‘Custodian!’ Lord Commander Hemmet fell to his knees. The guards around him followed his lead.
The Custodian stood wordless for a moment. He flickered, frowned, slid back a foot from the copper disk, maybe two. A faint buzz of vibration from the ring and there stood Fexler. The ghosts locked eyes, furrowed brows in concentration or fury, locked hands … and vanished.
‘Extraordinary!’ Lord Commander Hemmet pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. ‘What happened? There were two saints? Were they fight—’
All the lights came on. Every Builder light woke at the same moment so that the dome above our head sparkled like starry heavens. The light dazzled so that you had squint against it, and made the flames of the oil lamps invisible as if we stood outside in high summer.
‘The lights …’ said Norv the Raw, as if we might not have noticed.
Before any further statements of the obvious could be made doors of gleaming steel started to slide down from recesses above every entrance save the Gilden Gate. The action accompanied by a squealing noise that set my teeth on edge, the sound of nails down Lundist’s chalkboard.
‘The doors …’ said Norv. I resisted the temptation to beat him around the head.
It took maybe a count of ten for the doors to seal themselves, metal to stone, and without pause they began to retreat at the same rate. Guards came pouring through as the doors lifted, summoned by the squeal of the mechanism. For some minutes men of the guard rushed this way and that, set on diverse missions by the Lord Commander to establish that no attack was taking place, to see what other changes may have been wrought, to calm the servants, to set at ease the minds of other guard units, and the like.
All that frenzy came to a dead halt when they brought the Custodian in, the real man whose data-ghost we’d seen in the moment before Fexler wrestled him away again. He came in escorted by four men of the guard, with more crowding behind, discipline lost, curious children trailing a stranger in the market. Fexler had broken the Custodian’s stasis.
‘Well there’s a thing,’ I said. To Sindri’s party the Builder was a stranger in strange clothes carrying a stick crested with a mass of short red ribbons. They would have to be sharp to recognize him from the brief look at his ghost on the dais. To the guards, however, a legend walked among them. To Lord Commander Hemmet a saint approached, his revered ancestor and a part of the foundation of his authority. Hemmet raised a hand and the chatter died. ‘Welcome, Custodian! Welcome!’ A broad grin on his face.
The Custodian looked bewildered and perhaps fearful, but he had been asleep for a thousand years I supposed, so I allowed him that.
A pause, and then he spoke. But what language I couldn’t say. A harsh tongue, guttural, it seemed to sit on the edge of understanding. I caught one word that sounded like ‘alert’: he said it more than once.
‘Perhaps he speaks another language,’ I said. ‘I read that there were many tongues among the Builders, almost as many across the empire as there are kingdoms. And even if he speaks the empire tongue it may be that it has changed over the course of centuries. Things move on, nothing stands still, words least of all.’
Hemmet scowled at me but the anger didn’t last, a cloud across the sun. ‘You did this, you woke him up, brought the light back to the palace. And I won’t forget it, King Jorg.’ He set a hand to the Builder’s shoulder, then moved beside him, the arm around him, protective. ‘I will speak with the Custodian in private. Captain Kosson, afford our guests all possible courtesy and escort them from the palace when their needs have been met.’
And Hemmet left us, taking his saint with him.
I bent and scooped up the view-ring. ‘Well Father Merrin, you were right. Hemmet loves me now.’ I frowned. ‘I thought someone once told me … I thought I heard that you couldn’t tell a man his future because telling him changes it.’
Merrin smiled and turned those milky eyes on me. ‘It depends on the future, Jorg, and how much you tell them. My own visions are so hazy that there’s little detail to relate.’
‘So what else can you tell me about my future, Father?’ I stepped closer so what sight remained to him might capture me.
‘You don’t want to know, Jorg,’ he said. ‘The future is a dark place. We all die there.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
And, perhaps because he knew I would wear him down – that future being plain to both of us – he answered, ‘You will kill and kill again, do the darkest deeds, betray those you should love, destroy your brother, and lead ruin to us all.’
‘So, no real change then?’ I ignored the look on Elin’s face, on Sindri’s. Disappointment put an edge on my tongue. I had thought I might grow, might be better, might be more. ‘Tell me, Father.’ And here I used ‘Father’ as though I meant it. ‘Why doesn’t every man of consequence find himself a future-sworn seer and plan a path to glory?’
A stillness came over the man. The type of regret that cannot be manufactured. He spoke with a gentle, self-deprecating humour but I knew he spoke true. ‘To look into what will be isn’t unlike self-abuse. To watch yourself march through possibilities, to follow the truth through all those twists and turns. Just a little might stunt your growth.’ I thought of Jane, tiny and older than Gorgoth. ‘Or make you go blind.’ His cataracts seemed opalescent in the Builder light. ‘And if you look too far, if you look to see what waits for us all at the end …’
‘Tell me.’
Father Merrin shook his head. ‘It burns.’
And for an instant I glimpsed a skinless hand holding a copper box.
47
