There are things in this world that are older than language. Older than magic. Older than the stones we build our schools from. And those things sleep, and they dream, and they wait. And the day they stop waiting, it will not be a beginning. It will be a return.

Fragment of text found carved into stone beneath Déynáir, language unknown, translation disputed

Chapter 25

The Preparation

Ahra came back on the fifth day.

I heard him before I saw him. Footsteps in the empty corridor, quick and a little too loud, and Lynx's paws ticking against the stone, and then his breathing, out of breath, as if he had run all the way from the ferry. The door to the First-Year Room flew open, and there he stood with his bag over his shoulder and his hair in his eyes and Lynx in his arms and a face that was half relieved and half furious.

"Three days," he said. "Three days I sat in my grandmother's front room trying to pretend everything was normal, while Retia sent Fulmen with a note saying nobody had seen you in the dining hall for three days." His scent of warm bark and honey filled the room, stronger than usual, heated by the journey and the anger and the worry. "Three days, Chris."

"I know," I said.

"You know." He put Lynx down. Lynx ran over to the fire and lay down and began to wash himself, untroubled by his owner's drama. Ahra stood in the middle of the room looking at me, and his eyes were bright.

"Are you all right?" he said.

"No," I said. "But I'm here."

He nodded. Slowly. And then he came over to me and put his arms around me, and it was the strangest thing anyone had done in a long time, because fifteen-year-old boys don't hug each other, you just don't, but Ahra did, and it was clumsy and too tight and too long, and his robe was cold from the winter air, and his hair tickled my neck, and it was exactly right.

"Don't do that again," he said into my shoulder.

"What? Confront my uncle or lie in bed for three days?"

"Both. Not without me."

Retia was sitting on the windowsill, looking at us with a face that was soft in a way she rarely showed. She said nothing. She didn't need to.

I told them everything.

We sat in the First-Year Room with the door closed and the fire lit, and I told them everything I had kept inside, everything I had told them in pieces and halves, and now it all came out, from start to finish, in the right order.

The cave on the test island. The symbols. The fresh footprints. The stone that was warm beneath the wreath of hawthorn. The pulse of the mountain under my feet, stronger every week. Arcanus in the dark saying, "He was the best of us." Edrin's office. My father's last words. "Hide him. Hide him so well that not even Kôilé can find him." My mother, who had found me anyway, and my uncle, who didn't know how. My uncle saying "Please" in a voice that was a plea. The three days in bed. The nothing. And Alôpex saying: "You won't stop existing either."

I told them all of it, and when I had finished, Ahra sat still with his tea in his hands, looking down into it, and Retia sat with her legs tucked under her and her fingers twined together in her lap, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

"So it's true," said Ahra at last. "Edrin is your uncle."

"Yes."

"And your father was one of Section XIII."

"Yes."

"And Arcanus is one of them."

"I think so."

Ahra put his tea down. Slowly. Carefully. Raised his hands and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else.

"My brother," he said. "Kalmin. He's mixed up in this. He talks to Arcanus in the passages. He..." He stopped. His fingers curled into fists. "He's part of whatever's protecting you. And he's never told me."

"Yes," I said.

"Everyone keeps secrets," said Retia quietly. Her voice was flat the way it went when she said something that was true and painful. "My father. Your uncle. His brother." She looked from Ahra to me. "But we don't. Not any more."

It was a promise. A new promise. Not a stone oath. Nothing the castle heard. Just something we said and meant.

Nihil came on the sixth day.

He didn't knock. It was his room. When I went up after dinner, he was sitting on his bed with his worn winter robe still on and a book in his lap, as if he had been sitting there for some time waiting for the door to open. His face was thin and pale and had shadows under the eyes of the sort you get when you haven't slept for many nights. His scent of winter wind and bare iron was sharper than usual, with an edge of something metallic that reminded me of old Dherak. From his sleeve a white snout poked out and drew back in again as Alôpex came in behind me. "Brúma," he said softly into the sleeve, and it was the first time I had heard that she had a name.

"The holiday isn't over," I said.

"I can feel it," he said. No greeting. No introduction. Just that. "The mountain. It's calling. And I dream about things I don't understand."

"I know," I said. "You talk in your sleep."

He looked at me a moment too long. He said nothing to that.

"Stay here," I said.

