Ash and Silver

by Carol Berg

  “There is no point to all this yammering,” she snapped. “Leave here and come back when you can take your friends. Stay and we all suffer.”

  But I could not let it go. “I came here in answer to your beacon. Why will using magic trap me here?”

  “Because replenishing your power from this land will weaken it beyond use. Those who survived the Severing watched their magic wither even as their bodies starved. Recovering from depletion took longer and longer, and never did they attain the levels of power they’d known before. After a few years, none displayed talents greater than our ancestors had in the days before we moved to Navronne. Those of us born at or after the Severing have never even practiced greater magic—Aurellian magic as it was known in the Xancheira-that-was.” Though she was no older than I, Signé’s spirit was as dry and hard as old currants.

  “More immediately, Kyr will not allow it. He is accustomed to the indwelling magic he senses inside the citadel, but any other use reaps punishment. He does not wait for transgressors to starve, nor does he take care in their disembodiment.” Signé pointed up the hill toward the Sanctuary pool. “Leave while you can.”

  The overwhelming sorrow of the wood stilled any attempt to crack her resolution. And with the skewing of time, dawn would have long arrived at Evanide. Yet something in Bastien’s report of the silver Dané nagged.

  “Siever says not to trust Safia,” I said.

  She blew a note of exasperation. “Siever warned Benedik not to mate with Safia, as he saw early on what was happening to the long-lived. Safia never forgave him. His wife and three children are prisoned in the grove these ten years, and she’ll not tell him which trees are theirs. They were not dying. She took no care in their dissolution. Now, that’s enough questions.”

  She strode toward the bronze alley gate. I followed like an obedient pup, grieving for Signé and Siever—and Safia, too—and all those trapped here. But I could not let it distract me.

  “Safia told me that my magic was the answer for my kind and her own. So she must think I can help the Danae, as well.”

  “The only way to help the long-lived is to rejoin Xancheira to the greater world. Even if you have the power required, the key to undo the Severing is two centuries lost. The Wanderers were to bring back the magic we need, but Hercule and his people know nothing of it. Now will you please go? I must not be caught out when you stir the Sanctuary pool again. Thank you for wanting to help, Lucian de Remeni. I hope you can find a way to take your sister back. If not, we shall cherish her for what time she has left.”

  Signé saw herself as dead already. Another tragedy amidst so many. The mere memory of her singing bound my spirit with every color of life.

  “I will come back. I’ll not leave my sister or you or anyone here to starve, do I need to breach the gates of Idrium itself to find the way.”

  With a shrug, she set out across the crumbling cobbles toward the causeway. My fingers traced the curves of the bronze gate. Bold words faded quickly in the deepening cold. I wasn’t looking forward to drowning again . . . or falling back through the airless void. And how was I to . . . aim? The door at Evanide was meant to lead to this city when the proper magic was applied to it. But the pool—Sanctuary itself?—had no intrinsic destination as I understood it. It would help nothing if I ended up dead or halfway across the world from Evanide.

  And then in a blurt of sense, my mind began functioning. Of course there was a door to take me back. Feeling an entire ass, I sprinted after the lady.

  CHAPTER 26

  Signé spun in surprise when I caught up with her. “Are you crazed entire? I told you—”

  “Before the Severing, where did people leave the city to go to the hospice—the House of Clarity?”

  “All I’ve ever known is this place,” she snapped, “and no one’s gone anywhere.”

  “Would one of your survivors know? Perhaps some of the Wanderers left here by way of the hospice gate.”

  “The Wanderers were sent out from the Silver Tower.” She pointed to the taller of the broken stumps beside the citadel’s sole remaining tower. “If we could reopen their paths and traverse the void, don’t you think we would have done? If we could have repaired the Dark Divide, would we not have done that?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “We’ve not just thrown up our hands and yielded to fate. Our mages tried everything. Even diminished by the Severing, they were the most skilled and insightful practitioners of magic in the world. If Navronne is the Heart of the World, then the Duchy of Xancheiros was the Heart of Magic. We made our lives there for generations, developing our gifts and sharing them with all. That’s why the Southern Registry hated us. I doubt you were taught the truth of those days.”

