by Anne Perry
Tathea drew in her breath to speak.
Gallimir smiled. “At first we too thought it was superstition, but it is not.” He reached out and touched her arm gently, and his hand was warm. “It had to come. Is not reward without labour the heart of Asmodeus’ greatest lie?”
“Yes ... of course it is,” she answered. She faced at last the thought which she had been evading all these months. “Is that where we will find Asmodeus?”
“It would seem so,” Gallimir agreed.
She knew also that if Ishrafeli returned from Pera it was he who would go and face the Silver Lords, because the men of Lantrif, good and evil, were his people.
If she went first, perhaps she could share the burden, even ease it. Whatever happened, she would not leave him to face it alone. The end must find them together, in heart and deed.
“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “I shall return with you. We shall leave as soon as you are rested.”
That evening she wrote letters, and packed a few belongings—just the necessities of travel and the staff. In the morning they left the City in the Centre of the World for the last time, and took ship westwards. She stood on the deck and watched its glory and its corruption slip away, gold in the evening light, and fall below the horizon.
She left Gallimir in Tyrn Vawr, and began the long ride across the golden summer. She knew the shores were again ravaged by pirates, raiders from the Sea Isles, and in places even old feuds reawakened. War had touched the Island, as it had to. But here in the Heartlands the fields still shimmered green and the great trees rested on them like billowing clouds. Wild roses starred the hedges, sending their mingled perfume into the air. The purple spires of foxgloves crowded thick. Meadows were vivid with streaks of buttercups blazing in a gold carpet, and red sorrel splashed between. The beauty of it was almost a burden because she knew it could not last.
Already to the northeast Irria-Kand had fallen. To the south Shinabar and Pera were in the throes of the final slaughter. In the centre Camassia was still starving after the barbarian wars, and too much of the land was polluted for it ever to recover.
In the west Tirilis, long prey to the evils of indifference and greed, was now torn by internal strife. And due north Caeva was only scattered settlements in the forests that stretched to the lands of ice.
She rode westward through the summer glory, continuing long into the evening. The sky was fired in amber and burning pink, and the soft air hung hazy over the distance, like a gauze scarf. She knew that perhaps she would never see it quite like this again.
Lantrif was harsher than the Heartlands, a country of steep crags clothed with forests of slender trees, often mist-shrouded by sudden rains and then illuminated with brilliant shafts of light. It was silvers and blues and greens. The wild flowers lay in sheets, pale and delicate.
The pathways through the valleys echoed the sound of bird-song. Tathea saw the white lace of rapids, the dappled bark of trees in a hundred different patterns. Streams rattled over the shallows into pools with lichened stones, cool surfaces dimpled in sunlight.
In the high passes clouds flew like banners from the crags, and above her the thin ribbons of water bounded downwards.
By noon of the second day she came to the first small town that straddled the River with arching bridges. By late afternoon she was where the stream was wide enough to carry the elegant, shallow-drifted, silver-decked barges with their ornamental masts and slender oars which the men of the west had built since the dawn of their race. From here they went down to the city and beyond to the sea.
Tathea left her horse at a hostelry, with sufficient money for its keep, and paid the river master for passage down river on the next barge.
Later she stood on the deck watching the soft wraiths of the mist crawl up off the water’s face and feeling the boat move under her like a living thing. Fear tightened inside her as she thought of Lantrif; Ishrafeli had called it by the old name, the City of Fallen Kings. It was walled around and filled with crooked streets and myriad steps; slender, fluted and corbelled towers. He had told her its people were silent-footed, smiling, beautiful of voice; and yet always secret hearted. He had grown up among them, and still he knew them little.
She could hear his voice in her head saying that there had always been mysteries—not overt, not as simple as locked doors or sealed books, but elusive as a scent in the air. The words were easy, but there was too often another meaning in the eyes. She watched, knowing she should tear the image of his face from her mind, and winding yet deeper into the core of her. She saw the shadow of the trees rising blurred and ephemeral above the water, as if they floated and had no roots in the winding, cool-mounded banks. The moonlight made a silver breath of the vapour and spread sudden, luminous pools across the current.
