The Grey King Read online

  “Cafall! Cafall!”

  And out of nowhere along the ridge towards them came a white streak, leaping at the nearest fox, charging it sideways, so that it spun round with a shriek rolling over and over. The tight semicircle wavered, uncertain. Cafall leapt snarling at the next fox, his jaws closing quick and hard on its shoulder, and the animals squealed dreadfully and twisted away. There in the rent he had torn in the rank of the milgwn the white dog stood, belligerent as a bull, with his legs planted firm on the rock, and the message glinting in his strange silvery eyes was clear. Will grabbed Bran by the arm and slipped out with him past Cafall, free, while the panting foxes hesitated.

  “Up here, Bran, quick! It’s the only place!”

  Bran’s eyes flickered over black earth and white fur, dark hills and grey sky; he saw the great king fox of the milgwn watching them, controlled again, poised for pursuit. Then Cafall, curving to face the animal, began a long crescendo snarl more bloodcurdling than any sound Bran had ever heard in his life. In fulfillment of some long destiny, the dog was making it possible for them to escape. There was no excuse not to obey. With a sudden flooding of trust and humility, Bran turned and scrambled upwards after Will.

  Clambering on hands and feet over the rocky ridge, Will made for the place to which they must go; it sang to him, beckoning. Below the rocks to which they clung, smoke swirled like a dark sea; high above, unseen birds screamed and cawed in angry fear. When he could climb no further, Will saw a narrow overhung cleft in the rocks before him, a long slit broadened and eroded by frost and wind and rain. Its grey granite sides were green-patched with lichen. Irresistibly, it summoned him.

  He called to Bran: “In here!” Then his voice rose louder, commanding. “Cafall!”

  The granite sides of the cleft towered three times higher than his head. Entering, Will glanced back over his shoulder; he saw Bran following, bemused, and then a quick white shape slipping after him, as Cafall darted forward, nuzzling his nose briefly into Bran’s hand as he passed. Outside on the rock, a shrieking tumult of baffled rage rose from the furious milgwn, prevented from entry. Their master’s power, Will now knew, was a power over the rock and the mountains and all the high places of Gwynedd; but only over those. Inside the rock and the mountain was a different domain.

  He went on. At its far end, the rocky cleft widened a little. The light was dim. Things seemed indistinct, as if in a dream. Outside, the foxes barked and screamed. And then there was nothing more ahead of Will but bare grey rock: a formidable blank wall, ending the cleft. Will stared at the rock, and his mind filled with a warmth of discovery and relief as intense as joy. The dog Cafall was at his side, standing straight and proud as a young horse. Will dropped one hand to rest on the white head. The other arm he raised before him, with fingers stiff outstretched in a gesture of command, and he called out three words in the Old Speech.

  And before him, the rock parted like a great gate, to a faint, very faint sound of delicate music that was achingly familiar and yet strange, gone as soon as it was heard. Will walked forward through the rocky doors, with Cafall trotting confidently beside him, head high and tail waving. And Bran, a little hesitantly, followed them.

  Bird Rock

  There was no way of telling whether they were deep inside Craig yr Aderyn, or had walked through the grey rocky doors into another place and time. It did not matter to Will. Exhilaration was pulsing through him, in this the true beginning of his first full quest as an Old One. Turning to look back, he saw without surprise that the doors through which they had come were no longer there. The rocky wall at the end of the chamber where they now stood was smooth and unbroken, and upon it, high up, there hung a round golden shield, glinting dully in a light that came from somewhere deep within the room.

  Will looked tentatively at Bran, but the Welsh boy seemed unperturbed. His pale face was oddly vulnerable without its protective glasses, but Will could read no expression in the catlike eyes; he felt once more an intense curiosity about this strange boy with no colour in him, born into the Dark-haunted valley—mortal, and yet also a creature foreknown by the Old Ones centuries before. How was it that he, Will, an Old One himself, could sense so little of Bran’s nature?

  “You okay?” he said.

