The Blind Knights

They had been his brothers.

Kaelen understood it only when the first of them came at him through the smoke of the Lady Chapel, helm down, shield high, with the white-and-gold sunburst blazing on his breast. He saw the lift of the sword arm. He saw the particular lean of the shoulder, the slight dip of the left knee, a trick of footwork Captain Aldwyn had drilled into every recruit of the Sun Guard for twenty years. He knew the stroke before it fell. He had taught it himself, in the training yard, to a freckled boy of sixteen who was now trying to kill him.

"Garrick," he said. "Garrick, it's me."

The blade came down.

He turned it on his borrowed steel, a plain Northern longsword that Elowen had pressed into his hand on the steps of the Palace, and the shock ran up his arm to the shoulder. The boy's helm was dented. His eyes through the visor were wide and pale and fixed. They did not see Kaelen. They looked past him, at something very bright and far away.

"The Light be praised," said Garrick, in a high, singing voice. "The Light be praised. The Light be praised."

"Garrick!"

"The Light be praised!"

He swung again.

…

There were sixty of them in the chapel.

They stood in a ring about the altar rail, a wall of white and gold, with their visors down and their swords bare and their lips moving, all together, in a thin murmuring chant that rose and fell in the dark like wind in dry grass. The Light be praised. The Light be praised. A smell hung in the air: thick, sweet, cloying, the smell of cloves.

Kaelen knew that smell now.

The tea. He had thought it was only for him. For the troubled child, the dreamer, the orphan who woke screaming. But a man who has found a good recipe does not use it once. He had been giving it to the Sun Guard for years. To every recruit, at every Epiphany. A cup of warm spiced tea at the end of the oath, from the Cardinal's own hand. Doubt is the first prayer, my son, but sleep is the second.

And tonight, at midnight, he had given them something stronger.

"They're drugged," said Torrin Redmayne, beside him.

"I know."

"The whole company." The old Archmage's face, in the flicker of the chapel torches, was gray with rage. "He's turned them into dolls. Dear Light, boy, look at the eyes."

"I'm looking."

"Can you wake them?"

"I don't know how."

"Then we'll have to knock the buggers over." Torrin swung his good arm, and a sheet of flame leaped from his fist, roaring across the flagstones in a long red crescent. The nearest knights recoiled. "Go on. Get the girl down. I'll hold the stair."

"There are sixty."

"There's one of me." The grin was ferocious. "I'm a lot of man."

"Torrin—"

"Go, you fool! You've nine minutes!"

Kaelen glanced over his shoulder.

Lyra stood at the open flagstone behind the altar rail, with a lantern in her fist and the satchel at her side and her face white as paper. The flagstone had been dragged back. The black stair lay beneath it like a throat. She was not looking at him. She was looking, with wide pale eyes, at the sixty bright shapes between them and the stair, at the young men who had been his friends.

Then Garrick came at her.

He came silently, out of the ring, with his blade held low, and Kaelen saw it as one sees a thing in a dream: the white gleam, the lunge, the girl at the head of the stair with nothing in her hands but a lamp. He did not remember crossing the floor. He remembered the clash of steel on steel and the splintering shudder as he took the blow flat across his blade, and he remembered, with perfect clarity, putting his forehead against the boy's visor and saying in a whisper:

"I'm sorry."

And driving the pommel into his temple.

Garrick went down like a felled tree.

"Go," said Kaelen.

"I can't leave—"

"Go!"

She went.

…

The stair was longer than she remembered.

Lyra took it two at a time, with her shoulder against the wall and the lantern swinging wildly. The light slid along the stones like water. Behind her the roar of the chapel faded to a dull throb, then to a distant rumble, then to nothing. Her own breath filled her ears. Her heart hammered. Somewhere in the dark above, a man was fighting sixty of his brothers with a borrowed sword, and she was running away.

No. Not away. Toward.

She had to believe it.

At the bottom of the first flight she stopped, and put her hand against the cold stone, and listened. Water dripped. A draft stirred the lamp-flame. And beneath the silence, so faint she might have imagined it, a low and steady hum, rising and falling, like a great beast breathing in its sleep.

She did not need to ask what it was.

Wake up, said the hum. Wake up. Wake up.

She forced herself on.

She had gone another thirty steps when she heard the footsteps behind her.

They were soft. Uneven. A dragging, shuffling tread, as of a man with a bad leg who was trying to be quiet. She spun with the lantern held like a club, and the light fell on a stooped gray shape at the turn of the stair, with a bare white head and a ruined hand, and a black band at the throat that burned violet in the dark.

"Master," she gasped.

"Lyra." Ansgar was breathing hard. His face in the lamplight was gaunt and wet with sweat. "I thought... I thought I'd not catch you. I took the long way. The stair behind the vestry. They don't know it."

"What are you doing here?"

"What I should have done on the first morning." His eyes were bright. "I'm coming with you."

"They'll kill you. You wear the collar."

"I wear it still."

"Then how can you..."

