He pushed the emotion away and answered the ritual.
“I seek the one who seeks the light.”
“How do you mean to seek him?”
“By following the Path myself.”
“How do you hope to see the one who seeks if youdo not see the Path?”
“I seek the Path so that my eyes may be opened to the Light.”
A smile cracked her ancient face, revealing straight, brilliant white teeth attached to stretched, dead gums. The Prince’s skin began to crawl. This was no woman but a half-human construct, a plaything of the Visigony. Seeming to sense his unease, she very slowly held up a hand, keeping him anchored where he was, forcing him to wait for her directions. She laughed at him, a deep phlegmy chuckle, and finally creaked a gnarled finger straight, pointing to his left. Scowling at her but making no comment, he followed her direction to the center of three doors, eager to leave her presence.
He opened the indicated door: on the other side was a long corridor, in which children were playing.
Stunned, he found himself unable to move.
Children… he never seen one of those in person. Certainly not ones this small. There were three of them, two boys and one girl, dressed in simple brown clothing that hung draped over their tiny frames, all only just taller than the Prince’s knee, playing with… a piece of string, nothing more.
The girl tugged the string behind her, twirling in a circle, and the two boys chased it, squealing with laughter. The girl shrieked joyfully and ran down the corridor, blonde hair tied back behind her head in a way that reminded the Prince of a horse’s tail, and the similarly towheaded boys chased after her, laughing too. They never turned to see him, absorbed as they were in their game.
Two doors opened, and two pairs of Commons adults came out, also dressed in the simplest of attire. They took the children, laughing and cooing at them and each other, into their respective doors, and then the Prince was alone, and the hall was silent.
For a long time, too long, he stood there, shocked. Children were not allowed outside of their family’s quarters in the Fortress, and were never to be seen, much less seenplaying, by anyone aside from their relatives. He had seenchildren in the memories of other men, and knew of Most High who had had them, of course, but seeing them in person.…
This is not important.
He pushed the thoughts from his mind and walked quickly down the hall, all the while feeling that he was crossing through a land far more alien than any forested mountain. At the far end of the corridor was another door. He passed through it and found himself on a staircase that went up as well as down. He paused for a moment, and then realized that there was a crude painting on the wall in front of him, a painting of three golden falcons ascending into a dark blue sky.
He moved left and took the stairs up. He ascended another four floors before he emerged onto a raised platform on the building’s roof, from which a wooden catwalk had been laid that connected it to the next house, and from that house to the house after that—leading toward the Black Wall.
The Prince, who had lived his entire life thousands of feet above the ground in the Towers of the Fortress, was nevertheless daunted by the task of walking across a few narrow planks of wood hung nearly seven stories above the ground and anchored to nothing more than a series of wooden buildings that looked as though a strong breeze might push them over.
A strong breeze might even be overkill. A weak one would likely do just as well.
But as he began to think he’d gone the wrong way, another gleam of gold caught his eye and, squinting, he saw a golden falcon affixed to a wall several buildings away.
Clenching his fear into a hard ball in his stomach, he walked as quickly as he dared across the wooden planks to the next building, and then, without pausing for thought lest he be unable to continue, across the planks after that, the whole time trying to ignore the way the wood shook and bowed beneath his feet.
He came to the final roof and breathed a sigh of relief before rushing forward, feeling the blood high in his cheeks from the exertion and fear, his senses heightened. But when he reached the falcon, there was only one.
Where are the other two?
He looked around wildly, breathing hard, and after a few confused seconds saw another falcon two houses away. He was now in the very shadow of the Black Wall that surrounded Banelyn City proper.
I didn’t realize it was a prerequisite for Seekers to be good with heights.
He continued on, making his way across rickety boards and planks, picking his way through various heaps of discarded debris that smelled of rot and age, to the next golden falcon, this one set with a gleaming red ruby where an eye should be. The Prince wondered briefly how it was that this golden statue was still here, attached to the wall of a roof when anyone in this neighborhood of Commons might have found a way to take it down and sell it.
He passed a hand over it, and a tingle started in his chest and worked its way up his shoulders as the Raven Talisman responded to a life force. Stunned, he realized the falcon was a construct just as the old woman had been, and silently thanked the Empress he hadn’t fully touched it. There were Bloodmages in Banelyn as well as Seekers, and no doubt they had worked traps into the signs on the Path so that they couldn’t be moved. Perhaps Tiffenal himself had worked on the falcons; it was the type of project that would have interested the cunning Prince of Foxes. In fact, now that he thought of it, the entire Path seemed like the Fox’s doing.
He moved past the golden statue and looked around for the third. He was now only a single house away from the massive Black Wall, and, as high as he was, it still towered above him. As he looked upward, he saw a golden gleam near the top of the wall.
“Impossible,” he whispered.
Unbelieving, he crossed the last teetering house and stepped up to the sheer cliff face of black stone, wind whipping him mercilessly as it flew into the wall from behind him only to be rebuffed by the massive black stone and sent careening backwards. He crossed to the stone and put a hand on it. Not quite sure what he had expected, he was still relieved to find that the stone was just stone, cool and hard against his skin.
He looked up again and saw the golden gleam and knew, deep in his gut, that it was the third falcon. He walked slowly to his left, hand trailing on the black stone. When he was directly below the falcon, his hand lost contact with the wall.