  “I’m all right,” said Bran. He was looking up at the walls, beyond Will. “Duw,” he said softly. “Beautiful. Look at those.”

  It was a long, empty room. On its walls hung four tapestries, two to each side, their rich colours so deeply gleaming that they too seemed to shimmer in the half-light, like the golden shield. Will blinked in recognition at the images embroidered there, rich as stained glass: a silver unicorn, a field of red roses, a glowing golden sun. . . .

  All the light in this room seemed, he now saw, to come from only one flame. In an iron holder jutting from the stone wall near the end of the room, a single tremendous candle stood. It was several feet high, and it burned with a white unwavering flame of intense brilliance. The long shadow of the candle lay over wall and floor, motionless, undancing. Its stillness, Will realised, was the stillness of the High Magic, a power beyond Light or Dark or any allegiance—the strongest and most remote force in the universe, which soon in this place he and Bran must face.

  There was a faint whistling whine at his side, scarcely audible. He looked down, and saw the dog Cafall gazing backwards at Bran.

  Will said softly, “Go on, then.”

  The dog’s cold nose nudged his hand, and Cafall turned and trotted briskly back to his master, waving his tail. Bran thrust his fingers into the fur of the dog’s head in quick fierce affection, and Will knew that for all his calm appearance there was in his mind an uncertainty approaching panic, which Cafall had sensed and sought to reassure. Will felt a quick tug of sympathy for Bran, but there was no time for explanations. He knew he must trust his instinctive feeling that, in the last resort, the strange remoteness always apparent in Bran would prove to be the strangeness of great strength.

  He said aloud, without turning, “This way.” Then he walked firmly down the long lofty chamber. Bran followed with Cafall; Will could hear the footsteps ringing with his own on the stone-paved floor. He reached the tall candle in the wall. Its iron holder was set into the stone at the level of his shoulder; the smooth white sides of the candle reached far higher, high above his head, so that the white flame glowed up there like a bright full moon.

  Will paused. “First the moon,” he said. “Then stars and, if all is well, a comet, and then the dust of the stars. And at the last, the sun.”

  “What?” said Bran.

  Will glanced across without really seeing. Behind his eyes he was looking into his own mind and memory, not at Bran. Here in this place he was an Old One, occupied with the affairs of the Light; nothing else had very much relevance. He said, “It is the order of things, by which the High Magic shall be known. So that none may come within reach of it except by birthright.”

  Bran said, “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then he shook his head in quick nervous apology. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Will said. “Just follow. You’ll see.”

  The footsteps rang out again, and then they were at the end of the long room and there was nothing before them but a blank hole in the floor. Bran peered at it dubiously.

  Will said, “Do what I do.” He sat on the edge of the rough rectangular opening in the floor, and in a few moments he could see a staircase, running downwards at a steep angle. Cautiously lowering himself, he found the stairway was narrow and dark; it was like going down into a well. When he put out a hand to either side, each hand at once touched rock, and the rock of the roof too was very close to his head. He went slowly down. In a moment he could hear Bran’s careful steps following, and the soft scratch of Cafall’s paws. For a little while the glimmer from the upper chamber reached down after them, casting wavering patterns of shadow on the close walls, but soon even that faded, and there was no
light in the stair tunnel at all. In its sides, Will’s fingers found two smooth channels carved to form balustrades, a steadying refuge for the hands of anyone descending. He said quietly, his voice eerily echoing, “Bran, if you put your hands out—”

  “I’ve found them,” Bran said. “Like banisters, aren’t they? Bright idea of somebody’s, that.” The words were cool, but there was tension behind them. Their voices boomed gently in the stairway, muffled as if by mist.

  Will said, “Go carefully. I may stop in a hurry.” He was straining to hear the voice of his instincts; random images and impressions flickered in and out of his mind. Something was calling him, something close, close—

  He put out a hand in front of him, just in time to save himself from coming hard up against a blank wall of rock. There was no other stair ahead: only a stony dead end.

  “What is it?” said Bran, behind.