  This had naught to do with politics or history. “I look forward to learning whatever you will teach me, Lady Signé, but crossing the Dark Divide is the critical matter right now. The gate between the city and the hospice was much older than the Wanderers’ gates, though it was surely the same kind of magic—a portal for humans to access a shorter way through the Danae’s true lands.”

  “No human outside Xancheiros knows of the true lands or the short ways. How can you—?”

  “Call me a coward, if you like. Call me a simpleton. I just don’t want to drown or plummet into an abyss I can’t crawl out of!” I said, striving for patience. “But if my magic can take me across the Dark Divide from the hospice side, surely I should be able to access the hospice from this side, if I can just find the door. And my magic—whatever it is about my magic that enabled me to detect your beacon and made Safia recognize me as one who could help—has already opened the way once today. I’m thinking my passage ended in the pool because I expected to find Sanctuary.”

  She was silent, staring at me for what seemed eternity with the moonlight bathing her scarred face. My jaw ached from staying silent.

  “Siever might know. He was fourteen at the Severing. He’s the only one left who was born in the greater world.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Somewhere deep inside her something . . . curiosity, at the least, or perhaps a hint of possibility . . . stirred. It was very like sensing the flutter of a pulse in a comrade’s wrist when you’d dragged him out of the bay.

  “Come on.” She took out for the causeway at a spirited pace.

  Vines and fat-leaved shrubs snarled the steep hillsides to either side of the causeway and had broken through the paving of the ramp itself. The mouldering greenery stank of sickness, not health, dank, decaying, acrid, unpalatable. When the great bronze gate swung open at Signé’s whistle, a tide of fresher air rolled over us.

  A bony youth who’d not seen fifteen summers cranked the great gate closed as soon as Signé was inside. “Lord Siever will be most relieved, my lady. He left strict orders . . .”

  The boy’s report faded when he saw me, and his dark eyes followed as wonder propelled me past Signé. Had any people ever created such high-soaring walls and graceful buttresses, such pleasing layers of terraces and bright-painted archways? Their sculptures were astonishingly refined in their likeness, not to the appearance but to the energies of life, whether bird or beast or human . . . and yes, Danae, too. All of these were lit with pale green magelight—the veil of luminescence visible from the twin height of the Sanctuary pool.

  Rising behind all this in compact strength was a triangular bastion, that had once been defined by the three round towers. The edifice was wreathed in enchantments—defenses we of the Order considered our own and others of such making as I’d not yet learned, even if there was some master at Evanide to teach me.

  At the height of its glory, the citadel of Xancheiros would have swelled my spirit with that sweet, hurtful fullness I knew only from perfection, like the moments when magic filled me or the knights raised their voices in the Order’s anthem. Yet on this night, as if it were my own home, my heart ached for its broke
n carcass. Everywhere lay evidence of the ruined towers. Great slabs and cornices sat where they’d fallen, impossible to move without magic or the wooden scaffolds and pulleys ordinary builders used. Smaller rubble had been collected and used to reinforce the foundation of the broken towers.

  “Where’s Lord Siever?” called Signé to a pair of guards. Lances in hand, they stood at a wicket gate beside a sturdy portcullis. The wicket and portcullis were the only visible entry to the inner citadel that didn’t require climbing three or four stories over the makeshift fortifications.

  “Gone to the well, mistress,” said a young woman, dressed in man’s garb like Signé. “He prays you’ll come to him there and wake him if he sleeps.”

  “Anything else to report? Landieu, attention!”

  “All quiet,” said the gawping youth, his eyes back to Signé. His voice yet displayed uncertain timbre. “But before I took post, I heard Mercier whisper to Ranold of vines in the barley. I didn’t know . . . but I thought . . . you should hear of it.”

