ICO: Castle in the Mist (11 page)

Ico realized that the light wasn’t just coming from the blade—the idols were glowing too. Their glow echoed the brilliance of the sword, and both grew brighter until a light passed from one idol to the other and they split down the middle with a loud crack, sliding apart to reveal a passage beyond. The light faded.

“Sheathe the sword,” the priest ordered. The guard looked down, bewildered. The blade’s color had returned to a dull silver. After a moment’s hesitation, he reverently returned the sword to its scabbard.

The priest led them between the two statues. Ico reached out to touch one as they passed. The stone was cold beneath his fingertips.
Where did that light come from?
he wondered. Ico spied a cavity in the statue’s side with a tiny carving inside it. He looked closer and found that it was a depiction of a tiny demon.
It’s like something from a fairy tale.

The passage opened into the central column. In the very center a small dais like a copper knob protruded from the floor, with sheets of steel radiating out from it in bands.

The priest said something too low for Ico to hear to the guard without the sword. He walked over to the copper knob, pulled something like a lever next to it, and the entire device began to slowly spin. With a reverberating
clang,
the floor began to lift and Ico nearly lost his footing.

The room is rising!

Ico reached out and touched one of the walls, feeling it slide against his fingertips. A deep sound rumbled beneath them, and he could feel vibrations coming up through the floor. They continued to climb.

Of all the things Ico had expected to find in the Castle in the Mist, this was not one of them. “Amazing,” he whispered.

The kind guard gave Ico a reassuring nod. The priest had his back to Ico, while the other guard held the sword with its tip against the floor, clutching its handle with both hands as though he feared it might walk away if he didn’t keep a firm grip on it.

The clanging stopped.

They had arrived at the top of the column. Here stood another pair of stone idols. This time, the guard stepped forward and drew the sword with a mere nod from the priest. Again, a brilliant light ran across the idols and they parted.

As soon as the way was clear, the priest stepped through, the hem of his robes drifting above the floor.

There were no signs of life. The only sounds were their own footsteps and the metallic chatter of the guards’ chain mail. The castle was abandoned.

At first, Ico thought they had emerged into a room with a low ceiling, but as he walked further on, he realized his mistake. The room had only seemed low because they had entered beneath a wide staircase climbing from the center of a vast chamber. Ico took a deep breath, trembling as he exhaled.

You could hold a festival with everybody in Toksa here and still not fill this place.
The small stones covering the floor were as many in number as the stars he could see from the village watchtower, and Ico doubted that any of the hunters in the village were strong enough to loose an arrow that could reach the vaulted ceiling.

What is all this for?

Stone alcoves formed a grid along the walls, each cavity holding a strange coffinlike box with rounded corners.
No,
Ico realized.
Not just
like
coffins.
They were stone sarcophagi.

Ico followed the priest up the steps, recalling a story Oneh had told him.

Once upon a time, the story went, malicious spirits were born within the void that separated heaven and earth. Resentful that they lacked a realm of their own, they stole away human children and robbed them of their souls. But when they found that the stolen souls could not fill the emptiness inside their hearts, they seethed with anger till their rage became like tiny demons inside them.

Though they had brought the demons into being, the void-spirits were weaker than their own anger, and soon they were forced to do as the demons commanded. Distraught, the Creator hastily imbued the void-spirits with souls of their own, thinking this might placate them. But the demons within the spirits’ hearts took those souls and devoured them, so that no matter how many souls the Creator gave to the spirits, they were never sated but grew even hungrier than before.

At a loss, the Creator gathered magi from across the land and requested that they fashion stone sarcophagi in which to imprison the void-spirits together with their demons. It was the humans who had suffered when the void-spirits stole their children, so it must be humans who imprisoned them, the Creator declared.

The sarcophagi they made looked like eggs grown long and were covered with carved incantations of purification and placation. The wizards chanted their spells, imbuing the carvings with power, and the sarcophagi began to glow. Like moths to a flame, the void-spirits were drawn to the light and thereby trapped for eternity.

