Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  Far away, someone was calling him. Returning to the centre aisle, he looked back and saw that he had come much farther from the door than he had intended. The entry was only a dwindling point of light down an endless corridor of books. Silhouetted against it he could see Spaeth. It took a wrenching effort to turn back. On either side were mysteries begging him to stop and study, to admire their illuminated pages or feel the soft leather between his hands. There was a civilization’s worth of knowledge here, all undiscovered. Spaeth called urgently as he slowed at sight of a volume with a strange map traced on its cover. It took all his will to ignore it and continue on.

  When he came out into the stairwell again, Spaeth grasped his shoulders, looking pale and anxious. “You must not go in there again,” she said. He realized belatedly that he had frightened her.

  “There’s nothing to fear,” he said, wanting her to understand. “It’s a treasure trove. Think of all the knowledge preserved here! This is a priceless collection. The world needs to know about this.”

  “Promise me you won’t go past these doorways again,” she said severely.

  “Why not?”

  “Because this place has power over you.”

  Of course it did. He looked to right and left at the doors on the other sides of the square. If each of them opened into a room as large as the one he had just emerged from, then the library held acres of shelves, running far into the rock on every side, and more below.

  She shook him urgently to call his mind back to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t leave you alone again.” He gestured with the lamp. “Let’s go on.”

  They descended the next flight down in silence. The layout here was identical to the floor above, but when Nathaway held up his lamp to see what lay inside the doorway, he discovered that the books on this level were enormous tomes with spines half as tall as he was; it looked like it would take two people to wrestle them off the shelf. On the floor below that, the books were tiny, the size of little jewellery boxes. After that came the books in red covers, then books bound in metal.

  Down flight after flight they passed. After a dozen floors the shelves were filled with tall stacks of scrolls. Then came levels of hinged wooden panels carved with symbols, books that opened like fans, spools of ornately knotted strings, and books shaped like vases. On one level, the doorway was blocked by an impenetrable mass of spiderwebs. Through it, Nathaway could dimly see where collapsed shelves had spilled boxes of etched slates onto the floor. As they went ever farther down, the air grew stale, as if it, like the dust, had lain undisturbed for centuries. It pressed close and stifling, and their footsteps sounded muffled.

  At last they stopped to rest on a floor where the shelves were filled with white rhomboids. Nathaway leaned over the railing to see how far they had come. The well towered above them, the skylight only a tiny spot at the top. He peered down then, to see how close they were to the bottom. A draft of stale, wet air blew up past his face. As far as the light could reach, the flights of steps descended. And beyond that, somewhere down in darkness, a dim speck of light was moving on invisible stairs. It was the greenish colour of phosphor.

  Nathaway beckoned Spaeth over. “Look, we’re not alone,” he said.

  She looked uneasy. “I never thought we were.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Bone-lights,” she said. “We don’t want to get near them.”

  “Are they the Mundua?”

  “No. There are some circles even the Mundua and Ashwin shun. This may be one of them.”

  They went on.

  Deeper, they came on floors of statues with strange, elongated features. There was a floor of masks staring blankly out, and one full of plaster casts of hands. Then came floors of everything triangular, then feathers in gilt frames. Once, as he stood looking at rows and rows of braided hair, Nathaway thought he saw far down the aisle a moving light. For some reason his gorge rose at the sight; the light looked unwholesome, the colour of something rotting.

  The grand scale of the place still stirred him; it was a marvellous achievement of architecture and collection. Here was all their history, all their belief, all their art, classified and categorized. It must have taken centuries of effort. There was something a little insane about it.

  They began to pass bricked-up doorways. The ones left open led into cavernous spaces where rusting machines squatted in rows: silent, towering cylinders, castles of gears and pistons with ladders leading up their sides to catwalks for the operators. The architecture had begun to change, too. Now the stones were huge and rough-cut, the doorways’ low arches supported on squat pillars carved in spirals. From time to time the sound of dripping water echoed out into the stairwell.

  It had grown very dark by the time Spaeth came to a halt, holding her finger to her lips for silence. As the sound of their footsteps faded, Nathaway became aware of a soft babbling and cooing from somewhere ahead. He leaned over the banister to look down, and saw a swift, dark shape wing out from the balcony several floors below. As if attracted by the light, it veered in midair and swooped past Nathaway’s head. He ducked. It came to roost on the ceiling overhead. Gingerly, Nathaway held up the lamp. Black batwings unfolded to reveal a baby’s face, moonlike and cherubic, staring at him with the blank innocence of a china doll. Its mouth opened to coo, and he saw needle-like teeth.

  “Light my lamp,” Spaeth said, holding it out.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t go on,” Nathaway said. “What if there is no way out?”

  “Look up,” was all Spaeth said. He looked out at the way they had come, and saw a light descending slowly behind them, many floors above.

  When they rounded the square and came to the level under the one where they had stopped, they found that the ceiling was a crawling mass of black wings and round-eyed faces, and the floor was deep with droppings.

  “Walk slowly,” Spaeth said. “Perhaps they won’t bother us.”

