Текст книги "The Knight and the Moth"

Автор книги: Rachel Gillig

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

I rubbed my eyes and tried to see into the impenetrable darkness.

There was a clacking—so near I felt it in my chest. Clack, clack.

Clack, clack, the echoes sounded. Clack, clack.

Prickles rose on the back of my neck. “Rory.” I leaned over the pit and tugged the rope. “The Heartsore Weaver, Rory.”

But my voice never found him under the water.

The gargoyle gasped. “Look, Bartholomew.”

Out of the darkness, a shadow shifted. It came toward me, and I saw that it was small and on wings. Pale and delicate as gossamer.

A moth.

It fluttered to my face, so close its wings stirred my lashes, then withdrew, fluttering back down the tunnel from whence it had come.

“Wait for Rory,” I told the gargoyle, and stole after it.

The tunnel drew close around me, swallowing me down its throat, and I made myself small to fit, keeping my gaze ever on the moth.

There were more, I realized. Dozens of moths on the walls of the tunnel, their pale, fluttering wings beckoning me. I was on my hands and knees now, the tunnel so constrictive I thought it might strangle me. But the moths kept fluttering, and I kept following, and suddenly I was spat out into a new cavern.

I expected more darkness. And there was. But there was also the night sky. An opening in the cliff, roots and moonlight pouring in. I was in an oblong chamber, with walls of crude rock. Hundreds of weavings hung like tapestries around me. And from the weavings—

Little white sacks hung. Cocoons. Beneath them was a stone bench, stationed against the wall, and upon it—

A woman.

A naked woman, who lay supine and still, a shroud over her eyes.

The world went still. “One?”

I stumbled forward. Banged my knees upon the stone bench. “One.”

Mottled skin. Gray lips. Hands folded over her breasts, One lay upon the bench, her short brown hair fanning around her like a burned-out halo. When I touched her neck, searching for a pulse that was not there, her skin was as cold as stone.

She looked like she was resting, but it wasn’t rest. Whatever dream One walked in now brooked no awakening. She was lost, adrift, gone. No, it wasn’t rest.

It was sleep, eternal.

A cry ripped up my throat.

“Shhh,” came a woman’s low, craggy voice. “Not all have woken.”

I reeled.

Out of shadow, slow and rigid, a figure came, her steps an ominous clack, clack against the cave floor. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s tripped my little snare,” she said. “Or made it out of my pit.”

She didn’t wear a cloak like she had when she’d come to my room last night. It was the same face I’d seen.

But it wasn’t a woman.

She looked like one of Aisling Cathedral’s gargoyles—hewn entirely of limestone. She had wings, tucked against jagged shoulder blades. A head like a goat, with gnarled four-digit paws for hands and hooves for feet. And her eyes, wide and pallid…

Were just like the other Omens’. Just like my batlike gargoyle’s.

Just like mine.

“You—” My armor clattered as I rose to my feet, standing in front of One. “You’re the Heartsore Weaver?”

“Weaver, I was. Heartsore, I am eternally.” The Omen came forward, looking at neither me nor One. She was peering upon her wall. Staring through stone eyes at the white silken cocoons attached to the thread. “You must be quiet. My moths are still sleeping,” she rasped. “Frail little things, they are.”

She began to hum. Tuneless, cacophonous.

I watched her, skin crawling. I did not want her to know how well she terrified me. “Where is your loom stone, Omen?”

“No loom. No loom stone.” She nodded at the tapestry upon the wall. “Once, I wove the finest garments in Traum. Silk robes, I made. But that was a long time ago.”

She kept staring at her tapestry, and I followed her eyes. The cocoons had attached themselves to one particular weaving, as if the sprites favored it. It was fashioned in a beautiful braid that ran along the wall. Not woolen, but fine. Thin, sheer, and pale.

Gossamer.

Diviner shrouds.

I let out a wretched sound.

“Hush,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped, looking down at One. “They come to me every ten years, Aisling’s Diviners, brought by gargoyles. Naked but for their shrouds, and always, always, dead. Still, they smell of spring water.” Her throat hitched. “Taste of it, too, I imagine.”

