by C. E. Murphy
“I doubt I’m quick.” Lara eyed Aerin’s longer legs, then crouched to pull her own pack on and copy the placement of a water canteen. “Too bad we couldn’t bring the horses.”
“We might have ridden through the ghost fields undisturbed yesterday afternoon, had we had the horses.” Aerin’s tone suggested it was entirely Lara’s fault they’d been deprived. She set out with long strides, quick enough that irritation spurted through Lara. She could match Aerin’s pace for a little while, but would end up exhausted and slowing them down that much more if she responded to the Seelie woman’s machismo. It took active determination to not run and catch up, but Lara settled into a pace she could maintain, gnawing on salty meat and chalky bread. Food that would last forever, probably, though she wouldn’t want to live forever if it was all she got to eat.
The earth underfoot was unfamiliar: clots of dirt and poking stones rather than the smooth paved streets she was accustomed to at home. It smelled better, though, fresh and warming with the sunrise, without patches of gum and worse to navigate. The backpack, this early on, wasn’t onerous, though a few hours of carrying its bulk would exhaust her shoulders. It would take as little time for her calves and feet to become weary from walking on soft, shiftable ground, but as long as she didn’t give in to Aerin’s silent challenge, she would be fine.
Within an hour Aerin slowed to an amble, waiting for Lara to catch her, and then matching Lara’s gait. “You’re smarter than I thought.”
Lara laughed out loud. “That’s what we’d call damning with faint praise, Aerin. You’re half a foot taller than I am. I couldn’t keep up even if you weren’t trying to make me look bad. Your shoulder’s not bothering you,” she added awkwardly.
Tension thinned Aerin’s mouth. “Not since the drowning. I inspected it while you … communed … with the dead. It appears to be healed.”
Lara glanced into the sunrise at their backs, mountain shadows still lush with black this early in the morning and the meadows at their feet blue with first light. There was no hint of the sea that had risen to swallow the land, not from where they were; not with Llyr’s gift of vision riding them. Lara touched her temple thoughtfully. Most glamours gave her headaches, but nothing in her perception wavered or bent the way glamours did. He couldn’t, she thought, have actually changed their reality, but the perfect presentation of a drowned world without any hints to it being a lie sent a shiver down her spine. Llyr’s power vastly outstripped the Seelie and Unseelie magic users she’d met. She turned back to the path they were on, subdued, and asked, “The waters?”
Aerin scoffed. “Deadly to my kind.” Her certainty, though, had vanished. “A gift from Llyr, perhaps.”
“Llyr, whose waters they are,” Lara said quietly, but didn’t press it further. Aerin grunted in relief and pulled a few steps ahead to discourage talk.
The city in front of them grew incrementally closer, clear gold sunlight picking out details invisible from the fields. There were places where the obsidian towers were shattered, though time and tide had worn their sharp edges smooth. Others had never broken, but were still dulled; what Lara’s eye wanted to finish as crisp curving lines were gentle and rounded, having long since given up their architect’s conceit. Low city walls grew up from the earth as they drew nearer, all of them banked with earth. Lara imagined they would be buried in sand, if she could see the city as it truly was.
A chime rang, warning, and for the first time her vision wavered. The air thickened, light filtered by gray-blue water and filled with new elements: a school of fish, and kelp brushing against her skin as it grew up from the ocean floor. Breathing became more difficult, her chest aching, and her ears popped as the pressure against them increased. The chime sounded again, louder this time, and distorted by the poor conductivity of the sea. Lara stopped where she was, eyes crushed shut, and rebuilt the image of earth, not sand, encroaching on the city walls. Whispered, “Llyr’s vision is a gift. A truth from a long time ago. I accept it.” She twisted her arm back, feeling for the staff pinned in place beneath her pack, and felt a faint electric shock as her fingers brushed against the ivory rod. “Llyr’s truth is the truth of the moment. Without it we’re all lost to the ocean floor. I accept it.”
