The City

by Stella Gemmell

  Riis fell back. He could feel clean blood pouring from his neck, washing away the pain, the horror.

  He was riding a great white horse across a grassy plain towards distant mountains. The sky was ice blue and the air crystal with morning dew. He was heading for home, where his parents and his brother were waiting.

  Riis smiled.

  Indaro did not dare to turn. Her wild gaze was still fixed on Fell’s face.

  “Is he dead? Is he dead?”

  Fell nodded, and she looked round.

  The body lay on its back, the sword sticking up from its chest, green limbs splayed. Fell watched, half expecting it to reshape itself into the figure of a middle-aged emperor, or the demented creature from the pit of slime. But it didn’t. It remained the body of a young man, with fair wispy hair which floated in the water. It looked so harmless.

  Indaro’s legs buckled and he caught her as she fell. He grasped her to him tightly.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  Chapter 48

  Quintos, sergeant of the guards on the Paradise Gate, lifted his leather eyepatch and gingerly rubbed the empty socket. The vacant eye itched in the dry summer and ached all the year round. Quintos splashed his face with water drawn from the gate’s cistern and the cool water felt good on the creased and puckered scar tissue.

  He’d lost the eye in a scrap with the Blues in some gods-forsaken valley deep in the Mountains of the Moon over two years before. It was Quintos’ own fault. They were winning the skirmish, the diminishing troop of Blueskins retreating before them. The enemy were far outnumbered and, Quintos had to admit, still game, but they were giving way pace by pace, death by death. His friend and comrade Kallin Blackbeard had surged ahead and was swinging his old broadsword, slicing throats and chests and a few backs. Quintos had stepped in too close, leaning forward to thrust his sword into the vitals of an injured Blue. Kallin swung back and in the moment the tip of his sword pricked Quintos’ eye neatly like piercing a pickled egg. The surgeon had tried to save it but in days it had started to rot, then there was no choice but to rip it out.

  In the retreat back to the City he’d broken his leg in several places falling down a rocky cliff he’d missed in the dark and that had healed badly.

  His general Marcus Rae Khan had come to speak to him after that. The lord had told Quintos he was out of the war. Only Marcus himself could say those words and he’d accept them. The general understood fighting as well as any common soldier and he understood the pride of the fighting man. Marcus pledged he would find him an honoured place in service of the City and he was as good as his word. Now Quintos guarded a gate which guarded the City, and he could hope for no more honourable task than that.

  Quintos limped back up the steps beside the great wooden gates onto the top of the wall. It was silent up there—the unnatural silence of noise interrupted, he thought. The pause between battles.

  When they heard the City had been invaded the rest of the guards had taken arms and eagerly set off for the war in the south. Quintos hadn’t blamed them, or tried to stop them but he had stayed at his post. The great gates were closed, barred and bolted and the army of refugees outside who had been trying to get in all season had evaporated like dew in the night. The Paradise quarter had been emptying since the summer, homes abandoned, streets drifting with rubbish. But no one had tried to leave via the gate. Quintos had not seen a soul all day.

  He turned his back on the empty plain in front of the gate and surveyed the City. His eye detected movement and he shifted his head, trying to find perspective. A hooded man was leading a horse across a distant square in the direction of the gate. He disappeared into the jumble of buildings and Quintos sat down to wait for him to emerge again. The man and horse were in no hurry and it was a while before they appeared from an alley nearby. The man was cloaked and booted, ready for a journey. Deserter, thought Quintos, and he went down to meet them.

  Up close he could see the bay stallion was a fine animal, strong and well-fed although it was caked in drying mud as if it had swum across a river. The man’s boots and legs were muddy too, although the cloak was new and stank of money and power. Quintos’ heart hardened and he laid his hand to his blade.

  Then the man threw his hood back. “Do you know me, soldier?”

  It was all Quintos could do not to fall to his knees.

  “Yes, lord,” he breathed.

  The man looked around at the silent streets, the empty wall.

  “You are alone here?”

