The Spiral - 2 - The Threshold

Part 2 of 6 · All parts

The Keeper had begun at his wrists.

The Vaults lay far beneath the Thronetower on the plateau’s edge, below the long stair and the spiral tombs, below the cisterns, in the deeps where the wind that howled in the King’s Chamber far above could not be heard. Here the air held the taste of old ink and cold stone. Fragments of loreglass lined the walls here in the thousands. They sat dull as pitchstone in countless rows, until the old man passed by them, when each in turn gave up a brief glimmer, as of moonlight half remembered.

The Keeper did not tie the ribbons in rows. He wound them, each name and knot a fraction further round, wrist to elbow, in one long climbing turn. A name at each turn. A knot for each name. The linen was laid over the one beneath so that no skin showed between, drawn tight until the flesh beneath whitened. Bodum watched his arm vanish under the layers of it. Would his steps falter on the spiral? When he returned, his name too would join the Litany, bound to a rite older even than the King’s Teeth. If he returned. The knowledge pressed more tightly than any linen could.

“Every Reeve of Highseat has borne these, Steward,” the Keeper said. He did not look up from his work. “I wound your father’s. My master wound his. The winding is older than the Stewards. The kings bore them before you, back to the fall of Ennura, when the Drift came up out of the Glasslands, and the first of your line stood upon this rock and could not be moved.”

The Keeper was halfway up his forearm now, the names climbing past his wrist. “Though the names you bear are the Stewards’ only. When the last king was betrayed, and slain, our enemies opened and scattered the tombs in the valley. We learned that even in death we were not safe, so we brought our rulers up the long stair.” He drew a knot closed. “As the Blood turns, Steward. A turning for each of them, each laid higher than his father, and Kalipyr first of them, the only king in the spiral tombs above us.”

As the Keeper tied and adjusted the corresponding knots, he had been murmuring, and had been all the while, so low that Bodum had taken it for chordal chanting. Only now, with the names nearly at his elbow, did he understand that it was the same phrase with each knot.

As we are written, so we endure.

Beginning the next wrap the Keeper spoke again. “The binding of names. The waysalt and draft of sauma. Your walk in the Drift. The Orosi will tell you the anchoring is theirs, but it was done here first. In this room. Before there was an Oros to write it down.”

Bodum must have looked away. Toward the stair perhaps, or toward the wind he could not hear, though he felt it on his face. He remembered only that the Keeper’s hands had stopped.

“You doubt it, Steward?”

Bodum said nothing. He did not doubt it, but the doubt was not his own. It was Hemma’s that he carried with him down the long stair like a stone in his boot.

The old man resumed, and when he spoke again, his voice was not raised and was the worse for it. “Doubt the watchfires, then. Doubt the men who man them, and the towers on which they stand. All of it ground to dust in time. Only the written shall remain.” The last knot he tied at the elbow, where the turning ended at the oldest of them, and paused.

He said something more then, low, as he smoothed the sleeve of names flat, and Bodum caught only the shape of it, to mind his feet in the wastes for the splinters of glass.

“Speak up, Keeper.”

The old man looked up from his work for the first time, cried out, and leapt from his knees, driving a blade into Bodum’s heart as he did. The knife, an oily black chip of desert glass, sank up to the hilt.

Bodum woke from the dream, his hand pressed hard over his heart and the taste of sauma in his mouth like chalk.

“Are you whole, my reeve?”

His hand was still on his chest where the wound would have been. He withdrew his hand then, tilting it to look into his palm for blood that wasn’t there. “Yes,” he said, shaking off the dream and the deadly blow that woke him.

The great stone whorl stood over the camp, blacker than the sky it was cut from. The fire had burned down to a red seam in the dark. It cracked and spat as he panted. Twenty paces off, the Dungirii sat upright and awake. He had never once seen her sleep, though he knew she must. In the wan light, her eyes were pale rather than dark, not veiled by age, but swimming with flecks of light, like loreglass in shadow. They did not move when he moved.

“You spoke. In your sleep.”

