Vespera

by Anselm Audley

  The coast they found was facing a little east of south, dominated by a huge range of white mountains that reached into the interior. Not white in the sense that Lamorra’s mountains were, snow-capped on top and grey on their lower slopes, but entirely white, only their foothills free. To the west of them, hills gave way to an endless carpet of conifer forest, the taiga of old, which had somehow re-established itself after the storms had gone. He’d expected not to be able to reach the coast for ice-sheets, but there were none, and when he tested the water it was much warmer than it should have been. Still icy, but not frozen. Which suggested the vents were active here as well, though he couldn’t see the ruins of any cities.

  They were further west than he’d hoped, and so Navigator sailed eastwards along the empty coast until it began to turn north, and another huge range of mountains reared up inland. The emptiness was more profound than Odeinath had ever experienced. At sea was one thing, but here they were in the shadow of Aquasilva’s largest continent, for all anyone knew – though no-one had ever explored the side which faced towards the Continents, so that was only a supposition. And there was no-one here apart from them.

  Once they spotted a Tuonetar city high on a cliff, but the weather was already closing in and a three-day storm drove them long past it, away from the coast and out into the ocean. They had to beat painfully back towards Thure, finally sighting it only a day out, as they later discovered, from the entrance to the Chasm.

  The Tuonetar ruins were obvious here, black skeletal shapes arrayed along the coast to the east of them, stark against the plain. Broken domes, the ruins of great buildings and factories and greenhouses larger than any he had seen on Ralentis, stretching away in belts round and between the cities. Many of them must have been canopied rather than domed, to cover as much as possible of the usuable ground, but now only the frames were left, and the occasional shards of canopy glinting in the sunlight.

  Here and there they saw geysers, tall fountains of water leaping up amid the ruins that beat even the great fountains in the Octagon and the Imperial Plaza, and water cascading from the edge of the cliffs to hit the sea in a cloud of steam. The sea itself was far warmer here than it had a right to be, and when they switched on the aether apparatus briefly, they caught sight of vents bubbling from the seafloor to either side, reeking of brimstone. Below them, the water was too deep to see the bottom.

  He wanted to stop at the ruins they saw, but mindful of what they carried, he pressed onwards, and after a day and a half of passing the coast, the sea narrowed into a huge opening ahead of them, fourteen or fifteen miles wide by his estimate, with cliffs on both sides. The Chasm.

  There were still fragments of pack ice floating down it, but they were few and far between, and provided he set an ice watch should be no danger to Navigator. So they sailed on, into the heart of the continent, along a passage thick with Tuonetar ruins. They were nearly eight weeks out from Lamorra, and in that time they hadn’t sighted a single living soul.

  It took them nearly four days to reach the top of the Chasm, where the channels ended in a spectacular bowl of cliffs and an immense half-frozen waterfall crashing into the sea, and where on a painfully bright morning a week before northern midsummer, Navigator sighted the ruins of Eridan.

  The crew turned from their tasks, paused on the rigging or in the sails, stood still as they lined the Navigator’s rails, transfixed.

  Eridan had once covered the entire eastern shore, seven or eight miles of it, but the whole escarpment had collapsed, leaving a gouge running deep into the heart of the plain above them. The city rose out of the sea, smashed and ruined almost beyond recognition, a half-frozen labyrinth of exposed passages and streets and corridors climbing up what was now a hill like the tongue of a glacier. The fall had been far from regular, and here and there were sharp breaks, cliffs, dark gulfs where entire sections of the city had disappeared into the blackness of the caverns below. And the springs still bubbled, running water glistening here and there as it caught the sunlight, flowing over the skeleton of the city and into the sea. There were sections half-intact at the top, buildings sheared off as if a giant knife had cut down through them, spilling one half into the ruin of the city below but leaving the other with its floors and rooms intact.

  The doors of two of the caverns seemed still to be intact, on the northern side of the city, but there wouldn’t be anything behind them. Still, perhaps there might be something left, some trace of the great foundries where the Tuonetar had built their monumental arkships.

