Shadow and Light

by Peter Sartucci

  His restless feet ate the miles. Broken irrigation ditches slashed weed-grown fields dotted by collapsed homesteads overgrown with thistles. Near sunset two young toughs with bad teeth and stained knives tried to jump him from a ruin leaning over the road’s verge. He threw Darkness in their faces and fled as one cursed and the other prayed. Neither pursued him.

  The experience both heartened and frightened him. I’m powerful, but if they’d had bows, I’d have been dead before I knew they were there. He moved more cautiously after that, noticing the furtive movements of rabbits and jackals in the weeds. The distant blowing of rams-horns as shepherd talked to shepherd brought him no comfort, for they might be passing word of him as easily as the two outlaws. The local law would be thin protection for a half breed.

  Nightfall brought him no place to rest. The broken road crested another rise and he saw Belluno off to the northeast. The decayed city formed a dark block against the writhen soil. Its few whole towers were lit by only moonlight and a handful of torches. Rising Calm and setting Madness vied to light his way. The road followed a dry canal toward the dim city.

  Kirin stopped at a broken bridge, rested on a fragment of balustrade, and thought. His Shadow gave him vision even when the moons hid behind clouds. This coolness was much better than the day’s heat. And robbers would be easier to avoid in the dark. He resolved to travel by night from now on, and as he plodded he let his Shadow ooze out to completely hide him.

  Hours later, Calm neared the western horizon as he approached a blocky ruined temple standing near the track. A long day and night of effort had left him and his water bottle dry. A green wetness rode the breeze from the broken building, barely detectable beneath the heavy overlay of sheep. He drew his Shadow close until it coated him like paint and picked his way through rubble. A woven thorn-fence blocked the gaping entry and more such screens plugged every window. He circled the ruin as a black man-shape ghosting past bits of fallen stone and broken tile.

  In back two arthritic cypress trees bracketed a spring. A jackal raised his wet muzzle in sudden consternation, blinked wide eyes and fled. A fan of luxuriant rushes trailed from an overflowing pool like a bedraggled skirt. Kirin found the ruin’s back door blocked like the front, but scented the ashes of a recent fire within. Sure enough, the shepherd’s snores rode the wind. He probably caught up on much-needed sleep while his flock slept safe behind stone and thorns.

  Kirin filled his water bag, drank deeply, filled it again, and continued around the old temple. The dome had fallen in and the point of the single minaret’s spire had snapped off, but the small room at the top of the main shaft looked intact. He had to climb cracked walls and then wiggle through the minaret’s lowest unblocked window, afraid he would wake a sleeping sheep in the big room below. Inside he ascended a spiral of dusty stairs past nests filled with sleeping swallows. At the top the prayer-caller’s airy chamber welcomed him. Dried mud obscured the tile floor; starlight shone down through the hollow stump of the spire. He leaned on one of the eight waist-high windowsills to gaze across the ruined land.

  Much nearer now, the ragged top of the Scarp cut across the north. The few taller peaks in the ridge were separated by sharp canyons, one clearly broader than the others. The wrecked road he followed lead straight toward it. East, the barren hills wrinkled up like a carelessly-dropped blanket. West, the great central valley of Silbar opened to the stars, fenced by the high spine of the Bright Mountains eighty miles away. Their feet lay hidden below the curve of the World, but their white heads shone in the fading moonlight. The peak of God’s Footstool loomed above the rest, impossibly tall and pale in the night. Soon dawn would touch that point with fire and the shepherd would wake.

  Kirin wrapped himself in his one thin blanket and curled up on the hard floor, his pack for a pillow and memory for comfort in the chill. At home he lived with the endless background of spells and workings drawing on the city Node, a traffic operating too deep below the city for his Shadow to touch, but close enough to feel. He still hadn’t grown used to its absence even after six days and nights. But the toll of unfamiliar exertion left him tired enough to sleep through dawn and noon both, to awake as the Two Suns kissed the Bright Mountains.

