2

⁠—⁠—⁠— II ⁠—⁠—⁠—

For the second time since he had arrived in the keep, Guin heard the sound of the heavy cell door being barred behind him.

He stood with his shoulders hunched, his back to the door, and studied the cell. The young prince of Parros had been facing away, curled up under some furs on one of the beds, but the sound of the door opening had woken him. Guin was back! The boy had been on the verge of shouting, but had held his tongue when he saw the black knights in the doorway. Stepping down from the bed, he ran over and simply clung to the warrior instead.

With the boy’s slender arms wrapped around his waist, Guin nodded gently as if to say things were going to be all right. He was tired—incredibly tired—from fighting, and weak with hunger, but it did his heart good to merely stand there and stroke the boy’s hair, soft like silvery silk.

“You came back,” whispered Remus, watching the door close behind him.“I was so worried—I thought you’d be killed.”

“Worry not, child. I live,” Guin laughed.“It takes a great deal more to kill one as stubborn as I. Now…I need food, and wine, if there is any.”

“Yes, Guin.” The boy rushed over to the table, bringing back the remains of his dinner and the wine jug, and watched as the leopard-headed warrior launched into the cold meat, sticking his finger into the grain mash and noisily chewing as much as he could fit in his mouth. Clearly he had adapted to eating through his mask.

After a while he noticed the boy’s intent look.“What is it?” Guin asked.“Your sister, is it? Don’t worry about her, she can take care of herself.”

“No, that’s not—” Remus broke off what he was saying and went over to the cell door to make sure no guards were listening. He came back and whispered in the leopard ear.“The man next door…”

“The ‘Crimson Mercenary,’ was it?” asked Guin, between draughts from the jug of wine. It was mulsum, a drink of fermented honey popular in the lands of Gohra, and he found it quite good.“What about him?”

“Well…”

Guin looked over at the wall between them and the neighboring cell. The loose stone had been returned to its place, closing the small window between the rooms.

“I fell asleep… a pretty deep sleep, I guess, and… well, when I woke—” Speaking slowly, as though afraid of a scolding when he was finished, Remus recounted what had happened while Guin was away. After the warrior had left, Istavan had asked Remus for his bed sheets and spent a good while fashioning a rope, but then he had lain on his bench and begun to snore.

Remus had watched him for a while. Growing up in the beautiful palaces of Parros, with no one but stuffy royalty and obsequious servants to play with, the boy had never encountered anyone like the wild-spirited Istavan, and the mercenary had sparked his curiosity. Remus had tried to talk to him a few times, eventually giving up when there was no reply but the soldier’s snoring. Then he had sat down to wait for Guin. He was just starting to nod off, when suddenly he heard movement in the next room.

“Great Jarn!” came a whispered curse, followed by the sounds of someone quietly moving the furniture next door. Remus jumped from his chair and put his eye to the hole in the wall. The”Crimson Mercenary” had lowered his newly made rope through a large hole in the outer wall, and was starting to crawl through the opening!

“Wait, you!“shouted Remus, sticking his face through the small gap between their rooms. “That rope ladder belongs to me, too! Where are you going? Guin isn’t even back yet! Wait, hey, wait!”

“Quiet, boy!” said Istavan, glaring at him. “Shut your foolish mouth or the guards will hear you!” The mercenary continued working his way down the rope, not bothering to wait for Remus’s reply, and soon he disappeared in the darkness of the night outside.

“So he tricked me!” said Remus, finishing his story. “He said he was going to escape with us!”

Guin’s laugh was almost a howl. “So, Istavan has escaped! Don’t worry, he has his own destiny to follow. There is no way we could get through that little hole into his room to use that rope ladder anyway.” Guin turned to look at the opening. “Besides, he had no intention of escaping with us in the first place. He might have brought me along, for my sword, but children are a burden he would not have accepted. I guessed he would do as much—he seemed clever enough.”

“But he tricked me into giving him my sheets!” Remus was furious.

Guin laughed harder. “You are too trusting, my little prince,” he said, turning back to look at the boy. “You gave your faith too easily, and you were betrayed—but you cannot let something like that anger you, if you should ever want people to call you their king. I tell you not to worry, even though Istavan has left me in the same fix. I’ll think of a way to get you and your sister out of this keep unharmed, but let’s let the mercenary walk his own path. Meanwhile—I am very tired. Let us leave escape for later. Now, I must sleep.”

Guin closed his eyes and sprawled out on the floor where he’d been sitting. Remus walked quietly away so as not to disturb him, and was making himself comfortable in the corner of the room when Guin’s eyes suddenly opened.

“Your sister, Rinda—she is a seer? I would do anything to have her divine the truth behind something very strange I saw just before coming here.”