  But the bats discovered them while they were still on the steps. An eerie squealing of baby voices went up, and suddenly there was a cloud of them in the air. Spaeth and Nathaway both broke into a run. Black wings battered at his face, claws tore at his clothing. He felt needle-teeth pierce a vein at the back of his knee. He reached down to rip the bat away, and two more sank teeth into his wrist. Every moment he was heavier with the weight of them hanging on his clothes, fluttering, trying to find flesh. Desperately he plunged around the corner, past the cave mouth that vibrated with their shrilling, and down the next flight. They were in his eyes, but he kept on by feel, ignoring the prick of teeth. When he reached the next level, he rolled on the stone floor, feeling the crunch of little bones underneath him. A thin shrieking arose as the rest of the swarm fled. Panting and smeared with his own blood, he knelt and looked up. Thousands of them were pouring out and upward like billowing smoke. The cloud thinned as the bats scattered to each of the doors they had passed on the way down, each of the hundreds of levels.

  Spaeth was bending over him, checking him over. She looked relatively unharmed. “They didn’t like my blood,” she said. He winced, rubbing his neck where it prickled with puncture wounds. “I can help you later,” Spaeth said, “but not now. Can you walk?”

  He staggered to his feet, wondering if his dizziness was from loss of blood or some poison. He wanted to rest. But when he looked out he saw what made Spaeth’s voice so tense. On the stairway above them, a myriad of lights had appeared, moving slowly downward. At the sight, a heavy clot of nausea rose in his throat; his mouth filled with saliva, and he swallowed it down, almost choking. He could see now the rustling, ash-coloured figures, holding up torches of burning bone. The light felt clammy and unclean on his eyes.

  Nathaway and Spaeth fled downward. The walls were slick with seepage and black moss. Soon the railing ended and the steps became an irregular jumble, carved into craggy stone. They hugged the wall
, afraid of slipping into the pit. Around and around they went, as all semblance of architecture disappeared from the cave walls around them.

  The light of their lamps was growing weak against the pressing darkness. Nathaway could barely see the steps before him. He turned up the wick of his lamp again, but it was only a dim, glowing coal. He groped on, unsure what would meet his foot at each step. His blind pace was agonizingly slow. He refused to look back.

  It was pitch black when the stairs ended. Arm outstretched, he edged forward till his foot met the brink of a ledge. A dislodged pebble plopped into water. The echoes spread in rings, cold and deep. It was a dead end after all.

  All that long time ago, when they had crossed the world’s boundaries together on Yora, she had been so heroic. He said, “Spaeth, isn’t there something you can do?”

  “I don’t know this circle,” she whispered. “You brought us here. Only you can get us out.”

  A shaft of bone-light crawled past, casting a twisted shadow. Nathaway turned away, but felt its clammy touch on his back, worming down his collar. Whatever it lit on looked gangrenous and corrupt. Even the stone underfoot was growing toad-like skin.

  “Don’t turn around!” Spaeth said hoarsely. “Don’t look at them.”

  They were just behind his back. He could smell mold. He fought not to turn and face them.

  It was then he became aware of another light. He saw it first on Spaeth’s face, diffuse and dim. Looking for its source, he realized that the front of his own shirt was glowing, as if he himself were emitting light. Quickly, he fumbled at his collar and brought out the stone pendant Goth had given him. It was shining with a clear, green light the colour of sun-shafts in the open sea.

  The emerald light flowed into him, cleansing him from the inside out, putting his mind in a state of glow. He saw now that the green stone was far deeper than it looked, deeper than it possibly could be, as if an extra dimension were trapped inside. For a moment he lost his balance on the edge of a precipice, and when he caught himself he was standing on a marble pier in the light of a green spring morning. On his left, a pearly city rose in fragile leaps of spandrel and buttress up the mountain, its minarets like lace against the sky. On his right, the sun spangled the sea—but strangely, not a wave moved. Above him, swooping birds hung frozen. When he looked out beyond the harbour gates he saw the ominous purple line of an enormous wave on the horizon.

  An old couple sat on a bench looking out at the sea, with their dog on a leash beside them. He turned to them, and they smiled, holding hands. “What is this place?” he said.

  “Welcome,” the old woman said. “You must be the owner of the stone.”

  There was no sound, no wind. The waves that should have been lapping at the shore hung in a state of never-arriving. “Why is everything still?” Nathaway said.

  “Because this is the moment when we were imprisoned in the stone,” the old woman said. “The moment just before our destruction.” She gestured out toward the approaching wave in the distance, towering and impotent. “Nothing can change here, or our death would be upon us.”

  In a leap of dream-logic, Nathaway realized that this was Alta. Somehow, the ancients had managed to encode it all within the crystal matrix of the gemstone: the entire city and all its memories, preserved and yet not free to act or do.

  He did not belong here. There were things waiting for him in the world where time had taken its course. Seeing that a dinghy was moored to a cleat close by, he said, “Can I take your boat?”

  The old man and woman looked at each other, and the woman said, “Are you truly in need?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then take it with our blessing,” she said. The dog wagged its tail.

  As Nathaway unlooped the hawser, he felt a stir of sea breeze in his hair. The waves advanced, then froze again. He had changed something, and brought the city a moment closer to its death. He looked back at the old couple, but they were still smiling at him. They had known what would happen.