I drew my hammer and chisel, blocking One with my body. “If you touch her, I’ll—”

“I said be quiet.” The Omen showed her teeth, rows of cracked limestone. “I do not touch the Diviners. I lay them down here in my caves, my own little underworld, where the sea air has its way with them. It is the best burial I can offer.”

She looked over my shoulder at One’s lifeless body. “She was your friend?”

Tears burned my eyes, the cracks in my heart growing irreparably deeper. “Yes.”

“Is that why you have come? To see with your own eyes the fate of Diviners like yourself?” The Weaver’s eyes fell to my hammer and chisel. “Or have you been sent from your master upon the tor?”

I sprang forward, leveling the tip of my chisel against her stone throat. “I have no master, Omen. I come on my own volition to challenge you at your craft and claim your magic loom stone.” A single strike, and I could split her like I had a thousand stones before. “To take magic, power, myself, back from false gods like you.”

The Heartsore Weaver did not withdraw her throat from my chisel’s tip. “But I’m not a god,” she whispered. “Once, I was not so different from you.”

She blinked up at me with wide stone eyes. “Strange, that you have no memory before Aisling, yet you still knew to claw yourself free from that horrible tor. How wonderful, how wretched, it must have been, stepping out into the world. Learning the story you’d been told was a lie.”

“Do not pretend you did not benefit from that lie, Weaver. Is not the gold wasting in your pit from Aisling’s coffers? Did Diviners not drown, that you might earn it? Do folk not look for your signs in every bit of thread?” I was a rabid dog, my words snapping barks. “If I am wonderful and wretched for learning the truth of the Omens, your hands are marked by the blood of my metamorphosis.”

The Heartsore Weaver pressed her neck against my chisel, iron scraping against limestone. “Then you need not challenge me to my craft, daughter of Aisling. You have already beaten me by it.” She held out an empty stone paw, as if to show me she had nothing to lose—or give. “Who better than a lost Diviner to learn, then conquer, love and heartbreak?”

Moonlight crept through the fissure in the ceiling, casting the Omen and me in an eerie silver glow. “Where is your loom stone?” I asked again, my voice dangerously soft.

“That, I fear, is a long story.”

“I have time.”

She grinned then, shadows cutting across her inhuman face. “More than you realize.”

The Heartsore Weaver took a step back from my chisel’s tip. “You know by now there is magic in the world. The stone upon the tor, its water—the spring you drank from, drowned in—is the mother of that magic. From it, five objects were hewn. A coin, an inkwell, an oar, a chime.” She sighed. “And a loom stone.”

I waited.

“What you do not know, perhaps, is we whom you call Omens had no sway over that magic when the objects were made. I did not chose my loom stone’s power, and neither did she who carved it for me, yet, strangely, it suited me. Magic is like a god in that way. All-knowing, and most effective when not fully understood.”

I hated talk of gods. “What does your loom stone do?” I said, clipped.

“I could slip my finger into the hole in the center of it. If the stone’s face was pointed outward, I would be transported—made invisible. I could jump through the walls of this cave. Travel twenty feet in the air. All I had to do was know in my mind where I wanted to go. So long as the distance was not more than my line of sight, I could get there. Brilliant magic it was. But when I turned the loom stone over, its face pointed inward—”

How burdened she suddenly looked. Her head lowered, as if weighed down. Even her eyes seemed too heavy to lift. “I was transported not in body, but in mind. Perhaps it’s because I’m a weaver, and a tapestry is like a memory brought to life. I always know what I was feeling in that moment, what I was thinking, when I look back on something I’ve woven. The loom stone was no different. I’d slip it on my finger, and it gave me back the most important thing I’d lost.”

Her eyes lifted. Found my face. “My memory. If I wished to, I could recall who I was before I was the Heartsore Weaver.” Her head turned as she surveyed me. “Tell me, Diviner. Do you recall anything before you tasted Aisling’s waters?”

I could tell she already knew the answer. “No.”

She nodded. “Losing something is painful. Sometimes, finding what we’ve lost is just as agonizing.”

I looked down at One, lifeless beneath the tapestry. Whispered, like I was telling her a story before bed, “You can never really go home.”