  “Mercier is a fool, and you can tell him so. Keeping it secret will not slow the vines’ invasion. We knew the barley would go next. Now, let us in.”

  “They try to spare you ill news,” I said, as we waited for an exchange of passwords and a third guard inside to unlock the wicket.

  “Benedik swore them all to serve me to the last day of this world. I think that oath spikes my craw more than anything that’s happened. Had he not paid for his every fault a thousand times over, I’d not forgive him for it.”

  The wicket swung inward and we crossed a deserted bailey into the oddest fortress imagining could conjure. The three-sided structure was strange enough, but the entirety of the interior was open to the sky. Its scents were not of unwashed soldiers or greasy smoke, but of dirt and healthy growing things, of grain and herbs and greens. Stairs led upward to innumerable levels of all shapes and sizes, staggered so that all could reap the benefit of sunlight and rain from the open roof and from vast sections of latticework wall that had appeared solid from the outside.

  The level on which we entered was cluttered with long tables stacked with bins, bags, and implements for tending gardens. The underside of the level above was hung with net bags of turnips, onions, parsnips, and ropes of garlic. Some of the upper levels were entirely dark. Some were marked with pinpoint lights. And the only sound, as we passed between tables and stools, was that of water dribbling through myriad troughs.

  “But where did you house your people?” I said, wonder yielding to curiosity. “The thousands.”

  “In the city, of course.”

  Signé hauled open a bronze door so eerily like that I’d found in Evanide’s crypt, I almost jerked her back from the dangerous threshold. But it was only a stair that descended into cool dampness. A most ordinary smoking torch lit our way down.

  “Once the Severing was accomplished, the city dwellers went home and took in those from the countryside. Others were housed in the towers. All of us stay in the Gold Tower now the city’s dead. We’ve housed the Wanderers in what’s left of the Silver and Bronze. Your sister stays with them, though I offered her to stay with me.”

  Even after so short an observation, Juliana’s choice didn’t surprise me. I’d so much to learn of her—and of this woman whose life was shaped by a broken world. But the mission took precedence. Though it was not imposed by the Order, heart and bones told me that this rescue was as important as anything the Equites Cineré had ever undertaken.

  The stairs led us deep under the citadel into a network of passages. “Were the two fallen towers destroyed by the Registry?” I asked. “The story I heard spoke naught of war engines.”

  “There was no attack, no terms, no siege. As they set the fire to drive us out, we triggered the Severing. It was earthquakes over the next few years that destroyed the towers, the bridges, and so much else. And then the vines went wild. Kyr says the land grieves, trying to shake off the burden of human works and human magic before it, too, falls into despair.”

  Was that possible? Goddess Mother, I needed to speak to Morgan. Perhaps she’d know how to free the Xancheirans from the trees, or what to do about the silver-marked Danae, about the void, or about Sanctuary. But in the moment I told her any of it, my oath to her father would be in play, and I would have to bring him here. What did Danae do with mad ones of their kind?

  Signé pulled open a waist-high gate. Even if the guard had not mentioned a well, I’d have known what kind of place this was. The misty dampness of a deep-buried spring, so like that at Evanide’s heart, was unmistakable.

  Another torch welcomed us to the cave, as did a familiar mechanism. A Semmonis pipe stretched at an angle from the pool into a tunnel in the rock, lifting the water to some other reservoir where another such pipe would take it farther yet to distribute among the troughs and gardens above us. The magic that turned the helical screw inside the pipe hummed just below hearing, a pleasing buzz on the skin. What incomparable magic to work without renewal for almost thirty years.

  But we’d not come for mechanical or magical wonders. The gray-complected man, huddled in a blanket, sat leaning on the pipe beside the water. His sword lay at one hand, his walking stick at the other. His chest sank with a quiet wheeze, the only sign he wasn’t dead.

  Signé crouched a respectful distance from his weapon. “Siever!” she called softly, in a voice I’d thought reserved for her singing. “Our Deliverer needs your help.”

