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Here, cupped in the hushed earth, is the secret arterial chamber in the heart of Narnia.
In the frantic months of his rebellion against his uncle, when every day passed through him as swiftly as panted breath, Caspian walked it more times than he could recall. All through the hot blur of war, the Table hunched in the centre of that chamber like a slumbering beast, whose dreams were long, cold and deep as the bed of the ocean.
The banners of victory whip in a bright wind outside the How. The horses are being saddled and the troops lined up for the merry march to Caspian’s own coronation in a castle far from here. Now, come to this chamber for the final time, Caspian realises that he has never before stood in it alone.
The walls of sweating stone have a clammy glisten, gripped in a perpetual fever. In that empty room, blank ancient eyes seem to rest on him like fingertips. The chamber is a living thing, and Caspian can hear the heaving depth of each slow, loamy breath.
At the centre, the Table stands in the animal shiver of the firelight. The torch-glow shies from runes which even flames are afraid to touch.
Magic is not good or evil, my prince, Doctor Cornelius had told him once. It is only hungry.
If it is true, Caspian stands now in the mouth of a Magic so ravenous that the Lion himself could do nothing but feed it.
“There you are.”
Shock pinches his chest and he turns to see Lucy standing in the cavern entrance. She has brought the sunlight in with her, clinging to her hair and cheeks and eyelashes like a sheen of oil, its secret gleam, its uncertain shimmer over her childish face. She smiles, and her eyes are a blue so bright she might have stolen it from the noon sky.
“We’re nearly ready to leave, you know,” she tells him.
“It did not seem right to depart without coming to…”
He trails off, gesturing loosely at the Table. Lucy walks around it and her small hand drifts over its surface of weathered grey. Something with a cruel copper glint runs down her little fingers, but the moment he blinks, they are clean again. Perhaps it was only a trick of the twisting firelight.
“Doctor Cornelius told me it was here they used to come. Traitors, transgressors. To pay their debt of blood to the Deep Magic, until the Lion broke it.”
Lucy’s shadow has not followed her around the room. It stands pinned on the eastern wall, much taller than she, the regal dusty silhouette of something not quite a woman. The thought hits him like an arrow: the Table has four sacred sides.
With a casual ease he cannot imagine daring, Lucy hoists herself up to sit on the Table’s edge. In the shade of her skirts, the runes twitch. At the corner of his eye, they glimmer, twisting like the quicksilver surface of a river.
“They-they are moving -”
“No,” she says. Something more catches behind her teeth.
“They are!”
“They’d like to. That’s why they’re carved in stone. To make them stay put.”
“What do they say?” he asks, hesitant. “Do you know?”
Lucy grins a hidden fox’s grin. “Would you like to hear it?”
“I would be honoured,” he tells her, with trembling eagerness.
She opens her mouth and speaks.
He hears Lucy’s voice, sweet as the lark, but he cannot pick words out of it as he cannot pick raindrops out of the sea. Her voice doubles, triples, and beneath it rises the vast hoarse rumble of mountain stone, the endless devouring roar of the sun. The sound enters him through every pore, swallowing him like thunder, as deep as the plunge of an anchor into the black water of the unreachable.
The Table is whole and flat again, blood pouring off every side, thick and smooth and heavy as wine; the Table is cracked again, the great crevice filled to choking with stringy bones. They are crowned at the last with bleached lion bones, gnarled rags of fur clinging to them still.
Silence rushes back into the hollow like a quick tide. The Table is empty, the crack in its surface only a crack.
“It’s worse when Peter does it,” Lucy tells him blithely, perched on the hard lip of the Table with all the neat wryness of a sprite.
Caspian can only manage a dry sob, feeling a salty warmth run down into his mouth. He raises a shaking hand to his nose, his sleeve coming away red. His legs quiver with watery weakness. Edmund appears in the doorway as abrupt and deadly quiet as a crossbow bolt. The firelight treads a quick dance up the blade of his naked sword.
“Oh,” he says flatly, “it was you.”
Lucy pulls a face at her brother’s bland glare and Edmund snaps his sword back into its scabbard. Behind him, his tall shadow begins to slope towards the western wall.
“Peter said to come.”
“I know, I heard him,” Lucy replies with a flutter of petulance. “Caspian was just paying his respects.”
He remembers the dizzy image of the crack in the Table, bloated with a thousand years of sinners’ bones, the sticky reek of their long decay; the slow-swelling tide of blood ever rising beneath his feet. Horror closes over him again like ice water and he finds himself retching into a dark corner.
Lucy hops off the Table and goes to stand at Edmund’s side, picking at the cuff of his shirt. When Caspian rises, wiping his soured mouth, both of them are watching him. Their looks are sharp, secret as thorns.
“It... it is an evil thing,” Caspian gasps. “I am glad its power is broken.”
A silence tightens the room.
“Don’t make the mistakes of your ancestors,” says the king who was called Just, dropping each word like a stone. “This way is shut, that much is true. But be on your guard, Caspian. The royal house of Telmar owes a debt.”
All at once, Lucy skips forwards to take his hand. Between them he is led out into the balmy drift of summer, his visions of the Table already breaking up like a bitter dream in the warm flare of morning, blown away on the night’s fleeing wind. Outside, his horse is ready with ribbons on its bridle and a cheering crowd to begin the march to his coronation.
None remain in the sombre gloom of the How. None hear the whisper that rises from the ragged-lipped mouth, opened so long ago across the surface of the Table; the rasp of the countless Narnian corpses sunk by Telmarine hands, stirring under ashy, salt-wracked clay. In the haggard chasms of the far blue mountains, a snake grows suddenly dry with scouring thirst for the molten blood of stars.
Caspian of Telmar, I do not forget.