In the harbour quarter of Tés Aváir they say of a man who has lived a long time and doesn't look it that he has stood too close to the water.

Proverb, recorded in "Sayings from the Coast"

Chapter 20

The Mountain

It began with sleeplessness.

Not the ordinary kind, the kind that is about too many thoughts and too little tiredness. This was different. I lay in my bed in the room with my eyes closed and Alôpex warm against my neck, and my body was tired, and my head was quiet after the evening's meditation, and still there was something that wouldn't let me sleep. Surain had left that same morning. He had said he would come back, but not when, and I had already stood by the river that evening and listened on my own. That afternoon I had found Vessa after history and told her the only thing I could tell her without breaking anything: that someone was looking. She had pressed her books to her chest and nodded and hadn't asked for more.

It came from the north.

Not a sound. Not a smell. A feeling. A pull, deep down in my Dherak, a vibration that pulsed slowly and insistently, and it pointed in one direction, and that direction was the mountain.

I had felt it before. Faintly, in the background, like a sound you hear so often that you stop noticing it. But that night it was stronger. It pounded behind my ribs with the same deep note I had felt that first night on the test island, when the earth itself had hummed beneath me.

Alôpex lifted her head. "You can feel it," she said.

"Yes."

"It's been calling you for weeks. You've just been listening to it without knowing."

I sat up in bed. The darkness in the room was deep, and Nihil's breathing was slow and regular in the other bed. Through the window above my bed I could see the mountain. It rose against the night sky, darker than the darkness around it, and its outline was sharp against the stars.

I got up. Pulled on trousers, a jumper, my boots. Took my robe from its hook and pulled the hood up. As I turned towards the door, I saw that Nihil's eyes were open. He said nothing.

"Chris," said Alôpex. "It's forbidden."

"Yes."

"We're doing it anyway."

"Yes."

The castle at night was a different place from the castle by day.

The corridors were empty and silent, and the torchlight had dimmed to the low, bluish glow that threw long shadows up the walls. My footsteps echoed on the stone floor, and every echo seemed too loud, too clear, and I walked faster and more quietly and found the routes I knew from our passage hunts, the routes that avoided the corridors the teachers patrolled at night.

Alôpex ran ahead of me with her ears pricked and her tail low, and she found the way with her nose, and I followed her through one of the hidden passages we had mapped, one that led out through a door in the castle's cellar level and out into the garden.

The night air was December-cold. Sharp and clean and dry, with a frost that settled on my skin like glaze, and my breath rose like white smoke in the moonlight. The sky was clear, and there were stars everywhere, the strange Anglia stars that never quite looked like the ones I knew from the fjord, and the moon hung low and heavy over the horizon and cast a silver-blue light over everything.

The river lay to my left, narrow now, perhaps twenty metres across, and the ice along its edges was thicker than it had been that morning. But the middle never froze. The mountain lay ahead of me, and it was closer than it looked by day, a great dark mass rising above the treetops and up towards the stars.

I began to walk towards it. My boots crunched in the frozen grass. Alôpex ran beside me without a sound, her white fur almost invisible in the moonlight.

When I reached the edge of the forest, everything changed. The forest closed around me, and the moonlight became thin stripes between the branches, and the air grew denser, wetter, heavier with the smell a forest has at night: frost on bark, wet moss, the sharp smell of resin seeping out of the trunks of the conifers in the cold.

I began to climb. The path was narrow and uneven, and my boots slipped on the frozen stones, and my hands grabbed at roots and outcrops of rock to keep my balance. Alôpex ran ahead of me with sure steps, her paws finding the places my boots couldn't, and her white fur glimmered faintly whenever a patch of moonlight found her through the treetops.

The higher I climbed, the stronger the pulse beneath my feet. It was there all the time now, a slow, deep vibration that went up through the rock and into the bones of my legs and on up into my hips and my spine. It was the same vibration Surain had taught me to feel by the river, the same pulse that lay under everything, but here it was stronger. Much stronger. Up here on the mountain, Dherak wasn't something you had to search for. It was everywhere, soaked into the air and the stones and the earth, so dense that it prickled on the skin.

I stopped and breathed. In through the nose, four beats. Hold, four beats. Out through the mouth, six beats. The rhythm Maka had taught me by the river. And with every breath I sank deeper into the place that lay under the thoughts, the quiet place, and from there I could feel the mountain more clearly.

It was alive. Not in the sense that it was an animal. In the sense that there was something inside it that was breathing, slowly, with gaps so long that you might think it was dead, if you didn't listen patiently enough.

Halfway up I stopped.

Not because I was tired. Because something had changed. The air was different here. Denser. Heavier. Soaked with a Dherak stronger than anything I had felt, stronger than in the passages, stronger than in the cave on the test island. It was the kind of place Surain had talked about.

And in the rock face in front of me there was a symbol.

I knew it. The wreath of hawthorn. The sword. The dagger. Carved into the stone with a precision that wasn't human, every line sharp and deep, and although it must have been hundreds of years old, it was as clear as if it had been made yesterday.

I reached out my hand. My fingers touched the stone.

Warmth. The symbol was warm under my fingers, alive and pulsing, and the moment I touched it, it lit up. Briefly. White. Sharp. A split second of light that cut through the darkness of the night and made Alôpex blink and the trees throw shadows in every direction.

And something under the mountain responded.

