by Jim Grimsley
Near an open-air market we waited, bits of smelly rag wrapped round our heads. Imral and Kirith Kirin had gone away. Karsten wandered with me among the wretched shoppers who crowded the place, people who had been sick a long time, who had rarely had enough to eat, people who were wounded, hurt, hardly anyone like us, whole of body. People who looked like Verm. Karsten bought a ladle of hot broth, thin stuff floating in it, and I drank that gratefully from her cup, hoping my stomach would not rebel. The merchant, who had two noses, or a nose that had divided down the middle, was glad to see a real coin, he said, and thanked her.
From the market I could see, in the distance, two high Towers soaring toward the dark undersides of clouds, one about half the height of the other. Lights flickered on one of the summits. Karsten saw me watching, drew me away. Thoem and Karomast, High Places that had stood over the Old City center for millennia. But someone had torn down Karomast, or tried.
Kirith Kirin and Imral returned with horses bought or stolen, sad wrecks of animals, wanting proper food and decent treatment. We mounted the poor animals without discussion and set off again through the streets. Overhead, now and then, I glimpsed the two slender Towers. I made no effort to reach to them in any way, but when I was looking at them, I could see the whole city as if it were beneath me, as though I were on the summit; Ivyssa had been a thriving city but now people lived only at her old center, and boats moved there as they used to, but at the fringes of the city the waterways were clogged, the bridges collapsed, the houses fallen into the rivers or canals. A city fallen to ruin at the edges. A city of a few thousand.
But even when I was out of sight of the Towers, what I saw with my own eyes told the same story. Most of Old Ivyssa and nearly all the new city was wrecked and empty. Moving through the streets were armed parties of Verm and other creatures like them, hard to recognize as human. We had wrapped our heads as best we could and sat slumped on those sorry horses, but once or twice someone in the column gave us a second look as we passed.
We reached a part of the city where hardly a soul stirred except the Verm soldiers and us, and came to a place where scarcely anyone was on the streets or waterways. We were traveling through the part of the city I had seen through the towers, a wilderness of ruins where no one lived any more. We were walking through a battlefield after the battle, an eerie wind moaning among the collapsed walls. The stones of the streets were scorched black in places as if parts of the city had burned, as if there had really been fighting here.
We found a place to sleep in one of the wrecked houses, away from the trafficked streets, and I judged by the direct heading we steered that the place had been chosen in advance. Almost as soon as we got inside I collapsed, shaking with sickness, and Kirith Kirin built a fire while Imral went after water that was fit to drink. We had to boil it, but when it was boiled and poured through a cloth it was fairly clear, and Kirith Kirin dropped a pouch into a cup of the water and gave it to me. “Unufru, for the fever.”
I knew that was the right thing. He sat with me while the tea steeped. I drank it and leaned against him. He was real, his body was there, and his face, when I looked at him, seemed the same. Maybe a year or two older. But we had been apart longer than that.
I shivered until I got the tea down, my body worked with the unufru and the fever started to ease. The others were quietly getting food together, watching me, watching Kirith Kirin, who had yet to stir from my side since we got indoors.
“I’ve been away a long time,” I said.
Imral laughed. “Away. That’s one way to put it.”
“We thought you were dead,” Karsten said. “For years.”
Kirith Kirin was not saying anything. He had an arm loosely around me and drew it tight.
“Tell me what happened.”
“It was a long time ago.” Imral shook his head.
“Oh, I remember it well enough,” Karsten said.
We looked at each other, the four of us, and suddenly it was that day again, in front of Aerfax when we were almost at the gate, and I had found Kirith Kirin slumped beside his horse with his death working its way through him, and I stopped the killing chain of Words and put my cloak on him to keep him safe. I was there again, the memory too vivid to be distant, with Karsten wishing God to keep me safe and the high wind blowing, as if it were yesterday, or even more vivid than that, as if the whole scene were right outside the door of that ruined merchant’s house.
So the story was told, and I will not attempt to narrate how we got through it. Each one told his part. They and the army had begun their retreat, Kirith Kirin burning up with a fever like the one that was now easing off in me. Karsten had stayed at the back of the column while the retreat began; she wanted to watch what was happening at Aerfax, and she saw the flash of darkness that poured out of me toward a vague point in the road that became, after a clap of fire and thunder, Drudaen and his horse, moving at incredible speed. I remembered that he was riding in the ithikan and I broke the wave of it under him. He fell into the real world at that speed and killed his horse, a royal one. That was the last she saw of me, the Verm were attacking from the mountains along the column. At first the Verm were charging in a flood and she wondered how our army would make it to the first bend of the road, but then a wave of gray passed across the mountains and the Verm there died, some of them fused to the rock; after that the retreat became orderly. But the fireworks continued at their backs, she stayed at the rear of the column the whole march, to watch.
