City of Dragons: Volume Three of the Rain Wilds Chronicles

by Hobb, Robin

  But those memories were old ones. Now, from what the keepers told her, there was no sandy sloping riverbank, only a hungry drop-off to deep water at the edge of the city. If she attempted flight and accidentally landed in the river, chances were that it would tumble her in its rough current and she would never emerge again. She looked all around herself. Only the river, the wind, and the rain spoke. She was alone. No witnesses to mock a failure.

  She opened her wings wide and shook them; they made a sound like wet canvas sails slapping in a breeze. She paused only for an instant to wonder how she knew that, and then dismissed it as a useless tidbit of information. Not all memories were worth saving, and yet she had them. She moved her wings slowly, stretching them out, trying each claw-tipped vane, then lifting them to feel the wind against them. The right wing was still smaller than the left. Weaker, too. How could a dragon fly when one wing was less able than the other?

  Compensate. Build the muscle. Pretend that it was an injury taken in battle or the hunt rather than a flaw since her emergence from her cocoon.

  She opened and shut her wings a dozen times, and then, wings wide, beat them as strongly as she could without battering them against the ground. She wished there were a cliff to launch from, or at least an open hilltop. This sloping meadow with its tall wet grass would have to do. She opened her wings wide, discerned the direction of the wind, and then began a clumsy downhill gallop.

  This was no way for a dragon to learn to fly! If she had hatched healthy and whole, her first flight would have been made then, while her body was light and lean and her wings outsized for her. Instead, she lumbered like a runaway cow, her body heavy and muscled for walking, not flight, her wings scarcely developed to lift her bulk. When the wind gusted, she sprang into the air and beat her wings hard. She did not have enough altitude. The tip of her left wing caught in the tall wet grass and spun her to one side. Frantically, she tried to correct and instead slammed to the earth. She landed on her feet, jolted and frustrated.

  And angry.

  She turned and trudged up the hillside again. She would try again. And again. Until dawn grayed the sky and it was time to slink back to her stable. She had no choice.

  Somewhere, Alise thought, there is blue sky. And a warm breeze. She pulled her worn cloak more snugly around her as she watched Heeby turn away from her and charge down the wide street before leaping into the air. Her wide scarlet wings seemed to battle the morning rain as they lifted her. The dragon was becoming more graceful, Alise decided. More competent at getting into the air. And she seemed to grow every day and, with that growth, become more difficult to bestride. She was going to have to convince Rapskal that his dragon needed a harness of some sort. Or she would soon have to give up riding on Heeby to reach Kelsingra.

  A sweep of wind pushed her, bringing a stronger shower of rain with it. Rain, rain, rain. Sometimes summer and dry warm days seemed like something she had imagined. Well, standing here and staring after the dwindling dragon would neither warm her nor get her day’s work accomplished. She turned her back on the river and looked up at her city.

  She had expected to feel the lift of heart that the sight of it usually brought her. Most days when Heeby brought her here and she looked up at Kelsingra spread out before her, she felt a surge of anticipation for the day’s work. Today, she always told herself. Today might be the day that she made some key discovery, unearthed some find that gave her fresh perspective on the ancient Elderlings. But today, anticipation failed her. She looked up the wide avenue before her, and then lifted her eyes higher, to see the full panorama of the city. Today, instead of lingering on the standing buildings, her eyes seemed to snag on the cracked domes and fallen walls. It was vast, this ancient place. And the task she had taken on and pursued in such an orderly fashion was a hopeless one. She could not complete it even in a dozen years. And she did not have a dozen years.

  Even now, Tarman and Captain Leftrin were drawing closer to Cassarick. Once he reported there, once word of their discovery was noised from the Rain Wilds to Bingtown, the stampede would begin. Treasure hunters and younger sons, the rich seeking to get richer and the poor hoping for a chance at fortune would all follow him back. There would be no stopping that flood, and from the moment they set foot on the shore, the city would begin to disappear. A wave of despair swept over her as she imagined them, picks and crowbars on their shoulders, barrels and crates to hold their troves stacked on the shores. When they came, the old city would come to life again. The push to plunder would bring the money to rebuild the docks and bring ships and trade. A mockery of life would precede its destruction.