  What sort of hatred could drive men to do this? Not to conquer, not to subject and rule, but to obliterate, to bury all traces of what had been a great civilization forever in the arctic wastelands? Perhaps it was simply that both sides knew they could never rule the other, because the climate barriers were too great, the distances too vast. And for all the damage inflicted by the Tuonetar incursion into the Sea of Stars, the sack of the capital, Odeinath didn’t believe Thetia could have collapsed like this. It was too easy to survive there.

  By all accounts, it had been a terrible, bitter war, fueled by religion and hatred and ideology. By then, the Tuonetar state had been a dark perversion of its former brightness, a tyranny so dark it enslaved its subjects’ minds as well as their bodies, had turned every citizen into an informer on those closest to them.

  No, they had deserved defeat, but this . . . this was something else.

  There must once have been docks below the cliff for surface ships, since the Tuonetar couldn’t have been entirely dependent on their arkships. But any docks there had been were lost with the ruin of the city, would have been plunged into the abyss of the Chasm below them. It was no use trying to anchor, not if the bottom was the same here as everywhere else.

  ‘Break out the boats,’ he called. ‘Cassini, find Imris and get the aether recorder working. I want a full bathymetric survey as soon as possible. Tilao, get up into the crowsnest and see if you can find us a landing site.'

  ‘What are we doing?’ Cassini asked.

  With more confidence than he felt, Odeinath answered, ‘We’re going exploring. No-one ought to have been here in two hundred and fifty years. Let’s find out if that’s true or not. First, let’s find somewhere to leave Navigator.’

  An hour later, with Navigator safely moored to a more or less stable building at the edge of the ruin field, they set out into the heart of the ruined city. Odeinath took Cassini, Tilao and Daena with him in the first boat, left Granius and the sailing master in charge of the second. A good thing he wasn’t in the Navy, they never let the captain ashore unless they were sure it was safe.

  The omnipresent smell of brimstone was stronger here than ever, in the water and the air. It was overpowering now, but they’d get used to it eventually.

  It was slow going, with Cassini and Daena peering over the bow on either side to watch for underwater obstacles as they rowed down what must once have been a street, past the blackened and twisted ribs of buildings. The city on Lamorra had been destroyed; Eridan had been burned as well, before it collapsed. There were no traces of inhabitants left in the flooded houses – furniture, possessions, anything moveable would have been plundered by the Thetian armies.

  He’d read the climactic passages of Carausius’s History over and over again, until he had it committed to memory, and the words spilled into his head as he walked.

  The legions approached to within nine miles of the city and there rested, for it was a clear night and the priests were making observance to the star-gods. Our numbers had been much reduced by the crossing of the mountains, such that in some centuries of the Fifteenth Legion barely half of those who had set out with us remained, but our forces were hardened and ready for battle, and we had intelligence that their garrison had been reduced to a token force for what they believed was the final conquest of Thetia.

  He wondered how many people must have lived here, in the city’s glory days. It was easily three times the size of Vespera – Selerian Alastre,
back then – in those last years of false summer under Palatine II, but much of that space was taken up by greenhouses, from the look of it, and that patch of open water ahead must have been a square of some kind. Well, not exactly a square, because there were few straight lines in this city, but the Tuonetar equivalent. If only the Republican authors had been a little more curious about their northern allies . . .

  We attacked in the hour before midnight in two columns, with the Emperor himself at the head of one, and Marshal Tanais at the head of the other. The generosity of our northern allies had given us ample time to outfit our men with white cloaks and masks, and in these we advanced undetected to within a mile of the perimeter defences. The destruction of these was the task of the fire-mages under Temezzar, and as soon as the cry arose from the walls, the flamewood arrows having been ignited, the attack began.

  ‘To starboard,’ Cassini said sharply. ‘Broken building beneath.’

  The boat slowed still further, manoeuvring delicately round the obstruction as Cassini and Daena called out directions and warnings. Inside the half-shell of a shattered dome to their left, Odeinath saw the water bubbling, its surface a froth of white foam with steam rising into it. He dipped his hand into the water, found it hardly colder than a Thetian sea.

