The arrow flew past her ear and buried itself into the throat of the closest beast. She screamed as the creature fell to the cobbles. It bucked and writhed as the rest fled. Ylsriss gave Joran a shocked look, as he lowered the bow and rushed forward to retrieve the arrow. “What?” he asked, as he noticed her expression. “We need the meat, Ylsriss.”
He was right. She didn’t even know why she’d reacted like that. She might be a city girl, but she was under no illusions as to where the food from the markets came from.
“I’ll go and find us somewhere to camp,” she said. The grisly work of butchering a deer was not something she wanted to watch. He grunted in response, without looking up from the task.
She wandered along the streets. The doorways of the partially collapsed buildings hung open, the doors themselves having long since gone to rot. As she moved farther along, however, she could see the state of the buildings steadily improving, as if the outer edges of the city had born the brunt of the decline.
Popping her head through one of the closest doorways, she saw a home from another age. It had been empty for so long that any smell of decay had long since gone. All that remained was a faint mustiness. She made her way into the building, glancing nervously at the roof once or twice, although it seemed sturdy.
A kitchen and two small bedrooms complete with the crumbling remains of the furniture. Mounted high on one wall, a moonorb hung, dark and forgotten. Exploring the house was like being in a family’s grave. This had once been a home, not just a building. People had lived, loved and laughed here. She looked around, half expecting to see shadowy figures lurking in the doorway. Hugging herself against the sudden chill, she made her way back out onto the street.
They sheltered in the remains of a shop of some kind that night. The contents had mouldered away but the counter was still in place. Joran had raised an eyebrow and even argued a little when she had insisted on staying there rather than in one of the houses, but she was not about to spend the night surrounded by other people’s memories. Wood, at least, was plentiful as the shop still had more than one door in place. They roasted hunks of venison on sticks over the fire, and she felt warm and full for the first time in weeks.
Joran fell asleep almost before he had swallowed his last mouthful and Ylsriss stared into the fire, listening to the distant sounds of the crickets. How odd that, in this other world, there would be crickets. The sound took her to another place, another time. Memories of nights with Klöss, in their cabin above the shipyards, played through her head. She followed the thought onwards, though she knew where it would lead, to loss and to pain. Joran slept on, snoring a soft accompaniment to the sound of her tears, as she allowed the barriers to fall. She let herself think of Klöss and Effan. She could almost smell her baby and feel the softness of his cheek, the way his fingers would open and close over her skin as he fed from her. The pain was an ache inside her. Part of her soul was missing. It had been taken from her and that theft had left a wound that would never heal.
Morning brought fresh wonders. The city was a place of awe, a bizarre combination of the everyday and the exotic. Wells stood in squares, the remnants of decayed buckets still sat beside them under arches of giant moonorbs that hung from curved stone supports.
In one house, they found a large runeplate that covered a section of the kitchen counter. The glyphs were dead and unresponsive but, at first glance, they were identical to the ones on the segment they carried. Ylsriss compared them with interest, while Joran waited impatiently at the door.
“Look, Joran,” she called. “It’s not quite the same. This section here was never on our runeplates in the camp.” She pointed to where the glyphs extended over the edge of the plate, trailing down to create a sequence of sigils on the side of the device.
“I wonder why they are so rare here? It’s like these people relied more on wood for heat and cooking.”
“Yeah, interesting,” he said, his eyes still on the street. She sighed and followed him out.
On several occasions, they discovered charred stones at the end of a street. A blackened area extended out from a small crater, as if the ground had been scorched by some unimaginably hot fire that had burned down into the very stones.
Other times, they discovered large circular stone plates set flat against the stones of the streets. The plates were surrounded by glyphs as dead as those on the runeplate. They were obviously important and their placement close to a wall implied they had been used regularly, but Ylsriss couldn’t puzzle out what they were. Joran spent a full five minutes trying to make one of the stones move. He could see the direction that they were supposed to shift in from the scars in the stones but, try as he might, he couldn’t budge it. Ylsriss tried hard not to let her smile show when he gave up in disgust.
They moved each night, never sleeping in the same place twice. As they explored the city, Joran frequently checked behind them to make sure they weren’t leaving tracks. He needn’t have bothered, so far as she could tell. The cobbled streets carried no sign of their passage that wasn’t erased with the next gust of wind.
They’d split up on the third day. They could cover the ground faster and, if Ylsriss was honest with herself, Joran’s constant nagging to move on from the things that intrigued her was beginning to wear.
She’d found she enjoyed the solitude. It was hard to explain, but the silence of the city had a peaceful quality to it, as if the city itself was sleeping, waiting only for someone to wake it. Something else was niggling away at her though, and she stopped to look behind her on more than other occasion, certain she was being followed or watched.