Ico looked over the stone sarcophagi lining the walls. These, too, were carved with ancient letters and patterns. Ico’s hand went to the Mark on his chest. The whorls of the patterns there were not entirely unlike those upon the stones. Ico could read neither, though he thought that the patterns on the sarcophagi looked a bit like the outlines of people.

What does it mean?

“This is your Mark,” the elder had said when he placed the tunic over Ico’s head. “The Mark has recognized you.”

The elder had a hopeful light in his eyes when he gave Ico the Mark—
so why can I think of nothing but scary fairy tales when I look at these stones?
Ico pressed a hand to his chest, lightly squeezing the fabric against his skin.

While Ico stood in a daze, the priest made his way to the wall and looked up at one of the sarcophagi.

“There,” he said, pointing to one that looked no different from the hundreds of others save one thing: it glowed with a pale blue light, pulsating like a beating heart.

As the priest intertwined his fingers and began chanting a prayer reserved for this occasion alone, the stone sarcophagus slid forward on its base, emerging from the wall with the heavy grating of stone upon stone. The guards took a half step back, the horns on their helmets colliding as they did, sending a ringing sound through the hall.

The lid of the sarcophagus slowly opened.

“Bring the Sacrifice,” the priest ordered. The two guards stiffened and exchanged glances. Even without seeing their faces, it was clear neither of them dared to do their next task.

“You.” The priest indicated the guard with upturned horns. “Bring him.”

The chain-mailed shoulders of the other guard slumped with relief as his companion turned to walk toward Ico, dragging his feet as he went.

Ico considered his handlers as the guard approached. These men had been chosen to protect the Sacrifice, a deed of tremendous honor. They were sure to be commended upon their return to the capital. Even before they received this duty, temple guards enjoyed privileges as guardians of the faith. They were the sanctified warriors of the Sun God, the defenders of souls. They were also men of authority—regardless of whether that authority came not from them but from the priests behind them—who wielded power over other officials of the church and capital. They had undergone harsh training to earn their rank. Both their loyalty to the realm and their faith in the Creator who forged heaven and earth and bestowed souls on mankind were infallible.

And yet, as children of men and fathers in their own right, it was no easy task to offer up the healthy, innocent boy standing before them to an unknown fate.

The priest had lectured them before they left the capital. “The Castle in the Mist does not demand that we be heartless. The compassion you will feel toward the Sacrifice and the sadness you will feel upon leaving him are all necessary to the success of the ritual. The castle will not be satisfied with just the Sacrifice. We must also offer up the pain in our hearts for it to be sated.”

It was all right to be sad. It was all right to lament. It was all right to feel anger.

But it was not all right to run away. The castle must have its due.

The priest walked over to the Sacrifice and laid a hand upon his shoulder. The horned boy looked up at him, though it was clear from his expression that the boy’s mind was in another place.

The priest knew that the guard had a child of his own—a boy roughly the same age as the Sacrifice. He knew the pain that man had felt on their journey whenever he saw the irons on the Sacrifice’s hands. How could he help but imagine,
What if it were my son?

But if they did not offer the Sacrifice, the anger of the castle would not abate. And should the castle’s fury be unleashed, there would be no future for the world of men.

Though our Creator is good,
thought the priest,
our Creator is not omnipotent. The enemy of our Creator is the enemy of peace upon this world—in league with evil, maker of a pact with the underworld. So men must shed blood and suffer sacrifice, and be allies to god, that evil might be driven back. What else can we do?

Forgive me,
the priest whispered deep in his heart.

“Take my hand,” the guard said at last, extending his arm toward Ico, thankful for the faceplate that hid his tears.

The guard lifted him lightly off the floor. With heavy steps, he carried him toward the stone sarcophagus that sat pulsing with light, growling…hungry.

