'There's a small church half built out there, my lord," he called down, "and some men coming. They've a deacon with them."

The gateway had once boasted a deep ditch crossing its opening as a form of defense, but the pit was now mostly filled in with debris although on one side recent scars showed where someone had started to dig it out again. Boards thrown over this sinkhole made a bridge. The procession that approached was led by a young deacon in stained and mended robes, who supported herself with a staff since she walked with a pronounced limp. She had a merry face and a cheerful smile that made her look extremely youthful, since her two front teeth were missing, and her bright, open expression sustained the shock of Hugh's presence without much more than a widening of her eyes and a trembling of her hands.

'My lord!" She knelt before Hugh. He offered her a clean, white hand, and she took it in a hand chapped and dirty from hard labor and kissed his fingers, but after this he squeezed his fingers over hers and indicated that she should rise.

'I am Presbyter Hugh, come from the skopos' palace in Darre with these retainers."

'My lord." She gazed at him with tears in her eyes, perhaps blinded by his beauty or overcome by the scent of rose water that clung to him. "I am Deacon Adalwif, who watches over this flock on behalf of God, our Lord and Lady."

'You are Wendish," he said with surprise.

'So I am, my lord. My own people have their lands near Kassel, but after I came into orders, I walked east to preach among the Sa-lavu heathens. Here you find me." She nodded toward their audience, who watched in respectful silence. "They are good folk, if rather simple, but their piety and hard work have proved them godly. You see that we have accomplished all of that task which Presbyter Marcus of Darre set before us two years ago. The stones are raised. Now we are engaged in erecting a church in order to hallow this ground and to keep the old heathen spirits away."

'You have done well."

'We do our best to serve God, my lord." She hesitated as if to ask a question, but did not. "Now you have come."

'Here I will stay for the time being. I pray you, Deacon Adalwif, what day is it?"

She nodded. "Brother Marcus told me that within the holy crowns the days might pass in different wise to that on the profane Earth. I have kept a careful track of days so that my flock may celebrate the feast days, as is fitting, and so that children may be named in honor of the glorious and holy saints. It is the feast day of St. Branwen the Warrior."

He smiled, although a certain tension squeezed the curve of his lips. "A glad day for arrivals! We departed Aosta most propitiously on the feast day of St. Marcus the Apostle."

'St. Marcus!"

'It has taken far longer than I had hoped to come here."

'Fully five months."

'Almost six."

'All these passed through in a single night?"

'In a single night," he agreed, glancing up the hill, but the massive earthworks and the curve of the hill hid the crown from view. "Yet," he mused, "what matter if six months pass in one night? We must wait here until Octumbre in any case, preparing for what is to come. I have a strong company to attend me, Deacon, as you have seen. We shall finish building your church. Then we will erect a palisade since this place was the scene of a fearsome battle not many years past."

'True enough." She nodded gravely. "We remember those days well, my lord. Prince Bayan and Princess Sapientia brought a strong force here, but the Quman overset them and drove them northwest. In the end, so they say, Prince Sanglant saved us. All the Quman are driven out and will never return."

A shift in the wind made Hugh grimace, chaff blowing into his eye, but he smiled quickly and gestured toward the neat camp his servants had already begun to set up. "So we must pray, Deacon. If we are patient, and strong, all our enemies will be laid to rest."

HE drowned under the bones of the world. A whisper teased his ears, and he opened his eyes into a darkness relieved only by a gleam of pale gold light that emanated from his left arm. Amazed, he waited for his vision to come and go in flashes, to fail again, but the gleam remained steady as he looked around.

He lay in a low chamber carved out of the rock by intelligent hands or shaped by more persistent forces. The floor had been swept clean of rubble. To his left the slope of the chamber created a series of benchlike ledges along the wall. Creatures crouched there, curled up with bony knees pressed to chests and spindly arms wrapped tight up against their shoulders. Many wore bits and pieces of ornaments slung around thick necks, odd scraps they might have scavenged out of a jackdaw's nest, most of which glittered with sharp edges and polished corners. The creatures had faces humanlike in arrangement, yet where eyes should stare at him, milky bulges clouded and cleared. He could not tell if they watched him or were blind.

