But he had no other choice, except perhaps to shout for help, and much as his arms ached, he was even more frightened by the thought of bringing the whole of the Inner Bailey here to see his wretched foolishness. He tied the rope around his waist in case he missed his target entirely, then gently swung himself back and forth until he dared to take one hand off and reach for the wall. The first time he failed to find purchase, but the second time he found a crack, and when he wedged his fingers into it his swinging stopped. He searched with his toes until he found places to dig in his feet, but already his knot was loosening around his waist and he was beginning to sag farther from the wall.
He sent another prayer to Elysia, thinking of the Mother of God’s kind, forgiving face, the kind of face that would even find mercy for drunken young idiots, then as he swung again toward the tower, he let go of the rope completely and jabbed his aching fingers into the nearest crevice in the stone facing. The knot unwound and the rope slithered off, swinging back to hang out of his reach behind him. Morgan’s gut went cold. Now he could only move up or down by clinging to the wall as Snenneq had done.
What followed was a waking nightmare. Morgan did not remember much of it afterward, but every single movement, every release, every risk, every move from one crumbling handhold to another seemed to take hours. He knew it would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life, if he was lucky enough to survive. He did his best to ignore the pain and inch upward, impossibly slowly, crawling the vertical face of the tower like a caterpillar, so tired and agonizingly sore that he did not remember what it felt like to do anything else. The third floor passed, and the fourth went by too, as wretchedly slow as waiting for snow to melt. Morgan could think of nothing except the need to find a handhold, find a foothold, to move up. The weight of his own body began to feel like somebody else’s weight, as if another entire person was dangling from his ankles or plucking at his arms, trying to yank him backward into emptiness and death.
The fourth floor edged past him, then he was onto the fifth. He could see only what was above him, could do nothing except push his body close to the tower wall and search with his fingers for the next place to grab. One of his shoes fell off but he hardly noticed the difference. Up and up he climbed, except that now it had become something both more and less than climbing. For long moments he imagined himself crawling over a flat surface, belly down, while a great wind tried to blow him away. Later, he thought he was clambering through a tunnel into another country, a land of warmth and rest. But no matter what he thought, or dreamed, always something kept pulling at him, trying to fling him into empty space, some horrible enemy that wanted to smash him to death against the stones.
? ? ?
Morgan came out of another season of darkness to realize he could not find a handhold because there were no more—his free hand was groping in empty space. He looked up for the first time in a long while and saw that he had reached the top. The sight so astonished him that he almost lost his grip, but the quickening of his heart and his blood pushed his thoughts back to the night and the tower again.
Pulling himself up over the top seemed like the most difficult thing he had ever done. At one point, as he tried to lift his knee high enough to get it up onto the tower roof, he burst into tears. No one came to help him. He called out Snenneq’s name, or thought he did, but no one responded.
At last he levered the heaviest part of his body over the edge so he could collapse onto the curved, dome-shaped roof, then he scrabbled forward until he felt it beneath his legs as well. He rolled onto his back, gasping, his sinews throbbing with fiery pain. Whether he slept then or merely stopped thinking, he could not tell, but for a while he lay in darkness. When at last he opened his eyes again he saw nothing above him except the stars.
I don’t know their names, he thought. Someone—Sir Porto? Grandfather?—tried to teach me once, but I didn’t pay attention.
If these were truly his own stars. If he had not climbed so high he had reached some other world, some land in the sky.
At last he rolled over and dragged himself up on all fours. There was no sign at all of Snenneq on the roof, although Morgan should have been able to see him. The shallow slope of the dome curved gently upward before him, mounting only a few cubits in height between its edge and its center. It wasn’t a dome of windows and light such as stood above Saint Sutrin’s cathedral, but a dome as solid, stony, and secretive as the rest of Hjeldin’s Tower. Near the top of it the builders had made four great hatchways, one facing each quadrant of the sky. The hatch doors had been chained shut when the tower was abandoned, but now one of the hatches was open and the lid thrown back, the square black opening gaping at the sky like a hungry mouth.
“Snenneq?” Morgan tested the dome, which felt more solid than the walls themselves. It still held some of the day’s heat, even in the dark. He began to climb toward the open hatch. Why would the troll break it open and go inside the infamous tower? Did Snenneq really have so little fear of other peoples’ phantoms?
What if he didn’t open it? Morgan thought suddenly. What if someone else did? What if he was just standing there, and it opened behind him like the lid of a spider’s den . . . and then something came out and took him?
The picture in his head was too horrifying to be endured. Morgan crept forward in unwitting imitation of his climb up, stomach dragging on the lead roof, until he reached the open hatch. But he truly, truly did not want to look inside.
He’s here because of you, a voice told him, almost as if someone else spoke straight into his ear—someone honorable. Someone different. He’s here because of you. If he’s in there, you have to find him.
But Morgan did not want to look inside the hatch, let alone go in. Who knew what a dangerous shambles it must be, closed up for twenty years or more, empty for all this time?
But what if it isn’t empty? Again he imagined the hatch opening silently behind the troll, the shadowy shape emerging . . .
He pushed his head out beyond the edge of the hatch. The top chamber of the tower was full of large, loose rocks as he had expected, but there were dark places among them that almost looked like some monstrously huge mole or rat had been tunneling between the piled stones. Morgan was wishing harder than he had ever wished in his life that he had a torch—no, that he had a torch and a sword and three or four stout friends—when he saw something move. Something was alive in the chamber below him, down in the darkness of the tower’s top floor, down in the shadows.
“Snenneq?” he called quietly, but his blood was drumming and the cracked voice that came from his lips scarcely sounded like his own. Then the shape turned to look up at him. Morgan had only an instant to see the hairless face catch the moonlight, the empty black eyes, the rags of a hood that might once have been red, then the hammerblows of his own heartbeats filled his head as he gasped and pushed himself away from the hatch. Trying to scramble to his feet, Morgan missed his footing and fell forward instead, cracking his jaw against the edge of the hatch. A sudden, bright shouting of stars overwhelmed him for an instant, then the black swallowed him up.
32
Rosewater and Balsam
The Chancelry was part of a long building in the Middle Bailey that in King John’s day had been the castle mews. They had been destroyed in the fall of Green Angel Tower and the new stables erected in the outermost ring of the keep. It was not so much a sign that horses and royal carriages had become less important, Pasevalles reflected, as that counting and keeping money had grown even more so.
The Chancelry building had the shape of a long bone, something that two dogs might fight over, pulling at each end. This was appropriate, because while one end belonged to Pasevalles as Lord Chancellor, the other end belonged to Archbishop Gervis, the Lord Treasurer, and Pasevalles had to admit the relationship between the two occasionally came down to something like the contendings of a couple of mastiffs under the royal supper table.