[2]

"
DO NOT BE
angry with us. This is for the good of the village,” the priest said as he closed the lid. It was the first thing he had said to Ico since their journey began, and it was also the last.

There was no apology in his words, no plea. The voice behind that veil of cloth was even and cold.

The good of the village
…

For the first time, he felt angry.
This isn’t just for Toksa,
Ico thought to himself, recalling the stone city he had seen from the mountain pass. It wasn’t fair to blame the entire custom of the Sacrifice on the village. It wasn’t their fault.

The interior of the sarcophagus was spacious. Seated, his head wouldn’t even have touched the top, but his hands had been secured in a wooden pillory fastened to the back of the sarcophagus, forcing Ico to stand with his back to the front, bent over like a criminal placed in the village square as a warning to others.

But I haven’t done anything wrong…have I?

There was a small window in the door of the sarcophagus, but in order to look out, Ico had to twist his neck around so far that it soon became painful and he had to give up. So he stood, listening to the footsteps of the priest and the guards fade behind him.

A short while later, he felt the reverberations of the moving floor. The priest and guards were leaving.

I’m alone.

Silence returned to the great hall—the silence of the Castle in the Mist.
The silence itself must be the master of the castle,
Ico thought,
so long has it ruled this place.
At least, that was how it seemed to him.

Ico could hear his heart beating—
thud thud
. He took an unsteady breath. For a long while he stood there, alone, just breathing.

Nothing happened.

Am I supposed to stay hunched over like this forever? Am I supposed to starve to death in this sarcophagus? Is that my duty as the Sacrifice?

The image of the elder’s face loomed in Ico’s mind. He could hear Oneh’s voice in his ears.
We will be waiting for you to come home.

So I’m supposed to go home…but how?

He felt a slight vibration, no more than the quivering of a feather in the wind. The sarcophagus was swaying.

At first, he thought he was imagining it. He hadn’t eaten anything since the small meal that morning.
Maybe I’m already starting to tremble with hunger. Maybe I’m getting dizzy.

But the rocking only grew stronger, and he was forced to admit it wasn’t him—the stone sarcophagus around him was shaking.

The sarcophagus shook up, down, and to the sides with increasing violence. Hands bound to the wooden frame, Ico tensed his legs and swallowed against the fear. A low rumble accompanied the growing vibrations, filling his ears. It seemed as though the entire hall around him shook. Even the air keened with the tremors.

Soon, the rocking motion became more than the sarcophagus could withstand, and the wooden frame broke off the back. The mechanism the priest had used to slide Ico’s sarcophagus into its cavity worked in reverse, spitting the sarcophagus out. It smashed onto the floor, cracking open the lid and sending Ico flying into the open air. His body rose, the world spun around him, and the next instant he crashed onto the cold stones of the floor. His right horn struck the floor, giving off a hollow
clink,
before everything faded to black.

Rain was falling outside, a downpour.

Ico was climbing a tower so high it made him dizzy. Looking up from the bottom, the top was lost in shadows.

A stone staircase wound around the inside wall of the tower, as ancient and decrepit as the tower itself. The staircase had a rail at about Ico’s eye level, with spearlike spikes protruding all along its top.

Thunder rumbled, and Ico flinched. Night had fallen and a storm had blown in, though Ico couldn’t be sure when.

Halfway up the tower, Ico ran out of breath. It was cold. A ragged curtain hung in the window ahead of him, flapping in the driving wind of the storm. The frigid air blowing in through the window and the cold stones of the wall chilled Ico to the marrow.

Lightning flashed, bright in Ico’s eyes—but in that moment of illumination, he spotted something hanging far above him. One hand pressed cautiously against the wall for support, he peered into the darkness.
What is it?
The dark silhouette resembled a birdcage, but it would hold a bird far larger than any Ico had ever seen. It seemed to be suspended from the ceiling of the tower. Stepping quickly, Ico resumed his climb. In another two or three circles around the tower he would reach the cage.