Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars)

by Jim Grimsley

  My enemy stood here. He had begun to spread shadow over the forest as soon as he arrived, not because he wanted to destroy the trees but because he had no choice, he could not stop it. But Arthen could not tolerate its presence and was already withering around us. Drudaen could feel the dying, and so could I.

  He stood near the eastern edge of the tower and I walked toward him. There was no dueling between us, no strife. He turned and watched me. He stood with a slight stoop, wrapping a white cloak around his arms. I remembered him as handsome from the last time I had seen him but he had lived too long, the body had been stretched thin.

  “It won’t work, will it? I can’t come back.” He didn’t need for me to tell him the answer. He sighed.

  He took a last look around. We strolled along the tower, while light poured down over the tops of the trees. We came to a place where the sun reflected off a curve in the river below, and beneath us we could see the many colors and shapes of that other abandoned city. “You should have seen it when it was alive,” he said.

  “I can,” I said.

  He frowned. Drawing himself up as straight as he could, he looked me in the eye, where his lust and hunger and avarice and arrogance all suddenly yielded to a softness, a yearning for rest, and he nodded, and I said, “All right.”

  Overhead, as I breathed, the sky cleared again, and shadow dissolved and sunlight returned and Drudaen Keerfax watched it all. He felt shadow break apart far across the countryside north and south and he sighed with relief and sagged and shook his head. That much would be enough to kill him. Only one gesture remained. I passed my hand across my mouth and drew out the gem I had swallowed, such a long time ago, the raven impaled on the talon of God, and I handed it to him. “This is yours.”

  He nodded and the gem lay in his palm. He blinked at it and the light suddenly grew bright, and she was with him, for an instant, my great-great-grandmother, wrapping something around his arms. This was how Drudaen Keerfax vanished out of the world altogether, and the war was ended.

  Chapter 28: THENDURIL HALL

  1

  I stood there for a while, after he was gone. I had never known a world without the story of him. Now, in all the worlds I could see, I had no enemy.

  In that city on that Tower I stood until sunset. I waited to be certain his presence had done no lasting harm. I waited for a breath of warm wind from the south; I had called it and I knew it would come. Deciding we would have an early spring that year.

  I did magic on Seumren, the first in more time than a person should have to think about, and when I was done I went down. I made that place my own, walked its long stair down to the ground, emerged into the fountain court and saw it wrecked, and saw it in my minds eye as it had been in my dream, when the King arrived at the court to walk into the tower, not Kirith Kirin, for he had never reigned here. I was seeing Falamar, my ancestor, who had built this place. The last magician to reach the third circle, the last to die at the moment that he did.

  To move beyond the fourth level of magic is to learn to move the force that underlies all the things we see, not the force that shapes a stone, or transforms a stone, but the force that binds a stone to be itself. Jurel had learned this level of magic and had used it to make a peaceful kingdom. His room in Chalianthrothe was a device of the third circle. Falamar had moved third level power, too, the split second before he died because he could not control it.

  To move beyond the fourth level of magic is to move beyond the world of things. One rarely comes back from the journey, as I had done.

  I needed only know this when I was there, on Seumren, or when I was on Ellebren, or in the room of three circles at Chalianthrothe, or the other magic places; I need not know this all the time. This was the secret the Diamysaar understood but could not teach me, the thing one must learn oneself. How never to know too much.

  That night I walked out of Cunuduerum across the bridge that had first drawn me here, so long ago, so much longer ago even than it seemed. Fresh from Kinth’s farm, the smell of my mother’s home-made soap on my hair. I set out walking, meaning to get to Inniscaudra, step by step, the long way.

  2

  We met on the Illaeryn road near the three hills, when I was within half a day’s walk of Inniscaudra. He was riding alone, with Nixva on a bridle following behind him, and caught me at midmorning, washing out my tunic in a creek. He had found me as surely as an arrow finds the target in the hand of a fine archer, and he was always that.

  Any schoolchild can recite the words we would hear when we reached Inniscaudra, the words that are engraved on the stone seals that we placed over those doors when YY closed them this last time. I will give you a lifetime together, and I mean the lifetime you are due, and you will have your afternoon of happiness, I promise this, and I am YY who makes all of you, so I can do what I say.

  I caught up the bridle willingly and jumped onto Nixva’s back, barefoot; Kirith Kirin took off like lightning on the Keikin and we followed. I realized I had left my boots at the creek, but I figured I would come back for them sometime, or they would be there, if anyone else needed them. There would be more boots at Inniscaudra. So I rode barefoot, and Nixva tossed his head when I sat on his back again.

  We rode to Immorthraegul, the flank that overlooks Durassa’s Park, and in the clear noon we sat there, and he shared the food he’d brought.

  She said Kirith Kirin would be King one more time, for as long as he lived, and after there would be no more King or Queen, but the world would change again.

  We had the day ahead of us, now that we had found each other. We had only to cross Durassa’s Park sometime before sundown, and ride up Vath Invaths to that great house that would be our home, or one of our homes, for as long as we lived. As I had learned, that might be a very long time.

