Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (76 page)

Into the field the Sisters rode, richly dressed, on fine horses; but they failed to see me, at first. It frightened me, that I could come so close to them and yet be invisible. When had I got to be made of such thin stuff?

But when I joined the song, Commyna heard me.

She stood bolt upright in the middle of the song and searched the field. I was there in front of her and she could not see. But she heard.

So did Vella and Vissyn, when she signed them. All this, and they never faltered a single note in the song; nor did I. I stood in front of them and sang, and they could hardly find me. I stood so close to death. I wept and stood in front of them and sang. Finally they found me, they watched me, and they were weeping too.

That dream ended too soon. But they saw me. They knew I was alive.

6

One day, maybe even the same one, I dreamed I stood on Ellebren High Place, and the Rock of Ellebren burned beneath my hand. Out of the Rock I called fire, and light, and many colors burned over Arthen. I had heard someone calling for me. A voice too painful to recognize. So I stood on the High Place, as much of me as I could muster, and the Rock answered me, flashed fire and burned. Once I wakened the Tower, I remembered more and more. Over the Eyestone I sat, warming my hands as if at a fire. Once I had sat there with a man, fair and clean; once I had sat there with Kirith Kirin…

That dream, once begun, never ended.

7

Voices. Or was there a torch first?

One is at the end of a long wait. The dream of a summer day. A hand has been rattling the door but it could be the wind, or rocks settling. One has been sleeping for a long time and many noises have become familiar. The careful dream of dawn on a seacoast. The fragile coloring of dawn under shadow, the ghostly glimmering of water. And a hand, rattling the cage door, the chamber door, the prison cell battered by the ocean.

The realization came to me, along with a feeling of leaden weight. This was a real noise. Someone was rattling the door. And me, I was hearing the noise. I was in the body again, and I was hearing.

A torch. The glimmering of shadow beneath the door. Haunted voices. Suddenly the ache of the body rose and warmth, real warmth, rushed into the spaces between the molecules and cells. Someone was battering the door. I am at the end of a long wait.

Torchlight slanting. The heavy door eased inward. I counted the breaths and footsteps. “Jessex,” said the voice, and I knew it. Torchlight on my face. “Oh god,” he said, and set the torch in a bracket over the stone where I lay.

He fell across me. The welcome weight of him sighed against my ribs. When I had seen him last he had been nearly dead. For all that time I had hardly dared endure the thought of him. Now here he was, and his hands caressed my face. I knew him by his whole being. The sleep ended. He kissed me, and I was awake.

1

We faced each other in torchlight. Even after such a long time, his face seemed a familiar and comfortable object.

Presently he asked, “Can you move? Can you walk?”

“I don’t know. How long have I been here?”

He shook his head, looking to the doorway. He said, still in the soft voice, “I brought some friends.”

“Who?”

Smiling, but signaling me to speak more quietly. “Not so loud. You’re rather heavily guarded.”

“Am I?”

He pointed upward. I had no idea how far upward he meant.

He had brought leggings and a tunic, boots in my size and good cotton underclothing. Everything felt strange on my body, and it was only when I started dressing that I realized I had been naked on the stone, except for the Laeredon ring, the bracelet he had given me, and the earring I had put in Ellebren, before riding away to fight for Laeredon Tower. My body hardly responded to commands; he helped me to save time. He kept checking the door. Presently a slim shadow slipped through the arch and I recognized Karsten by the highlights of her hair.

Kirith Kirin said, “He’s awake. He’s fine.”

She froze at his words. I could not see her face but I could sense her agitation. Rushing to the stone where I had lain, she touched me as if I were fine glass.

We were soon in tears. I began to understand, from the desperation of her reaction, that we had been apart a very long time. But I declined to ask again. They finished dressing me, Karsten lacing my shin-high boots when it became clear my numbed fingers could not do the trick.

I’d no memory of the corridor outside, nor of any passage to this room at all. Outside the cell lay a guardroom full of cobwebs, stairs leading upward. We bypassed these, however, and slipped down a narrow passageway which led to a small armory. When I could not move quickly enough, Kirith Kirin carried me.

A concealed doorway sprang open and we entered another narrow corridor. Karsten concealed the entrance and we moved quickly through this tunnel and into others. More distinctly sounded rushing waves against rocks over our heads.

Up a spiral stairway we climbed, Karsten ahead of us. Soon I could see daylight; it hurt my eyes and I closed them. But I smelled fresh air and heard Imral’s voice. I said his name when I saw him. He lay the flat of his hand on my face.

A boat awaited us, slim and sleek, with a sail of transparent viis. Even I could tell we had emerged into the full of Aeryn winter. Cold wind bit through the layers of blanket; the sky lowered like slate. The motion of the boat disoriented me some; I had never ridden in a boat before, and I remember the thought striking me as funny. Wind filled the sail and Karsten guided us with the tiller. The west wind carried us away from the Spur, into mist.

When I looked back, what I saw shocked me. The Tower was gone, the rock spur sheered off. A pile of stones where Aerfax had stood, her only remains the sea gates that had opened, that opened now, in my memory of that long ago.

Over us, tattered and brown, the stuff of shadow. I could already feel him, Drudaen, everywhere.

Kirith Kirin told me to lie down, I was too wobbly to be standing in the boat, so I did. The smell of fish permeated even the planks of the deck, and the sharp sting of salt spray stung my nose as waves crashed against the prow. When I got tired of lying down, I huddled near the tiller wrapped in a plain brown cloak. The walk to the boat had exhausted me and I sagged to the deck, watching the swing of the sail. The others were moving grimly, silently.

