The City

by Stella Gemmell

  “Hiding, sir. Hiding from my master,” she blurted out, head down.

  “Down there? Should have drowned, idiot boy. Who’s your master?”

  Emly thought frantically. “Blacksmith,” she muttered, hoping it was a suitable answer.

  It seemed to be the right thing to say, for the man grunted and said, “Old Oren. Mean bastard.”

  Then, quite kindly, he said, “Get along then. Can’t escape him like that. No getting out of the palace now, lad. It’s all locked down.”

  Em nodded gratefully and turned and ran off into the nearest patch of darkness. Her spirits soared. She was in the palace!

  Chapter 38

  Bartellus’ stumpy fingers were so cold he was unable to feel the pin he was digging with. He stopped from time to time to bring it to his lips to ensure it was still there. The metal spike tasted of long-dead meat and Bart wondered again how many lives had ended in the cell.

  After a long time he had made a big enough hole in the base of the door to get one index finger in. He pulled at the door and he thought he could detect a slight movement in the rotten wood. He started working on making the hole bigger. He dared not use the hand with the broken fingers, even though they no longer pained him. Time was when the bones would have started to heal by now, but that was long ago. He could not risk breaking them again—he must give them a day to mend. So he worked one-handed, awkwardly leaning on one elbow.

  As ever his mind retreated to the past, to his glory days—the battles of Coulden Creek, of Petrassa Fields, when he had led armies of tens of thousands, Fell riding at his side, when the City’s armies were invincible and Shuskara owned the world. When he had learned from Broglanh, just a few weeks before, that Fell was leading a mission to kill the emperor and that he had a part in it, he had exulted. Time, and the ravages of time on his body, had for eight years forced him to accept the role of Old Bart, the fond father, master only of his own household. To stand at the head of an army again, sword in hand, a whole man, was an ambition he had no longer even dared cherish.

  He ignored his misgivings about the assassination plan. He believed in Fell and believed he could kill the emperor. If it could be done, Fell would do it. And the plan took advantage of the emperor’s curiosity and pride. When Shuskara had known him, known him as a friend, the Immortal had been easily bored and would quickly fall in with any suggested entertainment. Confined now to the palace, an old sick man, it was said, he would be intrigued by Fell, with the thought that the man might be his son. He would not be able to resist meeting him, even though he would expect a ruse.

  But the follow-through, two hundred men, unknown Blues, smuggled in through the Halls to take on the Thousand? The slim element of surprise could not weigh heavily enough to even those odds, thought the old general.

  So, with the emperor dead, and probably Fell also, and the Thousand still in control of the palace, it would be up to him to turn two armies, the Second Adamantine and the Fourth Imperial, behind the new emperor. In Fell’s plan this would be Marcellus. But Marcellus with the Thousand at his back would be no better than Araeon. Bart’s private plan was that Marcellus should die in battle too and the throne be taken by Rafael. There was no love lost between Rafe and the leader of the Thousand, Boaz. So then there would be a three-way division of power—Rafe Vincerus as successor by right, Boaz and the Thousand, and Shuskara and the armies.

  His whole body was icy and it was a long time before he realised that the water in the dungeon was stealthily rising. It was swirling around his buttocks and freezing his privates. His legs, cramped by sitting on the cold wet floor for so long, spasmed painfully. He dragged himself up on his feet, using the door as a support. He tried to quell the panic. Then he investigated the rest of the cell. Yes, he was right—the water was deeper, up to his knees, in the lowest part of the room. It had risen silently and he, old fool, had not noticed. He put his hand against the base of the door and found a slight current. The water was coming in under the door. He moaned. To the choices available to him, death by torture or death by starvation, had been added one more.

  He reached down and pulled at the door, hoping to shift it, but it was immoveable. He banged on the door, yelling for help, but he had no reason to think anyone could hear him, or care if they did.

  Calming himself, he wondered if this was a daily occurrence. Perhaps the dungeon flooded, as the City waters rose, in a rhythm dictated by some natural tide, which would soon ebb again. Had he been there for more than a day? He had no idea. Or perhaps the dungeons were allowed to flood from time to time, to clean them out. Then the flood would ebb soon.