“No. You cannot.”

The Heartsore Weaver looked out into the darkness of her cavern. “But I did not want to look back at who I was. I was too enthralled with being an Omen. For many years, I did not use the loom stone in that way. I kept to my hamlet, as we Omens said we would. For decades I sowed the seeds of gods and signs within the Cliffs of Bellidine. Used my loom stone to appear and vanish. To kill sprites. I gave Traum something to rally behind. To believe in.”

She began to pace. “Then, on a year without mark, she came. The Omens and I—we all needed the tor’s spring water to live. Not much, and not often, but we needed it. Sometimes the water came in a flask at the hands of her little foundling, but this time she brought it herself. We drank it together, like old friends. Then she asked me to make her a silk robe.”

The Heartsore Weaver reached out. Pet the gossamer weaving upon the wall, its delicate fabric snagging against one of her stone claws. “‘A Diviner is not so different from a silkworm,’ she said. ‘That is what I will call my foundling—a Diviner. He came into the world vulnerable. Fell into dreamless sleep. I wrapped him in my arms, put water to his lips, and he awoke a moth.’” Her stone eyes flashed. “‘Strange. Special. New. I want him to look the part.’”

My throat tightened. “You’re talking about the abbess. The abbess, and the foundling child from her story.”

“I knew her before she was abbess of anything.” The Heartsore Weaver’s gaze dropped to my hammer and chisel. “When she was but a stonemason who wore a shroud over her face. A craftsman, like me. I made her the robe. When I traveled to the tor to deliver it, the first stones of a cathedral had been laid. Many years later, she came to see me again, asking for five more robes. This time, there was no foundling child at her heels, but a stone gargoyle.”

The Heartsore Weaver rolled her shoulders, the sound inhuman—like rocks, scraping together. “More time passed. One by one, I made her the robes she’d asked for. But by the time I was on the sixth and final robe, I’d grown weary. Lonely. So I slipped the loom stone back on my finger, facing inward, hoping to be comforted by memories of my past.”

She stopped pacing. Shut her eyes. “Only they were a torment. I remembered my real name. My mother and brother. My wife and her parents. My naughty yellow cat. I remembered what it was like to love and be loved, to be careful and also carefree, to be good and bad—to be human. But I’d spent too much time sustaining the charade of the Omens. When I finally went home to see my loved ones, most had died of old age. Those who remained looked upon my stone eyes in terror. They’d thought me missing. Mourned me—let go of me. Soon they, too, died and I was alone with naught but my memories.”

The Weaver seemed lost in her story, her digits moving in strange patterns. Had she fingers and not claws, I might have thought her plaiting an invisible tapestry. “I withheld the final robe. When she came for it, I told her I no longer wished to be an Omen. That I didn’t have it in me to live forever, playacting as a god. I thought she would pity me. She didn’t. She called me disloyal. Took the robe I’d made and left me alone with my caverns, my silkworm sprites, and my steadfast foe—time.”

Her stone eyes snapped open, and the Heartsore Weaver took a step toward me.

“The spring water stopped coming, as I expected it would. I did not seek it. I hoped without it I would die. For nine years, I starved. On the tenth year, the limestone from my eyes began to spread, twisting and distorting my face. It traveled to my arms. Then my legs and torso. I fractured, my body changing until I was neither human nor animal nor sprite, but a weaving of all three.” She gestured at her goat-like body. “I became this. Hewn of stone. It was… excruciating.”

The Heartsore Weaver kept coming, her hooves tapping against rocks, her stone wings quivering. “She sent me coins from Aisling’s coffers to remind me that I was still holy in the eyes of the kingdom. I threw them in the pits of my cave, but ever, they mock me. Make a false god of me.”

Nearer and nearer she drew, her steps an ominous clack, clack—like nails in a coffin. “I don’t know when she decided starvation was a better tool than her hammer and chisel, or when her craft became cruelty. I wonder if the other Omens even questioned it. They don’t carry the horrible, beautiful burden of memory, of humanness, the way I must. When the first dead Diviner was brought to them, did they even pause before drinking her blood, hungry for spring water—or did they think only of their holiness? That, as gods, a Diviner’s body, her sacrifice, her tragedy, was owed to them?”

