Silent Hall (42 page)

“How do we get past them?” Phaedra whispered.

Nobody answered her. That shouldn't have surprised her, she thought. It wasn't possible. It simply wasn't possible.

In the stillness, Goodweather began to stir.

They stood, helpless, silently pleading with the little one to fall back asleep. She did not. Her cry pierced the air and the watchmen spun around, searching the dark camp for the sound's origin. The tent that hid the islanders from their view moved slightly, as whoever lay inside it woke up and started moving about. Hunter drew his sword.

He leapt out of the shadows and charged the guards, uttering no battle cry. The others followed him, running with all their might, too fast for Phaedra to keep up. She stumbled along behind, her terror growing with each footfall.

“Who's there?” called one of the soldiers, just before Hunter drove a sword through his belly. The man let out a horrified cry, dropping his spear and torch in confusion. In an instant, Hunter had spun away from him and rushed the next soldier, while Narky, Criton and Bandu charged past the dying man into the empty field where Silent Hall surely lay. They were all too fast for Phaedra. Her feet plodded dumbly beneath her, so slowly that she hardly seemed to be moving at all. They would catch her! At this pace, even the men awakening in the camp behind her would have the chance to catch up.

Hunter dispatched his second opponent and glanced despairingly in her direction. He knew she would not make it. She could see it in his eyes.

He did not have the time to help her. Soon another two soldiers were upon him, their torches burning on the ground while their spears lunged out at him. Phaedra shut her eyes and ran.

A hand caught her ankle and she fell to the hard dirt, a startled shriek escaping from her lips. Goodweather's acorn dug into her stomach where it had fallen beneath her, and she gasped for breath. The hand would not let go. The first man Hunter had impaled stared up at her. He was mouthing words she could not recognize, and his face flickered in the light of his fallen torch, the unseeing face of a man about to die.

She kicked him. She kicked him with her free leg, slamming her foot wildly into his nose and mouth over and over until he finally let go. Then she scrambled away, her foot wet and numb, crawling until she could once more rise and hobble into the darkness.

Silent Hall loomed ahead. “Help!” she cried. “Psander, help! Hunter!”

“I'm right here,” he panted, appearing behind her out of the night. “Keep going. I'll be right behind you.”

The gate was open before her. She ran, as best she could. By the time she reached it, she could hear the thudding of boots behind her as the enemy closed in. Then she was inside, and Hunter was leaping through the gate behind her. It shut with a slam.

There was light in the courtyard up ahead. Phaedra turned back, searching the near darkness for Hunter. He had not risen to his feet yet, and that worried her.

She found him still on the floor, his back heaving. “Hunter!” she cried, falling to her knees beside him. “Are you all right?”

He did not answer her. His whole body was shaking. Phaedra groped in the dark, trying to find an injury. “Where are you hurt?” she asked.

He shook his head, still face down on the ground. There were footsteps behind her.

“Phaedra? Hunter? Are you there?”

“We're both here,” Phaedra answered. “We made it. But something's wrong with Hunter!”

Criton rushed over to them, and helped Hunter to his feet. “I'm all right,” Hunter protested, finally speaking. “I'm not hurt.”

“Let's get you into the light,” Criton said, “and we can decide then.”

They stumbled out of the darkness together, into the light of the courtyard. There, Phaedra could finally see what was wrong with Hunter. He had a nasty cut stretching from his cheek to his ear, dripping blood down his jaw – but it was his puffy, bloodshot eyes that told Phaedra what she needed to know. She caught her breath, softly. He had been crying.

“Ouch,” said Narky, inspecting Hunter's gash. “That was a close one. He almost went in through your eye.”

“I'm fine,” Hunter insisted, turning away. “It'll heal.”

The tower door opened, and Psander hurried out to meet them. “You are here,” she said. “Why have you come back?”

“We found Salemis,” Criton told her. “We need your help.”