  The water had crept to his waist, and he tried to push aside his fear and think again of when he was free. He tried to recall the names of the generals of the two armies he was intended to lead. He had known the Adamantine leader for half his life. He was a short man, bulky, with a chin beard. His name was…Bart knew him as well as he knew any man. They had fought together, drank and whored, and played games of chance over thirty years. He had a wife he loathed and three daughters he adored. He once had a three-legged dog called Joker. But Bart could not bring to mind the man’s name. The other general, of the Fourth Imperial, was…yes, Constant Kerr, a man he hardly knew, distantly related to Flavius, someone the emperor called friend, but of a new generation. Bart was encouraged by this small success of memory.

  But his mind drifted and he started, inevitably, wondering about Emly, fearing she had been captured, fearing for her fate. The water climbed his chest unfelt, and he was startled when it crawled under his collar and trickled down his neck. He stood up straighter, as straight as an old soldier could stand. A dozen times already he had considered letting himself drown in the water, relaxing, lying back, letting the water flow into his mouth and chest. A swift death and fairly painless, he guessed.

  But an old enduring stubbornness, the determination which, with courage and luck, had propelled him through the ranks to lead an army, kept him from that act of committal. He held his head high and breathed shallowly the thick air, and held on.

  Nearly a thousand years before, the name of one man, a commoner, a foreigner and the son of a farmer, was as familiar to every child as that of the emperor himself. Lazarides the Lapith was a name which made children giggle, so they remembered it, even though they did not know what he was, which was an engineer. But everyone knew he was the most important man in the City, apart from the Immortal.

  In those days, when the City was younger, and less ambitious, and thus had fewer enemies, the emperor turned his mind to strengthening the core of the City, and he ordered that a new network of drains and tunnels, for sewage and rainwater, be constructed on top of the collapsing wreckage of the old system, itself built more than six hundred years before. He commanded engineers, and architects and common builders, from within the walls and without, to compete for the prize role of City engineer. The previous holder of the title had been hanged, drawn and quartered for some real or imagined slight against the Immortal, yet there was still an eager contest to fill the hapless man’s boots.

  Lazarides the Lapith was a genius. He appeared at the emperor’s court in the Red Palace one day as if from nowhere. He was young, not yet thirty, and no architect or engineer of the City admitted having heard his name before. Yet his knowledge of the City’s structure was comprehensive, and his detailed plans for the proposed new system made other men’s efforts look like the chaotic drawings of children.

  And they were beautiful. Drawn on thick creamy paper with many-coloured inks, they were illustrated with hundreds of tiny, intricate pictures of weirs and junctions, cross sections of pipes and giant cisterns, as well as prancing dogs and hunting cats, and workmen and scholars and whores, sailors and even engineers, rioting around the margins. The emperor was charmed by the drawings, and gave Lazarides the post of City engineer on the strength of them alone. Yet the young man proved to be an architect of skill, and a mathematician, an astronomer and philosopher. And his name is s
till remembered, by some.

  In those days there was plenty of empty land within the City—meadows and open parks and a few farms. Lazarides cleared them all to dig deep, wide pits in which he placed the bones and joints of his new system, the main tunnels like the Fallowly Dyke, and the huge and complex weirs like the Saduccuss Gate, which folk much later called the Eating Gate. Although over a millennium many of the tunnels and cisterns collapsed, worn by age and water and time, the Saduccuss Gate was such an engineering marvel that it survived, almost undamaged, until the present day, and only started to break down because the structure of half-yearly checks and repairs was abandoned in the last century, abandoned in favour of the pursuit of war.