  She took a deep breath and sighed it out. She couldn’t save the city. All she could do was try to document it as it had been when they discovered it.

  Suddenly she missed Leftrin with a terrible hollowness that was emptier than hunger. He had been gone for more than a month, and there was no knowing when he would return. It was not that he could change the outcome of what must happen but that he had been here with her for a time, witnessed the amazing stillness of the place, walked with her where no other feet had trod since the time of the Elderlings. His presence had made it all more real; since he had left the things she had seen and found and documented felt less substantial. Unconfirmed by his interest.

  Alise started to turn left, to follow a narrower road that would let her resume her careful mapping and exploration in her usual rote way. Then she halted. No. If she kept on the way she was going, she’d never even get to enter the grander buildings before they were plundered. So a change of plan today. It would not be a day of documenting and drawing and note taking. Today she would simply explore, walking wherever she felt drawn.

  She turned back to the broad avenue that led straight up from the river toward the distant mountains. The wind was at her back, and her eyes squinted against the falling rain. She looked from side to side as she walked, pausing at each divergence of the road. There was so much here to explore and catalog and record. She reached the top of a gentle hill and after a moment of consideration turned right.

  Along this wide street the buildings were grander by far than the humble homes and small stores she had been visiting closer to the waterfront. The black stone that made up so much of these buildings shone with the wet of the rain and glittered where threads of silver ran through it. Many of the lintels and columns of the structures were decorated. Here were pillars carved with twining vines and animals peering from behind them. There, an entry was shielded with stone that had been artfully carved into the shape of a trellis and vine.

  On the next structure, there was a portico under which she took refuge from the increasing violence of the downpour. The columns were carved in the shape of acrobats supporting one another, feet on shoulders and then hands upholding the ceiling. Tall doors of silvery and splintering wood barred her from entering. She pushed gently at one, wondering if some ancient latch still held it closed. Her hand sank through the disintegrating wood. Startled, she pulled her hand back and then stooped to peer through the fist-sized hole. She could see an antechamber and then another set of doors. She took hold of the door handle and tugged on it, only to have it pull partially free. Appalled at the damage she was doing, she let go, only to have the heavy brass knob tear free and fall at her feet with a clang. Oh, well done, Alise, she scolded herself sourly.

  And then, with the wind and rain howling past, she stooped down to pull handful after handful of wood away until she had an opening big enough to wriggle through. On the other side, she stood up and looked all around. She could no longer hear the patter of the rain, and the wind was hushed and distant. Light fell in soft-edged rectangles on the floor from the high windows. A carpet disintegrated under her feet as she walked into the middle of the room. She looked up: the ceiling was painted with a swarm of dragons. Some carried beribboned baskets in their claws, and in the baskets and dangling from them were brightly garbed figures.

  A second set of tall wooden doors beckoned her
. She crossed the room to them and found them much better preserved than the exterior doors. She clasped a gleaming brass handle and turned it, pushing against the door. It swung almost easily, with only a tiny squeal of disuse.

  The revealed chamber had a sloping floor that descended gently to a grand stage in the center of a theater. It was an island surrounded by a space of empty floor, then by tiered benches and finally chairs bearing the dusty ghosts of cushions. When she lifted her eyes, she saw that curtained boxes looked grandly down on the stage. Light came from an overhead dome of thick glass. Decades of dust dimmed the light that shone in from the overcast day. It could not disperse the lurking shadows that stood frozen at the outermost edges of the room. The waiting figures, half glimpsed, seemed to have frozen at her sudden intrusion.

  Alise took a careful breath and lifted her hand to wipe raindrops from her lashes. She knew they would vanish. It was a trick of the black stone, she was coming to understand. Sometimes it whispered, sometimes it sang loudly, and sometimes, when she came around a corner quickly or happened to brush her hand against a wall, she would have a glimpse of people and horses and carts, of all the life that the city still remembered. She rubbed her eyes thoroughly, dropped her hands, and looked around again.