  Something in his tone broke through the awe which was holding Quintos.

  “Yes, lord.” Then, thinking the lord might think his friends deserters, he added, “They went to fight the invaders. We were told the walls in the south were breached.”

  “Yet you chose to stay.”

  Feeling bound to explain, the soldier said, “General Marcus gave me this duty and I will do it until he or the emperor himself tells me otherwise.”

  Then, embarrassed by his words, he compounded it by blurting, “Are you leaving the City, lord?”

  The man looked at him with pitch-black eyes. “What is your name, soldier?”

  “Quintos, lord. They call me Leathereye.”

  “Of course they do. Will you open the gate for me, Quintos?”

  The soldier ran to oblige. He checked carefully through the spyhole before pulling back the two wrist-thick lower bolts. Then, using all his strength, he lifted the great bar. It was hard for one man, but he managed it and the bar thudded back into its socket. Warm damp air gasped in from the plain, with the smell of iron and dirt on its breath. Panting a little, Quintos stood aside.

  As the horseman walked through the gateway, holding the reins of his obedient mount, he paused close to Quintos. The soldier felt the power rolling off him like ocean breakers.

  He asked, “Did you see anyone leave the City today, Quintos?”

  “No, lord, not a soul.”

  The Keep collapsed with infinite slowness. Far underground, chambers unseen for hundreds of years crumbled and disintegrated. Statues carved by artists who had died a millennium before turned their blind eyes for the last time on the blackness and dissolved, condensed and flattened as the deepest strata of the City, forgotten by time, becoming one with the rocky earth. The machines of men which held the destructive floodwaters from the Keep stuttered and stopped at last. Water started seeping in through the darkest recesses of the ancient building, oozing through cracks and crannies, mounting the deepest staircases, pouring through doorways and long-abandoned corridors.

  When the level started to rise in the Hall of Emperors the surviving warriors picked up Shuskara’s dying body and carried him out to a rose-haunted courtyard. In a place of white pillars he was laid on a bier facing east and there they came, one by one, to say their farewells. Fell and Broglanh, and the new leader of the Nighthawks, Darius, stood at his head. Elija and Emly sat at his feet. Still shaken by the terrors of the day, Indaro lay nursing her wounds on a stone couch cushioned with winter roses.

  And it was there, for the last time, that Archange came to meet the old general.

  She laid a hand on his arm and he opened his eyes. There was a beat before he recognised her, then he smiled.

  “I will not bandy words with you today, lady,” he said.

  She said nothing for a while, listening to the lifeblood slowing in his veins. Then she told him, “I cannot save you this time, Shuskara. You are too badly injured.”

  She looked up sternly as Emly sobbed. “Do not be sad, girl. Yesterday your father was a condemned criminal facing torment and a lonely death. Today he is the hero of the City, once again the triumphant Shuskara. His name will live forever and men will speak it with pride. Any warrior would consider that worth dying for.”

  “I did nothing,” the general whispered. “Indaro is the hero. She battled impossible odds and she killed a man who couldn’t be killed.”

  Archange turned to the woman warrior but her face was stone.
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br />   “Yes. Indaro,” she said. “Because I believe you were a pawn in this day’s work I will be merciful. I will forget I have seen you here today. But when the sun sets you will be branded a criminal and hunted down by all the forces of the City, and any who shelter you will put themselves in peril.”

  There were angry shouts from the other warriors but Indaro just nodded. “I will not return to my father’s house. Do not seek me there.”

  “That would be wise.”

  Fell was heartsick. “Are we all to be treated like criminals?” he demanded.

  Archange turned her gaze on him and he saw the depth of ages in her black eyes and his anger faded. You could be no more angry with these people than with thunder and lightning. Yet so many had died, and he was tormented by the fear that perhaps Marcellus was the best of them.

  “I have been, among many other things,” she told him, “an historian. And it is the task of the historian to discriminate between the traitors and the loyalists, the invaders and the liberators, the freedom fighters and the terrorists. And to place the blame. The Immortal has been assassinated. Indaro killed him. Where else would the blame lie?”