  “Wait a moment.” An instruction was growing inside Will’s memory, like an echo from another world. Standing with his feet planted firmly on the last stair, he put the palms of both hands flat against the rough unseen rock face barring their way, and he pushed. At the same time he said certain words in the Old Speech that came into his mind.

  And the rock parted, silently, as it had when the great doors opened silently on Bird Rock, though no music sounded here. With Bran and Cafall at his heels, Will stepped forward into a faint glow of light that caught him into such wonder that he could only stand and gaze.

  They were no longer where they had been. They stood somewhere in another time, on the roof of the world. All around them was the open night sky, like a huge black inverted bowl, and in it blazed the stars, thousand upon thousand brilliant prickles of fire. Will heard Bran draw in a quick breath. They stood, looking up. The stars blazed round them. There was no sound anywhere, in all the immensity of space. Will felt a wave of giddiness; it was as though they stood on the last edge of the universe, and if they fell, they would fall out of Time. . . . As he gazed about him, gradually he recognized the strange inversion of reality in which they were held. He and Bran were not standing in a timeless dark night observing the stars in the heavens. It was the other way around. They themselves were observed. Every blazing point in that great depthless hemisphere of stars and suns was focussed upon them, contemplating, considering, judging. For by following the quest for the golden harp, he and Bran were challenging the boundless might of the High Magic of the universe. They must stand unprotected before it, on their way, and they would be allowed to pass only if they had the right by birth. Under that merciless starlight of infinity, any unrightful challenger would be brushed into nothingness as effortlessly as a man might brush an ant from his sleeve.

  Will stood, waiting. There was nothing else that he could do. He looked for friends in the sky. He found the Eagle and the Bull, with Aldebaran glowing red and the Pleiades glimmering; he saw Orion brandish his club high, encouraging, with Betelgeuse and Rigel winking at shoulder and toe. He saw the Swan and the Eagle flying towards one another along the bright path of the Milky Way; he saw the hazy hint of distant Andromeda, and Earth’s near neighbours Tau Ceti and Procyon, and Sirius the dog star. In longing hope Will gazed at them; in hope and in salutation, for during his time of learning the ways of an Old One he had flown amongst them all.

  Then the sky wheeled, and the stars slanted and changed; now the Centaur galloped overhead, and the blue double star Acrux supporting the Southern Cross. The Hydra stretched lazily over the heavens, with the Lion marching by, and the great Ship sailed its leisurely, eternal way. And at last a brilliant point of light, with a long curving tail, came blazing into view over half the inverted bowl of the sky, moving past in a long stately progress; and Will knew that he and Bran had survived their first ordeal.

  He pressed Bran’s arm briefly, and saw a flicker of reflected light as the white head turned.

  “It is a comet!” Bran whispered.

  Will said softly back, “Wait. There’s more, if all is well.”

  The long flaring tail of the comet moved gradually out of sight, down over the horizon of their nameless world and time. Still in the black hemisphere the stars blazed and slowly wheeled; beneath them, Will felt so infinitesimally small that it seemed impossible he should even exist. Immensity pressed in on him, terrifying, threatening—and then, in a swift flash of movement like dance, like the glint of a leaping fish, came a flick of brightness in the sky from a shooting star. Then another, and another, here, there, all around. He heard Bran give a small chirrup of delight, a spark struck from the same bright sudden joy that filled his own being. Wish on a star, said a tiny voice in his head from some long-departed day of early childhood: Wish on a star—the cry of a pleasure and faith as ancient as the eyes of man.

  “Wish on a falling star,” said Bran soft in his ear. All around them the meteors briefly dived and vanished, as tiny points of Stardust in the long travel of their cloud struck the aery halo of the earth, burned bright and were gone.

  I wish, said Will fiercely in his mind: I wish . . . Oh, I wish. . . .

  And all the bright starlit sky was gone, in a flicker of time that they could not catch, and darkness came around them so fast that they blinked in disbelief at its thick nothingness. They were back on the staircase beneath Bird Rock, with stone steps under their feet and a curved stone balustrade smooth to the sightless touch of their hands. And as Will stretched out one hand groping before him, he found no blank wall of stone there to bar his way, but free open space.