My heart beat against my breastplate, and the Omen came closer. Closer. “She certainly thinks that way,” the Heartsore Weaver rasped. “She believes herself a mother and a god, nurturing Traum with stories of the Omens and faith. But is it godly to punish your subjects for questioning you? Is it motherly to demand resolute devotion?”

She was almost upon me, so near I could see the cracks in her teeth.

“Moth, she calls herself. An insect made holy for mastering death—but she is not holy. She’s the sixth Omen. Abbess of the tor. But you know her true name. There is not a man, woman, child, or sprite who does not. It wails on the wind. Looms, like her eponym cathedral, casting shadows, darkening this land.”

And then she was right in front of me, her stone eyes locking onto mine. “Aisling.”

I was firm upon my feet, but it felt like a dream. Like falling. “The end of her lies, her sanctified story, draws nigh, Omen. Answer me—where is your loom stone?”

“I will tell you. But first, you must begin what you came here to do. Gift me what Aisling never did.” She reached for my hand. Lifted my chisel. “End my battle with time. I have never been able to do it myself.”

I stared into her stone eyes and waited for a snare. An attack of duplicity or force, like the other Omens had tended. None came. The Heartsore Weaver bore no weapon but her unrelenting silence as she waited upon my chisel—and my answer.

I’d lost my voice. All I could manage was a whisper. “You want me to kill you?”

“Yes.”

She let out a long breath, stepped over rocks, and came once more to the wall of weavings. Upon a stone table, next to One, beneath the pale cocoons, she laid her body down.

I stood over her. “Where would you have it?” My chisel brushed over her wrists, her throat, then settled over her heart.

“There is fine,” she said.

I fixed my chisel in my fist. Lifted my hammer. “Your loom stone, Weaver. Tell me where it is.”

“Strike me first.” She shut her eyes and let out a choked laugh. “I am ashamed, after all these years spent dreaming of death, that I still fear it.”

My throat tightened. “Be still.”

I struck.

The sound bellowed like thunder through the cavern.

“Again,” the Heartsore Weaver said, fissures coursing down her chest.

Again, I struck her.

The cocoons along the wall trembled.

If she felt pain, she bore it. I struck the Omen once, twice more, dust filling the air, her goat-like body breaking apart beneath my unrelenting hand. She had no blood within her, composed entirely of limestone, like my wall upon the tor—like Aisling Cathedral itself. When her limbs were at my feet and her chest fissured beyond saving, the Heartsore Weaver let out a gasping moan. “That is all. Let me speak.”

I stayed my hammer. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck into my armor, the joints in my shoulder, my arm, aching. The pale cocoons kept trembling. They jerked and swayed, until one let out a little white moth.

The rest came after. Dozens of moths, struggling within, then breaching their cloistered cocoons and crawling over gossamer, over One and what remained of the Heartsore Weaver. Out and into the world.

The Heartsore Weaver watched them through cracked stone eyes, and smiled. “Thank you.” Her voice was quiet. “My loom stone rests where it was made. Upon the tor. I returned it to Aisling when my body twisted beyond all recognition. When I became but one of her many stone creatures. An inhuman gargoyle.” She coughed, and dust flew. “Just like that first Diviner I’d made a robe for.”

Footsteps echoed behind me. “Sybil?” It was Rory’s voice, calling me. “Sybil!”

But I was frozen, staring down at the Heartsore Weaver, my voice a wretched scrape. “But the gargoyles on the tor… they’re sprites…”

“No. They are not.”

Again the Weaver coughed, more injurious this time. Her body was falling apart. “To be a gargoyle…” she rasped, “is a very strange thing. The ones upon the tor do not tell the stories of who they are—indeed they hardly speak—I think, because they do not remember what it is to be human. Or maybe they are too afraid to disobey their master. But not that first one. He was a most peculiar boy. What was his name? The first gargoyle she made?” Her breaths were labored. “I saw him not two days ago upon my cliff… came to see him last night, but you frightened me away. What was his name…”

Rory kept shouting, his voice desperate. “Sybil!”