With a grunt, he sat up. The movement made his head throb, and he had to shut his eyes to concentrate on not vomiting. At last his throat eased and his stomach settled, although the pounding ache in his temples pulsed on and on. The air was comfortable, not truly warm or cold; the air hung so still that he could taste each mote of dust on his tongue.

One of the creatures moved, arms elaborating precise patterns as it rubbed fingers one against the others, against its arms, and against the rock itself, clicking and tapping. The voice was not precisely voice but something more like the grinding together of pebbles.

'What are you?" it said.

'I am," he said. "I am..." It was like flailing in deep water as the riptide drags you inexorably out to sea. "I have lost my name. It is all gone."

'You wear a talisman from the ancient days," said the creature patiently.

He saw now a dozen of the creatures seated like boulders around the chamber, sessile except for slight gestures whose subtle configu rations and variations in sound began to make sense to him, flowing together and apart in the same way that seams of metal work their way through rock.

'The ancient days are only a false story! We must set aside comfort and dig for truth!"

'Despair is not truth. The ancient days are no false story, but a record carved in air to tell us the truth of the ancient days and the city whose walls speak."

'You are a fool! A dreamer!"

'You are trapped by falls of rock that exist only in the mind you carry!"

They spoke by means of touch and sound, reaching out each to the others, passing speech down from one to the next and back again, punctuated by the scritch of fingers on dust and the rap of knuckles against rock or skin, by the push and pull of air stirred by their movements and the intake and exhalation of breath. The words they spoke were as much constructs he made through his own understanding of language as uttered syllables.

'The talisman bears witness to the truth! This creature bears the talisman! This catacomb traps us because in the watch-that-came-before we walk here seeking luiadh. To find luiadh we follow the veins of silapu. One element leads us to the next. This creature leads us to this talisman, or this talisman to the creature. Do not pretend one comes without the other. Listen!"

They quieted.

The one whose skin gleamed like pewter, the one who had spoken first, shifted and addressed him. "What are you? The others of your kind, who descend from the Blinding, are empty when they reach us. You are not."

'I am alive," he agreed, before recalling the fate of the poor criminals cast into the pit. He shuddered. That shudder passed through the assembly like a venomous wind.

'It fears us!"

'It wishes to poison us!"

'It seeks silapu! Thief! Concealer!"

'Listen!" Pewter-skin stamped a three-clawed foot, and the others shifted restlessly before subsiding. When they crouched, motionless, they really did begin to blend into the rock so that he wondered if he still dreamed. They were only rocks, and he was hallucinating. But they kept speaking, and he kept hearing their words. "Let it speak.

What are you? Why are you not empty? Why are you cast down like the empty ones? Why do you wear the talisman?"

'I don't know." Shards of memory flashed in his mind like lightning, burned into his eyes. "You are skrolin. My people called you that once. It was one of your kind who gave me this." He brushed his fingers over the gleaming armband, cool to his touch although its surface burned as though it were hot. "I remember the great city. A shining city."

'Ah! Ah!" They stirred, sighing and groaning, and fell silent again. Their milky eyes swirled and stilled. A few brushed fingers over rock before curling back up into their crouch.

Pewter-skin spoke. "Tell us of the city."

'Are you going to eat me?"

"Eat you?"

'The bodies of my people. They are thrown down here for your food, and then you give silver to the miners in exchange."

They huffed, all their breath whuffing out. Dust stirred on the floor. First one, then a second and third, and finally all of them uncurled and with a rolling gait scurried out of the chamber, leaving him alone. He rubbed his filthy hair, shivering with fear and exhaustion as he struggled to get his bearings, to remember, but he could make sense of nothing. He possessed only scraps, like the chipped and broken ornaments the skrolin draped around their gnarled bodies. Nothing fit together.

Hadn't he seen a woman with wheat-colored hair, her belly swollen with pregnancy? She had betrayed him! But he wasn't sure how. It seemed as if anger and sadness had been his companions, but even they escaped him now.

He staggered to his feet, hit his head on the rough ceiling, and collapsed back to his knees while pain wept through him. It was all he could do to draw breath, let it out, and suck it in again. Once the world, every fiber of his being, had not hurt so much, but his head hurt all the time now. That was why he had been blind and mute. That blow to the head had damaged him.

When had it happened?

He couldn't recall.