“
You
need
my
help?” Psander asked incredulously. “Have you seen the army outside my door? Magor may pierce my wards at any moment, boy. He hasn't found me yet, but He's
looking
. Have you brought me anything to help with
that
problem?”

“Yes,” said Narky. “That's what we need your help with.”

Phaedra presented Goodweather's acorn. “We brought you a seed from the fairy world, from the plant monster that world is made of.”

“The Yarek,” Criton added. “Salemis said that if we infuse it with a God's power–”

“Who is this Salemis?” asked Psander, interrupting him. “The name sounds familiar.”

It took until dawn for them to explain the situation properly, and to tell her all that they had seen and learned. Psander's eyes widened when she heard of their plan to cause a breach in the mesh. “Escape from the Gods forever,” she mused.

“It's horrible there,” Phaedra warned her. “We think they killed all the wizards of Gateway.”

“They know you come to them soon,” Bandu added. “They try to eat you.”

“But,” said Narky, “it's less of a sure thing than dying here.”

Psander nodded. “Most anything is.”

“So,” said Criton, “do you think you can do it? Find some way to put a God's power in the seed?”

“There has to be a way,” Psander answered, sounding more desperate than confidant. Now that day had dawned, Phaedra could see how skinny the wizard had become, and notice the dark shadows under her eyes that did not retreat in the light of day.

Psander reached for the acorn. “Here, give me that. Go sleep upstairs, and leave me to my library. My wards will warn me if the Ardismen attack.”

Phaedra obeyed, while Narky glanced about the quiet courtyard. “Hey,” he said, “what happened to all the villagers?”

“They are indoors,” Psander answered him, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “They do not awake at dawn anymore. We have eaten all the roosters, for one thing.”

“And for another?” Narky asked, seeing through her evasion.

“And for another… they have all been ill.”

“Ill?”

She nodded. “Yes. The blueglow mushrooms you gave me haven't agreed with them.”

Phaedra gasped. Her mind immediately went back to the farmer ants, and to the pile of corpses where the mushrooms had grown.

“What you do to them?” Bandu demanded. “You kill them?”

“No, of course I haven't killed them,” the wizard answered. “I told you, they've just all grown sick. I used the mushrooms and the calardium that you brought me to make charms for each of them to wear. They ought to be harmless, those charms. All they do is siphon off the unused magical potential each person possesses so that I can use it to defend us. I've had to tap it out to keep Magor from breaking through my wards, but as I say, it ought to be harmless.”

“It ought to be,” said Narky. “It just isn't.”

Psander shrugged unhappily. “Right.”

They stared at her, but she only turned and opened the tower door again. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Or visit them, if you like. I don't care. Just don't disturb me while I'm in the library.”

They did not visit the poor farmers in their houses, much to Phaedra's shame. Instead, they stumbled up the stairs to their rooms and fell instantly asleep. When Phaedra awoke, light was pouring in through her window. It seemed to be midday, which confused her. Had she slept for only a few hours, or for over a day?

The hall was quiet. Even Criton and Bandu's room was completely silent, which gave her pause. She tapped gently on their door, and then finally opened it. There was no one inside. Narky's room was empty too. Only Hunter was still in bed, and he awoke when she opened his door. He rose quickly, embarrassed despite having slept fully clothed.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Do you know where the others are?”

He blinked at her. No, of course he didn't know.

“What happened last night?” she asked him. “By the gate?”

Hunter's face took on a troubled look. “We almost didn't make it,” he said. “I thought I might have to leave you out there.”

“But you didn't,” she said. “You stayed.”

“I stayed,” he repeated. “And we almost didn't make it.”

“So it was relief, then.”

He shook his head noncommittally. “Call it what you will,” he said.

She stood there for a time, looking at him. He was so noble, so serious. She couldn't remember having ever seen him smile. It was strange: his brother Kataras always had a smile on his face. Hunter really wasn't like his brother at all.

“I don't hear Goodweather,” he said, rising. “Where did you say they went?”

