ARCHMAGE

The sky came down.

I do not know how else to put it. The Awakening Storm, which had been gathering for an hour over the ridge, a swollen purple mass of cloud shot with veins of lightning, finally gave up the pretense of being weather. It lowered itself. A vast pillar of white fire dropped out of the zenith, as wide as a cathedral, and struck the basalt disk where I knelt.

I was inside it.

There was no pain. That is what I remember. The pain had been the Storm's first gift, and it had given it freely, and by the end I had drunk so much that I had gone beyond. I knelt in the center of a white silence, in a light so pure and absolute that it had no shadow. I felt my body dissolve into it. I felt the Gold tree on my arm, which had been cracking for an hour, shatter into a thousand shards of burning amber, and I felt each shard fall into the fire like a coal into a furnace.

I was not afraid.

So this is the thing, I thought. This is what they were afraid of.

I saw them. In the white. I saw the Founders, tall and shining, in a circle, with their hands joined. I saw a woman in a gray cloak, with ash in her hair, standing in a field of burning wheat. I saw a boy in a soldier's coat, with a ribbon at his collar. I saw a long line of faces, men and women, young and old, stretching back and back into the dark: every mage who had ever crossed, and every mage who had failed.

They were looking at me.

You came, said the woman in the gray cloak.

I came.

You were slow.

I had to be born first.

She smiled. It was a tired, tender, ironic smile, and I knew it, because I had seen it in a mirror. She raised her hand. In the palm, burning, lay the shape of a heart.

Take it, she said. It was always yours.

I reached out.

…

The Gold tree had burned to ash.

I saw it go. I saw the last twig of it flare, a spark in the white, and vanish. In its place, from the root, a single line of fire rose, thick as a thread, and began to climb.

It split. Once, twice. A fork, and a fork again. Nine branches, each of them burning, each of them spreading, curling, twisting as they climbed; and as they climbed I saw that they were not the branches of a living tree. They were charred. They were black, and cracked, and glowing from within, like branches in the aftermath of a forest fire. They crawled across my skin in tangles of ember and ash. They reached my elbow. My shoulder. My throat.

They did not hurt. They sang.

I felt the Sigil settle into me. I felt the vessel widen, from a cistern to a lake, from a lake to a sea. I felt the Heart in my chest expand, rushing into the new space, bright and vast and slow, filling every vein, every nerve, every bone. A wave of heat passed through me, and a wave of cold, and a wave of something that was neither, a deep and thundering calm.

The light began to fade.

…

I opened my eyes.

The ring was dark. The pillar was gone. A few last threads of lightning still trembled in the sky, far off, among the clouds. The moon had set. In the east a faint gray was coming, the first pale gleam of dawn, and against it the peak of Skyfall stood up black and clean.

I was kneeling on the basalt. I was alive.

I raised my left arm.

The Sigil lay across it from wrist to shoulder, up the side of my neck and onto my cheek. It was black and gold: black as char, gold as fire. It was a tree, but not as the Gold had been. It was a tree after the burning. Nine great limbs, bare, branched and rebranched in a delicate lace of cinder, and in the cracks between them an ember-light shone, pulsing slowly. It looked like a thing that had died and not noticed.

Archmage, I thought.

I breathed.

The air was sweet. I had never known how sweet. I could taste the snow on the peak, three thousand feet above, and the wet stone, and the first thin scent of morning. I could smell the ash on my clothes. I could smell blood: Josie's, a little. Hawk's. The cat's. I could hear the wind, and every gust of it, and the shifting of each pebble beneath it.

I could hear their hearts.

It was the strangest thing. I sat on the disk, with my head bowed, and the world poured into me, and I found that I could count them. The slow heavy beat of Hawk's, forty yards away, in the lee of a pillar. The quick hot thump of Josie's, beside it. The fierce small flutter of Nimbus, on the pillar's top. And beyond them, a mile down the slope, the faint, scattered, frightened pulse of a dozen men in black robes, running down the mountain.

And close, so close that I could feel it in my teeth, one more.

It was slow. It was strong. It was walking toward me.

I lifted my head.

…

He stood at the edge of the inner circle.

He had come across the gap. It was dark now, the lightning gone, the rings extinguished. He stood on the black stone with his hands at his sides and the torn rags of his shirt hanging from his shoulders. His hair was matted with blood. His chest was bare, and across it, glowing faintly, the silver star burned like a banked fire. There was a long cut on his cheek. He was gray with exhaustion. He was swaying on his feet.

He looked at me.

I did not know what he saw. I tried to read it. I had learned to read a good many faces, in my short, hard life, and I could usually find the thing underneath. But his was blank. It was the face of a man who has been holding a very heavy weight for a very long time, and has been told he can put it down, and cannot believe it.

"Declan," I said.

My voice was strange. It was low, and resonant, and had a faint echo in it, as if I spoke in a large empty room.

He did not answer.

He took a step. Then another. He came across the disk, slowly, like a man crossing a bridge in the dark, and he knelt in front of me. His hands came up. They hung in the air, trembling, a few inches from my face, as if he feared to touch.

"You're alive," he said.

"I think so."

"You are—" His throat worked. "You are not hurt?"

"I don't know. I can't feel anything."

"It will come."

"I'm sure."

He closed his eyes. I saw his chest move. Then, without any warning, he leaned forward and put his arms round me, and held me against him, hard, as a man holds a drowned thing he has just pulled out of the sea.

I did not move.

He was shaking. I could feel it. A fine, continuous tremor, running through his whole great frame, from the shoulders to the hands. He had buried his face in my hair. I felt his breath, warm and uneven. I felt his heart, thundering against my cheek. And I felt, with a shock that went through me from head to foot, the wetness on my neck.