  A cautious look over the windowsill showed the rubble-strewn temple floor empty of sheep, though the thorn barrier had been carefully closed. Some surreptitious scanning showed sheep flecking a field a mile or two to the west. Satisfied, he packed and descended, ate a few dates and drank at the spring, added his contribution to the shepherd’s privy, and resumed his walk with a lighter heart.

  This wasteland isn’t so hard, he told himself confidently.

  * * *

  A day later, as he struggled down the brutal north face of the Scarp, he took the thought back. He’d begun this descent after nightfall and now dawn already bathed him in a new day’s heat.

  The old road had disappeared completely a few miles from the edge, dissolved into wandering animal trails. He had picked one that seemed to run more-or-less straight toward a low part of the ragged edge, lost it in a maze of gullies, found it again, and followed it into this canyon. The walls grew higher as the floor descended in a tight series of water-carved steps, each larger than the last. He had slid more than his own height down the previous drop. Now he could see the broken ground below, tantalizingly close, but still better than three times his height below the little ledge on which he stood. He leaned out as far as he dared but could not see what lay below his perch.

  I can’t get back up. He stared back the way he had come. There’s nothing to hold onto. I have to go down.

  But what if there were sharp rocks? What if he broke an ankle or even his leg? He would die of thirst in this wilderness. He shuddered for a moment, then swallowed his fear. There’s no choice.

  He lay on his belly and swung his legs out over the emptiness. Jackknifing in the middle let him put the toes of his buskins against the rock and test for a foothold. He found one, eased his weight onto it, and then gripped the crumbling rim as he did a one-legged squat with his face and belly pressed into the stone and his other leg feeling for the next foothold. For a frightening moment his toes found nothing, then caught on a bit of protruding stone. He eased down onto it, fingers barely clinging to the ledge overhead, and put all his weight on it.

  The rock snapped off. His weight hung on his fingertips. His hands held, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Then the ledge above his head broke off.

  He slid feet first down the face of the cliff, crumbling sandstone banging his knees and ribs and scraping his chin and fingers bloody, until his feet slammed against another ledge with a shock that made his teeth rattle. There he clung to the cliff with fingernails and willpower. After his heart calmed he dared look down to see how much farther he had to go.

  A foot below his heels, a dimpled fan of sand and gravel spread out.

  He stepped down onto it and leaned back against the rock for a moment to get his breath. The detritus under his buskins merged with a corrugated plain sloping gently down towards a marsh some hundred-odd yards away. The broken road he had been following emerged from the detritus-fan and dived into the marsh, parting the reeds for a hundred yards before they overwhelmed it. Beyond he could see more mud flats emerging from Purification Lake as it shrank in the summer heat. Clouds of flies buzzed, birds flitted, and a lizard peered at him from atop a waist-high rock, then flicked away. The rising sun-warmed stench of the mud flats warred with the burgeoning life-smell of the marsh and the harsh scent of warming rock.

  He pushed off the wall, climbed atop the lizard’s rock and looked about. West, the land and the Scarp both descended until the lake lapped at the cliff itself. East, the valley floor sloped gradually up towards the wrinkled desert hills. Those were banded and streaked with pastel ochre, gray, and brown. The marshes didn’t reach the hills, so he hoped he could pass between them.

  He jumped down off the rock and headed east along the feet of the cliffs.

  Two ho
urs later, the suns finally high enough to no longer be in his eyes, he found a canyon opening in the face of the Scarp. A lightly-trodden but unmistakable horse trail issued out of its dry depth. He could see it switchbacking up the canyon wall toward the top.

  I could have walked down here? I should have looked farther. Salim take me for a fool!

  The horse trail branched into more trails headed north, northwest to the lake, and east into the hills. A rude rock shelter and a rough corral had been built outside the mouth of the canyon, neither looking recently used. He puzzled for a while over the sigil carved on a rock in the shelter wall, it looked familiar, but he couldn’t remember why. He shrugged and followed his nose behind the shelter. There a small spring filled a stone basin ringed by lush grasses and fading flowers. He refilled his water bag, ate a bit, and curled up to sleep in the most shaded corner of the shelter until night. Memories of Maia tormented his sleep.