  They still stared at her from the shadows, every head turned toward her. The bright motley they wore proclaimed their profession: they were tumblers and acrobats, rope-climbers and jugglers, performers such as she might have seen in a troupe at a Summer Fest or performing solo for tossed coins at the edge of the Great Market in Bingtown. They were impossibly still, and even after she had fully realized that they were statues, she still ventured a wavering “Hello?”

  Her voice carried through the hall and bounced back to her. On the far side of the room, the curtains that draped a theater box suddenly gave way and fell with a whoosh to the floor in a cascade of thread, fluff, and dust. She jumped, startled, and then stood, clutching her own hands and watching the myriad motes of dust stir and dance in the thin sunlight. “Just statues,” she insisted aloud. “That’s all.”

  She forced herself to turn and walk the aisle that circled the seating to reach the first of the figures.

  She had thought that up close they would be less unsettling. They weren’t. Each was exquisitely carved and painted. A juggler clad in blue and green had paused, two balls cupped in one hand and three in another, his head cocked quizzically, his copper-green eyes squinting in the beginning of a smile. Two steps beyond him, a tumbler had halted, one hand held out to his partner, chin tucked in to his chest as he stared curiously out at the empty seats. His partner was dressed in yellow-and-white stripes to match his motley, and her hair was an untidy tumble of black curls. Her lips were curved in a mischievous smile. Beyond the couple, a stilt walker had dismounted from his sticks and leaned them against his shoulder to regard the empty hall. He wore a bird-beak mask, and an elegant headdress mimicked a bird’s topknot of feathers.

  On and on she walked; no two figures were alike. Here was a slender boy stepping up on an offered knee preparatory to mounting his partner’s shoulders. Here was a man with a flute set to his lips and three small carved black dogs at his feet, all on their hind legs and ready to dance to his tune. The next was a girl with her face and arms painted white, in a gown decorated with gilt to mimic golden thread. Gilded, too, was her crown of feathers and rooster heads, and in her hands a scepter that looked more like a feather duster. Beyond her were twin girls, as lithely muscled as ferrets and clad only in brief bright skirts and a twist of cloth that scarcely covered their breasts. The skin of their arms and bellies and legs was painted with extravagant curlicues of blue and red and gold. Alise paused before them, wondering if the designs had been tattooed on or if they had been painted afresh for each performance. She had no doubt that each carving represented a very real and individual member of an entertainment troupe that had once performed in this very theater.

  Completing her slow circuit of the theater, she stood once more looking down on the stage. How did one document this? Or explain it? Why bother? A year from now, or two, every one of the statues would be gone, separated from their company and carted off to Bingtown to be sold to the highest bidder. She shook her head but could not clear it of the dismal thought. “I’m sorry,” she told them softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  As she turned to leave she noticed a gleam of something on the floor. She scuffed her rag-wrapped boot across it, baring a silver strip as wide as her hand. She knelt down, pulling off her worn glove, and used her hand to brush the dust from it. But at the touch of her hand, the silvery strip sprang to life. Light raced away from her touch in all directions, ribbons of it emanating from where she stood, outlining the aisles and racing up the walls to frame the distant overhead window in a complicated knot of silvery gleaming light.

  “Jidzin,” she said quietly, almost calmly. “I’ve seen this before, the metal that lights at a touch. There was a lot of it in Trehaug, once.” But she doubted it had been like this. This was completely intact and functional. She remained stooped, touching the strip and looking up in wonder at how the silver light woke the ancient hall to gaiety. Almost she expected the music that would announce the pause before the beginning of a performance.

  Every hair stood up on her body as a ghostly music began to play. It was thin and distant but unmistakably cheery. A horn tootled merrily, and some string instrument pursued it, note for note. And then the statues began to move. Heads nodded in time to the music, the feather duster became a baton, the twin girls moved in unison, a step forward, a step back. Alise gave a sob of terror as they came to life. She tried to get to her feet and instead sat down flat. “No,” she whispered in an agony of fear.