She heard the trumpets when the Aerfax sea-gates opened and Athryn’s ships came out. These were good boats with fleets of oars and trained rowers, but their sails were useless in the storm and they were afraid to come aground for a long time. They followed the army along the coast and then one of them beached and Imral took Kirith Kirin aboard it and the boat headed south as fast as it could go, toward Charnos. When the storm did calm some the rest of the boats put ashore down the road. About the time the last of the boats was pulling ashore, to the south they saw the dark sky suddenly white as noon, a fire and a blast they felt as far away as the stormy beach on which those poor boats were struggling. There was a murmur of despair from everyone and Karsten remembered that she said a prayer for me then. She guessed what had happened, that somehow the Tower had blown apart in the fighting.
Complete confusion ensued for a few days. The boats put to sea with a thousand troops in them, headed for Charnos. Karsten and Evynar marched the remaining army, about five thousand, to Teryaehn-in-Don. There they found an army of Verm encamped on the road north of the town, safely beyond the limit of my killing lattice, unable to come any farther south. The Verm had found that out at the cost of some lives, and had settled down to wait.
Karsten waited too. Pretty soon Ren Vael and Pelathayn brought the ships back, with supplies for Teryaehn. The boats took away another thousand of the army. Seeing this, the Verm were getting restive. Since the rumor had me dead, they wondered if my magic was still working, and tried to march down the road into Kleeiom again. A number of them died before they realized the killing enchantments were still functioning.
So Karsten sat in Teryaehn anxious that at any moment Drudaen would appear on the road. She left the town with the last of the soldiers. To the final moment, she said, she kept dreaming she would see me, somehow, coming out of the Don to join them. On Nixva, she said, though Nixva had gone on the earlier ships. But the story in Teryaehn was that Senecaur had blown off half the Spur and wrecked Aerfax, and that I had died in the blast.
She was glad to set sail for Charnos. But by then, shadow had taken hold over all the lands around the bay, and was spreading north. That meant Drudaen was alive. She knew that much.
By the time she got to Charnos, Kirith Kirin had been taken north by a group of picked riders on royal horses headed for Arthen. Imral was with them. The burghers of Charnos told her the prince – the King, they called him – had arrived breathing but not conscious. They got him mounted on Keikindavii and the party set ou
t.
Karsten stayed in the city long enough to organize the army’s northern march, and she managed to hold the whole force together long enough to reach Arsk before the Queen’s people broke away and headed for their homes. She tried to tell them what was coming, she said. But as far as they were concerned, the war was over. Her words proved true too quickly. As the Queen’s officers led the garrisons back to their old forts, their old postings, shadow followed them, and this time, when it fell on a place, it remained. She had promised them they could find safety in Arthen, and the burghers and the people of Charnos heard the same message from her, that they could all come north to Arthen, she would guarantee their passage. To escape what was to come.
The Jisraegen soldiers who had been with her through it all, the Venladrii loyal to Evynar, held together in a force of three thousand and marched north along the river, collecting our garrisons from all the places that had been secured for our march south.
The army quartered in Genfynnel, she said. But she had an odd feeling about the place, because of Laeredon. The tower lights were blazing, as if there were a great struggle going on. The people in the city said the lights had been idle for a while now, till the army arrived. She got suspicious, massed the troops and ordered a night march out of the city, double time north toward Arthen, and she recommended the city lord evacuate the rest of Genfynnel as well.
Her instincts were right. By morning Drudaen had come in person to the city, in pursuit of the army, it was thought, but he went to Telkyii Tars and stayed. He did no violence at first, he was working at the base of Laeredon, trying to get in, according to people from Genfynnel who fled to Arthen a few days later. He had artisans working with him, and some of them died trying to open the base. By then the Tower was making the most awful sounds, and the lights were so bright that even noon was a misery, and when his magic could not open the place, Drudaen went into a rage and rained fire on the city, rode through the streets and broke down the houses, and brought shadow north as far as he was standing. He called for an army to come and waited for it, and the Verm leveled the place, burned it to the ground, all but the Tower, which he could not touch.
They had heard this news in Inniscaudra, which the army reached safely before the end of Yama. Imral and Mordwen Illythin tended Kirith Kirin through those weeks, and once he was in the woodland again, he began to return to awareness, to blink his eyes, to see the world. At first he could hardly hold a conversation, he would ask them if they knew how much time was passing, that was all. But after a long time, he came to himself again.
“They told me what happened,” Kirith Kirin said. “They told me where I was and how I got there. They told me they thought you were dead.”
He went on when he was ready. No one spoke in the silence.
Shadow came farther north, as far south as Maugritaxa and Montajhena. In Inniscaudra, they settled down to wait.
A year passed, two. Amri the kyyvi continued to dream I was sleeping in a room and could hear the sea; she would have that dream long after she stopped serving in the shrine, until she wandered into the Arth Hills one day and was never seen again. From Arthen spies went out and risked their lives to learn what was happening under shadow, to learn the truth of what had happened at Aerfax after the army retreated. No one knew who had caused Senecaur to rupture and blow half the mountain into the sea, was it Drudaen, or was it me? No one knew whether anyone else had survived, other than Drudaen, including Athryn and her court. There were rumors of every description and no news, the whole south was in chaos, with the generals struggling to control the eastern half of the country and Drudaen sitting in Cunevadrim trying to repair himself and his High Place. When the spies came back, some of them after two years traveling, Kirith Kirin began to get a picture of the new south.
