The White Road of the Moon

by Rachel Neumeier

  Meridy stared at him. Then she let out her breath and shrugged. He was right. Or she hoped he was right. She wished she knew what happened to the witch-king’s servitors when he was finished with them—what might happen to them if Tai-Enchar were actually defeated. She could hardly imagine what defeat might even mean, in this context. If being dead for two hundred years hadn’t been enough to get rid of the witch-king, then she had no idea what would actually do it.

  She wished Inmanuàr would come back. But if Inmanuàr returned, no doubt he would draw the witch-king right to them yet again. Probably in Jaift’s body. That…had surely been one of the worst things Meridy had ever seen in her whole life. And it wasn’t over yet, and there was nothing she could do. Except defeat the witch-king. Somehow.

  She looked at Prince Herren. The same thing that had happened to Jaift had happened first to Herren’s mother. She couldn’t even imagine. Herren had faced that, faced everything. If he was overwhelmed now, well, she couldn’t blame him for a second. Yet the young prince did not seem overwhelmed. When he had asked how they were going to return to the world of men, she knew he wasn’t asking because he’d given up. He was asking because he hadn’t.

  If Meridy was certain of anything, it was that she did not have the strength, or the weakness, to meet the little boy’s eyes and tell him she didn’t know what to do.

  She looked around. This silent realm obviously wasn’t meant for mortal men or living creatures. No one had to explain to her they couldn’t linger here. She knew that. But how could she find the way without Iëhiy?

  “You know the road we must take,” Niniol said, gravely confident, and Meridy looked at him.

  Diöllin started to say something, but Meridy held up her hand for silence and the princess hushed. Then Meridy stood still for a long moment, listening to the soft, endless hiss of the wind blowing through frozen leaves and over drifts of snow. It was a sound born of silence, a sound that stood behind the silence, and the stillness of this place seemed to grow deeper and longer and wider for that tiny whisper. The pale light of the full moon flooded everything without, somehow, revealing anything.

  Inmanuàr would have quoted something. Something old, and appropriate. Meridy thought for a moment. Then she said softly, “ ‘The pale moon rose in beauty, shining like death, the road shining before us, a straight road laid for us through the shadows.’ ” The rolling lines came back to her easily, and she suddenly saw that a road ran through this winter wood. It stretched away, glimmering like crushed pearl in the moonlight.

  The moonlight poured down, and the wind stirred the snow and brushed it, stinging, into the air, and the leafless black trees closed around the road as though there were no end to them and never would be. But it was all an echo. It wasn’t the God’s true Road. Meridy held both her hands toward this dream-echo of a road and said out loud, quoting a line she dimly remembered from one of Ambica’s stories, “ ‘The path that can be found is not the true path.’ ” Then she closed her eyes, took Niniol’s hand, and Herren’s, glanced at Diöllin to make sure she had her brother’s other hand, and walked straight forward, not along the road that ran out before them, but straight across it, toward the opposite side.

  When the air softened, losing its stinging chill, she stopped walking and opened her eyes.

  They stood, Meridy saw, with only a faint sense of surprise, on the edge of a high cliff. Herren stood on her left, and Niniol, once again insubstantial, on her right. Below them, a glittering expanse of water stretched out in the sunlit afternoon. The shadows of high clouds raced across the bay, seeming to disappear when they met the land. Where the breeze stirred the bay, the rippling wavelets glittered and flashed as though sparking with inward fire. The sound of the waves against the rocky shore below was softly discernible even from this height.

  “Moran Bay,” Meridy said. “The waters that drowned Moran Diorr when the High King fell.”

  Herren shook free of her grip and walked forward, to the very edge of the cliff. Diöllin whipped in a tight circle around him, her worry all but palpable, but Herren didn’t notice and she sighed sharply and drew back a little. The princess, like Niniol, looked like a ghost again to Meridy’s eye: colorless, tenuous, merely a memory of the living girl. The sunlight here, echoing between sky and water, seemed stronger and more brilliant than the sunlight elsewhere. It shone around and through the quick dead.