It was towards the end of the first week that Joran came to find her. Ylsriss looked up from the runeplate she was studying in the kitchen of the large house as she heard her name echoing. She sighed in frustration and looked closely at the runes on the side of the plate and then at the block in her hand. It was made of a strange black stone, almost glass-like, and she’d never seen anything like it before. Glyphs were etched into three sides of it and she’d just discovered that the series on one side bore a striking similarity to the glyphs on the side of the runeplate.
“Ylsriss!” the call came again, closer this time. She muttered darkly and made her way out, taking the glass block with her. He turned into the street just as she stepped out of the house, a lucky coincidence that would stop him yelling any more, at least.
“Ylsriss,” he gasped, as he drew close. His face was flushed and he’d obviously been running. She felt fear touch her for a moment, as she wondered if the satyr had found its way around the ravine, but then she realised his eyes were glinting with excitement.
“What is it?” she asked. His enthusiasm was contagious and a smile lit her face.
“You have to come and see this!” He grabbed her hand and led her down the street at a run.
“What?” She laughed, tugging at his arm, but he wouldn’t let go.
“You’ll see soon enough. I wouldn’t do it justice if I tried to describe it, anyway.”
They raced through the silent streets, kicking up wind-tossed leaves as they made their way towards the centre of the city. The buildings grew steadily grander and more opulent, reaching up to three or four floors in height. He’d obviously explored far more of the place than she had, but then he didn’t stop to examine things. He looked at something once and then moved on.
The square was huge, easily the grandest she’d seen, and showed almost no signs of age. A few doors hung off their hinges and there were empty windows in some of the frames where glass should have been, but the area was in a far better state than the outskirts of the city. The buildings around the edge of the square looked as if they had been fine shops and she could pick out at least one inn. Joran ignored all of them and pulled her towards the largest building.
It was a massive edifice, fully five floors high, and constructed of brilliant white stone, set with columns and ornate carvings. One end of it appeared to have collapsed completely a
nd rubble spilled out into the square.
He led her up the steps and in through a gaping hole which, from the look of the scraps of rotten wood that still remained, had once contained large double doors. The entrance hall was grand. Even with the leaves that had blown in littering the floor, and the centuries' worth of dust and grime clinging to the walls, Ylsriss could see how opulent this place had once been. Joran fell silent and walked backwards so he could see her expression.
The dim light of the twilight sky soon faded as they proceeded inside, and Joran shocked her by producing a moonorb, activating it by tracing the glyphs with a deft hand.
“Where did you get...” she began.
He stopped her. “In here. It’s the least of it, trust me.”
They made their way through a maze of passages and corridors, passing through rooms filled with semi-rotten furniture and rugs turned to a rotten ruin. Finally, he led her up a set of stairs and stopped in front of a thick wooden door. He gave her a broad smile and pushed it open.
The room was lit with burning moonorbs which had been hung up at regular intervals. What caught Ylsriss’s attention, however, were the books. The walls were lined with shelf upon shelf of books.
She rushed over and pulled out a heavy tome at random before Joran could stop her. The pages crumbled like ash between her fingers as she opened it, until she held little more than the binding.
“They almost always do that. Leave them. This is what I wanted to show you.” He ushered her over to a workbench in the middle of the room. A small block of stone, carved with intricate glyphs, lay in the centre of it. The work was clearly unfinished and chips from the stone were scattered on the bench. Next to it, there were racks containing high-quality chisels and other tools. Further to one side, there was a lectern with a huge book lying open upon it.
She moved closer as he held the moonorb over the pages. “It’s not paper,” he said, grinning. “It looks like it, but it’s something different. Look!” He reached out and turned the page. The material held together. It was as strong as if it had been made yesterday.
She lowered her eyes to the writing. The page was filled with huge sections of text, as well as diagrams. She looked up at him in awe and then back to the book. The pages were thick and had an almost metallic feel to them. A tiny series of glyphs was etched into the uppermost corner of each page.
“I can read this!” she gasped. “Not every word, but I can understand some of it. It’s like a really old kind of Islik, a bit like they speak on the Far Isles.”
He pointed behind her to a stone rack set against the wall. “There are more there too.”
His smile lit his face and his eyes were filled with a joy at having surprised her, but she barely noticed it. Her attention was already being drawn back to the archaic script.
From that moment on, she spent almost every waking hour in the library. The book was like a gateway to another world. It hinted at a power she was only just beginning to perceive and she devoured the information on the pages with a hunger that surprised her.
Joran lost interest in it quickly. He visited with tales of the things he’d discovered, and forced her to eat and drink. After a day or two, he nagged her into taking breaks to join him for walks around the city, but she barely registered the things he took her to see. A bridge over an empty riverbed. An ornate garden, the plants running wild around the circle of tall stones that stood at its centre. An entire section of the city with buildings that were fire-scarred and blackened with soot. All too soon, her eyes would drift back in the direction of the library, and his voice would trail off in mid-sentence before he took her back to the library and the books.
It was another three days before she left the library. She'd studied late into each night, reading by the fading light of a moonorb. She’d drained four already and there were only two more remaining. The text was maddening. Some sections were so close to Islik, it was like talking to Tristan. Others had barely a recognisable word, using odd letters she'd never seen before, or additional syllables added onto the beginnings or ends of the words.