She followed him downstairs to the dining hall, where they found the others portioning out a single bowlful of oat gruel. The quiet grating of the spoon against the bowl seemed to mock the grand enormity of the room.

“This is all we found to make,” Narky told them. “I hope Psander has another store of food somewhere. There aren't any animals – we checked already.”

“We should visit the sick,” Phaedra said. “They might need help.”

Narky looked horrified at the suggestion, but the others agreed readily enough. They finished their meager breakfast and went out into the courtyard where the displaced village lay. The first thing that struck Phaedra, now that she was not running for her life, was the stench. The air was thick with the smell of so much rotting offal, and flies buzzed through the air with unmolested zeal. The trash heap that attracted them was hidden from sight by a pair of houses, but its size and location were unmistakable.

Only two villagers could be seen outside, even late as it was. They were both standing by the well, haggard and bent. When she approached, Phaedra saw that they were not nearly as old as she had assumed. The woman was probably twenty, the man not much older than that. They were pulling on the chain together, too weak for either to raise the bucket on his or her own. Their continental faces were pale and drawn, and both were losing their hair: patches of baldness dotted their heads. The silver chains hung around their necks like stones.

“Do you need help?” Hunter asked redundantly.

As if in response, the man's fingers slipped and the bucket went plunging downward again, nearly taking the woman with it. She let go at the last moment and placed her hands on the well's edge, reeling. Hunter caught her by the arm to steady her. “Thh,” she muttered.

Criton stepped forward and pulled up the bucket with ease. He poured the water into the two clay vessels by his feet, then dropped the bucket down again and lifted the vessels.

“Where are these going?” he asked.

They spent the rest of the day tending to the villagers. At first, only Hunter was brave enough to touch the sick townsfolk with his hands, but soon they were all helping however they could. There did turn out to be more food than Narky had found for breakfast, but it was more of the same, and had to be rationed out carefully. This much, at least, was easy. The villagers hardly ate a thing.

Phaedra asked once about old Garan, the woman who had first spoken to her of Psander and the Gallant Ones. The man she had asked shook his head weakly.

“Dead,” he mumbled. “Weeks ago.”

Phaedra was not sure why this shocked her so, but it did. She kept thinking of the old woman, and of her belief that nothing good could come of joining the wizard in ‘his' castle. She had said that it was too dangerous, trusting in wizards. How right she had been.

The villagers could barely get out of bed to eat, and the sickest ones had mysterious lesions all over their necks and chests. They had opened spontaneously over the last few days, the strong ones said. Still, it was hard to miss the fact that the lesions all seemed to be radiating outward from those calardium pendants. The sight horrified Phaedra, and followed her even when she closed her eyes. Few besides Garan had died so far, but she doubted it would stay that way for long.

The siege went on. The Ardismen did not approach the walls again, content so far to starve the inhabitants out. Hunter and Narky climbed up to the parapets the next morning and reported that the earth around the walls was black and scorched. Apparently, Psander's wards were good for more than hiding.

On the third day, the wizard finally emerged from her library. Evening was falling, and the islanders had just finished their portions of oat porridge with one of the sick families in their house. They were on their way back to the tower when Psander appeared at the door and ushered them inside. She looked as though she hadn't slept since they had last seen her.

“I found a solution,” she told them, her eyes wide and manic. “But you're not going to like it.”

Phaedra's stomach growled. “Tell us,” said Criton.

“Two Gods will have to suffice,” the wizard said. “From what I can tell, Eramia has already blessed the seed, so that leaves just one.”

“Well,” said Narky, “out with it.”

Psander ignored his impatience. She spoke in cold, measured tones that seemed meant to compensate for her wild appearance. “I'm going to need you to get me something,” she said. “I need tears from a man cursed by the Gods. Cursed personally, mind you, and the tears must be fresh, so you'll have to bring me the man himself. Alive. The good news is, I know where you can find him."

“Where?” Hunter asked.

“On Tarphae,” the wizard said.