.
Black. Grey-black. Fitted stone, one block to the next, seamless, the join between them a line so fine he couldn’t have got the knife into it. It went down. He leaned, one hand on the boulder, as far as his fear would let him, and saw that it went down in steps — a stair, cut or built or grown, following the curve of the throat around and away into the black.
A door, Old Pell said in the Cracked Bell, three cups in, to anyone. There’s a door at the bottom. I’ve seen it.
Every priest’s sermon of his life said the Hollows were consecrated and safe and none of his business. Every grandmother’s story said the opposite. Archas stood at the lip and heard both, and heard Sabine Hache at the well saying Owl’s afraid of the dark, are you, Owl, and heard his father saying no, and heard the flies.
He tied the sheep to the boulder. He checked the rope, the knife, the candle. He told himself it was to see where the door went, so he’d have something to say to Old Pell.
It wasn’t. He didn’t know what it was. Something down there had his attention the way a hook has a fish.
He went over the edge.
The steps were too tall.
That was the first thing. Each riser came up to his knee, so that the descent was less a stair than a ladder of stone, and he went down it half-turned with his palm flat against the wall, and the wall was cold. Not cave-cold. Cold, a cold with weight, that came up through the leather of his boots and settled in the small bones of his feet and stayed. Ten steps and the daylight above was a ragged white coin. Twenty and it was a star. He stopped, and struck the flint, and got the candle going on the third try with his hands shaking more than the cold accounted for.
The light showed him the stair and nothing else. Black stone, going down, curving. Dust on the steps like fine flour, undisturbed, his own boot-prints the first marks in it. He didn’t like thinking about that. He didn’t like thinking about how long undisturbed was.
He counted steps to have something to do. At sixty he stopped counting.
The silence was the second thing. Up in the hills past the Sisters the quiet had been a held breath; down here it was something that ate. His boots made no sound he could hear. His breath was there and then it wasn’t, taken from his lips and swallowed. When he cleared his throat, on purpose, to prove he could, the sound went a hand’s width from his mouth and stopped as if it had walked into a wall. The candle flame didn’t move. There was no air moving to move it. The wax ran down and burned his knuckle and he let it.
And under the silence, faint, at the very bottom of hearing where you couldn’t say if it was a sound or the memory of one — a beat.
Slow. Slower than his own, which was going like a rabbit’s. One. And a long nothing. And one.
He thought: that’s my blood in my ears. He knew it wasn’t.
The stair ended.
It didn’t open out so much as give up, the last too-tall step delivering him onto a floor, and the candle’s little ring of light lay on that floor and found nothing at its edges. No wall. No ceiling. The dark went out in every direction and his light was a coin dropped in it. He stood in it and the cold came up through his boots and the beat went one and the nothing went on and on and he understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with courage, that he was standing in a room that had been built for something the size of a cathedral, by someone who did not think in the size of men.
He walked forward. Because the beat was forward. There wasn’t another reason.
Twenty paces. Thirty. Shapes came out of the dark at the edge of the light and he flinched from each one and each one was a pillar, a column of the black stone, rising past where the candle could follow. Carved. He held the flame close to one and saw figures, a procession, robed and tall — too tall, that wrongness again, the proportions of the stair — and among them, low, on all fours, harnessed, with wings folded flat along their backs like dogs that had been taught shame —
He took the candle away from that.
Forty paces. The floor rose — three shallow steps, the first things down here built to a human scale, or built by something that had decided to condescend to it — and the light went up them and found the chair.
It was not a throne the way the king’s was a throne, with gilt and cushion and a lion on the back. It was a chair the way the Sisters were stones: a fact. Black. High-backed. Cut from the same seamless dark as everything else, as if the whole hall had been made so that it could sit here. And in it —
He’d known. From the ewe. From the beat. Knowing didn’t help.
The corpse sat the way the living sit when they’ve decided to. Upright. Hands on the arms of the chair, long fingers curled over the stone ends, one ankle crossed over the other. The clothes had gone to a dark shine that might once have been leather, fused to the body, cracked along the joints where the body had shrunk inside them. The body itself was — he thought dried and it wasn’t the word. Cured. The skin had gone the colour of old bark and stretched tight and glossy over the frame beneath, so that every bone stood proud, the long shins, the cage of the ribs where the leather had split, the knuckles like knots in rope. The lips had drawn back. The teeth beneath were white. They were very white, and very even, and the ones at the corners were long.
The hair fell past the shoulders, and it was white.
Not grey. Not the yellow-white of the old. White, gull-down white, his own white, and it moved. Not much. Not in any air, because there was no air. It moved the way weed moves in a stream, slow, in something he couldn’t see.
And the face.
He stood at the foot of the three steps with the candle in his fist and looked at the face, and the face was ruined — sunken, glazed, a skull with a hide on it — and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The bones of it. The way they’d been put together. He’d seen the saints painted in the Sunspire, faces the old masters had spent their lives on, and they were children’s scratchings next to what was under this skin. It was a face someone had meant. Two hundred thousand years of dark hadn’t unmade it. Nothing could. He understood, standing there, that he was going to see it again every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life, and that his life was going to be a good deal shorter or a good deal longer than he’d planned on and he didn’t know yet which.
The eyes were shut. Thank the Undimmed. Thank whatever.
One.
The beat. Not from the corpse. From —
From inside him.
He felt it. His own heart, going like a rabbit, and under it, a second thing, in the same place, keeping a different time. One. Slow. Patient. The way you’d knock on a door you knew was going to open.
His pulse answered it. He felt his pulse answer it, felt his blood turn in his veins like a dog hearing its name, and it was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him and he wanted to weep with how good it felt —
And he saw the blood.
At the corner of the corpse’s mouth. Where the lip had drawn back over the long white tooth. A bead of it. Dark. Wet. Hanging, full, catching the candle, in a place where nothing had been wet since before the hills were hills.
Come, said nothing, in no words, and he was already climbing the steps.
He didn’t decide to. Later he’d go over it a hundred times looking for the moment he chose and there wasn’t one. His feet went up the three steps and his hand came up and the candle went into his other hand and his fingers — his own fingers, brown with the Acres, red under the nails — reached for the mouth of the dead thing on the chair, and the tip of the first one touched the bead, and the bead broke, and it was warm.
He looked at his finger. The drop sat on the pad of it, black in the light, and he could smell it, and it smelled like iron and cold and something under the iron that was sweet, and his mouth flooded.
He put his finger in his mouth.
Iron. Cold. Then —
Then the sweetness, and behind the sweetness, heat, a heat that started on his tongue and went down his throat like a swallowed coal and didn’t stop at his stomach, went through him, into his chest, into the place where the beat was, and the beat said one —
and his heart stopped.
He felt it stop. Felt the rabbit go still. Stood there on the top step with his finger in his mouth like a child and the candle in his fist and no heartbeat at all, for one second, two, the longest silence in a hall made of silence —
One.
It started again. Not his rhythm. That rhythm. Slow. Patient. Sure.
Then the pain came, and he dropped the candle, and in the last of its light before it guttered out on the black stone he saw the corpse’s jaw ease open the width of a finger, and a breath of dust sigh out of it, grey and fine and final, like something that had been waiting a very long time to be allowed to leave.
The dark came in.
He went down into it with his blood on fire and his father’s no and his grandmother’s we’ll see and, under everything, very far down, a voice that was not a voice, saying a word he didn’t know yet in a tongue nobody living had spoken, saying it the way you’d say the name of a son.