A ripple of agreement washed through the staff, strengthening her belief. Sunlight slowly warmed her back again, the air thinning and becoming easier to breathe. Her ears popped again, compression releasing, and after long seconds she dared open her eyes and drag in a ragged breath. The Drowned Lands were once more as Llyr had offered them: not resplendent in their heyday glory, but ruins that could be walked through as tourists might.
Aerin stood a few yards ahead of Lara, facing her with wide eyes. “What in Rhiannon’s name was that?”
“That was my power trying to kill me,” Lara said hoarsely. “Us. Are you all right? I never heard you swear before.”
“It’s not an oath one voices around the king.” Aerin patted herself down, a jackrabbit pulse visible in her throat. “I am well. I thought for a moment I would drown.”
“You won’t.” Lara forcibly put the thought out of her head and thrust a finger toward the city. “Let’s go. Time’s wasting.”
Of all the visible city walls, the gates had come through closer to unscathed than anything else. Coral grew up over them, not in the astonishing colors of tropical waters, but in cooler yellows and grays and bleached whites that looked dead when not immersed. It prickled and reached out and up, making an imposing barrier between the farmlands and the city itself. Glimpses of shaped stone were visible beneath it, but time had long since hidden away whatever carvings might have once graced the city’s entryway.
Sitting in front of the gates were a pair of young men, rattling dice cups at one another and throwing down bones against the earth. They both had the Unseelie look to them, dark hair and gold skin, though they looked sun-browned rather than as if they’d leeched color from the earth itself. Lara slowed a dozen yards away, exchanging astonished glances with Aerin. Together they edged forward until the youths—though why Lara thought they were young, given the unaging aspect of all the elfin peoples—glanced up, then scrambled to their feet in a fit of embarrassment. One cried “Halt!” as the other scooped up a spear with a gleaming metal head.
Lara murmured “Do you really use that word when you’re standing guard?” to Aerin, who snorted.
“No strangers come to the Caerwyn citadel. We say very little at all when standing guard.”
“I am called Evrei,” the guard who’d spoken before said. “This city is guarded by my brother Evrawg and myself. Who goes there?”
Lara began, “My na—” and was cut off by Aerin’s interruption: “You guard a dilapidated hunk of coral. Why should I not go over the wall?”
“Certain doom lies that way,” Evrei said pompously. “Only one of the doors behind me leads safely into the city.”
“There are no doors at all,” Aerin protested. Evrei took one step back as the other youth—Evrawg—rolled his eyes and took a confidential step forward to murmur, “Of course not. He’s lying. Can’t trust him, you can’t.”
Lara put a hand over her face, trying not to laugh. “Aerin—”
“We have no time for this, Lara!” Aerin’s sword was in her hand when Lara looked up again, her expression set as she advanced on the guards. “We’ll pass with your leave or without it, but it’s your own heads you’re risking.”
Evrei pressed into the coral with an elbow under the sounds of Aerin’s threats. The delicate stuff crackled, dust sheeting to the earth as two arches gave way within it. The silvered path they’d been following split, each new road leading through one of the doors, city ruins visible beyond their shadows. Aerin hissed from the back of her throat, a feral sound of accomplishment.
“Evrei, which door—Aerin, don’t!” Lara ran forward, grabbing for Aerin’s backpack as she stomped through the closest door. She missed and skidded to a stop on the door’s threshold. Aerin vanished between o
ne step and the next with no footprints, no sound, no flash of color to say she’d once been there.
Lara’s gut filled with bile. Never mind that Aerin had carried most of the food: more important, Emyr would scry for her at sunset, and find nothing. Nothing, or worse, the doom promised by Evrei. The Unseelie city stood in danger now, unless Lara could get her back.
Her, or the two royal scions resting somewhere in the Drowned Lands. Lara dropped her chin to her chest and cursed. Evrawg, brightly, reassuringly, said, “Ah, she’ll be fine. Nothing to worry about! Go on after her, why don’t you, and see for yourself?”
“Because you’re the brother who always lies.” Lara turned from the doorway, feeling as if her pack had grown twice as heavy in the past minute. “Evrei, which door is the safe one?”
He pointed to the door Aerin hadn’t taken, a trace of sullen pout marring his mouth. “How did you know? We didn’t even get to say that one of us always tells the truth.”