  Back in the body he normally inhabited, he could feel Spaeth pressed tight against him. He still held the green stone in one hand, but now in the other hand was the hawser, looping away into the darkness. He held up the stone so that it lit the scene around him with the clear light of an ancient morning. The leprous bone-light slithered back. He followed the mooring line till it led to the dinghy, lying on the edge of black water. All around, vague shapes emerged from shadow—ships of every size and kind, lying on the sand. Some of them had tattered sails still set, the stubs of broken oars in the oarlocks. There were dhows and carrikers, pirogues and shallops, vessels of cork, reed, and metal.

  “Get in!” Spaeth said. He climbed into the bow, and she launched them with a mighty shove, then scrambled in over the stern. A strong current quickly seized the hull and bore them away. As Nathaway looked back, he saw, dwindling behind them, three figures on the beach, holding bone torches aloft. He shivered with clammy revulsion, and looked away.

  The stone around his neck no longer gave off light. He tucked it away in his shirt, thinking of all the souls caught in the crystal lattice. The lamps he and Spaeth had brought were extinguished. Absolute darkness closed in around them. Nathaway reached out to touch Spaeth’s knee. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, taking his hand in hers. Her skin was warm. “And you?”

  “I feel . . .” He felt as adrift as the boat they were in. Every bit of knowledge he had ever used to steer himself was gone.

  They floated on in the dark, holding hands. There was no sound now, neither surf nor wave. At times it seemed like they had stopped moving. Nathaway put his hand in the water, but if there was a current they were travelling with it. There was nothing left to do but wait, and simply be.

  Spaeth gave a sudden move, and he looked up. Faintly outlined against the black was the arch of a masonry ceiling. Their boat was floating swiftly, stern-first, down a broad tunnel. The light came from around a bend ahead. It was an ordinary light this time, the light of their own world. They had ended up borne on the current of the underground River Em.

  It was just before dawn when they emerged from the mouth of a huge culvert into the harbour. A low cloud of ash still hung above, and the water was scummy, but the eastern horizon glowed past the jagged outline of Loth. Nathaway breathed in the blessed normality of the scene. He had never expected to be so grateful just to know the rules of the world.

  The current swept them toward a dock where a collection of ramshackle rowboats was moored. As they passed, Nathaway caught onto the gunwale of one of them. They bumped up against it, and Spaeth reached over to seize the oars. Fitting them into the locks of their own boat, she quickly brought them round and sent them spinning through the maze of pilings toward open water.

  “There she is,” Nathaway pointed ahead. “Ripplewill.”

  Her sleek, low shape looked marvellously familiar amid all the ships riding in the Outbay. As they drew close they could see two figures standing at the rail, outlined against the dawn. A gruff voice hailed them.

  “Torr! Tway!” Spaeth called. “It’s me!”

  “Root and all, it’s Spaeth!” Torr said, clutching his cap as if he thought it would spring off his head in surprise.

  The figure beside Torr leaned over the rail to see. “Spaeth, is that Harg with you?”

  “No, it’s our Inning.”

  “Our what?”

  They bumped up against the Ripplewill’s side. Spaeth eagerly reached out to the hands that helped her step from the dinghy onto the deck. She turned to Nathaway, holding out her own hand for him.

  For a moment, he looked back at the city in the predawn light—the crowded commercial districts, the grand residences, all the towering tiers of buildings, crowned by the stern authority of the palace. It was his heritage—the world of structure, order, and
power that he had been born to own. What had started last night as a rebellion against a single unjust act had turned into something far more serious. If he voluntarily left aboard a rebel ship, he would be severing himself from his birthright forever. They would never take him back.

  “Nat!” Spaeth said, alarmed by his hesitation.

  He couldn’t leave her. The compulsion Goth had placed on him was too strong. And yet, he felt a painful wrench, like tearing fabric, as he turned away from the city to climb onto the boat.

  “Blessed boots of Ashte!” Torr said to Spaeth. “I thought Harg was going to flay me for letting the prisoner escape. And you magicked him back for me!”

  “He’s not a prisoner any more,” Spaeth said defensively, holding onto him as if he might still escape. “He’s my bandhota now.”

  Tway and Torr both looked as if her statement had knocked the words right out of them. Tway’s eyes automatically went to Spaeth’s unblemished arm, then to Nathaway’s bandaged one, then rose to his face with a disturbed frown. He couldn’t meet her gaze, but drew closer to Spaeth.

  “Are you ready to weigh anchor, Torr?” Spaeth asked.

  “I’ve been ready these past six hours, since I heard the shooting. We’ve been waiting for Harg, Gill, and Calpe.”

  “What shooting? Where are they?”

  “Why, the shooting in the city. It’s been going on all night. And if we knew where they were—”

  Nathaway was looking back over the harbour. “Torr,” he interrupted tensely, “There’s an Inning patrol boat heading toward us.”

  Torr seemed frozen at sight of the approaching skiff.

  “We can’t leave without Harg!” Tway said.

  “If you wait,” Nathaway said, “we’ll all fall into their hands.”