She was aware of another traveller standing beside her, watching, as she was.
“I have not seen you on the River before,” he remarked. “Nor did you bring goods with you when you boarded.”
She turned to look at him. He was grey-headed, of the old race of the west, with a delicate, subtle face, and he wore a silver cord around his neck. From it was suspended a sphere of perfect clarity, encircled by a chain, each link carefully wrought.
“I do not trade,” she answered him. “I carry words only, and beliefs.”
He drew in a long, slow breath, and let it out in a sigh. He was studying her face, reading it with intense thought, as one does a complicated page. Very slowly he smiled. “I see.” He moved his head in acquiescence. “Yes,” he said again. “I see.” And pulling his cloak a little tighter around him against the damp of the night, he gave a very slight bow, and walked silently into the shadows in front of the cabin on the deck, and was no longer visible.
She stood alone with the host of possibilities crowding her mind as to what lay ahead: which emissary of Asmodeus would be waiting for her, and for Ishrafeli—or would it be the Great Enemy himself?
She remembered with startling suddenness the day of Sadokhar’s birth, and how Asmodeus had mocked her then, and held up the black keys of the world. The power she had felt from him was as real now, as sharp and all-pervading.
There was no sound but the steady drip of oars and the whisper of the water as it slid past. The whorls of the wake drifted away astern, forming goblin faces beneath the surface, masks of indescribable deformity. Someone in this ancient, ensorcelled land had been weaving the slow, careful snares of long-withheld arts, secrets that men were never meant to know as long as their human weakness darkened their dreams.
Tathea stared up at the sky, now shredded over with flakes of cloud. The stream was broader. The trees on the banks were spectral, boughs silver-mounded in the moonlight as if heaped with blossom. She did not hear the footfall on the deck. She turned suddenly and saw the woman only yards away, slender, her eyes blue-green, the gossamer light on her face, as pale as milk.
“Do you travel to the City of the Fallen Kings?” the woman asked quietly. “Or beyond? To the sea, perhaps?”
“To the City,” Tathea replied. “And you?”
“That depends upon the Brotherhood,” the woman answered softly. Then, as Tathea seemed not to understand, she continued, glancing over her shoulder towards the cabin, then back again. Her voice was like the sigh of water eddying around the tree roots at the shore. “The Brotherhood of the Chain. No one outside knows who they are, but they know each other. They have signs.” Again the woman glanced at the cabin. She was so pale in the moonlight she seemed almost bloodless.
“Does someone threaten you?” Tathea said urgently.
“The Brotherhood threatens all people who are not of it!” She held her fingers to her lips. “And you are not of it ... are you?”
“No.”
“I thought not. But they will seek you ...” She laughed; it was a faint, rippling, eerie sound in the darkness.
Tathea shivered. The woman was so close now that she could have put out her hand and touched her. The soft breath of
wind between them might have drifted off ice, rather than the white gauze of moonlight.
“Who are you?” Tathea said with sudden urgency.
The woman smiled, showing a gleam of pearl-like teeth. “My name is Eris.” Then she swung round and stared, wide-eyed, at the cabin. From it was moving a cloaked and hooded figure. It came towards them, the heavy drapes of the wool masking even the outline of his head, making him terrifying, grossly anonymous.
Eris gave a wild despairing cry and hurled herself at Tathea, clinging to her as if to life itself.
Still the figure advanced. Where his face should have been was a nameless, impenetrable hole. He raised his arms.
Eris was frozen for a hideous moment, then she lunged backwards, drawing Tathea with her. For a wild, teetering instant Tathea felt the deck pitch and fall, and saw the sky pale as whey, swinging in an arc above her. Then the River caught her in its cold embrace, clinging, drowning, consuming her into itself.