“What we found out gave us little reason to hope,” he said, quietly. “We knew that, whatever happened in front of Aerfax that day, Senecaur had blown to bits and half the Spur with it. My best people got as close to the place as they could get, past his patrols in Kleeiom, and that was what they saw. Whether any of Aerfax survived, whether you survived, whether Athryn was still alive, none of us could find that out, because Drudaen had the place under guard by land and sea. But the fact that he kept the place guarded made us suspicious.”
In the third year after the Battle of Aerfax, as people had begun to name it, Drudaen moved.
Verm armies marched across the south and took control of the baronies the queen’s generals had set up in the absence of any other government. The Verm occupied Kmur Island and confiscated the treasury. A Verm garrison and administrators took over Ivyssa, and all commerce went through their hands. Charnos closed the Tervan gates and brought in her ships. She had stockpiles of food that would last a long time, and now and then sent out an armada to Novris to buy supplies and trade goods that the western city, also besieged by Drudaen, needed desperately. The two cities were able to hold out for a long time that way, supporting each other, but once he had the treasury he could build a fleet of his own, and he did. After that it was only a matter of time. First Novris fell to Drudaen, and then Charnos was blockaded and starved into submission and opened her gates again.
“How long did they hold out?” I asked.
“About twenty years, in the case of Charnos,” Kirith Kirin answered.
I was not looking at his face. I could feel his uneasiness. That same uneasiness was opening up in me. “Go on,” I said.
All that time shadow held fast, and under it the world slowly changed. As had happened in Turis, long ago, many people died outright. Of those who survived, babies who were born under shadow were twisted, grew crooked, and their parents grew crooked too, under the thin light of the new world. Everything changed. Crops grew wrong or did not grow and there was no longer enough food to send to market, and people in the cities had less and less to eat, and then nothing, and then they started going to the country to take land so they could try to raise some food and eat again. The cities emptied and people died in the countryside, murdered for land or trying to get land or simply murdered or dead of starvation.
But the strangest thing. Through the whole siege of Charnos, with all his resources turned to conquering the city, he spared the numbers to maintain a constant guard on Kleeiom and met the expense of a fleet to patrol the seas around Aerfax.
We set out to learn why, Karsten said. Imral and I went south.
They were away from Arthen for two years, and they got as far south as Novris in one direction before heading across country to the Narvos Hills, where we had marched so many years before. They followed the old road and headed south through the fens of Karns again.
No one had ever broken through my killing lattice there, north of Teryaehn Don. But Imral and Karsten were not ordinary travelers and crossed the countryside without hindrance. They wandered through the ruins of Teryaehn, flattened by order of Drudaen as soon as he regrouped after his losses at the Battle of Aerfax. Imral and Karsten moved west into Shurhala. They knew the land there as well as anyone who was patrolling it, and so were able to move farther and farther south. Close to the Spur, they tried some of the tunnels that led into the lower parts of Aerfax, but found these broken, maybe in the same explosion that shook the Spur to pieces. So they left the tunnels and made their way along a high trail to the end of the peninsula.
They got closer than the earlier expeditions and saw that part of Aerfax had survived, the lower quarters, which were the original Tervan building, and not the upper ones, the royal part, which had tumbled into the sea when that part of the Spur broke off. So they guessed Athryn and all her folk were dead. But they watched for a while and saw that there were in fact people manning the walls of the lower house, enough in Aerfax to keep invaders at bay. So Karsten and Imral stayed and watched. Twice while they were there, a ship flying the Queen’s colors raced across the bay, chased by one of Drudaen’s patrols, and trumpeted to have the sea gates opened.
But if the walls of Aerfax w
ere strong enough to keep out an army, what was strong enough to protect the survivors from Drudaen?
If ships were flying Athryn’s colors, she was alive. Someone was sending or bringing supplies to her by ship. She would have loyalists in Ivyssa who could undertake work like that, and loyalists on Kmur. So they went to Ivyssa, and after some checking Imral learned that Sylvis Mnemorel herself was directing the work, moving from house to house in Ivyssa, traveling by boat at night, keeping away from people who were loyal to Drudaen now, who would have been glad for the privilege of turning her over to him.
As they described meeting with this woman whom I had never met, or at least, never met when I was conscious, it was as if I had gone into that abandoned mansion along the First Canal of Old Ivyssa with them, as if I had seen her there. She could have ridden north into Arthen at any time these last centuries, but instead had stayed in the south to oppose Drudaen to his face through most of that time, risking what life she had left. Karsten and Imral had loved her and missed her for many years, and she them, and so their meeting was joyous and full of heartache at the same time. The three had a conversation much like ours in which they shared all that had happened since they were last together. From her they learned that I was still alive, that I had been in Athryn’s care since she fought to bring my body in from the Kleeiom road, and that I was the force that held Drudaen at bay there.