“I’m a truthseeker. You couldn’t trick me if you wanted to.” Lara sighed. “But if it makes you feel better, I’ll ask the question the right way. Which door would your brother tell me to take?”
Evrei pointed to the door Aerin had disappeared through, though the pout still pulled at his lips. “You’re only supposed to ask one question.”
“Evrei, I could have asked if the sky is blue or if grass is green. You can’t lie to me.” Lara hefted the pack on her shoulders, scowling at the doorways. “ ‘Truth will seek the hardest path.’ Shit. Aerin, when I catch up to you …”
The threat unfinished, Lara stalked through the door leading to certain doom.
Murky night enclosed her as she stepped through the door. Mist crawled up, encircling her thighs as if to hold her back, and the city shifted in her vision, becoming darker, grimmer. Lara retreated a step and encountered rough sticks that cracked under the pressure of her pack. She twisted around, heart jolting, to find the doors bleak hollows overgrown with impassable coral. Evrei and Evrawg were gone, if they’d ever really been there at all. The thought wavered tunelessly and Lara put it out of mind, unwilling to explore what was true and what wasn’t, especially having deliberately chosen the wrong door.
What had once been city streets sprawled before her, but she no longer saw them as Llyr had enchanted her to. Silver stone was buried beneath drifting sand, and scuttling bugs peeked out of bone shelters sunken in the moving earth. The homes and towers that had graced the Unseelie city were dank now, lightless and lifeless, and the defiant banners that had flown no longer rose above the town. Chilly wind passed through instead, lifting Lara’s hair in thin dancing tendrils and holding it aloft the way water would. Coral snatched at the strands, trying to tangle it and hold her in place.
She shut those thoughts down, too, and forced herself forward. Aerin had left no footprints, or the shifting sand had already taken them. Had already taken her, perhaps; Lara sank ankle-deep with each step, sand clouding up to grasp at her calves and knees before wafting down again. Pressure swam against her legs and over her arms, wind carrying more weight than it usually did. She wondered what devils hid in it. Song pounded inside her skull, encouraging her to pull down the veil of Llyr’s gift and see what accompanied her as she walked across the ocean floor.
It would be a very brief viewing. A minute or two of appreciating just what monsters and dangers roamed the drowned city. Then, without Llyr’s gift at hand, she would join them, one more lost soul far beneath the sea. And if she was lost, so were all the memories she’d promised to return to Annwn. So was Dafydd, and so, maybe, was Annwn itself. She’d seen no forgiveness in Emyr’s eyes. If she didn’t come back with answers, he would ride on the Unseelie city and destroy it. The transformation would be complete: Annwn would be the Barrow-lands in totality, a land of the dead and dying, though it might on the surface appear to be more.
An orchestra’s worth of triumphant music flooded her, pushing back the weight of heavy air. She had seen the Seelie as dying, had even seen the rival peoples as two halves of a whole, but the entire land’s metamorphosis had escaped her, at least in conscious thought. Drowned Lands, Barrow-lands; together they made up a whole, and she doubted suddenly that the Barrow-lands would ever be healthy, so long as the ground she walked now still lay beneath the sea. Whatever Hafgan and Emyr had done so many millennia ago had spelled doom for both of them. Hafgan, perhaps, had realized it earlier, and fled back to the Drowned Lands. A generous soul might think it was to lend his strength to maintaining what little memory of the land was left here, but Lara suspected his intentions were darker. Harboring his power, perhaps, so that when Emyr was weak enough Hafgan could attack without compunction.
She’d become cynical since meeting Dafydd ap Caerwyn. She wasn’t certain she was proud of that, but it lent her a sour strength to forge beyond the gates and enter the city itself.
Broken walls rose up cleanly, streets remaining delineated, but the ground was uneven, stone from fallen buildings making hills and toe-stubbing lumps. Lara scrambled up them, fingers dug into shallow earth, and slid down their far sides with her attention more for the grim skies than the path she took. The ebony towers shone darkly in the murky light, as opposite to the glowing Seelie citadel as could be imagined.