A butterfly touch fluttered over his back. He jerked up, saw Pewter-skin folded into that boulder curl just beyond arm's length. There was something wrong with the creature's smooth skin; the lack niggled at him, but he couldn't place it. He couldn't remember.

'Come." Pewter-skin used sounds, touch, and gesture to convey his meaning. "You speak words that poison. The others turn away from you. We look away from the thing that offends us. But I think I first will show you. I think you are ignorant." The skrolin unrolled and waddled away.

Walking made pain lance through his temple with every footfall, but he followed as the chamber narrowed on all sides. He walked in a crouch until the ceiling opened up and the walls fell away to a larger chamber. Pewter-skin led him to a low opening, where he crawled on hands and knees over coarse rock then cautiously down a steep incline to a larger chamber ribbed with veins of a mineral he could not identify. A well-worn path took them along a branching tube, past two shafts that plunged into darkness, three stone pillars with rubble heaped to one side, and four branches forking off the main corridor whose ceilings curved so low he could never have hoped to squeeze through them. The ceiling in the main tunnel remained high enough that he did not hit his head, and finally, where the floor ramped up, Pewter-skin scuttled through an opening and he scrambled up behind him, scraping his knees and palms although the soles of his feet were so callused that not even the rough rock edges could cut them. The ceiling and walls opened up with startling speed to a much larger cavern, and he sucked in a breath in surprise, inhaling a smell as thick as bubbling yeast in a closed, warm room filled with rising bread.

White growths, like huge mushrooms, grew in tidy rows and discrete clumps across the floor of the cavern. That powerful smell pervaded the air. He coughed, blinking back the stinging aftertaste of putrefaction that made his eyes water and his tongue turn dry. Life cannot grow from dead rock.

Corpses lay in stages of decay. The freshest bloomed heavily with a funguslike mass; elsewhere, a few last sprigs decorated bones as the spongy fungus devoured the last shreds of the living.

Pewter-skin plucked a handful of the white stuff and ate it.

'We live in a trap. Clavas keeps us alive. The empty ones give nourishment to the clavas. So we trade silapu for the empty ones. We cannot eat the silapu, though some say we could in the time of the city. In that time, we were a strong and clever people, handsome and crusted with growths. Now we are sick and dying, even the free ones."

'Where are the free ones? Why are you in a trap?"

'Come." Pewter-skin beckoned.

He followed through the garden of corpses and bones and into a tunnel streaked with discolorations that glittered as he passed. By the glow of his armband he picked out veins and crystals grown into the rock. Sparkling grains slipped under his feet. Tunnels branched out to either side and crossed over and under where shafts pierced down or up until their path bewildered him and he knew himself lost. Pewter-skin led the way unerringly, and after an interminable time that might have lasted the length of a hymn or a hundred years they squeezed between twin pillars and he stared up in wonder. The ceiling and walls of this wide cavern shone where the light reflected off it, although the walls faded to darkness not so many steps away. The floor was unusually level. Here the skrolin had used scoured bones to build a strange architecture: a pyramid of skulls; an archway woven of thighbones cunningly trimmed and threaded together; a wharf constructed of linked rib cages; shoulder blades and pelvic bones arranged in a crude miniature temple or governor's palace.

'This is the tale of the city," said Pewter-skin. "We try to remember."

'Why can't you remember?" he asked.

'The tale is told from one to another through many lives, but we forget if it is true, or if it is false."

'The trap you speak of? Is that a true tale, or a false one?"

'Ah!" The sound cut, edged with rage, resignation, and sorrow. "Come. Come."

A trail bifurcated the bone city, leading them past the eerie structures to the far side where ceiling met floor. There, at the joining, a narrow passage ramped down.

'This is the trap."

He smelled water. He got down on hands and knees and crawled forward into a tunnel far too low for him to stand upright. He hadn't gone more than a body's length when his hands met moisture. He touched liquid to tongue, spat it out, and wormed back out.

'It tastes like sea water."

'Such water is poison to us. Through that tunnel many watches ago we come, thirty of us, seeking luiadh. The earth shivers. The feet of the wise ones far to the north shift and tremble. The waters rush in to trap us here where the tunnels run in a circle. We cannot get out."

He had to sort through this speech. "These tunnels you live in now are a dead end. The tunnel you came in through filled with water because of an earthquake. Now you are all trapped here."