  This exploit, and the brave sacrifice of the Third Century of the Eighth Legion holding off Tuonetar reinforcements until the shock elements of the Ninth reached the walls, allowed our armies access to the City, and it was at this point that the Hierarch’s plan – why did he always talk about himself in the third person? – was set in motion, and the springs that had made the Tuonetar’s existence possible became the means of their downfall. For water was everywhere in the city, and the source of much of their power. The Exile mages in Marshal Tanais’ division struck first . . .

  They were clear in open water now, rowing fast across the open space and then into another street on the far side. The water was slowly becoming shallower, it was only another hundred yards or so to the point where the sea ended and the streets were dry. Ice-free in the lower reaches, no doubt due to the heat, but they’d have a time of it further up.

  With the warm-water vents unleashed and elemental creations causing havoc in the streets, the resistance at the outer perimeter was easily crushed, and the army entered the city. Our allies ran ahead, fierce fighters but undisciplined and eager for glory and plunder, while the legions advanced in proper order, cutting down the foe as they went. They showed no mercy in particular to those they called Watchers, instruments of the Tuonetar’s dread tyranny, and it was indeed these men who put up the most spirited defence, for they knew their lives would never be spared.

  ‘You should be first,’ Daena said, as they reached the end of the water and nudged the boat into a secure place between two ribs of a building, its bow grinding on the stones of the drowned streets. ‘You’re the reason we’re here, after all.’

  Odeinath picked his way down the boat and paused for a moment, looking out and up at the vast ruin field ahead of him, and his spirits lifted for a moment.

  However determined they were to sell their lives dearly, the Watchers were unable to halt our advance despite behaving more like assassins than warriors. The people of the City seemed more afraid of them than of us, and attempted to block our way with kitchen implements and staves, but to no avail, and within an hour we had fought our way to the line of the great inner domes. Our allies had ensured that they were already open, and so the legions of Thetia finally poured through into the heart of the Tuonetar tyranny, and the fate of Aran Cthun was sealed.

  In tropical surf he might have been tempted to leap dramatically out of the boat, but here he was more careful, climbing over the gunwale and into warm ankle-deep water, then up onto dry land, the streets of Eridan ahead of him. He saw Granius wave in acknowledgement and follow suit in the other boat, in the next street to starboard.

  He was in Eridan.

  It was here that we fought the last, and bitterest, battle of the war, as the tyrants threw at us their praetorian troops, the legendary Crimson Guards. It was an act of desperation, for the city had already fallen, and even as the column led by the Emperor faced fierce resistance, that led by Marshal Tanais to the right had already broken through into the inner palace. There was no order, or line of battle, only a confused melee, but it was here that the bloodiest, and darkest, deed of the battle occurred. For as the Emperor and his guardsmen fought at the gate of the palace on a heap of corpses, an enemy soldier who had pretended death reached up and struck the Emperor down from behind.

  Ahead of him reared the greatest of the domes, what must have been the heart of Eridan. Domed only on top, with galleries running around the sides – he could still see the framework, warped by the heat, and the gutted interior. He pointed over it as Granius nodded, and picked his way gradually uphill past blackened, windowless houses and mansions – had they been houses and mansions? He truly had no idea.

  But far from demoralising the army, this heinous act only spurred them on to berserk rage and fury which even the Crimson Guards were unable to resist, and from this point on no authority in heaven or the deep could have held them back from a righteous vengeance against the foes who had destroyed their homes and waged bitter and merciless war against them for thirty years. And in the space of the second hour from our entering the city, the tyranny of the Tuonetar was finally broken, the tyrants themselves and all their minions put to the sword, and the war came to an end.

  Odeinath pressed on through the streets, all the time walking upwards, careful not to lose his footing in the morass of ice and ruins or to fall into one of the gaping crevasses that criss-crossed the ruins entirely at random. It was a long haul, several hundred feet up the cliffs, and more than once he took a path only to find it ended in an impassable gap or a pile of broken buildings.

