The Keep

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 28Henk could not have said when the sound began — merely that he realized it was there. Vague and hesitant at first, with the uneasy quality of an image hovering in the corner of the eye which would vanish on direct inspection, it changed, somewhere beyond Henk’s perception, becoming not so much louder as more distinct. Yet still indefinable.

A wind, softly moaning through unseen chimney stacks?

Waves breaking on a distant shore?

Countless voices, rising and falling, carried by an unhelpful and shifting wind?

All these things and none of them.

Henk’s head craned even further forward than usual as he found himself drawn into listening intently. But part of him wanted to flee, as he had fled the rumbling and shaking that had led him to this place and the unconscious Adroyan but a little while before. For though the sound was indistinct, there was a fearful quality to it: an urgency? A striving?

War! Henk realized. Desperate, horrific, and total. It was as though he was suddenly on the fringes of some grim and awful arena: an inadvertent witness.

Yet what truly chilled him was not the bloodstained rage and madness of battlefield slaughter, but a cold and alien strangeness — a quality beyond anything he had ever known. And too, a vastness. Amid the swirling turmoil, he was the least of things. His destruction, his complete annihilation, would be both effortless and unnoticed.

“What is this?”

He heard his own voice echoing distantly.

There was no reply.

Adroyan was standing motionless, his arms extended, his head thrown back, and his eyes closed. Henk fancied he could see a shimmering about him, like the air dancing above a sun-baked horizon. He blinked wilfully and slowly, trying to still the disturbance, bring the man into focus. But to no avail. Adroyan was both near and far away, and it seemed that the shimmering was not merely about him, but passing through him, almost as he might appear beneath fast and turbulent water.

Henk realized that he was trembling; the shaking of his body resonating to this rippling distortion. He felt his legs beginning to buckle and, for a moment, a surge of panic that threatened to unman him completely. But some other resource intervened and, with a teeth-gritting effort, he stamped his foot and clenched his fists to force himself back in control of his body. The impact steadied him a little and gave him his voice again. He repeated his question.

“What is this?”

The noise took his words and twisted and spun them so that they danced and whirled like dead leaves in a blustering autumn breeze before being scattered and lost.

His alarm abruptly became an unreasoning anger and, without thinking, he was stepping towards Adroyan — the apparent cause, or the focus, of this disturbance. Washing about him, the whispering rose and fell, insistently urging him forward. Only as he came within arm’s reach did he realize that his fists were still clenched and that he was possessed by an intention to strike Adroyan down. Well used to the isolation of the Keep and to living in close proximity to only two companions for long periods at a time, Henk had no easy inclination to violence and the realization jolted him, jolted him sufficiently to halt his purposeful advance and deny this intention. As he stopped, the sound wavered, as too did Adroyan’s near-ecstatic posture.

A thought closer to his true self came into Henk’s mind.

“Is anything wrong, sir?”

As if foundering on the concern in his voice, the sound changed; the conflict within it intensified until it became a screeching, like fingernails down glass. Henk’s hands came to his ears, but even as he did so, the sound seemed to fold in on itself — at once both triumphing and destroying itself.

The Great Hall was silent.

Not even an echo of the disturbance lingered.

Henk lurched forward a pace to catch his balance, but Adroyan staggered backwards some distance before he recovered. Briefly his face was riven with confusion, wavering between despair and revelation. Henk stared at him, wide-eyed, despite some instinct telling him to look away.

“Yes, yes, yes.” Adroyan was murmuring softly to himself. “This is the place. The nexus — the knot — the great knot, which bound the Powers and denied us victory.”

He looked directly at Henk and this time Henk did turn his face away from what he saw there.

“But the time is near, we — we — will fathom the mysteries of this place — unfurl the binding hurt — mend time — release the...”

He stopped, and his eyes, hitherto focused on some unknown distance, became clearer. He straightened, and, his voice normal again, asked, “What did you hear?”

Henk found this abrupt reversion to normality just as unsettling as the unexpected passion he had just witnessed and he had to fight down a powerful urge to turn and run.

“A noise,” he said after a long moment under Adroyan’s now coldly indifferent gaze. There being no immediate response, he felt the need to elaborate. “Very odd — never heard anything like it before... even with a gale blowing outside. Something to do with this... earthquake, maybe?” He was about to ask, “Did you hear it before — when I found you?” but thought better of it.

Adroyan glanced around the hall. “Probably,” he said casually, neither answering the question nor furthering the exchange. But Henk saw the brief look in his eyes. The triumph and defeat that he had heard in the noise were there too, but mingled with doubt and anxiety.

“Probably,” he echoed, dully, to end the conversation. He had no desire to stay longer than he had to in the Great Hall, especially with Adroyan.

“Do you need me any more?” he asked. “Nyk might be needing help with the drawbridge.”

“Yes, the drawbridge,” Adroyan said, attentive now. He made an urgent gesture. “It must be released. We must not be held here. There are things to be done — important. Go and help.”

Henk needed no further encouragement and, after an awkward shuffle, was striding away with an untypical vigour in his step. He did not look back as he reached the archway that led from the hall. He would have seen little had he done so, for Adroyan was standing motionless, his head inclined slightly, as if listening to something.

* * * *

“I did tell you they were a little disordered,” Qualto said, apologetically.

The room where the Keep’s logs were kept was reached from the book room and they had spent a few minutes in there first. Badr had demonstrated his knowledge of the cataloguing system, carefully echoing Qualto’s injunction, “leave the books on the tables,” and then shown Josyff the ease with which the ladders moved.

“It must have been some kind of an earth tremor,” Josyff concluded again, though more for want of something to say than from any conviction.

“We call this the Archive,” Qualto said. “A bit pompous, I suppose, but...” He left the sentence unfinished.