  Iëhiy appeared in the sudden way that the quick dead sometimes did, glanced around with a jaunty air, and came to sit on Niniol’s feet. Light glimmered through every translucent hair of his coat and in his colorless eyes, and then tangled in the mane of the fire horse, which followed the hound out of the air. Gonnuol tossed his head suspiciously and trotted away, pacing along the cliff edge, his head snaking out aggressively when he saw Meridy looking at him. He paused to tear with his claws at the tough grasses that clung to the edge of the cliff. Every now and then, a grass blade stirred in answer to his violence.

  On a day like this one, Meridy could not believe anyone in the world could not see ghosts.

  “Remarkable,” Niniol murmured, studying Moran Bay. “How many miles did we step across with that little detour, I wonder?” He added, with an ironic glint in his eye, “Things like this never used to happen to me, you know, until I met you.”

  “Yes, well, things like this never used to happen to me, either,” Meridy answered. “Then I met Carad Mereth. So this is all his fault.” She hoped she would have a chance to complain to him about it. Soon, preferably. She thought of him, trapped somewhere in the witch-king’s realm, and winced. It had seemed so practical to find a way to rescue him and then let him deal with everything. Now she guessed that even if she’d managed to find him, it wouldn’t have solved anything.

  Of them all, she was almost sure Herren had the most to fear. But he looked steady enough. He stood at the edge of the cliff, so near the empty air that it made Meridy nervous, but he showed no sign of fear. Looking down at the blue waves, he said in a low voice, “Moran Diorr is down there.”

  Meridy nodded.

  “Then that’s where we need to go,” the young prince declared.

  “I know,” Meridy answered.

  Diöllin opened her mouth but closed it again without saying anything. Meridy gave the princess a sympathetic look. Diöllin wanted to protect her little brother. Of course she did. It couldn’t be any comfort for her to realize, as she must have by now, that she couldn’t, and that Herren wouldn’t let her protect him anyway.

  “How does one reach a city drowned beneath the salt waves hundreds of years ago?” asked Niniol, but his tone was resigned, as though he had no doubt they’d find a way.

  “It’s said by all the poets,” Meridy said, “that if one should descend beneath the bitter waves of Moran Bay, Moran Diorr still rests there. In all its glory it is preserved, for those who look into memory, for it holds still the ghosts of every man and woman and child who was caught within its borders when the sea came in.”

  “Good, good,” said Niniol. “And did any of these poets ever offer advice as to how one might descend to its drowned streets?”

  Meridy couldn’t help but smile. “Well, no. But I think I know. I think Inmanuàr did tell us how to reach Moran Diorr. The city lingers in drifts of memory, you know. It’s like any ghost town, in a way. What we need is an old ghost, one who remembers the city as it was when it lived. One we can follow so deep into memory that for us, the waters of the bay never covered the City of Bells.” And she held out her hand, deliberately, to Iëhiy. The wolfhound, ears up and tail waving, got to his feet and came to her. Sunlight streamed through him, brindling his coat in light and shadow. He seemed to have been poured out of glass and air. He was very old. She’d always known that. Next to him, Niniol and Diöllin were practically invisible.

  Beckoning to Iëhiy, Meridy stepped to the edge of the cliff, so that she stood between the infinite sky and the bitter water of the bay. Somehow the rushing sound of the waves washing
against the rocks far below made the cliff seem even higher. Meridy took care not to go too near the edge—she had never been afraid of heights, but this was something else.

  At her side, the wolfhound stood like a statue. He was fearless. Even if he’d been living, even if he might have fallen, she thought the dog would have been just that fearless. She had no doubt that the God’s hand was over him and had been all his life, for dogs were sacred to the God, who loved courage and faithfulness, and surely no dog anywhere was braver or more faithful than Iëhiy.

  She quoted softly, “ ‘Listen! Beyond the sound of the waves, drowned bells are ringing.’ ”

  It seemed to her that the world grew more quiet still, as though the wind itself had hushed to listen. And it seemed to her that behind the silence, she could indeed hear the sound of a thousand ringing bells. Tiny delicate bells of glass and crystal, their voices like chimes, sang above the joyful clear notes of heavy bronze bells; the sweet voices of bells made of mellow gold rang around and above the brighter notes of silver and brass and copper; and below them all tolled the deep voices of great dark iron bells, heavy and powerful as the sea itself.