  In the end, though, he worked his way up to what had once been the heart of Eridan, perched almost exactly where the collapse into the caverns had come, and out into an open space around what must once have been the heart of the Tuonetar Realm. It had been covered by a ring dome once, that he could see.

  Somewhere in this space, two and a half centuries ago, Aetius IV of Thetia, Aetius the Great, had fallen to an unknown Tuonetar soldier. Odd, to think that Odeinath was one of the first Thetians to set foot here in all these centuries, that the ground he trod might last have been walked by Hierarch Carausius or Marshal Tanais.

  And within that plaza, across the broken fortress wall and through the half-ruined remains of a labyrinth of corridors, he came into a circular building which must once have been sublimely beautiful with its arches and its polished black pillars, and a skylight over the centre whose bones still stood, and realised he stood in the building that had once housed the Tuonetar Senate.

  They stopped, all of them looking around, and Odeinath felt a thrill deep into his bones at the sheer antiquity of this place, the amount of history now lost which must have passed here. The heart of a dead civilization, orators and statesmen whose very existence had been erased from history. And elsewhere in Eridan, in places whose significance was lost forever, poets and artists and musicians had worked in happier times, before the Realm had fallen to tyranny and then to Thetia.

  It had been the tyrants, leaders of what they claimed was a popular revolution, who wrought this destruction, sparking the Great War and then driving tens of thousands of their own citizens and allies to side with the Thetians. Those same allies who had guided Aetius’s army through the mountains for the final siege, and who had been settled on Ralentis when the rest of the north was destroyed. Not what they had ever wanted, but . . .

  ‘Captain! Captain!’

  Odeinath looked round, annoyed that anyone had dared to interrupt his reverie. He thought he’d managed to train Cassini to notice when he didn’t want to be disturbed, but clearly that had been a vain hope.

  Cassini was standing opposite the entrance, where perhaps a speaker’s chair had once be
en. Where something stood that had very definitely not been left by the Tuonetar.

  A compass rose, surrounded by a wreath, and below it, a plaque with an inscription, almost obscured by icicles.

  An inscription in Thetian. Odeinath wasn’t the first, then, but it was the compass rose that transfixed him.

  ‘Tilao, clear the ice off!’ he ordered.

  The big Southern Archipelagan moved in and delivered the ice a few sharp, strategically placed cracks with the point of a dagger, and it fell off and shattered on the ground below. Tilao wiped the plaque clean with one glove, and stepped aside. He didn’t read Thetian.

  Odeinath, and the rest of them, did.

  TO THE MEMORY OF THE SENATE AND PEOPLE OF ERIDAN

  BROTHERS IN DESOLATION

  ALLIES IN NEED

  WE, SURVIVORS OF THE THETIAN REPUBLIC, SALUTE YOU

  AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR AID

  WE WILL REMEMBER YOU

  They found the cavern three days later.

  A shrill whistle sounded, echoing across the ruined, three short blasts and then three more, the signal from Tilao and his group that they’d found something worthy of immediate attention. The whistle disturbed a colony of seabirds perching on the cliffs, who rose into the sky in a vast, shrilling cloud.

  Odeinath and Cassini abandoned their survey of the subterranean levels underneath the Senate and slowly picked their way over to the city’s north-west corner, where the cliffs remained intact. The going was easier on level ground; it still took the best part of half an hour to get up to the top in the mornings.

  The buildings up here were the least damaged, some close to intact, though never enough for the contents to have been preserved, to give Odeinath a window into what the city had been like in life. But the building complex Tilao and his people had found was different, and he saw it at once.

  Driftwood, canvas, pieces of other buildings had turned a small dome complex in the extreme northwestern corner into a shelter against the weather. Whatever had been left inside had been stripped bare when the occupants left, but there were still traces of the alterations they’d made, a deep pit in the ice where they must have lit a fire underneath an improvised chimney, a few rags caught on sharp protrusions in the original building.