  The function of the Saduccuss Gate, and Bartellus would have known this if only he had recognised the name in his reading, was to chew up and filter out any large debris from the uppermost layer of the sewers, to stop it blocking or impeding the older and more vulnerable lower tunnels. When the first barrel of the gate broke and was swept away, now more than ten years before, it started a disaster that was inevitable and catastrophic. The lower tunnels started blocking up, then clearing, then blocking again, over and over as the years passed. More and more of them gave way under the weight of water, and the lower levels flooded every autumn and winter and became too treacherous for the Dwellers to enter, even in summer. And the water levels throughout the City started to rise.

  Now the gate’s condition was terminal, critical. More than half the barrels had been swept away and the remaining gaps had become blocked. As the persistent winter rains built up the pressure, the wooden piles and old stone started to shift, first a hair’s-breadth, then a finger’s-width at a time.

  When the ancient gate finally gave way, no one remembered its name and no one marked its passing.

  Far below the Eating Gate, some way to the west, Indaro and the army were racing away from a lesser threat. They ran along the Fallowly Dyke, fleeing the creaking dam, looking desperately for a way out.

  One soldier stopped and raised his lantern. “Here!” he shouted, “This way!”

  He had spotted a high narrow fault in the rock. In its shadow they could see what might be worn and ancient steps leading steeply upwards. The soldier plunged into the entrance. They could see his boots, climbing, then he disappeared. The rest of the army crowded round, glancing back, eager for a chance of safety.

  Elija grabbed Gil by the arm. “No!” he told him. “This is the wrong way!”

  “It goes up,” Gil argued, “away from the flood.”

  “No!” Elija cried desperately. “I’ve seen this on the map. I know where it goes. It goes up for a while then down to the Whithergo. Look…”

  He dragged the maps out of his pack again. The damp sheets were dirty now and they stuck together. Seconds passed as he tried to unstick them. The soldiers jostled impatiently.

  “It goes up. That’s good enough for me,” shouted one and he climbed through the narrow opening.

  “Stop!” ordered Gil as others pressed forward. “Elija? Are you sure?”

  But the boy had snatched up the papers and was already running farther down the dike. Indaro looked at Gil, who nodded, then they both followed the boy, and the army streamed after them. The groaning and creaking behind them seemed louder. Indaro was sure the dam would burst at any moment.

  “Here!” Elija cried, throwing himself on his belly to crawl through a low slit in the rock. “This is the way!”

  Indaro looked doubtfully at the black opening. It was scarcely big enough for her to slither through. What about the men? What about Stalker? She tried to remember this part of the map. Was Elija right? But her memory let her down, betrayed by fear and the overwhelming demands of urgency. Trying not to think she threw herself down and wriggled into the hole after Elija.

  It was hard to crawl forward with the lantern held in front of her, but she moved as quickly as she could, conscious of soldiers following. She kept seeing glimpses of Elija’s boots ahead in the jerking lantern light and tried to keep up.

  After a few paces the tunnel opened out a little and started going upwards. Indaro could get her feet under her and she moved faster. From time to time she felt something behind her tap her boots and knew she was closely followed. Half crawling, half wriggling was exhausting, and she was ever-fearful the light would go out. She thought she would go insane if she was left wriggling through the earth in the darkness, like a blind mole, under the weight of the City.

  Eons passed, and every muscle ached and she thought she could go on no longer. Then she could feel moving air again and, crawling and stumbling, she fell out on her knees on the floor of another wide tunnel. She scrambled out of the way of the following soldier and got to her knees. Elija was standing staring up at a great stone bridge spanning the tunnel, crossing a wide torrent of water. The bridge was old, and designed to cross a river many times the span of the present one. The boy pointed, and she stood and they both held up their lights. In the dim glow they could just make out a wide stone staircase, leading upwards, on the far side of the bridge. For the first time in hours Indaro felt a surge of hope.

  The first step of the bridge was too high to climb, so Indaro linked her hands and boosted Elija up. More soldiers were emerging from the narrow crack in the rock and without pause they started climbing the bridge, helping each other up the giant steps.

  More than half the army was through, including Gil Rayado, when they all heard the sound they dreaded—a distant rumbling. It came closer then, even muffled by many layers of rock, the explosion when the flood dam gave way was earth-shaking. The warriors still emerging into the tunnel moved with death at their heels. A dozen more scrambled out and started frantically climbing the bridge.

