Robert Carter - The Giants’ Dance

Will picked his way through the ghastly ruins and saw the slaughter sheds and the stone basins that had once caught the hot blood of terrified animals. The slaughter knives and poleaxes were all gone from their racks, but the grim channels and lead pipes put down to feed a line of barrels were still there. In the next shed was what remained of the fat-rendering cauldrons – the vats and moulds where the Sightless Ones had once mixed up wood-ash and fat to make their ritual washing blocks. The stone floor was still waxy from old spills, and slippery.

Will’s skin tingled as he looked around, but he could not be sure if it was the lign that was causing it. The pillars of the cloister stood like broken teeth now and the space of the great hall was open to the sky, though half of the roof beams remained overhead like the ribs of a great whale. Will saw ear-like growths on the timbers, and many of them were nibbled, as if by rats, though how rats had got up so high he could not imagine. Fragments of gilding and painting remained on the walls. Everything was defaced, rain-washed and sun-faded, and the gravestone floor was scattered with thousands of broken candles and spoiled washing blocks. The place seemed to have been ransacked and then abandoned quite suddenly many months ago. There had been much violence done here.

‘Now you see the horrible truth about what happens when the Sightless Ones gather the tithe,’ Morann said. ‘It’s not just carts full of grain they take to hoard and sell. Horses, cattle, sheep, fowl – all go into their slaughterhouses.’

Will saw the place where sheep and calves had been strung up to have their throats cut. Anything that walked on two legs or four was bled into ritual jars, then soap and wax made from their fat.

‘A sickly smoke always hangs over the houses of the Fellowship at tithing time,’ Gwydion said. ‘Many trees are hewn and much wood burned for ash to make soap. Flesh is boiled up and rendered of its fat, and the meat buried or left to rot, for the Fellows partake only of the blood.’

Will knew that the soap was used in ritual washing, which was why townspeople nicknamed the Fellows ‘red hands’, though never in public for that was punishable and could end in a person’s lips being cut off.

‘And why do they make so many candles?’ Gwydion asked, and when Will made no answer he added, ‘The Fellowship make candles to light their sacred pictures.’

Will looked to the wizard and then up at the faded remnants of paint and gold leaf. ‘But…why? When the Fellows have no eyes to see them? And why would a Grand High Warden want to visit destruction upon one of his own chapter houses?’

‘The Fellows call such a thing a “Decree of the Night Fogs”,’ Gwydion told him distantly. ‘It is ordered only rarely. It is their punishment for deviation. ’

‘Deviation?’

‘That is, if a house strays from their creed so far that they cannot whip it back into line. Then they cut it off and trample it into dust. This is done partly lest the disease spreads to other chapter houses, and partly by way of example. They erase all reference to the broken house from their records. They destroy its chronicle, take away its adherents. Such a house becomes to them a house that has never stood, and the Fellows who failed become men who have never lived.’

‘Is that what happened here?’ Will said, looking around. He could feel the prickling in his skin growing stronger and wanted now only to get away from the place.

‘I do not know what happened here, for the doings of the Fellowship are kept a tightly bound secret. But did I not tell you how the houses of the Sightless Ones are most often built upon ligns and other streams of earth power?’

‘How could this house have failed?’ Will asked, stepping over piles of broken wood and fallen slates.

‘This may be the explanation,’ Gwydion said. ‘You know that the Doomstone was the slab that capped the tomb of their Founder. When it was broken that source of power which is habitually tapped and abused by the Sightless Ones must have shifted. Did you not tell me of the madness that beat through the chapter house of Verlamion when the lorc came alive?’

Will remembered. ‘It was hardly to be imagined. As if the one idea filling all their heads had suddenly gone out like a candle and left a darkness which they could not bear.’

Gwydion turned to him. ‘In like wise, Willand, the troubles of this house may have started as soon as we plucked up the Dragon Stone. For the power of the lorc certainly shifts when a battlestone is taken from the earth, and this house also stands upon the lign of the ash.’

Will looked around the stone-cold walls, aware of the perpetual shadows that lurked in the corners.

‘You must beware the Sightless Ones,’ Gwydion told him earnestly, ‘for they do not love you. They will not easily forgive the intruder who defiled their most revered shrine.’

Will felt the walls close in around him. ‘I’ve wondered more than once why the Fellowship has not come into the Vale to get me. They were the only ones, apart from yourself and Morann, who ever came near.’

Morann shook his head. ‘They cannot find the Vale. They’ve never come into it, nor will they ever. I was always at Nether Norton when the tithe fell due. It was I who took the carts through the quag and down to Middle Norton. The red hands from Great Norton never approached further than that. They don’t know of the Vale’s cloaking. They’re interested only in amassing wealth. It’s gold that gives them influence.’

Gwydion said, ‘The Fellowship does not connect the Vale and what they call the pollution of their chapter house at Verlamion. Still, at their annual public self-mutilations in Trinovant Isnar has sworn to destroy the one who broke the Doomstone. You must not underestimate him, for he never underestimates his enemies. And the threat you pose them is very great.’

‘With all their wealth and power?’ Will said, looking about. ‘What threat could I be to them?’

‘That is easy to answer. I have already said that you are the Child of Destiny, third incarnation of Great Arthur of old. What you will do if the prophecies of the Black Book are brought to full fruit, will cause their spires to topple. And not before time!’

‘But I don’t see how—’

Morann made an open-handed gesture at what lay around them. ‘It’s been their habit for at least a thousand years to build where the men of olden times set up cairns and groves, and so supplant the Old Ways.’

Gwydion grasped his staff tighter. ‘Many of their chapter houses must be built upon ligns. They do not know it, but they feed on the power of the lorc as greenfly feed upon sap that rises in a flower stem. With every battlestone we discover and root out, Willand, another of their houses will fall as this one has.’

Will folded his arms. ‘Then let us hope we find all the battlestones. Whatever it was that made the Sightless Ones leave here, I’m glad.’

‘Bravely said.’ Morann clapped him on the back. ‘The red hands tell all who will listen that they bring freedom, life and peace, but they trade in slavery, death and war.’

Now Gwydion hastened forward like one who has suddenly found what he was looking for: a steep stone stair that led down into the cellars. They followed him into the stinking darkness, until he struck up a pale blue light for them to see by. The place was vacant now, the treasury emptied of its gold and all the strongroom doors thrown open. The blue glow that lit the palm of the wizard’s hand seemed reluctant to penetrate the gloom. He walked alone in the magelight shadows, and unguessable thoughts troubled him. ‘Behold!’ he said, raising his staff. ‘It is as I suspected. This is more than a thieves’ hoard-room.’