He was weeping.

He did it without a sound. He did it like a soldier, with every muscle locked. But the tears ran down my collar, hot and quick, and I knew that the Warlord of the Iron March, who had stood in a cell for forty years and not wept, was crying into my hair like a boy.

I put my arms round his back.

I held him. I did not say anything. There was nothing to say. I laid my cheek against his shoulder, and closed my eyes, and let him.

"You did it," he said at last. His voice was raw and low. "You did it. You did it."

"Yes."

"I did not think—I thought—" He stopped. He drew a long unsteady breath. "I was afraid."

"I know."

"I have never been so afraid."

"You said that before."

"I meant it then. I mean it more now." A broken laugh. "I begin to think that I shall go on being afraid for the rest of my life."

"That's very flattering."

"It is not flattery. It is a diagnosis."

I smiled into his shoulder.

…

"Is this the part," said Josie, in a small damp voice, "where we're allowed to come out?"

I lifted my head.

She was standing at the edge of the ring, with a flare-gun in each hand and soot all over her face. Her bun had come down. One of her eyebrows was singed off. Behind her, Hawk leaned on the long gun, which he had propped against a pillar, and looked off across the plains with the stern abstraction of a man who is not, under any circumstances, going to cry. Nimbus sat on his shoulder. He had a strip of black cloth hanging from his mouth, and an expression of devastating smugness.

"I killed seven," he said. "Seven. I want it recorded."

"It's recorded."

"Seven. And a half. The half was an accident."

"I'm sure it was."

"Tam," said Josie. "You've got a tree on your face."

I touched my cheek.

…

We found the Cantor an hour later, in a hollow below the plateau.

She had crawled there. She lay on her back in a pool of black blood, with Hawk's ball through her shoulder and the ruins of the golden mask beside her. Her white robes were stained. Her face, bare for the first time, was a woman's of about sixty: sharp, withered, gray-haired, with a beak of a nose. Her eyes were open. She was still alive.

Declan stood over her, with his hands at his sides.

"Cantor," he said.

"Warlord." She coughed. Blood spattered her chin. "You have grown... careless in your old age."

"I have grown fond. It is not the same."

"Hm."

"You were hired by the Chancellor."

"I was paid by the Chancellor." A thin smile. "The Choir has no master. We have clients."

"What did he offer?"

"A place." Her eyes slid to me, and rested there. "A place at the table. In the new Republic. He promised us a seat in the Senate. He promised us the freedom to practice our art." She laughed, a dry rattle. "He promised a great deal. He always does."

"And now?"

"And now you have killed my choir." Her lips drew back. "Seventeen of my best. They will be hard to replace. But no matter. We shall find new voices."

"I think not," said Declan.

"No?" She smiled. "Then I shall tell you something, Warlord, for old times' sake. A gift. A secret, from a dying woman to a man who once, a very long while ago, spared her life."

He said nothing.

"The Chancellor is not afraid of you." She spoke slowly, savoring each word. "He is not afraid of the girl. He has the Engine. He has the Senate. He has the Marshals, the Houses, the Relay. He has a hundred thousand Sigils, and each of them is a drop in a bucket." Her eyes glittered. "He has already decided what to do with you."

"And that is?"

"Nothing." She gave a hideous, sweet smile. "He will do nothing. He will wait. He will let you come to him. He will let you walk into the Senate, with your Archmage and your Warlord and your pretty little cat, and he will smile, and bow, and press a button."

The wind moved over the hollow.

"The Chancellor," whispered the Cantor, "does not intend for any of you to survive."

Her eyes went dim. She did not die at once; she lay a while, breathing shallowly, with the smile fixed on her lips. Then her chest stopped. A leaf drifted down from a dwarf pine and settled on her cheek.

Declan crouched, and closed her eyes with two fingers.

"She was telling the truth," he said.

"I know."

"It makes no difference."

"I know."

He rose. He stood looking down at the little dead woman in the white robe. In the dawn light his face was grave.

"She was right about the rest," he said. "It will be a trap. It will be the finest trap in the history of the Republic. And we shall walk into it."

"Yes."

"With our eyes open."

"Yes."

He turned his head, and for the first time that morning I saw him smile. It was a slight, tired, wolfish smile, and it was the most reassuring thing I had ever seen.

"Good," said Declan Marrow. "I should hate to be surprised."

…

Hawk found us at the hut in the foothills at midday.

He had gone ahead, on a mule, to see to the horses. He came back up the track at a trot, with a yellow slip of paper in his fist, and a look on his face I had never seen. He did not dismount. He leaned down from the saddle and held out the paper.

"Telegraph," he said. "From the shepherd's boy. It came in at dawn." He cleared his throat. "From the hospice in the Falls."

I took it.

The message was short. It was written in a clerk's neat copperplate, and it had been sent, I saw, at six that morning, by a sister of mercy named Agnes.

TO MISS T. REEVE, ASHGROVE ESTATE, C/O MR. BOONE, REDWATER. STOP. THE YOUNG MAN WHITLOCK, BROUGHT TO US BY CHARCOAL-BURNER, IS DYING. STOP. HE HAS ASKED FOR YOU BY NAME. STOP. HE SAYS HE WILL NOT SLEEP UNTIL HE HAS SEEN YOU. STOP. WE FEAR HE HAS BUT A DAY. STOP. IN CHRIST, AGNES.

I read it twice.

"Tam?" said Josie.

I folded the paper along its creases. I tucked it into my pocket. I looked at the mountain behind us, black against the morning, with the ring on its shoulder and the last of the storm clouds melting away.

"Get the horses," I said.