  Beside her, Herren drew in a breath.

  Iëhiy bounded joyfully forward, off the cliff and into the air. He did not fall, being a ghost; but neither did he run straight across the empty air. Instead, a bridge made of light and memory and the ringing voices of ten thousand bells spun itself out of the air before the hound. The bridge reached from the rocks at Meridy’s feet down in a dizzying sweep to bury itself in the depths of the bay.

  Niniol hissed through his teeth and murmured, “The God protect us!” in a tone that made it clear this was a prayer and no mere exclamation.

  “It will hold our weight,” Herren said determinedly, and started forward—brave as Iëhiy—but Diöllin leaped to prevent him.

  “Careful!” she cried. “An ethereal bridge—I should think it would need more than a ghost’s memory to anchor it against the weight of living feet!”

  But Meridy shook her head. “Iëhiy is a very old ghost, you know. He was Inmanuàr’s dog, and he knows his way home. No, I’m sure any road he travels is a true road, and any bridge the God lays before his feet is a true bridge. It will hold our weight—as long as it needs to. Long enough for us to walk into memory.” She didn’t let herself say, I think it will. She was afraid of finding their enemy behind them, but she was even more afraid the bridge might fade if clouds crossed the face of the sun. She didn’t say so. The clouds now were high and wispy, but there were more of them than Meridy liked—if she couldn’t have mist or fog or smoke, then bright sunlight was better than shadow. She shook away her fears, though, and said as confidently as she could, “Come on! Follow Iëhiy and never doubt that the bridge will hold—don’t doubt it for a second!” Then she ran forward. She didn’t let herself hesitate at the edge of the cliff; she didn’t reach forward to touch the bridge with a toe. For a bridge like this, she suspected that belief mattered.

  Her foot came down on the bridge, and it did hold. Light poured through and around the bridge, and the ghostly ringing of ten thousand bells rose up around her, and she walked forward, not too fast now because if she ran she might become frightened and fear was the cousin of doubt, and she guessed that doubt would melt this bridge as surely as uncertain light.

  The bridge held her and did not fail, but it did not feel like any normal bridge. It felt cold underfoot, and both brittle and springy at the same time, and not at all like it was real. It would have been too easy to imagine falling through it and down down down, to the rocks where the waves washed at the base of the cliff. So she did not let herself look down, or back. She went forward, following Iëhiy, and simply hoped the others followed her.

  Herren caught up to her before she’d gone very far, Diöllin right with him and Niniol a heartbeat after that, and Meridy took the young prince’s hand, gave her ghosts a smile, and walked more surely because they were with her. Risking a glance back, she was not quite surprised to see the fire horse trailing after them. Though he put each clawed foot down with delicate care, he, like Iëhiy, seemed unafraid of the dizzying fall below or the wide sky all around them.

  Behind the stallion, Meridy saw the bridge unraveling into light and air, so behind him there was no bridge leading back to the edge of the cliff. This did not seem to concern the stallion, however, and after all they could not go back. So she turned her face firmly forward and followed the high, waving tail of the wolfhound, barely visible ahead of her.

  Somewhere in that journey across the bridge of moonlight and imagination, they should have found themselves descending beneath the waters of the bay. But the waves seemed to melt away before them, towers rising up instead. The path of the bridge seemed to flatten until it was nearly level, as though they walked on a road of shimmering ice toward a city and not on a bridge that descended into the bay. Meridy never glimpsed water; there was no sign now that the sea had ever rolled in to cover this land. And, although Meridy did not look back again, she suspected that if she had, she would have seen no dark shadows of rocky cliffs behind them, either. They walked now though memory, and here the land had never sunk down and the sea had never come in to cover the towers.

  The voices of the bells rang in the air all around them. Meridy walked forward, following Iëhiy. Color and solidity washed across the wolfhound as he trotted before them, not all at once, but little by little, until eventually he looked exactly as he had in life. Beside her, Niniol, too, once more took on the appearance of a living man, so she knew they had stepped fully into the realm of dreams.

