by Kate Elliott
“What is this place?” he asked.
“The old ones built it, so legend says.”
It was more like a forest than any building he had ever seen; there was no layer of undergrowth, and no sky, but the pillars marched out on either side in uneven ranks, and each column had as different a look to it as any individual tree might—some resembling each other as oak tree resembles oak tree, yet different in the pattern of gems or decoration on its surface or the width or smoothness or curve of the pillar itself. Pale-skin divined a path by means of touching each pillar and moving on to the next, sometimes backtracking before heading out in a new direction, but always moving into the vast forest itself, endlessly on, into the wilderness.
In the midst of the forest a clearing opened. They came to the rim of a shallow bowl cut into the stone so unexpectedly that he almost tripped and fell, stopping himself on the brim, teetering there for one breath, then stepping back. In that bowl, along the level base, a hundred boulders rested all helter-skelter, and that was only what he could see within the halo made by the light, for the bowl itself was too wide for the glow of his armband to illuminate the whole of it. When he blinked, he realized that of course these were not boulders at all but a congregation of skrolin.
His legs crumpled under him, and he sat hard on the lip, where the floor gave way. He was too dizzy and weak to negotiate the sloping side. There he sat while a low rolling scraping sound shifted around him, disorienting him, and he fought to stay sitting and not simply keel over.
After a long time he became aware that Pale-skin squatted beside him holding two objects in his hands: a loaf of clavas and a stone bowl filled to the brim with water. The smell of the water made his mouth hurt, and in fact his lips were so dry and cracked that the moisture stung them and they bled, the iron bite of his blood blending with the metallic taste of the water. He forced himself to drink less than he wanted, to eat only a corner, not to gorge, and afterward he was so tired that he curled up on stone and slept.
When he woke, he drank and ate again, and now he had the strength to stand, for it was apparent that the boulders—the skrolin—had moved while he slept, changing position to create a clear path for him down into the bowl.
The slope wasn’t so steep that he staggered, but it was still difficult to keep his balance. Pale-skin followed him, bearing more water and clavas, acquired from an unknown source. The skrolin moved only their heads as he passed, watching him, and that shifting rumbling sound followed him as he descended because they all of them fell in behind. He came to a round amphitheater cut into stone with a series of circular ledges and, in the middle, a shallow pit like the fighting ground for cocks or dogs.
Most of the skrolin gathered on the ledges, but Pale-skin led him down by stages to the pit where eleven skrolin waited. Each one wore an armband, but his was the only armband that gleamed, and when he got close to them, he saw that the armbands they wore were pitted and faded and scratched and even tarnished green with age, ancient objects whose potency had withered.
He sat down cross-legged in the center of the pit. All around, up into the ranks of the amphitheater and beyond that into the darkness which the glow of the armband could not penetrate, he felt them watching him, the force of many gazes, of interest and curiosity and of something more besides that had the scent of hope or longing.
“I am a messenger,” he said. “I swam through the poisoned tunnel to bring you a message from those who were lost when the earth trembled and drowned the tunnel through which they traveled. Some among them are still alive. Can you find them and help them to escape the trap they are in?”
His words brought silence. He listened. He heard his own breathing, nothing more. If they pulled air into lungs and let it out again, as did humankind, he could not hear it. They were as silent as the stone around them. They seemed more than half stone themselves.
Finally, when he thought there would be no reply, a rush of clicking and stamping and rubbing and tapping swept through the assembly. After a long while, the noise subsided. Pale-skin had retreated, and in its place one with a gold sheen and a dozen crystalline growths mottling its skin shuffled forward to confront him. It wore draped about its body a number of chimes and charms that rang softly. With a deft movement, at odds with its clumsy body, it stripped the armband off its own long limb and held it out for him to see.
“You wear a talisman,” it said. “But the talisman you wear lives. The talismans we wear are long dead.”
A sigh of grief shuddered through the assembly.
“Is it true that the shining city existed in the long-ago time? Is it true? Or is it only a story we tell.”
He nodded. “It is true. I saw it. I was there.”
“Tell us! Tell us!”
He told them what he remembered, which wasn’t much, only flashes of sights and sounds, a memory of a vast city glimpsed deep in the earth, of pillars clothed in jewels, of a marketplace that lapped a river, of caverns streaked with veins of gold and copper and wagons that moved without horse or oxen to pull them. But as he spoke, the words took on substance, as though he were weaving the city right there before them, as if their listening and his words were the hands and the clay out of which a pot could be formed.
He created the world they had lost, and they believed him, because they wanted to.
“But it is gone,” he said. “It was all gone. They destroyed it.”
Adica destroyed it.
The pain struck, doubling him over, because he could not see or hear with the lance of guilt and grief assaulting him. Adica had destroyed it, but she had died in a wall of blue fire and after that he recalled nothing. Only her, death, and the destruction of the world.
He fell forward onto the floor, body pressed against the stone, hands clenched and teeth gritted but the pain did not cease. Adica hadn’t meant to do so much damage, surely. She hadn’t meant to kill innocents in order to save her own, had she? Hadn’t it all been an accident, a misunderstanding?