The shock robbed her of breath. Water closed over her face. She flailed her arms to be free, but Eris was beside her, her robes imprisoning them both, her body close and cold as the River itself. Her hands were fasted on Tathea, strong as iron.
Tathea fought to the surface and filled her lungs, shouting for help. Her voice was shrill, echoing across the mirror face of the water. Then the mists writhed in, coiling and clinging. And she was pulled downwards. Eris was wrapped around her like a drowning weed. Her hair was around Tathea’s neck, tightening, strangling her throat.
Terror of more than death rippled through her body, darkening her soul. A thing namelessly dreadful caught at her feet, sucking her down. Her lungs were bursting. She would be entombed here in this freezing, sightless water, binding her in hair, shrouding her in liquid ice.
Then there was a violence in the weeds, a turbulence. The water seemed for a moment to fragment into shards. She heard no sound, but she was free again. There was a darkness looming, a presence whose vast tentacles grasped towards them. Eris’s dragging arms fell away and Tathea found air, sweet, blessed air on her face. The River was washing around her, with spume-white foam and broken tentacles of stems, and yards from her there was the high shadow of the boat swinging round, turning.
A cry echoed back from the wall of trees and the hollowed-under, hungry banks. “Where are you?”
She recognised the voice of the man she had spoken to on the deck earlier. “Here!” she shouted back, kicking away the last clinging threads, panic still crawling in her limbs.
The boat loomed above her, an oar came down and she gripped it, heaving herself up. A hand reached out warm with life and held on to her. He was close in the shivering moonlight.
“You are fortunate to be alive, my friend!”
“What about the ... the woman?” she gasped. She was struggling to keep standing upright, even though the man supported her with surprising strength. “What happened to her? Why did she let go of me?” She was still shaking with the memory of it and of that older, nameless thing that had come out of the gloom.
“Eris?” he said softly, pushing back his hood so she saw his face again. “She is not mortal. She is of the River: a Lamia—half-woman, half-fish, who sucks men’s blood, and then their souls, when the moon is sickle-sharp. But even she is afraid of the Kraken.”
“Kraken?” she said in amazement.
“Oh, it was not real,” he replied with a faint, wary smile. “The sign of the Brotherhood has the power to make people see what they fear the most. Even the Lamia is not immune. It takes great courage to pierce the vision, and she is a thing of cowardice, a creation of sorcery risen again.” There was sadness in him. “But surely you do know this? Is it not why you are here?”
Tathea felt the shudder pass through her and leave her faint. It was only his grasp which kept her from buckling and falling over. She knew in that instant that none of this was chance. The anonymity she had imagined she had was an illusion, and she was dangerously stupid to have assumed it.
“Yes.” The courage was not in her answer as she had intended. “Who are you?”
“Parminiar,” he replied. He held up his thin, beautiful hand, sheltered by the folds of his cloak, and she saw that he touched the tip of his forefinger to his thumb, making a circle, like the link of a chain.
There was no time for the games of safety. “You are of the Brotherhood,” she said, uncertain whether it was hope inside her or only another fear.
His smile was hollow. “I am the Master of the Brotherhood,” he agreed. “We expected Kor-Assh to return, but he has sent you, Tathea. Perhaps it is your power that is needed now. The evil is old and very high and the people turn to it because they know we are close to the end. Destruction walks the earth, and who else will fight the Great Enemy for them? Who else has the art, except the Silver Lords, who have been since the beginning, and know the secrets which are as old as the earth, or perhaps older?”
She searched his face, gaunt in the spectral light, and saw something of the age and the wisdom in it, and a profound sorrow.
“You know the answer to that,” she said urgently, willing him to understand it and accept. “God can defeat any evil, if we will allow Him to use us to the last degree of all we have, all that we are.”