  “She was part of an army. It could just as well have been me that delivered the deathblow,” Fell argued.

  “But it was not,” she answered. “When you had the chance you felt compassion.”

  “I killed Marcellus,” he told her.

  She stared at him for a heartbeat and he wondered if this was news to her. “Do you really think you could have killed him if he had not chosen it?” Archange asked him.

  She turned from Fell and placed her hand on Shuskara’s heart. There was a long moment, then she said formally, “A hero of the City has died today.” Emly gave a little cry and wept.

  Archange looked around them as the assembled soldiers bowed their heads. “The historian also decides who was the hero, who the villain. Shuskara will be long remembered when the Vincerus name is dust.”

  “Forgive me, lady.” The old man in the corner was leaning heavily on a stick. Fell had never seen him before. “The woman skewered a boy, barely more than a child. Was that the emperor?”

  Archange looked around her, frowning, and Darius swiftly brought a chair. She seated herself beside the general’s body, arranging her skirts around her.

  “Where I come from, Dol Salida,” she said, “it is possible to create life and place it in bodies of flesh and make them live. We call these creations reflections. Their life is dependent on their creator. Araeon—the emperor—created many of these, several hundred I would guess over the years. Most were replicas of himself, but some were unlike him, some not even human. Araeon could also, with the same…magics…create different appearances for himself. In recent years the boy in green was one he often returned to.”

  She sighed. “He was a giant among us, the oldest of us, our hero and our father. But even the strongest weaken in the end.”

  She was silent for a while and Fell wondered if that was all the explanation they would be given, but she went on, “And Marcellus was one of the youngest, a genius in his way, an orphan. He was lonely, I believe, even among such a close-knit group as we once were. He created only one reflection in his long life. A brother.”

  “Rafe?” the old man said, “What happened to him?”

  She told him, “A reflection cannot exist without its original. Rafe died when Marcellus did.”

  Suddenly Fell realised he could not wait to be away from this place, this palace with its evil eternal creatures living together for centuries, self-involved, incestuous, infecting the entire City with their poisonous blood. He looked at Indaro, who was still frowning at Archange’s words. We will leave here, he thought, and we will never return.

  Archange had fallen silent, and was fingering the silvery veil around her throat.

  For the first time the child Emly spoke up. “My veil,” she said. Fell thought her voice was creaky, as if rusty and unused. “How did you come by it?”

  Archange looked down. The tiny metal and glass beasts adorning the hem shone in the sunlight.

  “It is mine,” she told the girl. “It was always mine.”

  She slipped the veil from her shoulders and, with a sweeping gesture, laid it on the ground in front of them, so they could all see the circular parade of animals. Fell crouched down to look at it. It seemed to be made of thousands of the thinnest threads of silver. In the centre a stitchwork gulon sat with its brush tucked neatly round its paws.

  “It was lost for years and has been hard-used,” Archange told the girl. “Where did you come by it?”

  Emly dipped her head, self-conscious now all were watching her. “In the Halls. Father found it on a corpse.”

  “A corpse with tattoos on his head?” Emly nodded. Archange frowned. “Then Bartellus had it with him when we first met in the Halls?”

  “Yes.”

  The old woman smiled ruefully and shook her head. “Many deaths could have been prevented had I known that at the time,” she said. “It is the most valuable artefact in the world,” she told them all. “It is also the oldest. Only the eternal mountains are older. And I sometimes think it has a mind of its own.”

  “Is it magic?” Emly asked.

  “In your terms I suppose it is. Its threads were once part of a shell, like a butterfly’s chrysalis, within which the reflections were born. But the chrysalis was destroyed, smashed to smithereens, five hundred years ago. It took us a very long time to find a way of reconstructing the threads and weaving them together again. It has never worked properly since, but it will.” She smiled at Em. Standing, she rearranged it around her shoulders.