The magnificent cities of the goblinkin vanish in cave-ins so massive that the land above is irrevocably altered. Rivers of molten fire pour in to burn away what survives.
Adica had seen the skrolin cities. She had known they existed. Perhaps she and the others had not comprehended the scope of the destruction they would unleash. Yet if they had known, would they have gone ahead anyway? He could not bear to think that she might have, so it was a mercy that pain blinded him, hammered him, until he could not think.
But he could still see.
Rivers run deep beneath the Earth, flooded with fire. This is the blood of the Earth. These are the ancient pathways that mold land and sea and weave the fabric of the world. Far away down the threads woven through the depths of the Earth by the fire rivers lie intelligences of an order both keener and slower than his own, sensing the measure of time in whose passing a human life spans nothing more than the blink of an eye.
Their minds touch his down the pathways of fire. Their thoughts burn into him.
You. Are. The. One. We. Seek.
The toll of their words rings in his head like the clamor of bells oh so slow, slower than the respiration of the skrolin.
Tell. Us. What. You. Know.
They peel away his memories, which are opaque to him but somehow clearly seen by these ancient minds for whom the unfolding of a tree from sapling to a great decayed trunk fallen in the forest flies as swiftly as a swallow through a lady’s hall at wintertide. He catches glimpses of their sight as they pillage his memories: the glittering archway that Adica wove; brave Laoina with her staff; wise Falling-down; crippled Tanioinin; the veiled one and the fearsome lion women; doomed Hehoyanah and Hani’s mocking smile; dying Horn; the camaraderie of Shevros and Maklos who took him across the white path which marks the border of Ashioi lands.
He weeps, because he knows all that he loved is lost to him not just because it is fled across the span of years but because the old ones are tearing those memories away as they search. They are
not done with him yet.
Will. The. Weaving. Save. Us. Or. Doom. Us.
They meant well, he says, but they killed more than they saved. They caused immeasurable devastation.
Ah!
They speak. They confer for hours, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, or for an instant only. He can’t measure them.
This. Is. What. We. Needed. To. Know. Now. We. Can. Act.
They withdraw. On the wind of their leaving he sees beyond the borders of the Earth where the cosmos yawns, immense and terrifying. He cries out in fear and wonder because this abyss is both beginning and end, a circle that turns back in on itself. He hears its voice, not male or female and as vast as eternity: I am what I was and what I am now and what I will be.
And woke with jumbled, painful memories that faded into a merciful haze. All was gone, veiled and shrouded.
He was still lying on the floor of the pit, and he was so tremendously thirsty. The skrolin waited beside him as if no time had passed and yet by the measure of his thirst he thought that hours had passed or a day, but it was impossible to know. He found the bowl of water and gulped it down, and that gave him the strength to eat half the remaining clavas with the manners of a man, not a beast.
At length, he croaked out a word, and the skrolin tapped and rubbed the ground and each other in response.
“Where do you go?” asked Gold-skin, who now spoke for the others. “What do you see?”
Only broken images remained in his head, which was beginning to hurt again. “A terrible fire destroyed your city. What happened after that I do not know.”
“We know. We know. The tale passes from one to the next down the long watches. First the survivors fight for many watches, each with the others, one guild against the next. After long and long the fighting exhausts the few who are left and it is agreed that some will tunnel turnward and some will tunnel antiturnward. Long and long we seek in the depths, but the shining city is gone and so some speak of it as only a story. Across many watches an archive is collected, things found among ruins, in hidden corners, but the archive remains closed to us, as if it never existed. So the quarrels begin again. The shining city is a story only. It is the truth. No one can agree. Now we are scattered. The talismans are dead. The archives are lost to us without the key. This is how you find us, with your story of the shining city. We wish to believe. We fear to believe. Is it true?”
“It is true.”
All around they stamped their feet and tapped and clicked until Gold-skin lifted the dull armband it had once worn and everyone hushed.
“Proof,” it said. “Bring one from the archives. Bring one. Bring two. Bring three. That will be proof.”
“What are the archives?” He touched the bowl of water, but he had drained it dry. Pale-skin, who had grasped his needs, picked up the bowl and hurried off into the darkness.
“They are proof. Closed to us, or open to us, they are proof. Or they are baubles, nothing more. Now we wait. Now we find out.”
Waiting among the skrolin took hours or days; he had entirely lost track of time. Pale-skin brought a whole bucket carved out of stone and filled with water as well as a dozen loaves of clavas. Many times he had to relieve himself by leaving the amphitheater and walking out into the pillars for privacy. He drank that entire bucket and a second one and ate all the clavas before a dozen skrolin returned bearing three massive scrolls forged out of metal-pewter, maybe, since it seemed too hard to be silver. They set these on the ground in front of him, unrolled them, and without further ceremony stepped back. The sheets were as long as his arm span, as wide as the length of his shin, and yet as thin as a leaf. How they could lay flat when they had just been so tightly rolled up he could not imagine.
One by one, the eleven skrolin who bore an armband came forward to press their talismans into a square etched into the center of each scroll. After a pause in which every creature there seemed ready for nothing to happen, yet something to happen, the skrolin would remove the armband and step back.