  Slowly, faltering, he went on down the dark stairway, and Bran and Cafall followed him.

  Then very gradually faint light began to filter up from below. Will saw a glimmer from the walls enclosing them; then the shape of the steps beneath his feet; then, appearing round a curve in the long tunnelling stairway, the bright circle that marked its end. The light grew brighter, the circle larger; Will felt his steps become quicker and more eager, and mocked himself, but could not help it.

  Then instinct caught him into caution, and the last few steps of the staircase, before the light, he stopped. Behind him he heard Bran and the dog stop too, at once. Will stood listening to his senses, trying to catch the source of warning. He saw, without properly seeing, that the steps on which they stood had been carved out of the rock with immense care and symmetry, perfectly angled, smooth as glass, every detail as clear as if the rock had been cut only the day before. Yet there was a noticeable hollow in the centre of each step, which could only have been worn by centuries of passing feet. Then he ceased to notice such things, for awareness caught at him out of the deepest corner of his mind and told him what he must do.

  Carefully Will pushed up the left sleeve of his sweater as far as the elbow, leaving the forearm bare. On the underside of his arm shone the livid scar that had once been accidentally burned there like a brand: the sign of the Light, a circle quartered by a cross. In a deliberate slow gesture, half defensive, half defiant, he raised this arm crooked before his face, as if shielding his eyes from bright light, or warding off an expected blow. Then he walked down the last few steps of the staircase and out into the light. As he stepped to the floor, he felt a shock of sensation like nothing he had ever known. A flare of white brilliance blinded him, and was gone; a brief tremendous thunder dazed his ears, and was gone; a force like a blast wave from some great explosion briefly tore at his body, and was gone. Will stood still, breathing fast. He knew that beneath his singular protection, he had brought them through the last door of the High Magic: a living barrier that would consume any unsought intruder in a gasp of energy as unthinkable as the holocaust of the sun. Then he looked into the room before him, and for a moment of illusion thought that he saw the sun itself.

  It was an immense cavernous room, high-roofed, lit by flaring torches thrust into brackets on the stone walls, and hazy with smoke. The smoke came from the torches. Yet in the centre of the floor burned a great glowing fire, alone, with no chimney or fireplace to contain it. It gave no smoke at
all, but burned with a white light of such brilliance that Will could not look straight at it. No intense heat came from this fire, but the air was filled with the aromatic scent of burning wood, and there was the crackling, snapping sound of a log fire.

  Will came forward past the fire, beckoning Bran to follow; then stopped abruptly as he saw what lay ahead.

  Hazy at the end of the chamber three figures sat, in three great thrones that seemed to be fashioned out of smooth grey-blue Welsh slate. They did not move. They appeared to be men, dressed in long hooded robes of differing shades of blue. One robe was dark, one was light, and the robe between them was the shifting greenish-blue of a summer sea. Between the three thrones stood two intricately carved wooden chests. At first there seemed to be nothing else in the huge room, but after a moment of gazing Will knew that there was movement in the deep shadows beyond the fire, in the darkness all around the three illuminated lords. These were the bright figures on a dark canvas, lit to catch the eye; beyond them in the darkness other things of unknown nature lurked.

  He could tell nothing of the nature of the three figures, beyond sensing great power. Nor could his senses as an Old One penetrate the surrounding darkness. It was as if an invisible barrier stood all around them, through which no enchantment might reach.

  Will stood a little way before the thrones, looking up. The faces of the three lords were hidden in the shadows of their hooded robes. For a moment there was silence, broken only by the soft crackle of the burning fire; then out of the shadows a deep voice said, “We greet you, Will Stanton. And we name you by the sign. Will Stanton, Sign-Seeker.”

  “Greetings,” Will said, in as strong and clear a voice as he could muster, and he pulled down his sleeve over his scarred arm. “My lords,” he said, “it is the day of the dead.”