  As if on cue soldiers of the Thousand marched in. The black-bearded leader glanced around the assembled warriors and his gaze rested for a moment on Fell and Indaro. Then he spoke quietly to Archange.

  “I am to speak to my counsellors,” she told them. “We have much to discuss.”

  “What happens now, lady?” Fell asked her. “Will you surrender the City?”

  She seemed reluctant to answer, and he said, “Marcellus claimed the last of the Serafim will ride down from the Shield and continue the battle.”

  She was fiddling with the veil like a finicky old lady. “Do not question me, Fell,” she said mildly.

  He allowed anger to sound in his voice. “We fought this battle so the war would end,” he said. “We will not see that betrayed.”

  “Who do you think you are talking to!” she asked him. Suddenly she had grown taller, and her eyes flashed with a black power which rocked him back on his heels. The air in the courtyard crackled as though struck by lightning and he was blinded by the glare.

  “How dare you speak of betrayal! You are traitors and are only alive this moment on my whim,” she cried.

  When he looked again he saw all the roses round the courtyard had blackened and charred. A cold wind whipped through the white pillars and the flowers fell to dust. He heard a child’s sob of fear, then a moan and he looked to Indaro. He saw her wounds had opened again and rushed to her side.

  Archange had seated herself once more and she looked as he had seen her before, a handsome old woman in pale blue robes.

  “You have won today’s battle,” she said quietly. “Araeon and Marcellus are both dead. I am no soldier and I do not wish to prolong the slaughter. The Serafim will not ride out. I will see to that. But the City will not surrender to its enemies.”

  “You will not fight but you will not surrender,” Fell commented evenly.

  “I will follow the example of women throughout history and bend, like a reed, with the winds of history,” she said.

  Liar, Fell thought. You will ruthlessly force others to do your will, just as you have always done.

  “A thousand thousand years ago,” Archange said, her voice so quiet it barely stirred the air, “in a place called Cumae there was a woman renowned as a seeress, a sybil. Her fame came to the attention of the gods who, then as now, were jealous and could be
whimsical and cunning and cruel within one action. The sun god appeared to the woman on the beach at sunrise. He spoke respectfully and told her her wisdom had impressed him and he offered to grant her a wish. She bent and scooped up a handful of sand, and asked the god to grant her as many years as were grains in her grasp. He agreed, proving, at least to his own satisfaction, that she was not as wise as she thought, for she did not ask for eternal youth, and was condemned to grow older and more crabbed and pained as the centuries marched on.”

  Fell wondered if this was a plea for understanding. But, as with Marcellus at the end, he felt only dislike for the woman.

  Archange stood and turned to the girl. “Come with me, Emly. I will see your brother gets the aid he needs. Dol Salida, you have my thanks for this day’s work. Now I have another task for you.”

  She swept from the room, soldiers clattering after her, and finally the only ones left with the old man’s body were Fell, Indaro and Broglanh.

  Fell said, “I wonder if Shuskara would be happy to know he died as part of that woman’s game,” he said.

  Broglanh said cheerfully, “We’re soldiers—we’re always pieces in someone’s game. But we are alive and the emperor is dead. That was the plan. The plan succeeded. Today was a good day.”

  He looked at Indaro and his smile faded. “Where will you go, Red?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need medical care.”

  She shook her head wearily. “There’s no time. I must be far from the City by dawn.”

  Fell took her hand. It was so small, the skin rough and calloused under the blood and dirt. He raised it to his mouth and kissed it. “We will both be gone by dawn,” he said.

  The inside of the jolting carriage was splashed with colour, soft blues and greens and pinks all over the walls and ceiling. Emly had spent so long in the dark she had forgotten such colours existed. Beside her a painted horse trotted across a cornfield under a sunset sky. The girl traced the animal’s outline, feeling the tiny brushstrokes of the jaunty tail under her fingertip.

  Glancing at the old woman, who seemed to be asleep, she kicked off her boots and pulled her feet up on the carriage seat. The soft material, like rabbit’s fur, was delicious on her bare skin.