When they had finished, they all looked expectantly at him.
He saw the pattern, but he didn’t know what it meant. He crouched beside the unrolled sheet, slipped his armband off, and pressed it onto the sheet.
Light flashed. The armband glowed red hot, and he yelped and released it, but it did not roll away; it was stuck to the metal. Light undulated down the length of the sheet in waves, a stark white light followed by successive ripples of gold, pale yellow, silver, and a last dark surge which drove furrows into the surface, gashes and gouges too thin to measure yet he knew what they were.
He recognized writing when he saw it, although these marks were alien to him.
No sound issued from the skrolin.
They stood, like stone, without speaking or moving, stunned or shocked or ignorant.
But he knew. He understood. The miracle had happened. All that had separated them from their ancestors was their access to the knowledge that their kind had accumulated in the ancient days. These scrolls held their memories, closed to them for untold years and centuries. In this same way the pain had choked off his own life from him, glimpsed in snatches as transitory as the tales the skrolin had told themselves over and over since that day when the great weaving had destroyed them.
How long they stood in silence he could not measure. In the depths of the earth, he possessed no gauge by which to quantify time.
They stood in silence for as long as they needed to absorb what he had wrought. They stood in silence while he unrolled the other two sheets, pressed his armband to the centers, and watched as these, too, revealed their secrets.
At length, Gold-skin turned to him.
“A life for a life. A payment. An obligation. You do not belong here, you consume too much fuel. We will trade. One among us will lead you to the Blinding so you can return to your own kind. That is your life, in exchange for the talisman.”
My own kind.
He no longer knew who his own kind were. He could only remember the wheel, and the garden of clavas growing among the rotting flesh of the dead.
“What of your kinfolk?” he asked. “The ones who are trapped? What of them? Can you rescue them now? I can help you. I made a promise to them.”
They gave him no more speech. Pale-skin clasped him tightly, pinning his arms to his side, and hoisted him with awkward strength.
“What of them?” he called, desperate for an answer, but none came.
For hours or days Pale-skin carried him through the labyrinth that is utter night, stopping three times to give him water and clavas, and depositing him at long last, and unceremoniously, on a shelf of rock where grains of soil slipped beneath his fingers although he still could not see.
“Climb up,” said Pale-skin. “Climb up. You have done us great wrong. You have done us great good. We will not forget.”
It rattled away, and he was left alone in the pit. But he probed and touched and sought for handholds, however useless it seemed, because he did not want to die in the pit. So he climbed up and up and up and just when he thought he had been abandoned at the base of the Abyss and must climb for an eternity without ever reaching the top, he discovered a certain alteration in the darkness revealing contours across the rock. He saw a crack of light far above.
He climbed, although he had to rest frequently and more than once slipped and almost fell. When he squeezed out through a narrow cleft, scouring his back against the rough rock, he spilled down a short escarpment, scraped through a bramble bush, yelping and cursing, and came to rest in the shade of a tree on a layer of decayed leaf litter. A bird shrieked a warning and fluttered off through the branches. The light hurt his eyes, but it gentled and mellowed as he caught his breath, dizzy, gasping for air. It was hot and muggy, but there was ease in it and the savor of freedom.
He eased up onto his forearms. He lay on a hillside overlooking a valley a quarter cleared and the rest wooded. A half dozen unseen hearths spun fingers of smoke into the darkening sky. In o
ne clearing a pond faded to a pewter gleam. It was hard to see more detail than this because the sun was setting, the far horizon bathed in an orange-red glow so beautiful that he wept.
4
FOR three days they trudged overland along an old Dariyan road still used by the locals for market traffic, of which they saw little. This was the driest country Hanna had ever seen. Nothing that was truly green grew, only prickly juniper, the ubiquitous olive trees, and so many varieties of thorny shrub or broom that she wondered what they had to protect themselves against besides goats. She and the others soon became coated with a film of dust. Her mouth was always parched. Her lips cracked, and the sun was merciless.
They changed direction, turning east at dawn on the fourth day so that they marched into the rising sun, and for the next three days followed a trickle of water running over rocks which Sergeant Bysantius persisted in calling a river. Every chance she got, she sluiced its waters over her head, neck, hands, and red, swollen, blistered feet until she was streaked with sweat and dirt never completely washed away by the water. Yet for moments at a stretch that cool touch relieved her skin and the headache that continually plagued her.
Where a hole in the ground swallowed the stream, they turned up a defile with jagged, steep-sided hills rising to either side. After two arduous days on a rocky trail, making poor time and less distance, the wagons were left on the path with a guard while Sergeant Bysantius pointed the rest at an impossibly steep trail that led straight up the side of the hill. His soldiers rolled a dozen barrels out of the wagons and with great difficulty lashed them to stout poles and lugged them up. Two other men carried Mother Obligatia on her stretcher up that twisting trail which switched back and forward and back while the rest of them strung out behind, falling farther and farther back. It took hours, or years, before their footsore and exhausted party reached a row of buildings perched on a ledge cut into the cliff face.