“Bartholomew!” came the gargoyle’s echoing cry.

The Heartsore Weaver’s breath went out. “That’s it. The foundling upon the tor. The first Diviner.” The newborn moths fluttered, their pale wings beating over stone. The Heartsore Weaver watched them with unseeing eyes, her last words quiet as a prayer. “Little Bartholomew.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE THE FIRST DIVINER

When Rory and the gargoyle found me, I was sitting on the stone bench, surrounded by moths, my left hand upon One’s body, my right upon the Heartsore Weaver’s.

“Sybil.” Rory was breathless, his face lined with fear. “What—”

He took in the room. The Omen—and the Diviner—dead within it. “What’s happened?”

I looked past him, directly into the gargoyle’s stone eyes. “The story,” I murmured. “The one you’ve tried to tell me. The one with the tragic beginning, and the desolate, interminable middle.”

He knew. He was the strangest, the wisest creature, in all of Traum. So much like a child.

Because he was.

The gargoyle folded his hands in front of him, watching the moths. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “I cannot tell it all myself. I do not remember it all. But I will tell you the story the way she told it to me—in her own words.” He steadied himself. Made his voice even, smooth. Like the abbess’s.

It began with a whisper.

“You know this story, Bartholomew, though you do not remember it. I’ll tell it to you as best I can and promise to be honest in my talebearing. If I’m not, that’s hardly my fault. To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it?

“Once, you came upon Traum’s highest tor, where the wind whispered a minor tune. There, the gowan flowers were white and the stones were gray and both stole the warmth from your bare feet.

“You were a foundling boy, wandering and starving and alone. You cried out, but there was no one to save you. You lay yourself down in grass, and white moths came to float over you. You shut your eyes…

“And died, Bartholomew.”

My armor was a ruinous vise. I fought to draw breath.

The gargoyle kept going. “I found you there, and I, a graver—a kind, quiet carver of stone—brought you to the top of the tor where a spring of magic water leached. I put that water upon your lifeless lips. You coughed. Stirred. And awoke strange, special, and new.

“I took care of you, Bartholomew. Loved you, like you were my own child. We lived on the tor, needing nothing but spring water to survive. For many years, we lived that way. Then, one day, five craftsmen came, all different in mind and manner and skill. One believed in coin, another knowledge. One held fast to strength, another to intuition, and the last to love.”

Moths fluttered over my hair, stirring it, but I stayed perfectly still.

“But their finest craft,” the gargoyle continued, “was arrogance. They could not choose a leader, each believing themselves the superior choice. Tools of their crafts became weapons, and when those were not enough, the craftsmen took to one another with arms and fists and teeth until they all lay upon the grass, bloodied and silent and still.”

Rory and I looked at each other, his face the mirror of my own horror.

“They killed one another,” the gargoyle murmured. “All five craftsmen, dead. When their bodies were cold, I made a cup of my palms and brought spring water to their mouths, and though they were dead, the craftsmen took in air like it was their first breaths. When they awoke, their eyes were pallid, like limestone. They had no memory of who they were or how they’d died, and oh—how obedient that made them. It was easy to convince them they were divine. Then, with the tools of my craft, I fashioned them each an object from the tor’s magic stone. A coin for the brigand merchant, whom you called artful, an inkwell for the harried scribe, an oar for the ardent oarsman, a chime for the faithful forester, and a loom stone for the heartsore weaver.

“So you see, Bartholomew. Firstly by happenstance, then with great intent, you and I created gods.”

My hammer and chisel sat in my palms, feeling like a thousand pounds.

The gargoyle went on, his eyes blank as he recited the abbess’s tale. “We became Traum’s architects. For it was the tor that we minded, the spring upon it the strangest, the strongest, magic of all. With it, I could bring dead things back to life, but also, I could wield dreams. Did you know that, Bartholomew? That all the dreams you had were by my own design?

“No. Of course you did not know. You were never that clever. You, my little foundling, my perfect Diviner, would lie in the spring, and I would press down upon you until you lost consciousness. I could make you dream anything I wished. I showed you frightful hamlets, stone objects, signs. Portents were named, and faith was forged, within that spring upon our tor.

