The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams

it—terribly, wonderfully alive.
    In fact, there was an astonishing and holy aura about this entire room that went far beyond Simon’s understanding. The throne of heavy, yellowed bones, the massive black figures guarding an empty chair in a high, deserted chamber, all seemed filled with some dread power. All eight inhabitants of the room, the scullion, the statues, and the huge eyeless skull, seemed to hold their breath.
    These stolen moments filled Simon with a quiet, almost fearful, ecstasy. Perhaps the malachite kings but waited with black, stony patience for the boy to touch a blasphemous commoner’s hand to the dragonbone seat, waited ... waited ... and then, with a horrible creaking noise, they would come to life! He shivered with nervous pleasure at his own imaginings and stepped lightly forward, surveying the dark faces. Their names had been so familiar once, when they had been strung-together nonsense in a child’s rhyme, a rhyme Rachel—Rachel? Could that be right?—had taught him when he was a giggling ape of four years or so. Could he remember them still?
    If his own childhood seemed so long ago, he suddenly wondered, how must it feel to Prester John, who wore so many decades? Mercilessly clear, as when Simon remembered past humiliations, or soft and insubstantial, like stories of the glorious past? When you were old, did your memories crowd out your other thoughts? Or did you lose them—your childhood, your hated enemies, your friends?
    How did that old song go? Six kings ...
    Six Kings have ruled in Hayholt’s broad halls
Six masters have stridden her mighty stone walls
Six mounds on the cliff over deep Kynslagh-bay
Six kings will sleep there until Doom’s final day
    That was it!
    Fingil first, named the Bloody King
Flying out of the North on war’s red wing
     
    Hjeldin his son, the Mad King dire
Leaped to his death from the haunted spire
     
    Ikferdig next, the Burned King hight
He met the fire-drake by dark of night
     
    Three northern kings, all dead and cold
The North rules no more in lofty Hayholt
    Those were the three Rimmersgard kings on the left of the throne. Wasn’t Fingil the one Morgenes spoke of, the leader of the dreadful army? The one who killed the Sithi? So, on the right side of the yellowed bones the rest must be ...
    The Heron King Sulis, called Apostate
Fled Nabban, but in Hayholt he met his fate
     
    The Herynstir Holly King, old Tethtain
Came in at the gate, but not out again
     
    Last, Eahlstan Fisher King, in lore most high
The dragon he woke, and in Hayholt he died ...
    Hah! Simon stared at the Heron King’s sad, pinched face and gloated. My memory is better than most people think — betterthan that of most moon-calves! Of course, now there was at last a seventh king in the Hayholt—old Prester John. Simon wondered if someone would add King John to the song someday.
    The sixth statue, closest to the throne’s right arm, was Simon’s favorite: the only native Erkynlander who had ever sat on the Hayholt’s great seat. He moved closer to look into the deep-cut eyes of Saint Eahlstan—called Eahlstan Fiskerne because he came from the fisher-people of the Gleniwent, called The Martyr because he too had been slain by the firedrake Shurakai, the creature destroyed at last by Prester John.
    Unlike the Burned King on the throne’s other side, the Fisher King’s face was not carved in a twist of fear and doubt: rather the sculptor had brought radiant faith into the stony features, had given opaque eyes the illusion of seeing faraway things. The long-dead artisan had made Eahlstan humble and reverent, but had also made him bold. In his secret thoughts, Simon often imagined that his own fisherman father might have looked like this.
    Staring, Simon felt a sudden coldness on his hand. He was touching the Chair’s bone armrest! A scullion touching the throne! He snatched his fingers away—wondering all the while how even the dead substance of such a fiery beast could