I fetched Ahra and Retia up from the First-Year Room. Retia sat down on the floor with her back against my bed. Ahra stayed standing in the doorway, as if he wasn't sure whether he was allowed in, until Lynx walked past him and jumped up onto my duvet, and then he sat down next to him. Nihil stayed where he was. He watched them with quick eyes that took in everything: Ahra on my bed, Retia on the floor, the three Amícûs all watching him with attentive eyes. None of us had ever come over to his side of the room, and I could see that he didn't know what to do with himself.

Then he laid the book on the floor between us.

I knew the spine before I had seen the rest. Black leather, worn and cracked, the spine broken, the pages yellowed and thin. And on the spine, in gold that had almost worn away: Godrand. The same book that had stood on the back shelf in The Golden Book on the first day in Tés Aváir, and which hadn't been there when I passed in November. It smelt of cellar and old magic and something sour, like things that have lain in the dark too long.

"Where did you get that?" I said.

"It was in the locked section of the library," said Nihil. "The spine said Godrand. I took it because it had your name, and then I couldn't put it down." He looked down at it. "In November."

"It comes in in the morning and it's gone by evening," the bookseller had said. One evening in November it hadn't gone back. It had been under his bed for a month. Three metres from mine. He had read it alone at night while I lay listening to him breathe. I felt the anger come, hot and quick, the same as in Edrin's office. Another one who had held something back. And I knew it was unfair, because Nihil owed me nothing, and he was the only one of them who had never promised me anything. I let it lie.

He opened the book at a page with an illustration. "This is from three hundred years ago. Just after the time of the War."

We all leant over it. The illustration showed a mountain in section, like a cross-section of a cake, and inside the mountain there were chambers. Many chambers, connected by tunnels, and in the deepest chamber there was something drawn in red ink that didn't look like anything I had seen before. It wasn't an animal. Not a person. Not a weapon. It was a shape somewhere between all three, and it was surrounded by symbols I knew: the wreath of hawthorn, the sword, the dagger. Out in the margin there were small golden characters, and those Nihil couldn't read. He said so before anyone asked.

"Section XIII sealed it," said Nihil. His finger followed the lines of the illustration. "In the time of the War. They put it in there and sealed it, and they set a guard that was never supposed to sleep. The book calls it 'the Guardian of the Gate'. It says that whatever is in there isn't from this world. It came through an opening a long, long time ago, and it can't be killed, only shut in."

"A gate," said Retia. "To what?"

"The book doesn't say. Or it's been torn out. There are pages missing." Nihil looked up. "But it says the seal is at its weakest on the shortest day of the year, when the Dherak in the ground is at its lowest. And it says someone with Godrand blood is needed to open it." He looked straight at me. "Or to close it again."

Silence in the room. The wind tugged at the window. Alôpex lifted her head from my feet and looked at me with her black eyes.

"The dreams," said Nihil. "I dream about fire. About someone screaming. About tunnels under stone." He looked down at his hands. "I thought it was my own mess. My kind of thoughts."

"I've heard you," I said.

"But it isn't," he said, as if I hadn't spoken. "It's the same as you. I can feel it because my Dherak is like yours. Too big for what I can hold. The mountain can feel us both."

"Welcome to the club," said Ahra from my bed, with a half grin that didn't reach his eyes.

We made plans. If you could call it making plans.

Four teenagers on a bedroom floor with an old map, an older book with missing pages, and three magic words we had learnt a month and a half ago. That was all we had. That, and four Amícûs who were cleverer than us, and a stubbornness that was bigger than our experience.

"We know the seal is under the mountain," said Retia. She was kneeling with the map from our passage hunts spread out on the floor in front of her, the red lines pointing north. "We know the passages lead down there. We know Arcanus and Kalmin have been down there. And we know someone is pushing against the seal."

"We don't know who," said Ahra.

"We know it's Malum's people," I said. "Arcanus told Kalmin."

"We don't know what we'll do when we get down there," said Nihil. He sat with his back against the wall on his bed with his arms crossed, looking at the map with those flat blue eyes. "We don't know if we can close the seal. We don't know what happens if we can't."

"We know enough to know we can't wait," said Retia. "The Winter Solstice is tomorrow. The seal is at its weakest that night. And Malum's people know it."

"So the plan is: go down, see what happens, and improvise?" said Ahra.

"Yes," said Retia.

"That's a terrible plan."

"Yes," said Retia.

Ahra looked at me. I looked at him. And we both laughed, the kind of laugh that comes when something is so absurd and so dangerous that the only alternative to laughing is to go back to bed.

"All right," said Ahra. "Terrible plan. I'm in."