  Indaro and Elija had reached the top. Indaro guessed the river they were crossing must be connected higher up with the Fallowly Dike, for the water level below them started rising quickly, the spume on top swirling with unseen currents. She watched the crack in the rock far below. One more soldier squirmed out, then a jet of water exploded from the opening. One man was washed from the pipe like an insect, arms and legs moving, then there were only corpses, drowned in the flood.

  Indaro shook her head in wonder. The last man out alive was Stalker. Other soldiers dragged the crippled man up onto the first step of the bridge.

  Then they shouted in alarm when a high wave of water appeared in the light of their lanterns tearing down the tunnel towards them, hitting the bridge with a sound of thunder. Soldiers still on the lower steps were swept away. Others, including Stalker, hung on grimly to the stones of the bridge as the waters washed over them. Heart in mouth, Indaro watched the water rising. She wondered if they were safe, even at the top. But after a moment or two the level started to fall again, subsiding slowly, leaving half-drowned soldiers to climb wearily to the top.

  Indaro climbed back to where Stalker sat on the edge of the bridge, staring at the churning waters below.

  “There’s a stone stairway next,” she told him, sitting down. “We’ll be climbing away from the water.”

  “Good,” he replied, “I’m sick of being a worm in the earth.”

  Indaro wanted to tell him she was glad he had survived, but she could not find the words.

  Gil’s second had been counting heads. “We’ve lost 42,” he reported grimly.

  Stalker looked up. “Some of them lost their nerve,” he offered, “ran back to follow their comrades up those steps.”

  Indaro shook her head. “It must have been hard, waiting for everyone else to go through,” she said.

  “Aye,” Stalker agreed, “it’s always the waiting that gets you.”

  Gil had consulted with his timekeeper. “We’ll rest here for two hours. Eat if you can,” he ordered his troops. “I’m sending scouts.” He indicated the next staircase. “Volunteers?”

  Indaro lay down on the ancient stone, noting the deep grooves worn in the surface along the length of the bridge. Grooves worn by what? Not car
t wheels, for no horse could climb the stone steps. By water? Across the line of the river? Scarcely. She shrugged and dismissed the problem. Her spine fitted neatly into a groove, and she lay back and tried to make her sinews relax, to take advantage of the respite from running and crawling.

  She stared up at the roof of the tunnel, dark and unseen. She had lain like this, in the breaks between battles, a thousand times before, but always she had watched the sky, wondered about the stars and the moon, soothed by their familiarity, their serene indifference. Here there were no stars, no moon. She tried to pretend they were up there, obscured only by cloud and not by many layers of rock and earth.

  Why did the moon always chase away the stars? she had often wondered. When she was a child her tutors told her the moon was a god, or the carriage of a god, perhaps the symbol of a god. The stars, there was general agreement, were the souls of people who had died on earth. When the moon was at its biggest, then the stars fled the sky, through fear or respect. But little Indaro had watched the stars carefully, and she noticed the number never changed. Yet people died all the time—even a child knew that—so why did the number of souls in the sky not increase? This worried her, but nobody seemed to know the answer.

  When Archange had rescued her, so many years ago, she had learned everything anew; and she had found that the stars were merely chips of rock thrown into the sky by the great explosions on earth. This made sense. But then why did the chips of rock disappear when the moon was full? A satisfactory answer to one problem merely raised another. It seemed to Indaro that this was the way with everything in life.

  She stopped thinking about it and fell asleep.

  Fell Aron Lee was walking towards her across a high room filled with light. Pale draperies swished in a slight breeze, and far away she could hear the buzzing of insects on a summer’s afternoon. Fell was in dress armour of red leather embellished with gold, something she had never seen him wear before. He looked so young, his skin flushed with health, his stride full of energy. But as he came closer she could see his eyes were dull and old, and full of fear. She held out her arms to him. She wanted to soothe away the pains and the heartache, to make him whole again. She was the only one who could.