“What did you see?“ Remus replied irritably. He didn’t always like to be reminded of his sister’s powers of sight—powers that he did not share.

Guin shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of an image burned into the back of his eyes, and rolled up in a sleeping fur.

“Your sister said she didn’t want to enter this keep, that she could feel something in the air, that the fortress was doomed. I thought she was just talking about the count’s disease. But down in the dungeon—after they made me fight a great ape of Gabul—I tried to escape; I took the keep lord as my shield and I… I saw something very strange.”

“Something strange?”

“Yes.” Guin sat up suddenly. With the fur still wrapped about him like a ragged pelt, he stared out into the datkness of the room. It was as if his shining eyes peered through the solid rock of the walls, searching the entirety of Stafolos Keep for something.

“Perhaps I should not say ‘strange’—for all I saw was the lord of Stafolos Keep, the Black Count Vanon. Perhaps it was a trick of my eyes… yes, that is what I want your sister to tell me: that I was seeing things, that it was the cold of the dungeon that chilled me to the bone.”

Guin shivered. “You do not understand; you were not there. I had the count at sword-point. I was standing this close to him, when my body began to shake like I had come down with a fever. I tried to stop the trembling, but it was no use. My legs, my arms, every part of me shook like a young bird in a nest of vipers. It was as if I was hanging above the mouth of hell by a thin thread, and I looked down into the abyss and saw… nothing.”

Guin kept talking, now more to himself than to the boy. “The count was laughing like a crazed magpie… He threatened to take off his mask right there and let his rotting plague ride on the wind to all of us, and the chill feeling grew strong, terribly strong. I was the closest to him, closer than all of the knights, so I saw something they could not, or rather… I saw nothing better than they could.”

“That makes no—” began Remus, but Guin cut him off, his fingers moving unconsciously to make the sign of Janos in the air.

“What I mean is, when that diseased creature began to pull down his mask, I saw where it joined the armor below, and I saw nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Not one thing under that mask but empty space.”

Remus swallowed.

“It’s true,” said Guin. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I dropped my longsword, so shocked I was. My eyes can see baltos roosting in the tops of Roodwood trees, or a grass snake winding through a thicket, but when I looked behind the Black Count’s mask, where there should have been at least a withered head, there was nothing. Had there been anything—a shadow like the night sky, with twinkling stars—I would not have been so shocked. But what I saw through that crack was an abyss like that of the lands of Doal—it was the abyss of hell itself.

“It was only a tiny crack, but the tepid wind blowing from it raised bumps on my skin, and the smell of rot grew until I could bear it no longer.”

Guin’s eyes closed in recollection. “I want to know what he is,” he said, after a moment.“I want to know what this Black Count Vanon really is.”

The warrior and the little boy looked at each other in silence. The currents of their thoughts drifted unbidden to the soldier from Valachia, the mercenary Istavan, and his seeming conviction that all their lives were in danger if they did not escape the keep before night’s end.

Mark my words: you’ll have every accursed stone in the place coming down on your head.

“Guin…” said Remus in a shaky whisper. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.” Guin’s voice was firmer than before. “But I know we cannot sit here with our fingers crossed to see what fate brings us. Whatever might await us outside, we need to get out of this tower and out of this keep. Child, if it comes to a choice between the fear that seems to live within these very walls and the zombies of the Roodwood, I will take the zombies!”

“But, what about Rinda?”

“She is coming with us. I’ll find a way.” Guin tilted the jug to drain the last drops of honey wine before curling up once again. “And as for this Mongauli apparition… I don’t know what to think, so I won’t. What will come to be, will be. No point wasting energy worrying about it now.” With these words, the warrior closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep.

Hunched in the corner, Remus watched his leopardheaded companion. A dark, uneasy image had risen in his mind, vague but terrible, and it was not until long after Guin had gone to sleep that the image finally began to lose its form and fade.

It did not seem that this would be a night of quiet rest for anyone in the keep.

Just moments after Remus had finally settled down to sleep, there came the loud clanging sound of men in armor running up the stone stairs of the tower, followed by a creak as the bar on the prisoners’ door was lifted. The door opened, and a torch was thrust into the room.

“Two in here—the leopard-man and the prince.”

Guin turned and sat up, asking angrily whether captives of the Mongauli were not even allowed to sleep.

“This one’s fine.” The tall knight who stood in the doorway waved on the men who accompanied him, then turned back to Guin.

“Didn’t you hear the guards shouting? Seems one of you captives got it into his mind to go for a swim in the Kes,” he explained. “He’s a fool that’d jump into the dark waters of the Kes, but we’ve got a bunch of them dirty Sem in here, and they’d probably be right at home in there, they would. So we’ve got to see which one of you jumped.”