"It is keyed to a name." He smiled, a crooked, painful smile. "It will not stop me acting. Only speaking. I've decided I would rather be dead of a collar than a coward." He drew a breath. "Besides. You'll need a pair of hands to hold the lamp."

"A lamp?"

"You'll see."

He took her arm.

She was astonished by the tenderness of it. His good hand was thin and warm and trembled, and he leaned on her more heavily than he knew. She felt, through the gray wool of his sleeve, the knotted bones, and the ruined claw of the other hand pressing against her side, and understood that he had climbed three hundred steps in the dark with a leg that could barely bear him, because he would not let her go alone.

"Little scholar," said Ansgar. "Walk with me."

…

The recess had changed.

She smelled it before she reached the foot of the stair. It was a sharp, dry, metallic smell, like a cold coin on the tongue, and with it came a sense of enormous pressure, as though the air itself had thickened. A glow lay on the last of the steps: a thin, pale, violet-white shimmer, faint at first, then brighter, then so bright that she had to narrow her eyes.

She turned the last bend, and stopped.

The little chamber was gone.

In its place, cut in the rock and shining like the inside of a pearl, was a vault, round and high-roofed, lined from floor to ceiling with Aethel-glass. Every surface blazed with a cold, pulsing light. In the center stood a pedestal of black stone, and on it, in a cradle of silver wire, lay a sphere.

It was the size of a grapefruit. It was perfectly black. It seemed to drink the light that fell on it, so that it hung in the heart of the vault like a hole in the world. A fine violet corona played about it. It hummed. It hummed in the stones and the air and the soles of Lyra's feet, a long, deep, patient, dreadful note.

The sleeper, she thought. It's awake. It's already awake.

Above it, in the vault's roof, was a round opening, perhaps five feet across, ringed with polished crystal. A shaft of brilliant white light fell down through it and struck the sphere squarely at its crown. The beam was narrow, steady, blinding: the light of the Sun-lamp, she realized, that must be burning in the lantern tower overhead. It poured on the dark sphere like water on a hot stone.

And the sphere was beginning to glow.

A thread of white had crept in at the pole. It was thin as a hair. It widened, as she watched, to a line, and the line to a crack, and the crack to a curve of living gold that spread across the black like a dawn.

"No," whispered Lyra. "It's too soon. There's no Crown. There's no focus. It shouldn't..."

"It doesn't need the Crown," said a gentle voice. "That was only theater."

She turned.

…

Cardinal Malakor stood at the far side of the pedestal.

He was in his full vestments: scarlet cope, white alb, the gold mitre of his rank. He held his crook before him in both hands, and the glow from the sphere lit his face from beneath, so that the lines seemed carved out of marble. He looked tall. He looked serene. He looked, she thought, almost exactly like the saint in a stained-glass window.

He smiled at her, over the shining thing.

"I am sorry about the dawn," said Malakor. "I had hoped for a ceremony. A congregation. A nice touch of grandeur." He nodded upward at the beam. "But the mist came in. I saw it from the tower, rolling up the river like a winding sheet. Halloway, I presume. He was always the cleverest of them." A fond sigh. "I could not risk a delay. I made the sun myself."

"You'll kill them all."

"I shall judge them."

"You can't read, Your Eminence." Her voice cracked. "You can't read the First Tongue. It's not judge. It's devour. It's the same word. It's always been the same word."

"My child." The mild eyes were full of compassion. "I have spent forty years with the Old Tongue. I taught it to you. Do you think I would be mistaken in a single verb?"

"You were. You are."

"I think you are frightened."

"I'm right!"

"You are very young." He tilted his head. "And you want so badly for me to be wrong. I understand. It would be easier. It would let you off the hook." A gentle shrug. "But I have read it, Lyra. Many times. I have sat with it in the dark. It says the sun will come, and the judgment, and the world will be made clean." His eyes lit. "I have seen it in dreams. A great white wing. A song. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

"It's an explosion."

"It is a miracle."

"It will kill you!"

"Yes," said Malakor.

He said it simply, with perfect calm.

"Of course it will. I have known that for years. I shall be at the heart of it. I shall be the first to be judged, as the verse says, and the first to be found worthy." His face was luminous. "It is the only way I can think of to end it. The lying. The fear. The long slow rot. A single clean stroke, and the world made new. And I, who have sinned so much, who have murdered a holy man and a family and a girl of seventeen..." His voice broke softly. "I shall have a place in it. In the Light. At last."

Lyra stared at him.

She had been afraid of Malakor for a day. She had hated him, pitied him, wept over him. She had not understood until this moment what he was.

He was a man who had decided to die, and to take the world with him, and had dressed it in white.

"How long?" she whispered.

"Hm?"

"Until it wakes."

The Cardinal glanced upward.

The thread of gold had spread across half the sphere. It pulsed. The hum had deepened to a throbbing roar, and the vault shuddered, and little showers of dust fell from the roof. Far above, through the shaft, Lyra heard bells. Hundreds of them. She heard a faint, thin, terrible singing.

"Ten minutes," said Malakor. "Perhaps nine." He smiled. "I should say, my dear, that you have rather a lot of reading to do."