Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (83 page)

We climbed across the causeway to the base of Yrunvurst.

I had been brooding over Drudaen the whole morning, thoughts all unformed like a seething cloud, knowing him close, then knowing him gone. I had been thinking what he must be like now, as old as Athryn had been, or worse, and longing to return to Arthen, to the embrace of those trees. He must want that more than anything, since only that could save his life. He had won the whole world, except for that one small patch.

Five years ago he had come to the room where I could hear the sea, he had visited me there, before he pulled Aerfax down. He had tried to bring himself to kill me but he could not do it. Why not? The thought must have maddened him ever since. He must have understood, after a while, what had really happened in the room, and what I had become.

One sensed his disquiet, his weariness. The shadow he had spread over the world weighed on him, something he must maintain, something he must manage, without letup. He ruled the whole world that same way, without daring to take his eyes off it; and as time went by, in order to sustain his life, he had to eat more and more of the life around him. By now he would want to return to Arthen more than anything. As Athryn had. To be truly young again. To try to begin again. But shadow was part of his nature, now. He could never stop making it. Even if Kirith Kirin had been willing to allow him into the Woodland again.

In the base of Yrunvurst remained one room intact, invisible to most eyes, though I could see it, and my enemy could see it, and had known it was here for years. Today he finally got the courage to go into it, a room built by his father’s enemy, Jurel Durassa, and he had traveled somewhere from that room. I could almost see him, the bitter wind blowing, clouds gathering, a white figure riding through the ruined city, needing no light to see. We had grown close, he and I; and I could almost smell his sadness, his heaviness. He had come to this room searching for a way into Arthen, and he had found it, and he had gone there, I could feel the change everywhere.

I dismounted from Nixva and stood at the head of a broken stair leading down the mountainside at the base of Yrunvurst. We had been sitting there for a while, and no one had said anything. I stood near Kirith Kirin’s boot, looking up at the rest of him, the Keikin blowing and stepping. “He’s gone already,” Kirith Kirin said.

“Yes. I think so.”

“Then we’re too late?”

I shook my head. “Everything is fine.” I did watch him for a long time. “Where will you go now?”

“To Drii,” he answered. “While we can still get through the pass. Then to Inniscaudra.” He touched my hand in the gentlest way, and that was how we parted.

I descended the stairs that their eyes could not see, entering the room beyond. I vanished to their sight.

1

Drudaen had ruled the world for a hundred years only to find that the world dwindled every day while he was king of it. He had kept himself alive for a very long time through a sort of art one hardly cares to contemplate. He had come to the end of his rope. Maybe he had already known this when he visited me beneath Senecaur, maybe he already knew he had failed. Exhausted from a war that lasted so long, that destroyed the very prize he had sought, he finally understood that he would die unless he found a way to return to the Woodland.

As for the way to get there, he had known the secret of that since long before I was born. In the base of Yrunvurst is a room and from that room one can travel without moving, not to any place one wishes but only to one place, to Seumren-over-Cunuduerum, the city on the banks of the river. Jurel Durassa made the room, a way to get to Seumren to take Falamar down. A way to make certain Falamar could never hold Seumren against him. Kentha had found the room and told Drudaen about it, she had used it to travel to the River City, to study the priests’ writings, the akana. Drudaen had been afraid to use the room before, had used it only a few times while he was camped in Vyddn, trying to learn the Praeven language for himself. But now that I was awake again, now that he knew I was coming, he had no choice but to go to Seumren again, and try to stand on the High Place.

In the fountain at the base of Seumren I had met Kirith Kirin. Remembering that day, a long time ago, I entered the room beneath Yrunvurst and stepped through the room onto the High Place at the top of Seumren, where the wind was blowing and clouds spread out, the same brown stuff that had covered the rest of the world for so long.

My enemy stood here. He had begun to spread shadow over the forest as soon as he arrived, not because he wanted to destroy the trees but because he had no choice, he could not stop it. But Arthen could not tolerate its presence and was already withering around us. Drudaen could feel the dying, and so could I.

He stood near the eastern edge of the tower and I walked toward him. There was no dueling between us, no strife. He turned and watched me. He stood with a slight stoop, wrapping a white cloak around his arms. I remembered him as handsome from the last time I had seen him but he had lived too long, the body had been stretched thin.

“It won’t work, will it? I can’t come back.” He didn’t need for me to tell him the answer. He sighed.

He took a last look around. We strolled along the tower, while light poured down over the tops of the trees. We came to a place where the sun reflected off a curve in the river below, and beneath us we could see the many colors and shapes of that other abandoned city. “You should have seen it when it was alive,” he said.

“I can,” I said.

He frowned. Drawing himself up as straight as he could, he looked me in the eye, where his lust and hunger and avarice and arrogance all suddenly yielded to a softness, a yearning for rest, and he nodded, and I said, “All right.”

Overhead, as I breathed, the sky cleared again, and shadow dissolved and sunlight returned and Drudaen Keerfax watched it all. He felt shadow break apart far across the countryside north and south and he sighed with relief and sagged and shook his head. That much would be enough to kill him. Only one gesture remained. I passed my hand across my mouth and drew out the gem I had swallowed, such a long time ago, the raven impaled on the talon of God, and I handed it to him. “This is yours.”

He nodded and the gem lay in his palm. He blinked at it and the light suddenly grew bright, and she was with him, for an instant, my great-great-grandmother, wrapping something around his arms. This was how Drudaen Keerfax vanished out of the world altogether, and the war was ended.