“Where do you want to go?” Joran asked, a cautious smile on his face. He didn’t seem at all surprised by her desire to wander the city that early in the morning.
“There’s something I want to try,” she replied, as she picked up a small bag and headed towards the entrance.
He hurried to keep up with her as she marched through the square and into what had clearly once been a residential backstreet. She stopped at the end of a row of houses. The sky was still a pale twilight. Sunrise was still four hours or more away. She moved towards the wall, her steps small and slow. Joran frowned as he watched her. Then he saw it.
“You opened one?” he blurted, pointing at the circular stone that had somehow been shifted to one side. “How did you even move it? When did you do this?”
“Last night. It was a full moon and I didn’t want to miss it,” she said, her tone plain and matter-of-fact.
He gave her a hurt look and muttered something to himself, but she ignored it. She was already moving towards the shallow hole that had been revealed when she had moved the stone plate. It contained a silvery circle of metal which was completely covered in glyphs, most of which were a mystery to her. The glyphs that were etched into the stones surrounding the hole, however, these she understood.
She set down her bag and pulled the curious stone block that she’d found near the runeplate out of it. “Here goes,” she breathed, as she traced the series of glyphs.
Joran yelped and leapt back as they flared to life, the characters burning bright green or amber as she traced them. She looked back over her shoulder to make sure he was clear, before touching the final glyph. The circular cover stone slid back over the silvery capture plate, making a sullen grinding sound as it slipped back into position.
She grinned at Joran’s wide eyes. “Watch this but please keep quiet. There’s a lot for me to remember and plenty of things that could go wrong here.” A mute nod was the only response she got.
She examined the glyphs again before setting the glassy block down in the small depression at the edge of the series of characters. Her fingers moved slowly, carefully, and she became aware she was chanting under her breath as she worked, naming each sigil in turn as she activated the sequence.
Joran cried out again, as the channel that had been cut into the stone blazed with light for a moment before dulling as the conduit awoke for the first time in untold ages. The glassy block began to pulsate, as the glyphs on it drank the power in greedily. In a matter of moments, it was done and the illuminated symbols grew darker before finally fading completely.
Ylsriss picked up the block and turned it over in her hands, before looking at Joran in triumph. “Well?” she asked.
“Well, what?” He sounded frantic, like he might bolt at any moment.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me? It worked!”
“I don’t even know what you did. Except nearly blind me.”
“Don’t be such a big baby,” she snorted. “It wasn’t that bright. What I did was infuse this.” She waved the block at him.
“In-what?”
“Infuse,” she repeated, drawing out the unfamiliar word. “Look, come back to the library with me and I’ll show you.”
She led the way back, almost at a run, as the day grew brighter.
“Okay, how much do you know about the glyphs?”
“Not much,” he shrugged. “The same as anyone, really. The fae have a way to make them work. They take some of the power they get from the moonlight and somehow put it into the glyphs. It works for a while and then they have to put more power in.”
“That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.” She pointed up at a dark moonorb. “Fetch that one down for me, will you?” He took it off the wall without comment and passed it to her.
“The people who lived here knew an awful lot about glyphs. The things that I’ve read suggest that they knew far more than even the
fae. Most importantly, they learned to power their glyphs directly.”
She knelt, setting both the moonorb and the glassy block down on the floor before her. With the fingers of one hand, she traced a series of glyphs cut into the block and a soft light flared from them. Lifting the moonorb and turning it over in her hands, she muttered to herself, searching for the right place. “Ah, here it is.”
She pressed a small section of the base of the moonorb onto the glowing block. Lights pulsed both within the block and on the base of the moonorb, as different glyphs lit up and, within a matter of moments, the orb was glowing brightly.
“Lords of Blood, Sea and Sky, Ylsriss, that’s incredible!” he gasped.
“It’s more than that, Joran.” Her smile shone as she spoke. “Don’t you see? I could create a moonorb, if I had the time. The people who lived here powered their own glyphs. They didn’t need the fae at all!”
Chapter Fifteen
They stayed in one of the finer mansions close to the library again that night. Since Ylsriss had begun studying there, it had made sense to stay within easy reach of it. She suspected that the only reason they moved house every night was because Joran was bored.
“Do you ever wonder what happened to the people here?” he asked, looking up from his plate.
“How do you mean?” she said, when she'd finished her mouthful of venison.
“Well, think about it. The city is largely intact, isn’t it? Some things are broken or have fallen down, but others are fine. This house. That plate.” He pointed as he spoke.
She sat up at that, her jaw frozen mid-chew as he continued. “It’s not a city that looks like it was taken by force. I mean, I don’t really know what that would look like, but if there had been fighting, I’d expect more damage. Even the section that's all fire-scarred looks like it was burned more by accident than as the result of an attack. If there was no war, then where are all the people?”
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