Chương 30: The Pit

My heart had not slowed down since we'd left the round white room. My father walked half a pace ahead of me while I followed and kept my eyes forward the way I'd been trained to, but my eyes wanted to be everywhere at once, because we were going somewhere I had never been. I knew this estate.

I knew it the way you know a house you've spent sixteen years inside, which is to say I knew the parts of it I'd been permitted to know, and I had assumed, without ever quite thinking about it, that the permitted parts were most of it. They were not.

We passed through a colonnade I'd never seen, open on one side to a drop I couldn't gauge, and then down a wide shallow stair cut from a paler stone than the granite I was used to, and then along a corridor that curved for so long I lost the sense of which direction the estate was behind me.

"You are quiet," my father said.

"I'm looking." He seemed to like that answer. He didn't say so. He just kept walking, then he started to talk, and I understood after a moment that he was showing me the place. That building there was the old records house, he said, where the branch families kept their genealogies before the practice was centralized. The tower past it had been a signal tower once, in the days when the house had needed to speak to its bannermen across the valley by light.

The long low hall with the tiled roof was where the disciples took their meals. There were many disciples. Thousands of them, he said, all of them top tier warriors, with many mages among them. I had known the estate was large. I'd walked out of it a week ago through gates I hadn't known existed, past training grounds I hadn't known existed, and I'd promised myself I would stop being surprised by the size of the place I'd been born in. Alas, I was surprised again.

"You'll leave for Sartheon soon," my father said.

"A full year, before your first leave. Longer, if the terms fall the wrong way."

"Yes, father." I hid the excitement in my voice at the mention of this.

"A boy of your name does not simply get into a carriage and go." He said.

"The house has to mark it. Anything less would be an insult to what you are, and the house does not insult itself." So there was a ceremony. I... I did not particularly want thousands of people to look at me and decide what they thought. But my father was walking ahead of me showing me his home, and something in the way he'd said it, told me complaining would not go over the way I wanted it to. So I didn't.

"... Thank you, Father."

"Hm." We turned another corner, the corridor opened, and the sound reached me before the sight did. There were voices. A great many of them, too far off to separate into anything, layered into one low continuous roar that came from ahead of us and filled the corridor. My steps slowed without my telling them to.

"You feel that," my father said.

"Good. Come." The corridor gave onto open air, and I stopped. I had thought the gates of House Aridis were the largest thing the house owned. I'd stood in front of them a week ago and felt small. I had been wrong, and I understood the extent of my mistake the moment the thing ahead of us came into view, because the gates of House Aridis would have fit inside the gate we were now walking toward with room left over on every side.

Two vast dark shapes rose against the sky, curved and swelling, and for a second my mind refused them and read them as hills, low black hills flanking the mouth of something enormous. Then the proportions settled and I understood they were doors. The material was black and depthless, obsidian or something that wanted me to think it was, and it drank the afternoon light instead of throwing it back, so that the only thing on the whole surface that caught the sun was the gryphon.

The gryphon of the house had been worked into the black across both doors at a scale I had no frame for. One wing alone would have covered the front of my wing of the estate. The beast reared with its wings spread the way it always did, over every gate and every crest and every tile I'd ever knelt on. And the sound was coming from behind it.

"This," my father said, "is the Pit." I didn't say anything. I was looking up.

"Our forefather, Durhain I, raised it four thousand years ago, after he took this valley from the giants and the evil spirits that had held it since before men had a word for the place." He'd stopped beside me, looking up at it too, with obvious pride.

"There is a larger one in the world. One. The Crown's, at the capital. Everything after that is smaller than what you are looking at." A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. I finally found my voice.

"What is it for?"

"Battles." He said pleasantly.

"You see, the great houses do not go to war with one another. We are one kingdom under one crown, and open war between us is forbidden." He looked at me.

"But men are men, Howl. Every house wants to know it stands above the rest. So a long time ago we agreed on a way to prove it that doesn't burn a single field, and we called it the Dance. Once every four years, every house that matters sends its finest fighters to one arena, and they compete. The kingdom comes to watch. The allied kingdoms come too, kings and their courts, envoys from across the sea, anyone worth inviting. On its face it is the grandest entertainment in the world.

Underneath it, it is how the houses settle their ranking. When the last match is done, everyone knows who is first, who is second, and who is nothing, and that ranking holds for four years, until the next one. The Dance... I looked up at him.

"Is that what the Pit is for? The Dance?" He chuckled.

"It is. Though not in a long while." He let his eyes travel up the black doors.

"Every four years a different house holds it in their own arena before the whole world. It is an honor most houses will never be trusted with, and a house that hosts poorly is not asked again." I hadn't known any of this. How come I was not told something this incredible?

"When did we last host?"

"A hundred and five years ago. Not since."