“How do you know it was a prisoner?” asked Guin, a smile in his voice. “Maybe it was a Gohran soldier, sick of guarding this place every day.”

“No Gohran is so weak,” said the knight proudly, “and the sentry said the jumper climbed from this tower.”

“How can anyone be so sure,” asked Guin, “when demons make their nests right here in this keep of Stafolos?”

Even in the dim torchlight, Guin could see the color drain from the knight’s face. Cursing, the man put his hand on the hilt of his longsword and made to step into the room, when he was arrested by a shout from the next room over.

“Here it is! The prisoner jumped from here! He’s dug a hole in the wall, he has! You, jailer! Who was in here?”

“A mercenary from Valachia—said he talked back to his Excellency the Count.”

“He’ll have a hard time getting across the Kes… though Valachia is near the sea and maybe he thinks he’s a swimmer. Send an order down—get guards out there with torches, shine them on the surface of the water until we find the corpse.”

There was more clanging and footfalls outside as the scattered guards came clamoring back down the stairs.

“Freak!” the knight spat and walked out, swinging the door shut behind him.

“I hit a sore spot, it seems. They know there’s something amiss here in the keep all right.” Guin sounded pleased. “I wonder if Istavan made it down in one piece. He seems like a man you could kill a hundred times before he died—but swimming in the Kes, and at night…”

“Guin?” Remus’s quiet voice came from where he sat hunched in the corner. Guin looked up. “Is it really true that you lost your memory? You really don’t know who you are? Guin, sometimes, it seems like—”

“I don’t understand it myself,” Guin replied. “Sometimes I say things before I even realize I knew them. I don’t even know what I know, and what I don’t. But…I do not know who I am…or who I was. That much is true.”

“I was thinking, when they took you away to fight in the dungeons,” said Remus. “Rinda and I, we’ve only been with you for a couple of days now, but somehow it seems so much longer—like we’ve known you forever. You told me not to trust too easily, but I never doubted you once. I thought, maybe, could you be someone we know?”

Guin chuckled. “A warrior serving the royal house of Parros?” He thought for a while, then shook his head. “I do not think so. In my mind, I can see the great Kes, and the barbarian lands beyond—I know these places. But Gohra, Parros, all the lands of the Middle Country, these are like a hole in my memory. No, it is like I never knew of them in the first place, like someone planted in my head all the knowledge I might need to live in the Marches, but left the rest a blank sheet. They dropped me here to find my way… to where?”

“You mean you don’t remember Parros? The Crystal Palace? Or the Mongauli capital of Torus, surely you must remember that! Yulania? Kumn?”

“Nothing.” Guin held his head for a moment, then growled.“There is an aching in my mind… This word, ‘Aurra,’ is like a pounding hammer, it’s all I can hear.”

“Whatever could—” began Remus, but then he let out a cry and pointed at the window.“Guin! Look! The sky outside, it’s red! Is it morning already?”

“No. They’ve placed torches along the keep walls—searching the river for the Crimson Mercenary, no doubt.”

“Oh…” said Remus, thinking again. The torchlight reflecting off the river surface was enough to paint the entire cell with flickering red light. “So, Guin, maybe you came from the territories to the north, or the lands to the south. No one really knows what’s down there…”

“Neither do I.”

“I don’t think there’s any land in the Marches that could train a warrior like you, though.”

“Who I really am is not that important right now,” Guin replied brusquely.” Let’s worry about that once we’re out of this place. Now—sleep, child, even if just for a little while. Though it may be hard with all this light, I admit.”

“What’s that noise?” asked Remus suddenly. “Can’t you hear that? Like many men talking all at once.”

“The black knights searching for Istavan, no doubt. They’ve led out some horses from the stables and are sweeping the landing in the back.”

“I… yes, I suppose that’s it.”

Remus seemed troubled. Guin chuckled. Compared to his sister, Rinda Farseer, the little princess of Parros, Remus was easily scared, always jumping at shadows.

Yet this time Guin was wrong. He was mistaken about the cause of Remus’s unease, just as he was blind to the true potential that still lay dormant in the young boy—or mostly dormant. Remus certainly did not have the powers of prediction that his sister Rinda had, but he was her twin brother, and they shared two halves of the same soul. What never occurred to Guin was that Remus’s trembling, his fear and his unease, might be precisely the kind that the warrior himself had experienced earlier, in the dungeon.

Guin turned irritably toward the wall, away from the brightness of the window, and attempted once again to give his wearied body the sleep for which it ached. The red torchlight spilled into the room and over the round shape of his leopard head, painting a strange shadow on the wall. Remus sat with his arms around his knees, weary and weak, but unable to sleep. He sat staring at the warrior.

“Guin… Guin…” he whispered, but there was no answer.