  Only one of the Jhinuuserret will stay behind, in my house, this one where I stand, until the end of all the worlds that I and all the others have made.

  That was the first day he called me by my two names together. We were walking along the shrine path on top of Immorthraegul, and we looked across Illaeryn at the clear sky. “You never did understand what it meant, when the Sisters called you to the field that day, did you? Before we went south. Answer me, Jessex Yron.”

  Said with that inflection, I understood.

  A mortal magician could not have lived a hundred years. Not even asleep.

  She took Athryn Ardfalla, and Sylvis Mnemorel followed, by her own choice. She took Mordwen Illythin because it was his time. Ren Vael died and Pel Pelathayn died when Cordyssa was burned, so they have already gone.

  She took Evynar Ydhiil, home to Zaeyn at last.

  A day will come when this will be over, and all this joy will turn to sorrow, I suppose. But that day we were together, and happy, and the thing we had fought for was won. No one wanted anything of either of us, except what we wanted of each other. And I could dig my bare toes in the winter grass.

  We lost the world we knew when she came. She brought us another.

  We walked across the hilltop, passed the shrine, then started downward at the turn of light. We would have time to cross Durassa’s Park without hurry.

  Afterword: ANESEVEROTH

  This war has come to be known as the Third War of the Sorcerers, following the first between Falamar and Jurel and the second between Kentha and Drudaen. Often enough, though, it is simply called the Long War. Archival records in Ivyssan government buildings that survived indicate that at the beginning of the war the population of Aeryn was close to four million, split nearly equally along the lines of Anynae and Jisraegen, with the Verm counted among the Jisraegen, along with three hundred thousand of the people of Drii, and unknown numbers of Tervan, Svyssn and beings beyond our ken. During the war about a half million people of both races took refuge in Arthen and escaped the main force of the conflict. At no time did shadow fall on Arthen and remain. To feed these folks, crops were planted in the Woodland for the first time in ages, and in certain areas trees w
ere felled to make fields, though nowhere near the duraelaryn. The cultivated land was returned to its forest state at the end of the war. Thus the population inside Arthen never suffered from the dreadful famines that swept the rest of the country, if not at the beginning of the war then certainly by the end of it. At the end of the three generations that the war crossed, the numbers inside Arthen increased to about six hundred thousand, most of the population growth coming from new refugees, this according to counts Kirith Kirin ordered to be taken from time to time.

  Of the remaining three and a half million of the Jisraegen and Anyn peoples who never came to Arthen, by the end of the hundred years of the war, the Kellyxa and Vyddn plains could count scarcely one hundred thousand souls. A scant twenty thousand were to be counted in the north, though these numbers were increased when another twenty thousand refugees returned from the Svyssn and Tervan countries to the ruins of their family lands, their devastated towns and villages.

  The numbers of the Drii dropped, too, but not as drastically, to one hundred fifty thousand. Most Drii who died were killed in the various armies, which swelled to unheard of sizes in the later stages when the Tervan and Svyssn had joined the war. At one point there were two hundred thousand troops afield in the Fenax and the north Kellyxa, and many of these died in battle against Drudaen. Worst hit of all were Drudaen’s servants, the Verm, of whom merely ten thousand lived through the devastation of shadow and war.

  How many people were killed in fighting and how many Drudaen killed himself in order to prolong his life is a matter over which scholars still debate in the Praevenam and the Yneset, both of which we have revived in recent years. It is a matter of concern to nearly everyone, for Drudaen touched nearly everyone with the destruction that he brought. How many members of our families will we find in Zaeyn and how many never made the crossing because he sucked their souls into himself? What has happened to his spirit since? Did he cross the Gates like anyone else? Or did Kentha meet him at that last moment because she had prepared another place for him?

  I have never tried to know the answers to these questions, any of them. The why of Drudaen will always puzzle us. He was already long-lived, his magic gave him nothing more than he had already, and yet somehow the use of magic enraged him, or sickened him, or changed him, or all those things. The ones who live a long time face such possibilities, as we know from history. The sickness passes, or not. I believe it did pass with Drudaen by the end, but it was too late, he could no longer stop making the shadow that kept him alive.

  Less is said of Athryn’s place in the causes of the war, due to her conduct at the end of it. But when YY took her, there were not many who were sorry to see her go.

  Many cities were destroyed in that war and never were rebuilt. Cordyssa vanished in the late stages of the conflict, and its ruin still sits on the mountain. Bruinysk was destroyed and never rebuilt. Genfynnel has become a park, and the only structure standing on the acropolis at the fork of the river is Laeredon Tower. Teryaehn was never resettled. Arroth was abandoned, and remained so for many years after the peace. Arsk was sacked and razed and rebuilt during the war. Kursk was left a husk but partly rebuilt afterward. Charnos and Ivyssa suffered reductions in population as people abandoned the cities for the countryside or were taken to slave camps in Antelek, where the Verm were trying frantically to farm in order to stave off starvation themselves. Teliar was abandoned during the war though people moved back there, later, and I bought Brun’s house by Ithambotl the great Anyn architect for myself. Kirith Kirin and I stayed there many times while he was King.

