Doors Opened

Synopsis

Koa worked out that the iron-banded door at the end of the hall was not a door: it was a door painted onto solid stone. Aldo found genuine wear on one of the painted studs, pressed it, and a slit opened onto a three-layered dial with no keyhole anywhere: right, then left, then right, which is how a left-handed people build a lock. Two spray-traps sat under it, so they argued for an hour rather than guess. Mikhail read the twelve symbols and what each stood for: servitude, power, experimentation, perfection, growth, and seven besides. Three had to be chosen in order, and there were two ways in. Aldo took flask, tree, gem: experiment, growth, perfection. The lock clicked, part of the ceiling came down on the other two, and the door ground open.

Beyond was a hall built into the mountain across several levels with no supporting pillar in it, and past that a balcony over the whole oval valley with a nest on it big enough for three men to sleep in, feathered reddish-gold cresting to platinum. Koa said it was no giant eagle’s.

Then Aldo saw movement at the foot of the cliff: two figures running, and a dozen gnolls with hyenas closing from the direction of the camp. Koa shouted down, and one of the strangers shouted back that the gnolls were slavers who eat the flesh and take the rest, and asked them to come down and fight or open the door. There was no getting down the trapped stairs in time. They screamed the count; the two smaller strangers cursed them and ran; the gnolls cornered the third, a big man with an axe and a chain, and he was killed while all three watched from a thousand feet up.

Up an ornate wooden door was a long hall with four heavy doors off it. Three had no handle, no latch and no way to be opened. The fourth gave onto a round chamber with a stone table carved in relief with the map of Idir as it stood seven hundred years ago. There Koa saw a flickering figure Aldo could not see, and Mikhail heard a voice neither of the others heard, and Aldo, who perceived nothing at all, panicked and tried to drag them both out.

The spirit is Peren, and old, and bound there by a spell to wait for whoever was prophesied to come. There is one great curse, it said, on all of Idir and all Peren alike; in Idir it takes the form of the Shattered Throne, so that any true ruler of the land goes mad and his realm crumbles under him, which is why this country has never held a government worth the name. The Mól made the Peren by alchemy, as perfect servants in their own image, and the Peren rose and pulled the empire down, and the one who led them was Vëné. She chose the party, and there should have been visions; only her Peren kin can perceive him, which makes Koa’s seeing and Mikhail’s hearing either a mistake or a sign that she is in trouble.

Seven keeps bind it, each holding a pair of diametrically opposed stones: destroy the one that powers the curse, or set its opposite correctly, and that keep goes quiet for a month before it heals. Break three in the same hour, or all seven inside one moon, and it ends. He marked six on the map: this one; Haudh-Gwenn; a keep in the forest east of Loshev; one north near Ridh, on a hill at the end of a river that runs underground; the Chaos Keep beside the Free Folk woods; and one far south of Haudh-Gwenn. The seventh is lost. Behind the sealed doors are the cursed ones: guardians who reform when killed, and who would have been let out at anybody else.

Shown a gold feather, he named the bird: a beast the curse transformed, who answers Vëné’s call and guards this place, and whose Taal name means the exalted matriarch. Sing Vëné’s song and she may consent to carry a rider. For the song they need Peren records of her; Nathan Fox was the first name anyone thought of.

Under the map table was a loose slab, and under it three bottles seven hundred years old. Aldo drank one, and both of the others suddenly heard the Elder in their own perfect dialects. Then Mikhail smelled the bottle properly and told him it was fermented blood. Aldo ran the length of the hall and was sick into the great bird’s nest.