Josyff, Badr and Esyal gazed round at the room. It was small compared with most of the rooms in the Keep they had encountered so far; smaller even than the common room. And it was indeed disordered. The shelves lining four of its five walls were filled with books, stacks of papers, boxes and parcels. Randomly distributed amongst these were jars of pens and pencils, disordered heaps of writing paper, several small clocks, a variety of dust-covered and sorry-looking ornaments, and a liberal dispersion of less readily-identifiable objects. A battered desk at the centre of the room was similarly decorated, and the floor was little better — cluttered as it was with boxes too large for the shelves, and lumpy, anonymous sacks between which isolated stashes of brushes and brooms rose, sentinel-like. Only a hasty intervention by Qualto prevented Josyff from tripping over a bucket.

He gave a guilty smile as he balanced the bucket precariously on an already unsteady box.

“Perhaps junk room might be more appropriate,” he said.

Josyff searched briefly for a kinder description to ease his host’s awkwardness, but found none. So he laughed.

“I’ll have to play the bureaucrat,” he said. “‘Not my department’ — but I’m sure you know where everything is.”

“I doubt it,” Qualto confessed. “Not in here. I’ve no idea why we’ve let this place get into such a state — it’s not as if we were short of space. I really must get round to...” Again he left the sentence unfinished.

Esyal intervened. “I can tidy this up, if you want. Perhaps start sorting out your old records — your logs.”

“As well as helping with the cooking, and helping the surveyors?” Qualto said, giving her a wry look.

Esyal’s hands fluttered momentarily, before she reaffirmed firmly. “I have to do something.”

Qualto gave a shrug of acceptance. “Well, it does need doing. I suppose you might as well. With all that’s happened these past few days, everything’s upside down. I’m sure we’ll all end up doing all manner of unfamiliar things. I certainly can’t see our daily routines getting back to normal for a long time.”

“Until you’re finally pulling up the drawbridge behind us all, eh?” Josyff said, with a chuckle.

Qualto responded in kind. “No disrespect intended, surveyor. It’s just that we’re not used to change around here. The odd little calamity now and then — something leaking, something squeaking, something not working, but...”

“I sympathize. I don’t imagine you choose to work in a place like this for the excitement.”

Qualto let out what might almost have been a sigh. “No indeed. Though I’m not sure whether the Keep needs us or whether we need the Keep.” He was silent and thoughtful for a moment then he clapped his hands sharply and became brisk. “Anyway. Anyway. Change is change. Heaven knows, no two days out here in the mountains are ever really the same. And you’re all here, and most welcome. Esyal — thank you for your offer — set to — tidy this place up — bring order to our disordered records — and you’ll be most welcome in my kitchen any time, as well.” He took Esyal by the arm and led her to a set of shelves by the door. Josyff and Badr drifted behind them, caught up in the backwash of this sudden activity.

In contrast to the rest of the room, these shelves were comparatively tidy; serried ranks of stout books faced the advancing group resolutely. They were set out in groups, each with a different coloured binding, though all were embossed in gold with the same design on their spines. Qualto picked one and riffled through the pages for the others to see.

“There doesn’t seem to be much written in it,” Josyff said, looking over his shoulder.

Qualto stopped and placed his hand palm down on the page, to hold it open. There was a date and then three or four lines of clear but not particularly neat handwriting.

“One page per day it says in the Duty Orders, and one page per day it is,” he said.

“And yours not to reason why, eh?”

“Indeed,” Qualto confirmed with a knowing smile.

Josyff followed his mood. “What happens if you have a busy day?”

Qualto’s smile broadened. “Oh, we’re allowed a degree of literary discretion to cope with the likes of the last few days,” he replied. “And it’s not as if we’re short of new books.” He indicated the lower shelves, also full of the same kind of books. Josyff bent down and picked one at random. Every page was blank. He could not help expressing his surprise as he replaced it and scanned the other waiting volumes that filled the shelves.

“Good grief, even at one page a day these’ll last you forever.”

Qualto answered his next question before he asked it.

“The Estate sent them years ago.” He made a disowning gesture. “Maybe someone bought a job lot for a good price.”

“I can’t see them being cheap however good the price.” It was Badr. He was idly thumbing through one of the empty books. It had a pale blue cover. “It’s good paper and this binding looks expensive to me.” He took another and compared it with the first. “And look at these covers. Is this design the same on all of them? It’s very elaborate — here...” He offered the books to Josyff who took them after a brief hesitation. He turned them towards the light to examine the covers.

“I haven’t really looked at them,” Qualto said. “I think they’re all the same. That kind of... scrolling pattern is common on Estate documents. I don’t know if it’s just a traditional style or if it has some special significance.”

But Josyff scarcely heard him. He was looking intently at the design neatly scored into the soft cover. Lines of varying thickness and depth wound their way from the spine to fill both covers. Sharp-edged and clear, they twisted and wove themselves into a myriad elaborate patterns and intricate knots.

Or...

Was it perhaps just one line?

He turned the book over several times, and brought it closer to his face. It was one line, he decided — one single thread. Innumerable short branches deceived the eye into seeing multiplicity where there was none, but there was definitely only one line threading its way through the seeming confusion. He felt a small frisson of triumph at this discovery and something prompted him to bring the other book closer to compare the two. He noticed as he did so that all the branches tapered delicately and appeared not so much to end as to plunge into the depths of the book.

Scanning from one book to the other and moving them back and forth, he was about to remark that the patterns were not quite the same, that there were subtle differences between them, when his eyes began to shift their focus. Before he could respond to this, the two patterns were dancing and wavering, moving to a rhythm which was suddenly pulsing through his mind.

The images came together.

He was falling...

...falling...

Into pale blue depths, with golden lines singing all about him.