  Only after he woke at sunset did he remember where he had seen the carved sigil. Duke Darnaud’s men had worn it at Pieter’s trial. This must be his hunting camp.

  Kirin stared about in fear, then remembered that the canyon would have echoed the iron-shod steps of any approaching horses. He quickly gathered his gear, covered himself in a cloud of Shadow, and strode purposefully onto the trail that headed north.

  Many hours later he toiled his way onto a long low treeless plateau that lay above Purification Lake and below the hills. Antelope ran from him, and an owl swooped low to look at him, then veered away to the northeast. Distantly he heard a lion’s roar near the lake and shivered in dread. His Shadow thickened about him.

  He found a paved road in surprisingly good condition despite grass sprouting from every crevice. The moons and his night-vision lit the vast emptiness, so unpeopled and frightening that it made him crave the comfort of walls. He began to run, eating the miles with a loping stride as the road gradually curved east toward a huge gap in the hills. When he got to a junction where another road ran up arrow-straight out of the big lake, he stopped, weary and panting, next to a tumbledown shrine. A head-tall pedestal held the broken stump of a statue. After a little rest he climbed onto it to look east.

  He could see the road descending into an oval basin much smaller than the great valley that held Purification Lake. A second lake filled the south part of this vale and glinted in the moonlight. He remembered that Dona Zella had called it Ibis Lake. It stretched north into the heart of the oval vale, where its steely waters met blocky black shapes.

  Ruined Silbariki.

  His heart thumped as he gazed on his goal. The ancient city looked bigger than Aretzo, the stumps of walls and broken towers spread for miles across Ibis Lake’s northern shore. Lines of shining water extended deep into the wreckage like the flooded roads of Aretzo’s Sump. They converged on a clump of ruins in the center, where a soaring dome ringed by eight broken minarets still rose above the city.

  He stared at the dome’s curve with his magesight and caught the flicker of spells. Somebody had warded the place. They have to be keeping Prince Terrell there. To be within sight of his goal restored his flagging confidence and he hunted for a way to get there.

  A deep gash in the landscape ran from Ibis Lake to Purification Lake, draining smaller lake into the bigger. He saw no bridge across the artificial canyon, no trees growing out of it, only a yawning trench cutting off northern travel. North of it the imposing height of a sheer red-colored cliff rose to tower over the gap that joined the two valleys. He could barely see the distant thread of another road at the cliff’s foot, arrowing toward the drowned city. It looked like the obvious approach, but that trench lay between him and it.

  The first light of approaching dawn began to lighten the night. He needed a place to shelter, and soon. A smaller ruin down the road looked promising. The lion’s roar had frightened him down to his bones, he wanted stone walls around him before he lay down to sleep.

  The ruin had been a walled monastery. The gates were long gone, and a side road led into a partly-paved courtyard. The temple squatted in the center in a ruined splendor of carved stone. Directly in front of the broad steps leading to the building’s doorless entry lay an oval pool of shivering water. A spring still poured into it from a stone spout carved like an angel’s face. Two elderly orange trees and a hoary fig spread their branches above a riot of weeds and garden gone wild.

  It looked like heaven.

  Kirin circled to the upper edge of the pool, with the deepest water and a stone rim still whole and clear. A nightjar trilled in the fig tree. He slipped off his pack, stripped to his hose, and slid down into the pool. He gloried in the coolness and squeezed mud beneath his toes as he immersed himself completely in blessed, cool, clean water.

  He managed to retain the sense not to tempt fate for long, but scrubbed himself and his clothes swiftly, refilled his water bottle from the spring, and then entered the temple.

  Behind the grand façade lay a collapsed wilderness of stone and the stump of the eastern minaret. Its stair had mostly fallen but with effort he made his way up the narrow fragments of steps remaining to reach a second-level room. Bats had coated the floor with guano, but the next set of stairs was whole, so he continued to the third level. A bit of roof survived next to an arched window looking north and down onto the front courtyard. Another window on the east side faced the soon-to-rise suns. The high perimeter wall lay right below it, eroded but not broken. Nothing could get at him here unless it could climb or fly.