His throat was dry. He reached for the goatskin but did not drink. “What did I say?”

She was a long time answering. The seam of the fire ticked and settled.

“Her name,” she said.

His hand went, without his sending it, to the cord at his throat, and to the small weight of black glass that hung there, the inscription - by deeds, not gods - worn shallow with handling, her parting gift to him.

She had looked up at him before she spoke, the way she always did when the light caught his blue eyes, though she never said what she saw there. “So are men made, my love,” she had said. She had little faith in rites, and had said so; but she had faith in him.

As he circled its rough edges with his thumb, he thought of her fingers, deft and delicate, tying the cord. “There,” she had said. “A bit of Drift-glass. If you lose your salt, that will find you the way home.” The memory of her unsteady smile and her hand on her belly as she pushed the glass into his palm made him ache for her. That ache was sharper than any thirst or hunger and stayed with him in the quiet of the desert night.

Bodum did not speak to the Dungirii again that night. He did not ask her what else he had said, and she did not offer it.

He woke to night still clinging to the edge of the Glassland lazzaretto, the ground beneath him holding what little coolness it could. He knew he must begin the Walk before the sun rose high enough to bake man and sand alike hard as fired clay. In the east the first light gathered, the sun’s glow red and immense over the distant waste. Its upper rim had not yet broken the horizon, but its glow had already stained clouds there with copper and blood. For a little while the land beneath it remained black and still, in that narrow mercy between darkness and heat. Soon enough the Glasslands would burn, and he would be walking east into them.

She was already standing when he rose, her face lifted to a dawn she could not see. She had packed nothing, because there was nothing of hers to pack. The goatskin lay at his feet, and he knew by its weight when he lifted it that she had filled it from her own.

He looked back at the Threshold, the whorl. In the first light it was less black than it had been, but no less wrong - a crown of blades the height of a keep, leaning slightly toward the east, and at its center beneath, the mouth, with burl flowers thick about it.

Sensing his gaze, the Dungirii spoke. “I go no farther. Walk toward the sun until it clears the horizon. Then turn, and keep the Threshold on your left,” she said. “Widen each turn. Do not straighten your path. Veer, and the Way will not open. Those who wander are lost. Nearer the Drift, much is lost, while things best lost may yet be found. Take nothing. The Drift takes enough for the both of you.”

He shifted his body, the small weight at his throat ticking against the clasp of his cowl. Her head turned toward the sound.

“What do you carry, my reeve?”

He glanced down and then to her, tucking the glass on the cord within the folds of his hood.

“Nothing,” he said.

The wind moved through the burl flowers between them. She did not ask again though she was silent long enough that he thought she might. When she spoke at last it was to the open desert path.

“You may ask one question of what you find there.”

What would he find, he wondered. What will find me?

“And coming back?”

“Keep the Threshold on your right. Narrow as you go, and mind the Spiral. It is the only way.”

He licked his lips. He was not ready.

“It opens once in a Steward’s life, my reeve. It will not open for you again, and there will be no way back to what you find there. Your father learned that. He went to the edge of the flowers every year until he died, but the way was closed.”

He had not known that. He pursed his lips and said nothing.

He waited for more, a word for the road, a hand on his arm, whatever it was that Dungirii gave their own when they sent them into the sand. It did not come. She stood in silence, her eyes on nothing and her face toward the whorl, behind him. After a while he understood that this was the whole of it, and she could not lie, even to wish him well.

A light breeze stirred the burl flowers, and she lifted her face to the sky.

“The wind is from the east,” she said at last. “Keep it on your face going out. On your neck coming back. If it seems to change, it has not. You have.”

He slung the goatskin over his shoulder, then turned east toward the bloom of red and gold, with the whorl behind him, and began to move. Not long after, the sun crossed the horizon, and he turned, beginning the spiral. He looked back once, from the far side of the first turn. She had not moved. She stood where he had left her with her face toward the sound of him, and she did not raise her hand.

He looked back a second time, further off, and still she had not moved. He kept the whorl on his left, and did not look back again. He didn’t dare.