What’s wrong with me? thought Remus. He could only come up with two answers: either he was completely without courage—as cowardly as a little girl—or else it was that his twin sister, with whom he shared his soul, was also lying awake up in her tower room.

He had never tried to feel for his sister over a distance— there had never been a need, for they had never been more than a room apart before now—but, twins that they were, with the blood of the priests of Janos running in their family line, a little white magic between them would hardly have been surprising. Perhaps Remus’s senses were telling him something. What if Rinda was in danger? A sudden, pressing unease came over him, and he hugged himself more tightly and closed his eyes, focusing every thought on his sister.

“Rinda… Rinda… Rinda…”

Nothing happened. After a while, he sighed and stood up. Taking care not to wake the sleeping Guin, he moved a chair quietly to the window; then, climbing atop it, he peered out of the small opening at the world outside.

A cool night breeze hit his face. Instead of the dark, sleeping forest and the mountains in the distance, all he could see was the blazing red of dozens of torches, burning the night sky, and reflecting off the grim black walls of the keep.

Then a thought came to Remus. All those torches were surely keeping the search parties safe from the terrors of the Marches at night when fiends ran rampant, but wouldn’t those same red flames cast so many shadows that the searchers’ flesh-and-blood quarry might find it far easier to hide? A shiver ran down Remus’s spine, though he couldn’t have said exactly why. He didn’t care whether Istavan was caught or not, did he?

The night air was filled with the constant commotion of the search parties and a pervasive feeling of unrest. A thin hint of purple outlining the edges of the distant mountains told of the approaching dawn. Remus put his hands on the stone of the wall and listened to the whinnying of the horses, the constant barking of orders, and the swishing of leaves as riders beat through the brush, and he thought that he wouldn’t mind it if dawn decided to come just a little early today. The sun brought a thousand blessings—it was the protector of mankind. The golden orb’s rays would brush away the malignant wings of night where Doal ruled; its penetrating light would reveal all things. The fiends that hid in the night, the ill omens, the danger, all succumbed to the dawn light—and even if Remus and >Guin and Rinda were still trapped in this accursed keep come morning, it would be enough that they had lived through the night. The dawn would teach them to look at all of the portents and the night-worries, and laugh.

“It was just like this,” whispered Remus, remembering, “when the crystal city fell in flames, when the blood flowed and the screams and terror came in the night. It was just like tonight.” Though no one was listening, Remus put his soft cheek against the cool stone of the wall and ruminated on his life—until these last few bewildering days, a long peace spent in the shining light of the crystal city. Will Rinda and I ever see the crystal spires of Parros again ? Will we ever see anything beautiful again?

The watch lights of the sentries burned red, pushing back the night, and the moon hid its bluish-white face behind a thin veil of clouds. Heeding a sudden impulse, Remus stood up straight on the chair and looked outside again.

There was something out there in the night, something great and terrible. Remus felt his eyes drawn upward until they lit upon the source of his fear.

“The black tower!”

It stood close to the keep walls, directly across from Remus’s cell halfway up the white tower. Even from his narrow window, he could see that the black tower had neither windows nor any openings for light at all, as though it were designed to hold an unspeakable malaise festering deep within its impure darkness.

Remus’s fingers unconsciously made the sign of Janos to ward off demons, and the boy quickly jumped down from the chair and ran across the room to sit hunched against the far wall. But the sight of the black tower lit by the watch fires was burned into his mind like a wound, a horror forged from the misfortune and terror of the night itself, that could find him and haunt him even through the wall.

Remus moved quietly towards Guin, careful not to wake him. His feeling of terror grew until it was almost more than he could bear; his breathing came in gasps, and he put his fist to his mouth and bit his knuckles. The back of his head burned and went numb, and he curled up in a ball, somehow knowing that they would not make it through the night unscathed; that something would go catastrophically wrong before the break of day. Istavan had sensed it with his animal instincts—that’s why he had jumped into the black flow of the Kes like a rat fleeing a sinking ship. Remus wanted to jump, too. Dangerous though they might be, the waters of the Kes were far preferable to sitting here at the mercy of the fear that gnawed at his stomach.

And then Jarn quietly gave the little wheel of his fate-loom another turn.

And Remus heard it.

Through the pre-dawn darkness, over the faint sounds of the search below, came a girl’s shrill voice—not to his ears it seemed, but directly to his heart.

“Stay away, demon! You touch me once and I’ll bite my own tongue off! Help! Somebody! Remus! Remus! GUIN!”

There was no question: it was Rinda, and she was in trouble. Remus jumped to his feet, shouting at the top of his voice to be let out. Guin stood up, startled, staring at the boy.

Somewhere down below, the keep bell began to ring.