  “Not rid of him yet?” Either the man feigned sleep or he was clearer spoken in a doze than many I knew while awake. His eyes remained closed. “Has he a lust for trouble?”

  “It would seem not, as his question has to do with his manner of leaving the city.”

  His eyelids dragged open as if they lifted the weight of the water. “Even rats know where their bolt-holes lie. Is the man a dolt?”

  “Most likely,” I said, which lured his gray-blue gaze away from Signé. Of course he did not sleep, not with such pain as I read in those sunken eyes. “I need to know where people left the city to go to the Aurellian hospice—the House of Clarity. I’m thinking it will be a more direct route home than jumping into a bottomless pool.”

  His torpid mask fell away and he sat up. “The hospice? Is that where you’ve come from? Am I afloat with the Last Ferryman or does that make a kind of sense?”

  “If the Danae created a short path between Xancheira and the hospice through their true lands, the entries would be placed somewhere similar. The door that brought me is in the deepest part of our fortress. Not at the spring, though. I suppose . . . do you have a crypt?”

  “No!” Signé’s scorn would wither a rock. “Our dead are committed cleanly to the fire.”

  Siever’s dry laugh set him coughing. “The answer ’tis not a crypt, but like. Come, let me up. I need to see this.”

  He labored to his feet. Signé did not offer him aid, though her body was urgent to do so. Instead of grabbing his arm, she grabbed the torch.

  “Where?” she said. “Old chests and artworks couldn’t possibly define a way of the long-lived.”

  “’Tis not the refuse room we need.”

  They took me back through the gate, and into a passage that sloped gently upward. Slow going for Siever.

  “I appreciate this does not require climbing a stair,” he said, breathless. “’Twould be wicked if rescuing the rescuer were to end me beforetime. Amid her incessant praises, the young Juliana did manage to name thy few faults. She says thou’rt always hard on those around thee, ever trying to make them better. She resented it terribly, as most of us do. So I must tell thee, exercise does little for me these days. Here!”

  He turned a corner and waved his hand at a short passage.

  “The cold store?” said Signé, distraught. “Siever, you mustn’t tease! He needs to leave.”

  “’Tis true,” he said. “All the way to the
end.”

  A series of dark chambers opened off the passage between us and its blunt end. Odors cascaded from one to the other as we passed their doorways—of earth and roots, of smoke and fish, of brine and blood meats. But I had no mind to inspect the spare contents, for the chambers themselves oppressed my spirit so sorely, it was all I could do to walk past them. The walls, ceilings, and half-open doors were cast of solid iron, and the darkness inside the chambers seemed to eat the flaring light.

  “Why iron larders?” I said.

  “Necessary, back when the hospice gate was in use,” said Siever. “Not for larders, certain, but for protecting our fellows from their own wild magics until they could cross to the hospice. After the Severing, ’twas no longer possible to go, and with the fading of our talents, no longer necessary. A small blessing amidst the harder things.”

  “You confined people in these rooms? I thought Xancheirans were enlightened!”

  “How else were we to shield them from harm?” said Siever. “Their power was driving them mad. The iron walls not only kept them from overextending their senses but prevented them from harming others until they could be helped. They didn’t remain here long—and they were gently tended. But ’tis sure the long-lived would consider this cavern the nearest thing to death.”

  “So where is the hospice gate?” said Signé, cutting off my retort that surely a thousand methods of protection would be more merciful than iron closets.

  “There,” said Siever, taking the torch and illuminating the end of the passage. “Behind yonder shelves.”

  The squarish alcove of native rock—quite similar to the rock of the crypt—had clearly been used at some time for storage. A sturdy oak frame held five shelves, littered now with dirt clots, shreds of straw, and empty baskets. Signé and I dragged the heavy cupboard aside, and there it was. A bronze portal framed a door almost the twin of that in Evanide’s crypt, though instead of the tree, the door’s center panel depicted a pair of open hands—the age-old symbol of healing.