The Serpent Bride. Sara Douglass

      “I don’t know, Maxel.”

      “I am sick of hearing your ‘I don’t knows’!”

      “I —”

      “Listen to me, Vorstus. I know that you were instrumental in aiding my escape from the Veins, and for that you know I am grateful. But I am not going to spend my life mired in debt to you, nor am I going to put up with you stepping coyly about something that has the power to destroy this entire world. Gods! Have I not had enough darkness in my life? Or do the gods demand something else from me besides losing seventeen years, seventeen years, Vorstus, to those damned, damned gloam mines? Have I not suffered enough”

      “If Elcho Falling is waking, Maximilian Persimius, then you must do what needs to be done.”

      The patronising idiot, Maximilian thought. “Ah, get out of here, Vorstus.”

      Maximilian waited until Vorstus had his hand on the door handle before speaking again.

      “One more thing, Vorstus. You know of the Persimius Chamber?”

      Vorstus gave a wary nod.

      “You know what it contains?”

      Another wary nod.

      “But you never took Cavor there. You never inducted him into the deeper mysteries of the Persimius throne.”

      Vorstus now gave a very reluctant single shake of his head, and Maximilian could see that his hand had grown white-knuckled about the door handle.

      “I was standing in the Persimius Chamber the other night, Vorstus, and a strange unsettling thought occurred to me. Here you are, Abbot of the Order of Persimius, and the only one apart from the king and his heir who knows what truly underpins the Persimius throne. But for seventeen years, when everyone save Cavor thought me dead, you never once took the opportunity of inducting Cavor into the mysteries? Should you not have done that? I can perhaps understand you waiting a year or so, hoping for a miracle, but seventeen?”

      “I always had faith that you —”

      “You knew, for those entire seventeen years, Vorstus, that I was alive. That is the only reason you did not induct Cavor into the mysteries. You knew I was coming back.”

      “I —”

      “Get out, Vorstus. Get out!”

      When the door had closed behind him, Maximilian walked to a mirror and stood before it, seeing not a reflection of himself, but of the bleakness that had consumed him within the Veins.

      “You knew where I was,” Maximilian whispered, “and you left me there for seventeen years.”

      Much later that night, still unsettled and unable to turn his mind away from Elcho Falling, Maximilian sat in his darkened bedchamber, rested his head against the high back of the chair, and closed his eyes.

      As he had visited the Persimius Chamber on a previous night, so now Maximilian visited another of the mysteries his father had taught him.

      The Twisted Tower.

      The crown of Elcho Falling carried with it many responsibilities, many duties, and a great depth of dark, writhing mystery. Each King of Escator, and his heir, had to learn it all in case they one day had to assume once more the crown of Elcho Falling.

      There was an enormous amount of information, of ritual, of windings and wakings, and of magic so powerful that it took great skill, and an even better memory, to wield it. There was so much to recall, and to hand down through the generations, that long ago one of the Persimius kings, perhaps the last of the sitting Lords of Elcho Falling, had created a memory palace in which to store all the knowledge of Elcho Falling.

      They called it the Twisted Tower.

      Maximilian now entered the Twisted Tower, recalling as he did so the day his father had first taught him how to open the door.

       “Visualise before you,” his father had said, “a great twisted tower, coiling into the sky. It stands ninety levels high, and contains but one door at ground level, and one window just below the roofline. On each level there is one single chamber. Can you picture it, Maxel?”

      Maximilian, even though he was but nine, could do so easily. The strange tower — its masonry laid so that its courses lifted in corkscrews — rose before him as if he had known it intimately from birth and, under his father’s direction, Maximilian laid his hand to the handle of the door and opened it.

       A chamber lay directly inside, crowded with furniture that was overlaid with so many objects Maximilian could only stand and stare.

       “See here,” his father had said. “This blue and white plate as it sits on the table. It is the first object you see, and it contains a memory. Pick it up, Maxel, and tell me what you see.”

       Maximilian picked up the plate. As he did so, a stanza of verse filled his mind, and his lips moved soundlessly as he rolled the words about his mouth.

       “That is part of the great invocation meant to raise the gates of Elcho Falling,” said his father. “The second stanza lies right next to it, the red glass ball. Pick that up, now, and learn …”

      Maximilian had not entered the Twisted Tower since his last lesson with his father, just before his fourteenth birthday when he’d been abducted. That lesson had, fortuitously, been the day his father had taken him into the final chamber at the very top of the Twisted Tower. Despite it being well over twenty years since he’d last entered, Maximilian had no trouble in recreating in his mind the Twisted Tower, and travelled it now, examining every object in each successive chamber and recalling their memories throughout the height of the tower.

      As he rose, the chambers became increasingly empty.

      It began at the thirty-sixth level chamber. This chamber was, as all the chambers below it, crammed with furniture, which in turn was crammed with objects, each containing a memory. But occasional empty places lay scattered about, marked by shapes in the dust, showing that objects had once rested there.

       Maximilian turned to his father. “Why are there empty spaces, father?”

       His father shifted uncomfortably. “The memories held within these objects have been passed down for many thousands of years, Maxel. Sometimes mistakes have been made in the passing, objects have been mislaid, memories forgotten. So much has been lost, son. I am sorry.”

       “But what if we needed it, father? What if we needed to resurrect Elcho Falling?”

       His father had not answered that question, which had in itself been answer enough for Maximilian.

      Now Maximilian entered the final chamber at the very top of the tower.

      It was utterly barren of any furniture or objects.

      Everything it had once contained had been forgotten.

      Maximilian stood there, turning about, thinking about how the chambers had become progressively emptier as he’d climbed through the tower.

      He was glad that he had remembered everything his father had taught him, and that he could retrieve the memories intact as he took each object into his hands.

      But, contrariwise, Maximilian was filled with despair at the thought that if, if, he was to be the King of Escator who once again had to shoulder the ancient responsibilities of Elcho Falling, he would need to do so with well over half of the memories, the rituals and the enchantments of Elcho Falling forgotten and lost for all time.

PART TWO

1