  Then Iëhiy stopped and turned back to wait for them, his ears pricked forward attentively, and they were standing in the center of a broad avenue, with tall, graceful buildings to either side. The street was paved with fitted white stone, worn smooth by countless feet, that cast back the light not of the afternoon sun they had left behind, but of the full moon.

  The towers of Moran Diorr were white as the stones of the street; white with broad veins of pale gold and smoky gray-blue winding through them. Those towers rose astonishingly high in the air, with domes and balconies, doors of carved and polished spicewood and narrow arched windows. The stone of the towers was carved everywhere, with flowers and leaves and interwoven patterns in delicate relief, and the windows glittered with glass in shades of gold and amber and rose, and flowers spilled over the balcony railings. The towers’ height gave them a light and airy look for all their size, and Meridy realized the spires of Cora Diorr must have been built as an echo of these towers.

  Around and amid the towers, tall houses glowed in the moonlight, all sunset colors: saffron and carmine, warm orange and apricot, and all of them embellished with elaborate swirling plasterwork. Their rooftops were tiled in red and rust and tawny gold, steeply pitched, with long strands of enameled prayer bells swaying from their gracefully overhanging eaves.

  Bells were everywhere: not only the strings of prayer bells but bells of brass and copper and bronze, steel and dark iron, some smaller than Meridy’s hand and others taller than she was. Wind chimes of steel and brass hung from lampposts; delicate strings of gold and silver bells trailed from the branches of the trees that lined the avenue; bells of clear glass and lapis from the rising dishes of a many-tiered fountain where water splashed. Several of the towering spires were open to the air, and within them hung tremendous bells of bronze or iron. All the city was filled with the sound of bells, though there was no wind Meridy could feel; but even though they stood within the city, the sound somehow seemed to come from very far away, from hundreds of years in the past.

  There were no people in the street at all, or in the windows of the buildings. There were no human voices mingled with the voices of the bells. There were not even any visible ghosts, except for those who had come with Meridy.

  “My sweet God,” Niniol murmured in a hushed voice, speaking for all of them.

  “Are we really here?” Diöllin asked. “Is this r
eally Moran Diorr?” Forgetting her customary disdain, she stared around in open amazement.

  “This is one layer of memory,” Meridy explained, knowing it was true. She looked around at the graceful empty streets and the deserted towers. “See how…empty it is here. This is the memory of the city, but we need to go deeper, farther back, into the memory of the people who used to live here before Moran Diorr drowned, to truly see the city as it was.”

  “We need to find Inmanuàr,” Herren said, and though he had been staring around with the same wonder they all felt, he spoke those words with what seemed to Meridy a kind of disturbingly flat resignation.

  Herren was right, though. Meridy knew that, too. They did need to find the High King’s son. Meridy looked around, searching for inspiration, and found it in the usual place. She said, “Iëhiy!” The hound bounded to her, whining, then trotted away down the wide avenue. Herren started off after the dog without looking back or waiting for anyone else.

  Diöllin called after him, “Herren!” but though her brother must have heard her, he did not look back.

  “No, listen, your brother is right,” Meridy told Diöllin. “He’s older than his years—as you’d expect, since he’s anchored Inmanuàr all his life.” Though come to think of it, that could not be at all reassuring, so then Meridy simply shook her head, touched Diöllin’s hand in sympathy, and hurried after Herren, knowing the princess had to follow.

  The High King’s palace, when they found it, proved to be a many-cornered structure so vast it would probably have taken days to walk around it, with a white spire at each corner and a tiered roof rising to a swooping dome. Meridy knew this must be the palace; if she had spent a year imagining what the High King’s palace must look like, she would have imagined a great and beautiful building exactly like this. But its vast gates—brass and black wood—were standing open, and so were the doors beyond the gates. The city seemed even emptier and more deadly quiet here, where no doubt noblemen and lords, merchants and tradesmen, and petitioners of all stations and degrees had once thronged. Meridy glanced around, half seeing the crowd in her mind’s eye. But even here the city stood deserted and empty.