  Mordwen Illythin was too old for fighting, Kirith Kirin never allowed him to take part in any of the combat, but he kept a long account of the war that has become the standard text on all that happened after the Battle of Aerfax. By the close of the war, Mordwen had reached the end of the long life granted him, and he would have gone of his own accord into the Deeps, except he wanted to stay to see how the story came out, he said; we were saying good-bye, that last day, before YY took him with her. He gave me his books to keep, because I was the one who would be here longest.

  Pel Pelathayn and Ren Vael died in the last fighting at Cordyssa, when Drudaen loosed Verm soldiers into the place and told them to do whatever they wished with the people who were left, to take whatever goods they could find, him having by then no other way to feed them or reward them, his gold worthless like everything else. The Verm killed the men and women of fighting age, raped the young ones and beat the old ones, sacked the city and burned it to the ground. Drudaen stayed back from the fighting though he saw to it that Ren and Pel were targeted and killed. So he has the deaths of those two on his head, too; but they died fighting and passed safely through the gates, as far as we know.

  My uncle Sivisal lived a long time but never married; when he died he was still serving Kirith Kirin in Arthen. He caught a cold that turned to pneumonia, not the death he would have chosen but the one he got. Since he had left no family I had none. The war proved to be the last gasp of the Clans, which were never much remembered afterward; sad to say, I suppose, since the Clans first appeared in the age of the Forty Thousand.

  Brun stayed in Arthen at court until Theduril went south to fight in the Novris resistance; Brun had first met him in that city and returned there with him. She died in the early fighting and Theduril in the late. When I heard she had finally married him, though, I felt a sense of ease for her. I missed her oddly in after years.

  Trysvyn died at the gates of Bruinysk when the Verm were besieging that city. She came from there, and gave her life there. Gaelex the Marshall died of old age in Inniscaudra. So too died Inryval, Thruil the groom, my old tutor Kraele, Theduril, Fethyar, Unril, Idhril, Vaeyr, Kaleric, Duvettre, the clerks I knew. So died Axfel, cared for by Mordwen to the end, though Mordwen had never liked the dog.

  Nemort died in the north Fenax in one of the early campaigns against the Verm. He remained loyal to Kirith Kirin to his death.

  My mother’s body perished in the explosion that consumed Senecaur. She herself had been dead a long time, or so I choose to believe, and it was only her body that was re-animated by Drudaen as his weapon against me, though in the end she hurt him more, that day.

  I suppose it is safe to say that all those I knew would have died anyway, given that I slept for so long, except the Jhinuuserret. But one’s later friends never feel quite the same.

  The Law of Changes, under which Kirith Kirin and Athryn Ardfalla had exchanged the crown for thousands of years, ended when Athryn left the world. We believed that when YY came this time she would end the current age of the Jisraegen as well, but she prolonged it, for one last long afternoon of peace, she said. For she trusted Kirith Kirin to make a peace that would last a while, and so he did.

  Years after peace had begun, when the work of rebuilding and restoring had been going on in earnest for a long time, we traveled to Mykinoos as Kirith Kirin had promised we would one day. He had been buying the land around my father’s old farm from whoever had claim to it after the war. This had taken a while since it was a long time before such claims could all be sorted out, work he had a hand in himself. But in the end he assembled a park he named Aneseveroth, Sea of Circles, and he took me there when the new stone lodge had been finished to his satisfaction.

  He had bought land right up to the Mykinoos square; the village had survived the war as a shell but was repopulated in the boom of trade that accompanied rebuilding. Kirith Kirin’s current Marshal of the Ordinary Thumin had recruited settlers to return to Mykinoos along with all the legitimate claimants to the lands thereabouts who had survived. The gates of Aneseveroth were right at the center of the village, and the villagers were free to wander in the parks. Mykinoos has become a tourist site in latter days, because I was born there, and most folks think that Aneseveroth was my father’s farm. The real farmhouse, the real farmyard and barns, we made into a woody garden, working together during the summers we spent in the comfortable country house he had
designed by the architect of the day. An imitation of Ithambotl, as all buildings are, in my opinion, but a nice house.

  But that first day, no garden had been begun; there was only the high wall Kirith Kirin had commissioned to enclose the old farm grounds, and within was more than a century of growth, a hardwood forest all matured, and the remains of the life I remembered. We walked into it alone, Imral and Karsten back at the house, our guests for the opening of the park but not for this more private journey.

  I stood there and took a breath. You could still see the shape of the land if you tried, overgrown as it was. I could almost see myself running back from the fields with Axfel and Jarred, the news of my uncle’s impossible visit ringing in my ears. I took a deep breath.

  “You sent for me,” I told him, and took his hand, warm and comfortable, in mine. “To this place. And this is where it started.”

  “For you,” he said.

  “Yes, for me.”