Something flickered in Parminiar’s eyes. “Do you really believe that? Not just when you are standing here willing me to fight beside you, but when you are alone in the darkness of the night, when you have time to think, to weigh good against evil and count the cost?” There was a passionate gentleness in his thin face. “Do you ever allow yourself to imagine you might fail, even to acknowledge that you could? Do you measure the power of evil and look at it truly? Or do you know the danger of it, and keep your eyes averted?”
“I know the danger of it.” She shuddered as she spoke. “And I look. I have seen Asmodeus face to face, and he has promised me pain beyond anything I could dream of.”
Parminiar’s eyes widened with a new grasp of horror. “Yes ...” he said with an indrawn breath. “You have!” It was an exclamation of understanding. “Then perhaps the Silver Lords will not take you so much by surprise.” There was still doubt in him, and grief. He only half believed what he said. They had touched him with a fear no words could ease.
“And will I take them by surprise?” she asked with irony. And yet perhaps if they were expecting Ishrafeli ...
“No,” he said without hesitation. “They have woken again the forbidden arts of sorcery, learned in the beginning, when men aspired to heaven by the hidden path, not knowing God had closed the door.”
“There is no door,” she answered. “The hidden pathway seems to go upward, but its end is in another place. When you pick up the Enemy’s weapons, it makes no difference who you would use them against, it is you who sustains the wound. The weapon has become part of you and you of it. You have already changed what you are.”
He looked downward. “I know.” His voice was little more than a sigh. “I believed once that if the end were good enough, it could cleanse the means and justify it. I know better now.”
She did not ask how. She thanked him for his help, and bade him good night until the morning.
At midday the sun was soft in a mackerel-flaked sky when she stepped ashore with Parminiar beside her. They stood on the quay with the towers of the City of Fallen Kings above them in curious, ornate shapes—some round as globes, some corbelled, some spiral with silver turrets. The highest of all was the ancient seven-sided tower of the first Lords of the River, as old as the black basalt palace from the dawn of Shinabar. The roofs plunged at a score of angles, reflecting the light in unnumbered shades of grey. The streets and alleys between were a maze of steps.
“Are you still determined to speak with the Silver Lords?” Parminiar asked her.
“Of course,” she replied. If she were to take any of the burden from Ishrafeli there was no alternative now. And they probably already knew she was here anyway. To leave now would signal cowardice.
&nbs
p; Parminiar sighed. “Then come, I will take you to Timon, the High Seneschal. He will admit me, and it will save you much waiting. But I warn you, he is no friend to me, or any of the Brotherhood.” He began to walk up the quay and to climb the steps to the street. The grey houses rose on either side with their windows winking in the light, and layered storeys, the steep-pitched and many sloping roofs. The slates were mottled in the shadows and pale as doves’ breasts in the polished light.
She waited for his explanation, keeping pace with him.
“The Silver Lords created the Brotherhood in the beginning,” he said at last, “seven hundred years ago now, as warriors to withstand the Camassian Empire when they invaded the Island.” He smiled bitterly. “The Silver Lords are thinkers and rulers. They would not risk their own lives, or stain their hands with blood. The Chain symbolises strength, secrecy, equality. Each link is as important as another. Each stands or breaks on the honour of them all, and each is bound only to his neighbours. And yet in times past the whole has been strong enough to bind even the most dreadful power.” He did not look at her, but at the winding street ahead of him and the soaring flight of steps that led upward to an arch across the street. “I fear it is no longer so. We grew proud, and defied the men who created us. And they became afraid of the power of destruction that is loosed on the world now, and have turned to the old arts to battle against it. There is no longer trust between us.”
“But Timon will admit us?” she urged.
A smile flitted across Parminiar’s mouth. “Oh, yes. He will be curious, if no more. He will already know who you are.” At last he turned to look at her. His face was haggard in the sunlight, his eyes hollowed out with weariness of a long battle whose victory he did not expect to see. “Be careful, Ta-Thea,” he whispered. “For all your wisdom, there is much you do not know. These arts are older than you are. In spirit they are sons of Tiyo-Mah. They weave a net that will snare us all in the end. And it is nearly closed.”