I felt it through my feet. A movement deep down in the earth, a slow, heavy movement like something turning over in its sleep. Not an earthquake. Something alive. Something that had lain still for a very long time and now, for the first time in a very long time, sensed that someone was there.

Alôpex pressed herself against my leg. Her fur was standing on end, and her heart was hammering against my ankle.

"Chris," she said. "What's down there under us... it's big. Very big. And it's woken. Not completely. But a little."

I took my hand away from the symbol. The light went out. The pulse under my feet grew weaker, slowly, but it didn't disappear completely. It was still there, deep and slow, the heartbeat of something older than the castle, older than the school, older than everything people had built here.

"That's what's been calling you," said Alôpex. "It can feel your Dherak. And your Dherak can feel it."

"What is it?"

"I don't know. But it has been waiting. For a long time."

"Godrand."

The voice came from above. Calm. Clear. Not angry. Something else.

Arcanus was standing on a ledge of rock ten metres above me. His hooded silhouette was dark against the bright stars, and his golden bracelet glinted faintly in the moonlight. He stood completely still, with a stillness that said he had been standing there a long time. Perhaps the whole time.

"Professor," I said. My voice was hoarse with cold.

He jumped down. Didn't climb. Jumped. Ten metres, and he landed without a sound on the stony ground in front of me with a lightness too controlled to be natural. His robe didn't move. His feet made no sound.

His scent was close to me now, layered and manifold, and it had changed from the one I knew. There was something new in it. Something open. A layer had been drawn aside, and under it was a scent like old pine and warm iron, and it reminded me of something, it reminded me of someone, but I couldn't place it.

"You touched the seal," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"And you felt what is beneath us."

"Yes."

He looked at me from under his hood. I could see his mouth and his chin, and his mouth was tight, and his chin was tense.

"There are things under this mountain that are older than the school," he said. His voice was low and serious. "Older than Anglia. They have lain still for three hundred years, sealed in by people who knew what they were doing. And now they are beginning to wake. Not because of you. But because you are here, and your Dherak is too great for them to ignore."

"What are they?"

"Things that no longer belong in this world. Things that were shut away for a reason."

"By Section XIII?"

Silence. A long silence. The night air was cold between us, and my words hung in it like frost forming on glass. An owl screeched somewhere down in the forest, and the sound was sharp and lonely, and it echoed through the frozen trees.

"You know more than you should," said Arcanus at last. His voice was low.

"I know less than everyone wants me to think. But I know enough to know that everyone is lying to me."

Arcanus didn't move. But something in the way he held himself changed. His shoulders, which were always tight and controlled, dropped a millimetre. It was the smallest movement, but it said that something in him was giving way.

"It isn't lying," he said quietly. "It's protection."

"That's what everyone says. And it doesn't make it any better."

He looked at me. And for the first time I could see his eyes under the hood, clear in the moonlight. They were dark and deep and full of something that was more than authority. Something like grief.

"Go back down, Godrand," he said. "And don't come up here alone again. Not because I forbid it. Because what is down there..." He stopped. His hand gripped the outcrop of rock beside him, and his fingers tightened on the stone. "It can feel you. And there are others who can feel you too, when you use your Dherak this close to the seal. Others who are not friendly."

A name rose in me, cold as the water in the river. The woman's voice at the round table in the dream. "They are stronger than us, Malum."

"Malum?" I said.

The silence that followed was different from the others. It was full of something.

"Did you know my father?" I said.

His mouth opened. Closed. His hand on the outcrop held on so hard that I could see his knuckles white in the moonlight. And then he opened his mouth again, and he said:

"He was the best of us."

That was all. And then he turned and vanished upwards into the darkness, without a sound, and there was only the cold night and the pulsing stone and the words he had said, hanging in the air like smoke.

He was the best of us. Of us. Not of them. Of us.

Arcanus had known my father. And he had counted himself as one of the same.

I went down. My boots slipped on the frost-covered stones, and my hands were cold, and my heart was hammering. Arcanus didn't look much over twenty, and my father had died before I could remember anything. I did the sum all the way down, and it didn't add up. And I had said the name from the dream out loud to a teacher. It only dawned on me now. Behind me Arcanus was gone, but his scent still hung in the air, warm and faintly of iron and full of things he hadn't said.

When I reached the edge of the forest and stood on the frozen grass again, with legs heavy with Dherak and hands shaking with cold and with something that wasn't cold, with the castle in front of me and the river glinting in the moonlight, I stopped and looked back at the mountain. It rose above the forest, dark and enormous, and what was inside it was still pulsing, faintly but without stopping, the heartbeat of something that was waiting.

I breathed. Cold night air that tasted of frost and stars.

Arcanus had said: "He was the best of us." Of us. My father. And Arcanus.

Surain had said: "Your father was one of the Thirteen."

Haltora's scent of embers had flared when he heard my name by the river.

Edrin had looked at me with a pain he wouldn't explain.

And now Arcanus. All of them. All these people who knew my name and carried something they didn't say, and the pattern that had slowly come into view over the weeks grew clearer with every name that was added. My father had been part of something. Something big. Something that connected them all. And I was what was left of what he had been.

I walked home through the frozen landscape with Alôpex at my side and thought that the mountain wouldn't wait for ever, and that neither would I.

When I closed the door of the room behind me, Nihil was sitting upright in his bed in the dark with the blanket round his shoulders.

"You smell of mountain," he said.

I didn't answer. I pulled off my boots and lay down with my face to the wall and heard him go on sitting there for a long time.