"Me too," said Nihil. He said it quietly, without a grin, and his eyes were serious, and that was the moment I understood that Nihil Mathson wasn't in because he was brave. He was in because he had no choice. The mountain was calling him as hard as it was calling me, and the only difference was that he had lain with it for weeks, three metres from my bed, and I had turned over and pretended to be asleep.

"Thanks," I said to him.

He nodded. A short nod. Nihil's nods always said more than his words.

In the evening we sat by the river.

It was four metres wide now. Four metres of dark, slow water with ice along the edges, and tomorrow, at the Winter Solstice, it might be three, close to its narrowest. You could almost cross it dry-shod. Every barrier was thin.

The sky was clear and cold and full of stars, the strange stars of Anglia that never looked like the ones over the fjord, and the moon was a thin sickle hanging low over the horizon, casting a faint, silver-blue light over the river and the grass and the castle walls.

We sat in silence. Retia at my side with Fulmen in her lap. Ahra on the other side with Lynx against his leg. Nihil a little way off, alone but present, with his hands folded and his gaze fixed on the mountain that rose black against the shining stars. Between the roots of the bare tree behind him sat Brúma, his ermine, white in her winter coat and black at the tip of her tail, and so still that you only saw her when she turned her head.

Alôpex lay in my lap breathing slowly, and her fur was warm under my fingers, and her heart beat with the calm regularity that said she was ready for whatever came.

The air smelt of frost and stone and the cold water of the narrow river and something underneath it all, the metallic scent of Dherak that was everywhere on the island but stronger tonight, denser, as if the earth itself were breathing more deeply.

"Are you scared?" I said.

"Yes," said Ahra.

"No," said Retia. A pause. "Yes."

Nihil said nothing. His jaw tightened, and that was answer enough.

We sat looking at the narrow river and the great mountain and the cold sky, and we said nothing more, because there was nothing more to say. Tomorrow everything would change. Tomorrow we would know things we didn't know yet, and we would wish we didn't know them, and we wouldn't be able to forget them.

But tonight we were just four people by a river in December, with four animals that had chosen us, and a silence filled with everything we shared and everything we were afraid of.

It was enough. For one evening, it was enough.

Cajis's message came at eleven o'clock at night.

A small grey dove, the same one that had brought Retia's letter weeks earlier, flew in through the open window of the First-Year Room and landed on the table in front of Retia. The little roll of parchment was tied with red string, and Retia's fingers undid it with movements that were too calm, a control that says the hands know something the brain refuses to accept.

She read. Her face didn't change. But her fingers held the parchment so hard that it cracked at the edge.

"My father's here," she said. "On the island. Cajis heard it from one of the neighbours, who saw him board the ferry to Déynáir this morning."

"Here?" said Ahra. "On Déynáir?"

"Yes."

We looked at each other. The Thief King had left his city. He had come to the island. And there was only one reason a man like Niram Caritas would leave Tés Aváir: whatever was under the mountain was important enough.

And then I felt it.

Not a sound. Not a scent. A movement. Deep beneath my feet, deep beneath the castle, deep beneath everything human, something stirred. Not the slow pulse I had come to know. Something faster. Something being pushed. Something reacting to a power that wasn't mine.

Alôpex rose in my lap with her fur on end. Lynx growled. Fulmen spread its wings.

A tremor ran through the castle. Short. Hard. The flames in the fireplace jumped. A picture fell from the wall. A glass on the table toppled over and rolled onto the floor and shattered with a sound that was too small for what was happening.

"Someone's pushing against the seal," I said. "Now. Not tomorrow. Now."

Nihil's eyes were wide and dark, and he was already on his feet. Retia stood with Cajis's letter crumpled in her fist. Ahra's face was white, but his hands were still, and they weren't shaking.

"The plan was tomorrow," said Ahra.

"The plan is now," I said.

We took our robes. Our staffs. The swords stayed by our beds, because you didn't carry a sword outside combat lessons, and we kept that rule out of pure habit without thinking about it. What we had. It wasn't enough. It was never enough. But it was what we had, and it was what we went with. Out in the corridor there were shouts and running footsteps, adult voices disappearing down towards the cellars, and we took the passage the other way.

Alôpex ran ahead of me into the night. Lynx followed Ahra. Fulmen flew above Retia's head. Nihil walked alone, but he walked, and his steps were sure.

We went up the mountain in the dark, four people and four animals, and none of us knew that only three would come down again.