1

I stood there for a while, after he was gone. I had never known a world without the story of him. Now, in all the worlds I could see, I had no enemy.

In that city on that Tower I stood until sunset. I waited to be certain his presence had done no lasting harm. I waited for a breath of warm wind from the south; I had called it and I knew it would come. Deciding we would have an early spring that year.

I did magic on Seumren, the first in more time than a person should have to think about, and when I was done I went down. I made that place my own, walked its long stair down to the ground, emerged into the fountain court and saw it wrecked, and saw it in my minds eye as it had been in my dream, when the King arrived at the court to walk into the tower, not Kirith Kirin, for he had never reigned here. I was seeing Falamar, my ancestor, who had built this place. The last magician to reach the third circle, the last to die at the moment that he did.

To move beyond the fourth level of magic is to learn to move the force that underlies all the things we see, not the force that shapes a stone, or transforms a stone, but the force that binds a stone to be itself. Jurel had learned this level of magic and had used it to make a peaceful kingdom. His room in Chalianthrothe was a device of the third circle. Falamar had moved third level power, too, the split second before he died because he could not control it.

To move beyond the fourth level of magic is to move beyond the world of things. One rarely comes back from the journey, as I had done.

I needed only know this when I was there, on Seumren, or when I was on Ellebren, or in the room of three circles at Chalianthrothe, or the other magic places; I need not know this all the time. This was the secret the Diamysaar understood but could not teach me, the thing one must learn oneself. How never to know too much.

That night I walked out of Cunuduerum across the bridge that had first drawn me here, so long ago, so much longer ago even than it seemed. Fresh from Kinth’s farm, the smell of my mother’s home-made soap on my hair. I set out walking, meaning to get to Inniscaudra, step by step, the long way.

2

We met on the Illaeryn road near the three hills, when I was within half a day’s walk of Inniscaudra. He was riding alone, with Nixva on a bridle following behind him, and caught me at midmorning, washing out my tunic in a creek. He had found me as surely as an arrow finds the target in the hand of a fine archer, and he was always that.

Any schoolchild can recite the words we would hear when we reached Inniscaudra, the words that are engraved on the stone seals that we placed over those doors when YY closed them this last time.
I will give you a lifetime together, and I mean the lifetime you are due, and you will have your afternoon of happiness, I promise this, and I am YY who makes all of you, so I can do what I say.

I caught up the bridle willingly and jumped onto Nixva’s back, barefoot; Kirith Kirin took off like lightning on the Keikin and we followed. I realized I had left my boots at the creek, but I figured I would come back for them sometime, or they would be there, if anyone else needed them. There would be more boots at Inniscaudra. So I rode barefoot, and Nixva tossed his head when I sat on his back again.

We rode to Immorthraegul, the flank that overlooks Durassa’s Park, and in the clear noon we sat there, and he shared the food he’d brought.

She said Kirith Kirin would be King one more time, for as long as he lived, and after there would be no more King or Queen, but the world would change again.

We had the day ahead of us, now that we had found each other. We had only to cross Durassa’s Park sometime before sundown, and ride up Vath Invaths to that great house that would be our home, or one of our homes, for as long as we lived. As I had learned, that might be a very long time.

Only one of the Jhinuuserret will stay behind, in my house, this one where I stand, until the end of all the worlds that I and all the others have made.

That was the first day he called me by my two names together. We were walking along the shrine path on top of Immorthraegul, and we looked across Illaeryn at the clear sky. “You never did understand what it meant, when the Sisters called you to the field that day, did you? Before we went south. Answer me, Jessex Yron.”

Said with that inflection, I understood.

A mortal magician could not have lived a hundred years. Not even asleep.

S
he took Athryn Ardfalla, and Sylvis Mnemorel followed, by her own choice. She took Mordwen Illythin because it was his time. Ren Vael died and Pel Pelathayn died when Cordyssa was burned, so they have already gone.

She took Evynar Ydhiil, home to Zaeyn at last
.

A day will come when this will be over, and all this joy will turn to sorrow, I suppose. But that day we were together, and happy, and the thing we had fought for was won. No one wanted anything of either of us, except what we wanted of each other. And I could dig my bare toes in the winter grass.

We lost the world we knew when she came. She brought us another.

We walked across the hilltop, passed the shrine, then started downward at the turn of light. We would have time to cross Durassa’s Park without hurry.

This war has come to be known as the Third War of the Sorcerers, following the first between Falamar and Jurel and the second between Kentha and Drudaen. Often enough, though, it is simply called the Long War. Archival records in Ivyssan government buildings that survived indicate that at the beginning of the war the population of Aeryn was close to four million, split nearly equally along the lines of Anynae and Jisraegen, with the Verm counted among the Jisraegen, along with three hundred thousand of the people of Drii, and unknown numbers of Tervan, Svyssn and beings beyond our ken. During the war about a half million people of both races took refuge in Arthen and escaped the main force of the conflict. At no time did shadow fall on Arthen and remain. To feed these folks, crops were planted in the Woodland for the first time in ages, and in certain areas trees were felled to make fields, though nowhere near the duraelaryn. The cultivated land was returned to its forest state at the end of the war. Thus the population inside Arthen never suffered from the dreadful famines that swept the rest of the country, if not at the beginning of the war then certainly by the end of it. At the end of the three generations that the war crossed, the numbers inside Arthen increased to about six hundred thousand, most of the population growth coming from new refugees, this according to counts Kirith Kirin ordered to be taken from time to time.