Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (82 page)

Inside, we took supper, and when we were done, we sat near the fire with a sense of waiting, knowing a conversation would begin, since we were here and had completed the first stage of our journey. “I suppose,” Kirith Kirin said finally, “it’s about time we talked.”

Karsten laughed and Imral laced his fingers through her hair. I had never seen them so free with each other, Karsten leaning against his leg, taking his touch for granted. “We can’t put it off any longer,” Karsten said. “Which way do we ride from here?”

The question was meant for me, and I understood this; but I also understood that Kirith Kirin would answer it, and I preferred that he do so. He looked round at them all. “We ride north. To Montajhena.”

“You mean to Cundruen,” Karsten said, “on the way to Drii.”

“I mean to Montajhena,” Kirith Kirin answered.

Imral was watching me, perplexed. I understood his confusion, since it was relief for Drii that concerned him most. “Why?”

“One of the Verm armies is already heading there,” Kirith Kirin answered.

“Away from Drii?”

“Yes.”

Disbelief in Imral’s gray eyes. Then a slow smile, as he looked at me. Karsten took his hand. Athryn poked the fire. “He sent one army down the passes, but what about the other?”

“It’s marching west, across the Fenax.”

“Already?”

“Yes. He’s wasted no time. He’s bringing all the forces he has left.”

“Which way will he ride?”

“He’s already ridden to Montajhena,” Kirith Kirin said. “There’s a place he needs there.”

No one asked him how he knew so much. No one asked me why I kept silent. A moment passed, and Karsten said, “He’ll be there long before we are.” Here she looked at me, and here at last I did speak.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t want to get there first?”

“No. I don’t want to hurry at all.”

They looked at each other in some mild surprise, which is about as far toward astonishment as the twice-named go. They had expected something more difficult, I guess, some journey or strategy that required more planning. But now we were done, and Kirith Kirin said good-night to them all, serenely, and took me to bed. We stood together in our room as the others talked quietly. I could make out no words, only the comforting sound of their voices. I had learned a new magic, called knowing no more than was necessary to do what I had to do. We took off our clothes and lay down together. That night we simply rested, content with one another, sorry at the thought that tomorrow we would leave Chalianthrothe, where we had found a new happiness.

Meanwhile, beyond that glittering house, out in the larger world, an army was indeed already moving south through Cundruen Pass, ahead of it Drudaen himself, moving on an ithikan wind down the passes. Drii, the last of all the Aeryn cities to survive the war unscathed, herself besieged these twenty years, found herself suddenly free.

1

Rather than head directly north, across Rars and Reydon, we chose a more westerly route that would carry us toward Trenelarth Forest and the place where stood what was left of the city of Kursk. We rode at a fair pace, though without hurry. At night, as before, we camped in abandoned farmhouses or in any place that would afford us some measure of shelter. The cold winds of mid-winter fell on us, sharp and bitter, off the backs of the mountains.

I had never seen such desolation with my own eyes. Hardly a soul stirred on the landscape, and the road lay neglected and nearly deserted. Where villages had once stood there remained only blackened patches of ground, as if a hand of fire had swept them off the surface of the earth. Where a field had once grown corn or wheat, there was hardly enough brown grass to cover the ground, and above our heads stretched that strange colorless sky. Every day we rode forward in perpetual twilight through a country so bleak no one could recognize it, even among the twice-named. The sight sobered all of us, but for them it was not new. For me, it was.

Near Kursk there were more people, but anyone in the countryside who saw us riding fled from us. Some horsemen and wagoneers were on the road near the city, but they passed us sullenly, without acknowledgement, most of them having suffered the change in appearance under shadow, becoming Vermish, and we kept our heads wrapped and sought no company from anyone we met.

We entered the sad wreck of Kursk near nightfall, seeking shelter in the streets where the houses had been abandoned. We found an old roundhouse with the first floor largely intact and we settled there for the night. I climbed to what was left of the upper story and studied the city till it was too dark to see. A bit of the defensive wall had survived near where we rested, and a part of a tower, streets winding this way and that along the course where the rest of the fortifications used to run. It would not be true to say I tried to imagine what had happened here, because I already understood much about that. But there, in that present moment, I marveled at so much destruction.

We passed a peaceful night, but the next morning found the city full of Verm soldiers. We packed our bags and saddled our horses. Walking the horses through the streets without making any attempt to conceal ourselves, we gathered more and more of the Verm behind us, till, when we finally reached the bridge over the Deluna, we found it held by more of the Verm, soldiers lining both shores of the river, maybe three hundred in all. Archers fitted arrows into their bows and stretched them taut. From the body of these soldiers emerged three white-cloaked figures, one of whom I recognized as the witch from Novris, the woman named Cormes. I dismounted from Nixva and began to walk toward them. The soldiers had stopped where they were, though that was not their intention, and they were surprised at themselves. The archers dropped their bows at the same moment, and stared down at them stupidly, the bows on the ground and their arms limp, and the Verm soldiers shuddered and looked at each other and at me, and slumped to the ground, most of them, or off their horses, but they did not die. This must have surprised them, when they stopped to think about it.

The white-cloaked ones had been approaching through the moment that the Verm began to sag to the ground. A lot of noise filled my head, the commotion of their art. I might have heard the words but instead I watched them. I stopped in front of them and looked from one to the other to the next. Two men and the woman named Cormes. I stripped them clean and bare, all of their minds, till there was nothing left in them that could ever trouble anybody again. I let Cormes know who I was before she, too, fell into sleep. I let them live, I did not seek to loose the tiiryander and set their souls free of their bodies, I did not eat their souls and take their strength into myself.

