Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [329]
"We came home," I said. "It's a long story."
"So I believe." Hyacinthe resumed his climb, the cloak of indeterminate color trailing behind him. I gasped after him, muscles quivering. I'd forgotten how long and steep was the stair that led to the top. I was nearly done in by the time we reached the open-air temple.
It was unchanged during his tenure, the flagstones of white marble, marble columns reaching skyward like an unanswered prayer. Far below us, the ship Elua's Promise looked like a child's toy, floating in a watery ring. In the center of the temple stood the great bronze vessel upon its tripod—the sea-mirror, Hyacinthe had called it. And beside it, a pair of robed figures bowed deeply before the Master of the Straits.
"Tilian," Hyacinthe said, naming them. "Gildas. You will remember Phèdre nó Delaunay."
I remembered them. Gildas, the elder, had been white-haired when I'd met him before; now, he was ancient. He came forward trembling, one crabbed hand extended. "Thou hast agreed," he said, his voice quavering, speaking in the D'Angeline of the oldest courtly lays. "Thou hast agreed to the sacrifice, fair lady!"
"Not exactly." I took his hand in both of mine. The bones felt bird-hollow, sheathed in skin like parchment. "I have come to break thecurse, my lord Gildas. Your long service here is done."
He withdrew his hand with a querulous sound. Hyacinthe merely watched, colors shifting in his dark eyes. Tilian, the younger, bowed to him.
"Wilst thou require the basin refilled ere sundown, my lord?" he asked.
"You heard her," Hyacinthe replied. "Soon it will be ended here, one way or another. I require nothing further."
They remained behind, watching with consternation as Hyacinthe led the way down a second set of steps to the lonely tower that had been his home for so long. It rose, grey and stony, from the rocks of Third Sister, the oriel windows glinting in the sun—rose-red, amber, emerald, a cobalt like the color of Imriel’s eyes. I gaped at it now as I had not, then. Hyacinthe paid it no heed. It was his prison, as familiar to him by now as his own skin.
I had forgotten how many of the isle-folk attended upon the Master of the Straits. They bowed low as he entered, watching with curious eyes as we mounted the curving stair, circling to the top of the tower. His attendants, his gaolers. They had been kind to us, long ago. They treated him now with a mixture of awe and fear.
We climbed to the very top of the tower, a level unseen from below. And there, the chamber was set about not with colored oriels, but windows open onto the skies, looking out over the seas in every direction. It held uncountable treasures gathered from the deep—a gilded helmet encrusted with coral, a mottled egg the size of a newborn baby, a marble sphinx, an unstrung harp made from the jawbone of a whale, all things strange and wondrous, salt-pitted and ancient. Hyacinthe stood in the middle of the room and looked about him.
"Here is where he taught me," he said softly. "What I became, I learned in this place. He was not bad, you know; only desperate, and bound by strictures not of his making."
"I know," I whispered.
"It's funny." Hyacinthe turned to a massive bookstand, riffling through the pages that lay spread open upon it, pages of incalculable power. "I never had a father, not really. For a little while, in the Hippochamp, I thought Manoj might acknowledge me. But..." He shrugged. "There was the dromonde, after all. And in the end, it was this, instead. And he is the nearest thing I have known to it. To a father."
I watched him wrap the pages in oilskins and place them in anancient leather case, bound with straps of bronze. "Are you sorry to leave it?"
"No." He closed the case, and looked at me, swallowing hard. "Yes." He sat down on a low ivory stool that