Her mind’s eye abruptly filled in details of shattered architecture, finishing the spires and swoops of the towers. They’d echoed the Seelie citadel once, though this city was built around its soaring towers where the Seelie city was entirely contained within the palatial structure. Still, their hearts were one and the same, another reminder that the highland and lowland peoples were of a kind. Or that they had been, before they’d been torn asunder by the staff Lara now carried across her back.
The staff pulsed as she thought of it. The air flinched, then surged in, weightier than before as it pried at the ivory rod. Lara’s breath clogged, her confidence slipping away as the air—air, she insisted, not water—took on a determination to separate her from the staff. Muck thickened, daylight fading until the only light came from the dark towers.
The air—the ocean—lit up around her in wrong colors, a flood of black light illuminating the things she hadn’t been able to see before. Sea life flickered by, darting around her at the last moment. Lara was grateful, as it seemed wholly possible, in the wavering blue light, that she might register as a ghost herself, and that fish might swim through her without noticing. Bits of net wafted through the water, constantly tied and untied by the currents. But it was the city itself that came alive in unnerving pulses.
Fallen buildings were reconstructed in the changing light. From one moment to the next walls flickered into place and faded again, reminiscent of an old hand-cranked film. But no ancient film had the quality of effects the withering city showed her. Beasts swam within the broken city walls, serpents and kraken and long-toothed monsters she had no name for. Lara stood rigid on the ocean floor, heart sick in her chest, certain that any motion on her part would bring a tentacled, hard-beaked behemoth whipping down on her.
Women sauntered by, their bodies so beautifully formed that Lara’s avocation as a tailor twitched to the fore, eager to measure and mark them for clothing. Their long hair streamed behind them, paragons of femininity, but the faces they turned to Lara were stretched in raging screams, like the Sirens of Greek legend. Men trailed after them, but not lovelorn sailors: these were ragged skeletal horrors, as tormented in appearance as the women whose paths they traced. Fish darted in and out of their skulls, escaping through parted teeth and eye sockets. Lara pressed knuckles against her mouth, holding back gasps.
The impotent fury of a drowning people had not left their city unmanned. Not when those who died were creatures of magic themselves. The phantasms revealed by the towers’ light were real, as able to rend and destroy as any mundane animal. Motion would almost certainly attract them, and she had no weapon with which to fight.
Warmth pulsed from the staff again, contradicting that belief. A stillness swept through the
ocean. Then as one, the city’s protectors turned toward Lara. Toward the staff she carried; toward the embodiment of the city’s downfall. The next breath she drew was thick with water, though the black light didn’t relent. There were more magics at work here than just Llyr’s, and the only question was whose were the strongest.
Lara whispered “Llyr’s,” investing the word, the thought, with a thread of desperate truth. She didn’t dare unleash the staff, not yet, maybe not ever, but the air cleared a little. She lurched a step or two forward, sand still clouding around her feet. It settled again quickly, though, making divots like any sand dune might. Wind—wind, not water, she told herself fiercely—rushed over those depressions, smoothing them out again so she left no more trace of her passage than Aerin had, but the greater ease of movement was heartening. She wasn’t utterly without power, even in a dark realm where her magic could be her undoing.
Laughter barked free, distorted by the thick air. Never in her life had she imagined herself to be in any way powerful. Yet in the midst of a lost land a world away from what she’d known, she was willing, even eager, to rely on a talent that mere weeks ago she’d only recognized as a sometimes-frustrating quirk.
Laughing had been a mistake. Monstrosities half-hidden in ruined buildings darted forward, drawn to the sound. It marked her as alive, and the living were unwelcome in the Drowned Lands. Lara spared a thought for Aerin, whose blade would do her no good against enemies she couldn’t see, and then she was running, no longer caring that speed would attract attention.
The sea beasts were faster than she was, much faster, black light showing them in their natural element while she ran as if in a nightmare, slowed by the density of water. The back of her mind screamed panic, urging her to hurry, but every step came more slowly as mist and water clawed her back again. Something latched on to her ankle, sending her sprawling, and cold hands scampered up her leg in search of a vital place to strike.