We passed a dark, rocky island on the top of which stood old fortifications. That was Kmur Island, where the treasury was, or had been, and the ruins were Dernhang, a mortal palace, never meant to last forever. But the Queen had been living at Dernhang when we headed south. Now the place had fallen down, or been burned, maybe, judging from the look of it. How long ago? Suddenly I was afraid to ask.

The rocking of the boat and my body’s confusion combined to make me sick to my stomach, and I lay along the deck, half soaked with spray. By then I started to feel feverish on top of the sickness and would have thrown up but I had eaten nothing, so I heaved instead, and felt perfectly miserable.

We were a long time in the water, all day and night. They took turns sitting with me, afraid to leave me alone. We hardly talked. Fever came on me full blown, to be expected after so long a trance as had befallen me. I felt hot and sick through the night, drowsing, with the sound of their voices for company. At some point we had stopped sailing and were lying adrift.

Near dawn we began to sail again, and I saw the shape of a city emerging out of the mists on the shore.

We slipped into harbor through the commercial traffic and fishing boats. Karsten obtained us moorage from the harbormaster, as if we were local traffic, her papers in order. We were sailing into Ivyssa. All the coasts were guarded, Kirith Kirin whispered, but in Ivyssa the whole city moves on water, and one more boat would hardly be noticed.

We left the boat docked on one of the inland canals and never saw it again. We dressed in rags from the bottom of the boat, stuff I had been lying on, and we began to move through narrow streets and along dark canals and waterways. I was hot with fever and followed only part of what was happening, but the city was brown, the light thin, hardly a spot of green growing anywhere, and the people we passed seemed misshapen or discolored or sick or worse. Streets twisted, rose and fell, we crossed a canal and vanished into side streets. People were looking at us because we did not look like any of the rest of them. I put one foot in front of another, the best I could do.

Near an open-air market we waited, bits of smelly rag wrapped round our heads. Imral and Kirith Kirin had gone away. Karsten wandered with me among the wretched shoppers who crowded the place, people who had been sick a long time, who had rarely had enough to eat, people who were wounded, hurt, hardly anyone like us, whole of body. People who looked like Verm. Karsten bought a ladle of hot broth, thin stuff floating in it, and I drank that gratefully from her cup, hoping my stomach would not rebel. The merchant, who had two noses, or a nose that had divided down the middle, was glad to see a real coin, he said, and thanked her.

From the market I could see, in the distance, two high Towers soaring toward the dark undersides of clouds, one about half the height of the other. Lights flickered on one of the summits. Karsten saw me watching, drew me away. Thoem and Karomast, High Places that had stood over the Old City center for millennia. But someone had torn down Karomast, or tried.

Kirith Kirin and Imral returned with horses bought or stolen, sad wrecks of animals, wanting proper food and decent treatment. We mounted the poor animals without discussion and set off again through the streets. Overhead, now and then, I glimpsed the two slender Towers. I made no effort to reach to them in any way, but when I was looking at them, I could see the whole city as if it were beneath me, as though I were on the summit; Ivyssa had been a thriving city but now people lived only at her old center, and boats moved there as they used to, but at the fringes of the city the waterways were clogged, the bridges collapsed, the houses fallen into the rivers or canals. A city fallen to ruin at the edges. A city of a few thousand.

But even when I was out of sight of the Towers, what I saw with my own eyes told the same story. Most of Old Ivyssa and nearly all the new city was wrecked and empty. Moving through the streets were armed parties of Verm and other creatures like them, hard to recognize as human. We had wrapped our heads as best we could and sat slumped on those sorry horses, but once or twice someone in the column gave us a second look as we passed.

We reached a part of the city where hardly a soul stirred except the Verm soldiers and us, and came to a place where scarcely anyone was on the streets or waterways. We were traveling through the part of the city I had seen through the towers, a wilderness of ruins where no one lived any more. We were walking through a battlefield after the battle, an eerie wind moaning among the collapsed walls. The stones of the streets were scorched black in places as if parts of the city had burned, as if there had really been fighting here.

We found a place to sleep in one of the wrecked houses, away from the trafficked streets, and I judged by the direct heading we steered that the place had been chosen in advance. Almost as soon as we got inside I collapsed, shaking with sickness, and Kirith Kirin built a fire while Imral went after water that was fit to drink. We had to boil it, but when it was boiled and poured through a cloth it was fairly clear, and Kirith Kirin dropped a pouch into a cup of the water and gave it to me. “Unufru, for the fever.”

I knew that was the right thing. He sat with me while the tea steeped. I drank it and leaned against him. He was real, his body was there, and his face, when I looked at him, seemed the same. Maybe a year or two older. But we had been apart longer than that.

I shivered until I got the tea down, my body worked with the unufru and the fever started to ease. The others were quietly getting food together, watching me, watching Kirith Kirin, who had yet to stir from my side since we got indoors.

“I’ve been away a long time,” I said.

Imral laughed. “Away. That’s one way to put it.”

“We thought you were dead,” Karsten said. “For years.”

Kirith Kirin was not saying anything. He had an arm loosely around me and drew it tight.

“Tell me what happened.”

“It was a long time ago.” Imral shook his head.

“Oh, I remember it well enough,” Karsten said.