'Yes. Fourteen of us have emptied, but we the rest endure with the clavas."

'So you trade silver to the miners in exchange for the corpses, which are the soil on which your food grows."

'Yes."

'It is this tunnel that leads back to your home?"

'Yes. Through this one we came. This tunnel is the path to the home, where the tribe roams the long caverns."

'Is there no other path?"

'None. Many watches we have looked. Many watches we have dug. We wait in a trap."

'Can you not climb to the surface? Find another entrance into the depths?"

'The Blinding burns us. The water poisons us. We cannot reach them. We are in a trap."

'Can you not dig your way back? You are miners, are you not?"

'We dig in the earth. We dig, but slowly. We who came to be trapped here scout only when first we come here. We left the strong tools behind. Also, we are too few to dig so far within the span of our life. We will die here, waiting. One by one."

He nodded. "I'll go. I'll swim as far as I can and see if I can get to the other side."

'The water does not poison you?"

'No. I can't drink it, but it does not poison me as long as I do not drink it."

'Why?"

'I don't know why. The salt is too strong. That's why we can't drink it."

'No. Why do you help us? Do you not wish to escape back to the Blinding?"

He sank down cross-legged, rubbing his eyes. "Why would I not help you? You are trapped. Maybe I can free you by telling your kinfolk that you still live. If I climb back up the shaft, they will kill me, so I am doomed anyway. Maybe God sent me here to help you, seeing your need."

'Who is God?"

He laughed, and the sound of laughter spooked Pewter-skin, who leaped backward and rolled up into the curled position, like a turtle retreating inside its shell. Yet his laughter acted like a knife, cutting one of the strands of the rope that chafed him. So many things bound him: his empty memory, his aching head, the mystery of his anger and grief. Still, laughter was its own enigma, a tonic to ease the burdens of life.

'Let me gather my strength first. I am so tired. I hurt. I need water to drink. Share your clavas with me, if you will. Tell me your stories while I rest. Then I will see how far I can swim." days fell into a routine. On fair mornings, Hugh presided over the schola, such as it was, with certain likely children seated on the ground before him as he taught them to write and read. Zacharias was never allowed to come close enough to listen, for if he had, he would have learned to write and thereby have a means to speak, and it was obviously Hugh's intention to prevent Zacharias from ever speaking in any form again. He had, therefore, to content himself with scratching letters in the dirt with a stick when he thought no one would observe him, and from these bent and crooked symbols he tried to puzzle out a meaning, for since he knew the liturgy by heart surely he must discover the secret that allowed words to be poured into letters, the Word that brought forth Creation according to the Holy Book in which he no longer believed. Yet there was something, surely, to the Logos, the thought and will that nestled at the heart of the universe, its kernel, its soul-if the universe had a soul. If any man had a soul.

Hugh had long since given up his soul, yet how might a man appear so beautiful and so kind and at the same time hide within himself such a poisoned heart? How could any great lord stand so patiently before a dozen dirty Salavu peasant children and teach them their letters? A pious churchman might, who hoped to see them become deacons and fraters in their turn who could minister to their countryfolk and thus bring their heathen relatives into the Light. Did that mean Hugh was a pious churchman? Or a cunning fraud? Yet he labored in support of King Henry and Queen Adelheid as their loyal servant.

These contradictions Zacharias could make no sense of. He did not understand a man of such elegance who could nevertheless live in this wilderness without complaint, keep his hands clean and yet bloody them with such cruelty as cutting out an innocent man's tongue, teach snot-nosed common children like any humble frater and yet walk among the great nobles in Darre with the arrogance of a man born to the highest rank. Be ruthless and yet seem so compassionate when mothers brought hurt children to his care, or his soldiers confessed their cares and worries and little crimes to him, for which he always prescribed a just penance leavened by the kiss of mercy.

,'/,' did not hate him, I would love him.

The weeks passed as spring flowered around them. The church rose plank by plank, and many nights Hugh took Zacharias, Deacon Adalwif, and the other clerics to the crown where they studied the stars and the mysteries hoarded by the mathematici and prepared for the spell that would soon be their part to weave.

'What of the miracle of the phoenix?" Deacon Adalwif often asked Hugh as they walked back through the earthworks by lamplight.