  But the statues came no closer. The music played and they moved, nodding time, waving hands gently, lips smiling but eyes unseeing. As she watched, the music faltered, the statues’ gestures became more hesitant and sporadic, and then, as the music broke and wavered unevenly, the statues shuddered to a halt. The music ceased and the silvery shining of the jidzin slowly failed. In moments, the only light in the great hall came once more from the distant overhead glass dome, and the statues fell to stillness.

  Alise sat on the floor, rocking herself gently. “I saw it. It was real,” she assured herself. And knew as she spoke the words that she was the last person who would ever see this particular Elderling magic.

  Outside, the rain had ceased. The wind was cold, but it was pushing the clouds clear of the sun, and the additional light was very welcome. Alise pulled her damp cloak closer, but the wind found every tear in it and fingered its way in to touch her with chill hands. She hurried along, then turned down a side street to escape the direct push of the wind. She startled when a raven gave a sudden disapproving caw and lifted from the eaves of a building to sweep away in flight. Here, if she walked close to the front of the buildings, she was sheltered and the weak sunlight even held a trace of warmth. She pulled her gloves back on as she walked. When was the last time she had felt warm all the way through? The answer came quickly: the night before Leftrin had left to return to Cassarick. She wondered where he was on the river and how the storms were affecting his passage. He had assured her that the trip downriver would be much swifter than the one upriver had been, and that the shallows that had slowed their passage and confounded them for days would no longer exist.

  “All we’ll have to do is follow the strongest current downstream; there’s no trick to it. And if we have doubts, well, I’ll just let Tarman have his head, and he’ll find the way for us. Trust me. And if you cannot trust me, trust my ship! He has protected generation after generation of my family from this river.”

  And she did trust, both her captain and his liveship. But she wished Leftrin was here. She longed for his return as much as she dreaded it, for when he came back, the days of this untouched city would be numbered. A pang of guilt struck her. There was work to be done, a vast amount of work. The short winter day was passing swiftly, and she
had to be back and waiting for the dragon before sunset.

  She walked quickly past two buildings that had fallen prey to time or earthquake or perhaps both. The façade of one had collapsed, leaving a heap of rubble that spilled out into the street, revealing its deserted interior. As she clambered over it, she marked how the building next to it leaned on the first. Cracks ran up through the black stone foundation. She hastened past them on the far side of the street.

  Shivering now, and hungry, Alise decided to find shelter in which to eat her noon meal. She had strips of dried smoked meat in a packet and a small bottle of water. Simple food, but her hunger made her mouth water at the thought of it. What wouldn’t she give, though, for a cup of steaming tea, spiced with cinnamon and sweetened with honey. And a few of those greasy sausage rolls that the street vendors sold in Bingtown! Tubes of flaky pastry, oily and brown edged, stuffed full of spiced sausage and onion and sage.

  Don’t think about such things. Don’t think about hot rich food, or new warm woolen stockings, or her heavy winter cloak with the fox fur collar and hood, folded uselessly on a shelf in Hest’s house. How she longed to feel its welcome weight on her shoulders.

  At the end of the street, an immense plaza, paved all in white stone, glittered in the sun dazzling her eyes. It seemed to have been created for giants. A huge dry fountain held a statue of a green dragon clawing his way into the sky, his gleaming wings half opened. Was it oversized, or could the creatures truly attain that size? She gaped at it, imagining a horse sliding down that throat in one gulp.

  Beyond the fountain a wide set of steps led up to an immense building. Gigantic white figures in bas-relief graced the outside of the black walls. A woman was plowing a field behind a team of oxen. She wore a crown of flowers, and her skillfully portrayed diaphanous robes appeared to billow behind her in the wind. Her slender feet were bare. The image made Alise smile as she imagined what the woman would look like at the end of a single furrow, let alone a whole plowed field. Someone had indulged a very artistic imagination in that image!