"Oh," I said.

"It was a choice." He was still looking up at the doors.

"We could have hosted a dozen times over in a hundred years. We were asked, but we declined. The house had turned inward by then; preparing. We knew an Axiom was coming, the signs were there long before you were born, and there was work to do before you arrived. The estate to remake. The grounds. Ourselves. You do not host the world in your walls while your walls are being rebuilt, so we shut the gates and let them forget we were here." He looked at me then.

"And now you have arrived. So we open the gates, and we remind them. We will be first power in the world, Howl. Not for four years, but for a thousand and more, once you are what you will be." He laughed, pleased with the shape of it. I laughed too, though It came out thinner than his did. Because I was thinking about what he would say if I told him the truth of what I wanted. That my great ambition, the one I'd built in the dark over sixteen years, one book at a time, was to see the sea.

To eat food I had never eaten. To stand in front of the things I'd only ever read about and find out whether the pages had gotten them right. There was no first house in it anywhere. So I wondered, standing under those doors while my father promised the world my name, whether the problem was that I simply did not have enough ambition. My father kept laughing, and before I understood what was happening his hand came down on the top of my head, and I flinched. To my relief, he didn't seem to mind it.

"You'll want to close your mouth before we go in," he said.

"Nine thousand people are waiting for you inside." I tried. I really tried to hide my reaction, but it seemed my face still betrayed me, because my father seemed to have noticed.

"Most of them are disciples," He specified.

"Elders, the officials of the house, the branch heads, the ones who keep the machinery of this place running that you have never had cause to meet. Thirty-five thousand of them belong to this house all told, and today a little more than nine came to look at you." His hand was still on my head as he turned my face up toward the gryphon with the smallest pressure, so that I was looking at the thing again.

"Do not make that face when you go through. You looked out of your depth just now."

"I... I am out of my depth."

"You may be." He took his hand away.

"But you will not look it. You are going to rule all of this one day, Howl. Every stone of it, every one of those thirty-five thousand, and a great deal that is not inside these walls. A boy who is going to own a thing does not walk into it with his mouth open like a visitor." I looked at him, unable to tell if that was a joke. In the end, I closed my mouth, straightened my spine, dropped my shoulders and I made my face do nothing.

It was the hardest still face I'd ever had to hold, because my heart was going like I'd just finished the duck walks, and the sound behind the doors was rising. My father watched me for a moment.

"Better," he said. Then he smiled, already turning toward the black doors.

"Are you coming?" I followed. The doors opened for us. There was no push, nor groan of hinges, nor attendant working them; they simply drew apart as we approached, the gryphon splitting down the middle, and the light of the place spilled out through the widening gap. They rose as I crossed the threshold. A vast rolling shuffle of thousands of bodies coming to their feet at once, and then they spoke together.

"WE GREET THE AXIOM OF HOUSE ARIDIS." It came down on me from every side at once, folded into one voice, and it hit the sand and the stone and came back up doubled.

"WE WISH YOU SUCCESS. WE WISH YOU HEALTH."

"Oh," I said, heart racing even more, unsure what to do at the sudden situation. I was still looking up, because the Pit went up. The sand at the bottom was farther below than I'd expected and the seats climbed away from it in tier after tier, ringing the whole arena, up and up until the highest rows were small against the sky. If my father had not told me the number, I would not have guessed nine thousand.

I would have guessed a hundred, maybe less, The place had room for so many more that nine thousand looked like nothing in it. Most of the seats were empty, and all of the ones that were not had been filled directly across from the doors, so that every occupied seat faced me, every one of those distant faces turned toward the entrance I had just come through. My father raised a hand and pulled mana into his throat, and when he spoke, it came out enormous with a grinding quality to it that was hardly human.

"HOUSE ARIDIS." Every soul in the Pit stood at attention. A silence so sudden it made the noise before it feel like something I had dreamed.

"SOON, MY SON WILL DEPART FOR SARTHEON. BEFORE HE GOES, IT HAS BEEN DECIDED THAT HE WILL DEMONSTRATE HIS PROWESS BEFORE THE ELITE OF THIS HOUSE, SO THAT EVERY ONE OF YOU MAY SEE WITH YOUR OWN EYES WHAT HAS BEEN BORN TO US."

"WE ARE HONORED!" They all replied in perfect unison. He lowered his hand and turned, and he was smiling at me. This time, there was something underneath his smile that made me want very much to know what he was about to do. He then leaned in, and when he spoke it was pitched for the two of us and nobody else.

"This is the first of my gifts to you, son." Then he turned back to the Pit before I could reply anything, then...

"BRING OUT THE TROLL."... What did he say? Ding! [Quest Issued] Objective: Defeat the troll. Reward: New skill (Rank S). Weapon (Class S). Failure: A lot of shame and drama.