“A cathedral was built there, and you tiptoed, small as an insect, through the narthex, into the nave, down the aisle. Blood stained your lips, and you fell into the spring that came from that ancient stone upon the chancel. When you looked up at the rose window, the light kissed stained glass. Your craft was obedience. You said the names of gods and how to read their signs. You learned how to dream—

“And how to drown.”

The gargoyle sighed. “But then—you stopped obeying me, Bartholomew. You stopped being my perfect Diviner. You did not wish to dream or to talk of the Omens any longer, for you had helped make them, and therefore could not fully believe in their divinity. You no longer wished to tell a story that was a lie, even when I assured you it was necessary. That the hamlets of Traum had become the Stonewater Kingdom, and a kingdom always needs something to believe in. Constantly, I had to childmind you. When that ceased to work… I remade you.”

The gargoyle’s voice hardened. He shut his eyes, imitating the abbess. “Lie in the spring, Bartholomew. What signs do you see, Bartholomew? Don’t mix up your words, Bartholomew. Don’t cry or be sick, Bartholomew. Ignore all the pain, Bartholomew. Never complain, Bartholomew. Stop humming, Bartholomew. Swallow the blood, Bartholomew. Would that you were a daughter, Bartholomew. Soon I’ll replace you, Bartholomew. I’ll forget and erase you, Bartholomew. Bartholomew. Bartholomew. Bartholomew—”

His shoulders shook, and he let out a long, mournful sound. When he opened his eyes, looking me in mine, I knew he was speaking in his own voice now and not the abbess’s.

“She kept me locked away in the cottage with no windows. Denied me spring water, thinking I might starve. I do not know how long it took for my body to fracture and change… a long while, I think. I must have gone senseless for the pain. I starved, but I did not die, turning to stone instead. I became a gargoyle. Fearsome—a guardian at Aisling’s gate. Suddenly, she was pleased with me again. Suddenly, I was useful once more. After all… swords and armor are nothing to stone.”

“Oh, gargoyle.” I ran to him, armor rattling, and threw my arms around his body.

He made sad little sounds against my shoulder. “She told me to find her more dead foundlings. Girls, this time, since I had proved such a disappointment. I searched the gutters of the Seacht, Coulson Faire, the Chiming Wood, and brought them to the tor, where she’d fill their mouths with spring water and coax them awake. She tied gossamer over their stone eyes and told them they were strange. Special. New. They dreamed in her cathedral, as if born of its water, and the story of the Omens prevailed. Then, every ten years, the dreamers would vanish, and new foundlings had to be brought. But the ones she liked best, the ones she lent her hammer and chisel to—the most obedient—she always kept locked away to make into gargoyles.”

Rory’s face was wan.

“I suppose I saw it then,” the gargoyle said. “How she guarded the tor like a dragon. How she was made as large as a cathedral herself, commanding the Omens, the spring, and the foundlings she raised to dream within it. How, like a god, she said she loved us but hurt us.”

Tears fell down my cheeks, stirred, then made cold by the fluttering wings of moths.

“My name was wiped from her stories, and so were the names of all the Diviners that came after me. But I tried to hold on. I think I must have spent centuries trying to tell the world who I was in my own peculiar way.”

I pressed my hands into his stone body. “My dream. Of the moth. That wasn’t a sign from gods. You were the one to drown me… it was you, Bartholomew.” My tears fell. “You, trying to tell me your story.”

He pulled back to look at me. “I’m sorry for all of it,” he said, wiping my cheeks. “But she gave me a second chance at life, though it was hardly living. My devotion to Aisling was hard to undo. I am sorry I found you, sick in the Seacht; I am sorry that I brought you back to the cathedral like the dozens of dead or dying girls I’d brought before.” His chin quivered. “I’m sorry that, upon the chancel, you died. I’m sorry she remade you with spring water, and that you bore such loyalty to her for it.”

He wrapped his arms around me. “To live again after death is strange magic, and an even stranger fate. Would that things were different, Bartholomew. Would that we had never been reborn. But if we hadn’t… well. I have wondered, and pondered, and now I am sure. For better, for worse—

“The rest of the story could not exist without us.”

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