  Satisfied, he made a nest in the sheltered corner, spread his clothes to dry, and slept.

  But not for long. Less than two hours past dawn he awakened to howls that sounded like laughter. A pack of hyenas had arrived and taken over the courtyard. They woke him when they found his scent at the water’s edge, raised their hunting chorus, and followed his trail.

  CHAPTER 41: TERRELL

  Terrell’s eighth day dawned with aches and boredom. Fenman perfunctorily brought him water and left again. The hours began to crawl. Then a heavy tread announced the arrival of someone new. Terrell’s hopes rose as he saw the familiar form.

  “Darnaud?”

  Terrell choked back the temptation to say anything more as his cousin strode across the cracked floor. He’s with Fenman, which likely means Ap Marn and Chisaad own him too.

  The Duke of Guglione stopped next to Terrell and stared down at his face. He wore half armor—back-and-breastplate on his torso plus vambraces on his arms—and had sword and main-gauche at his belt. For a long moment he stood there, silently looking Terrell up and down while Fenman waited a pace behind and to his right. The aide looked nervous, even fearful. Darnaud looked gloating.

  That’s not good, Terrell thought. He’s trying to make me feel trapped and helpless. Which I am, but I don’t have to let him know that I know it. He stared back, studying Darnaud the same way. He noticed a recent dent in the Duke’s breastplate. The man’s left vambrace had also been freshly scored, and blood stained his trousers where they bloused above his boots.

  “I see you’ve been fighting, My Lord Duke,” Terrell observed in as close to a detached voice as he could muster.

  “Killing darkies,” Darnaud answered, and smirked. “Three of your damned ‘Twenty’ got my blade in their guts. Not much challenge in it, but a man has to take his fun where he can.” He drew his sword.

  For a moment Terrell thought he was about to be run through. Mother Umana, accept my soul! Then Darnaud laid the flat of the blade’s tip against Terrell’s inner thigh. Fenman drew a sharp breath.

  “No darkie should have blond hair like yours,” Darnaud remarked casually, sliding the sword toward Terrell’s crotch. The sharp edge shaved off some of the fine blond hairs growing between his legs. “It’s not right.”

  Terrell felt the blood drain from his face. He’d never thought he might have to endure death by torture. He locked his jaws against speech or screams and gave himself to prayer. Father Haroun, lend me your courage!

  Darnaud
continued, “You won’t be using your manhood again, but you’ve had enough practice to know what you’ll be missing without it. I think I’ll start by cutting one of your balls off, then--”

  “Your Grace!” Fenman interrupted, his face aghast. “Damage done to him will affect the golem! My Lord Ap Marn’s orders are quite specific. He is not to be harmed until it is time!”

  Darnaud’s blade stopped with the sharp edge touching Terrell’s stones, which were trying to withdraw into his body. For a long moment the cold steel paused there while Terrell stared at Darnaud and the Duke stared back. “Time. Faugh.”

  When he withdrew the sword Terrell almost fainted in relief. Darnaud sheathed it without taking his eyes off Terrell’s. “I’ll have to wait a bit then. Just as well. I need to go kill your pet darkie with the magic sword. He’ll be a real challenge. I’ll have to backstab him, so he can’t use that damned thing against me. Maybe send three men against him first to distract him, then come up behind. I know! I’ll cut off his head and bring it back here for you to see before I get to work on you.” Darnaud grinned and leaned over him to add, softly, “That’ll make your despair sweeter.”

  “Pen will kill you, you triple-damned traitor!” Too late, Terrell clamped his jaws against further words. Idiot! He berated himself. You let him know he’s gotten to you!

  Darnaud smiled cruelly. “Well then, maybe I’ll poison him first. Then while he’s dying I’ll run a pike up his ass and bring him back here whole. His carcass can stand watch while I take my time with you.”

  He sauntered away, throwing back over his shoulder as he left the room; “Think about that while you wait for me, darkie.”

  Darnaud chuckled as he exited through the western ward spell, with Fenman scurrying along behind him.