The Verm watched all of this. When the three magicians were sleeping on the ground, with their riderless horses tossing their heads, I released the Verm and some of them rose up on their knees as Kirith Kirin led our party to where I stood. I mounted Nixva again and turned toward the Verm. “Let us pass,” Kirith Kirin said, “and no one will be harmed.” So we rode through the soldiers, some of whom made way for us, across the bridge into Trenelarth, with the Verm watching.

2

We followed the road north, somewhat sheltered from the winter wind by the forest, though we felt it when we crossed into Vyddn, cold wings spreading over us from the mountains, the promise of snow. We rode through a countryside as devastated as all those we had left behind. No one troubled us on the journey, and in fact we saw hardly a soul.

So desolate was the landscape that we had trouble finding food and had to ration our small store of dried meats, cumbre and dried fruit. We took shelter where we could find it, but in Vyddn there was hardly a building standing, and in places the road itself had been obliterated, the earth scorched and dark. We slept in groves of trees where there was dense undergrowth to break the wind; we slept in whatever walls or half-walls remained standing of a house or a barn or an inn or even a shrine. We slept in the open coiled round each other for warmth. Winter wind howled onto us, and the brackish cloud thickened and soon let fall a light, dingy snow. The touch of the stuff repelled me.

I had begun to dream I was still sleeping in Senecaur, I was lying on the rock listening to the waves when Drudaen entered. He came in mumbling those words of his, and I was irritated by the noise, but when he stood over me and took down his hood I was shocked, he had grown even older, his skin stretched thin over his skull, blue veins showing through white tissue, his eyes bloodshot; he came to me on the slab of stone and tried to rub the water in my skin but the touch repulsed me and I woke. The image of him returned when I was awake, while I was riding, the face of the sad old man, exhausted, his body nearly translucent. The darkness of his eyes, the slash of his mouth.

It was so easy now to read his thought along that part of his wave through time. What he needed, more than anything, was a way to enter Arthen again. His life was ebbing. Shadow could not sustain him, and yet he could not end it.

I remembered the real visit from Drudaen when I was sleeping in Aerfax. He had been in the room a long time before I became aware of him. He was still handsome then, not ancient like the old man of my dream. He watered my body, which was soothing. He had a sad look. He wanted me to wake up and join him. If I did not wake up, he was lost. He had come here to kill me and now he knew he could not. The thought had fled.

That was the second time I moved magic from the third circle. The first was when I destroyed Senecaur and protected myself from the blast.

3

After some days we came out of the high country into Vyddn, and rode through the hills into the foothills, following what was left of the road to the gates of Montajhena nestled beneath Thrath Mountain.

We found an army waiting on the road, many thousands of Verm encamped with slaves tending their cook fires. The Deluna tumbled over rocks in its course and gave out a perpetual roar. We made camp above the Verm on a hilltop, making no real effort to hide from them. We could see down into their camp, and beyond to the ruined stones that were once the gates to this city. Beyond, the city’s wreckage lay shrouded in mist that glowed softly in the dusk, and I stared at it with the first stirring of astonishment. The hills rise up sharp around the lower city, and the upper city climbs the flank of Thrath, into a hollow formed by vast ridges of the mountain. I stared at it till the last light, sang the evening song under my breath.

Verm patrols passed us twice but the soldiers saw nothing of us. Not even our campfire gave us away. This time there was no debate about the need for it; Athryn and Karsten found rocks for a circle and Imral and Sylvis gathered wood. We slept peacefully, the six of us, with thousands of soldiers camped around us, the hills lit with the glow from the ruins of the city, a pervasive milky light. I could feel what was coming. Drudaen lay very close by, at first, and then, sometime in the night, he went up to one of the Towers and vanished. He was very afraid, he had been afraid of this journey for a long time, but he knew he would have to take it. When I woke in the morning I could no longer feel him anywhere near.

In the morning the air was clear and we could see the whole sweep of the landscape, the world rising suddenly upward, the mountain soaring out of nowhere, embracing the city on its sheer flanks. Even the wreckage of Montajhena was beautiful, stones of all colors worked in many ways, streets and lanes visible, the bases of the defensive towers and the wall, and beyond, a high, graceful arch in the side of the mountain, where the road winds through to Cundruen Pass. Beyond, farther up on the mountainside, the bases of the two towers rose up from other wreckage, Yrunvurst and Goerast, places I had seen before in what I had called the eye of the mind. The sheer, vertical landscape enthralled me, and I felt the same as in that first moment when I saw Chalianthrothe, when I realized what beautiful places there are in the world.

The others were watching it too. They gazed down mournfully at the road, the gates, the high terraces of the city, the winding streets. A cloud of grief enfolded them, not visible in any motion they made nor apparent in any word they spoke. Reflected in their eyes I could see the beauty of the city that had been destroyed.

We saddled our horses and rode them down the hillsides to face the main body of the Verm army. We were no longer hiding.

The Verm had grown canny and made no move while we approached. Maybe they had heard of the incident at the Kursk bridge and knew what might happen. We rode up to them and through them, quietly, without any fanfare, across their outermost camps, exercise yards, makeshift markets, and the Verm stood and stared at us and never lifted a hand, even the ones who thought about doing so. We rode through thousands of them and they watched, and their officers watched, and one or two of Drudaen’s apprentices watched, as we found the road and the gates, threading through the broken stone. The others proceeded along the thoroughfare in the lower city, and when I caught up with them, after watching the Verm a long time, we began to climb again, along the broad flank of the mountain, through the cedars and pines, along the streets of the high city where the bones of old buildings lay bleached clean by years of weather. The Verm remained in their camps.