The Crippled God

door set into an archway. The iron handle was shaped from three lengths of linked chains entwined, stiff enough to form a ring. She stared at it, remembering how at first she’d had to reach up to grasp it, and tug hard to swing back the door. Hostage Room. Born into it, imprisoned within it, until the day you are sent away. The day someone comes and takes you. Hostage Room, child. You didn’t even know what that meant. No, it was your home .
    Reaching out, she grasped the ring. A single tug and something broke on the other side, fell with a clunk. Oh … no, no, no —
    She opened the door.
    The bed had partially collapsed. Insects had chewed the covers until they fell to dust. Thousands of generations of those insects had dwelt in the mattress, until it too crumbled to nothing. The creatures had eaten the wax candles in the silver sticks still standing on the solid blackwood dresser. Above the dresser, the polished mirror was mottled with midnight stains. The broad windows had been shuttered tight; now little of that remained but heaps of fittings on the floor.
    Sandalath stepped inside. She could not see it yet, but she knew it was there.
    Locked from the inside .
    In the passageway leading to the Tutor Chamber she found the small, frail bones of this room’s last hostage. The mice had eaten most of the child, until little more than grey stains marked its position – a body sprawled between the two chambers. Teeth lay scattered like the beads of a broken necklace.
    I know how it was for you. I know . Slaughter in the citadel, screams rising from below, the smell of smoke. The world was ending. Mother Dark turned away. Anomander’s dreams of unification fell like dust through his fingers. The people were fleeing – fleeing Kurald Galain itself. The end of the world .
    She crouched down in the narrow corridor, stared down at the remnants. Child? Are you me? No. I was long gone from here by then. Sent off to serve my purpose, but that purpose failed. I was among a mass of refugees on Gallan’s Road. Blind Gallan shall lead us to freedom. We need only follow the sightless seer. We need only trust in his vision. Oh yes, child, the madness of that was, well, plain to see. But Darkness was never so cold as on that day .
    And on that day, we were all blind .
    The child hostage would not have left this room. She had learned obedience before all else. Told to stay, she had set the flimsy lock that she had believed would bar the outer door – we all believed it, each in our turn. It was our comfort. Our symbol of independence. It was a lock a grown Andii could break in one hand .
    But no one came to challenge your delusion of safety .
    The lock was proof against everything going on outside this room. It was, in fact, the strongest barrier of all .
    She sank down further, leaned one shoulder against the passage wall.
    I am queen and I am hostage both. No one can take me. Until they decide to. No one can break my lock. Until they need to. In the meantime, see me sitting so regal on my throne. Frozen like an imagein a frieze . But she would not weep, not for herself. All that running had taken her precisely to this place, this moment in time. All that running .
    After some time, she climbed to her feet, went back into the outer room. Stared at what remained of herself in the mottled mirror. Fragments, pieces, an incomplete map. Look at me. Are you looking at me, now, at last? I sense the stirring in your mind. Impatience, the wanting to be away, off somewhere else – anywhere but in this skull, anywhere but behind these eyes. What in your life has so chilled your heart, that you so quickly refuse another’s pain, another’s loss?
    Run, then. Go on. Run away, skip down the passage, find all the places that stab deep enough to make you feel .
    Sandalath turned away. Back to the door, down the spiralling descent. One didn’t need ghosts, she decided. Not a single ethereal glimpse was necessary. Empty corridors and echoing chambers were in themselves ghosts, emerging in the instant of her arrival, only to fade away once she was past. Like the rooms of memory. Step inside, conjure what you see, wonder at what you feel, and then leave. But you take something with you. You always take something with you. Swirling, raising up dust . She wanted to howl.
    ‘Mother Dark, I understand now. Once again, I am a hostage.’ She had died – drowned? – in the rolling surf of a distant shore. The end of a long, harrowing journey,