Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (20 page)

“What would happen?” Laodice asked, her face tight and
angry. “If this was done inside a god’s territory?”

Giliead let his breath out, exchanging a narrow look
with Ilias. Ilias could tell he didn’t think the traders had known about this
either, and that was a relief. Giliead said, “It would leave.” He started back
along the path toward the city.

If a god left its territory, the city and the villages
around it would lose the protection from curselings, lose the services of the
Chosen Vessel to defend against wizards; they would have to disperse.

Ilias lengthened his steps to catch up to Giliead. “Would
a god really leave for something like this?” he asked, low-voiced. The only
mention in the Journals of a god leaving that he could remember had been when
the people of the town had killed its Chosen Vessel.

Giliead threw a look back at the traders. He snorted. “I
have no idea. And I’d rather not find out.”

They reached the open gates, the others following. On
the far side the road opened into a surprisingly large plaza, and the buildings
under the looming cliffs were elaborate, with narrow pillared porticos and
entablatures carved with rosettes. All the decoration was painted with touches
of red, green, purple, yellow. As the traders fanned out in a loose circle,
watching the doorways cautiously, Ilias stared; he hadn’t been expecting
anything so ornate. Then he realized these buildings were only façades, carved
and built on the cliff faces, with the doorways leading back into the rock.

“The place was honeycombed with caves already,”
Laodice explained, seeing his surprise. “That’s why they chose it. They camped
in them when they first came here to look for the gold.”

Ilias shook his head, not sure he had heard right. “They
what?”

Giliead lost his air of abstraction, turning to stare
incredulously at Laodice. “They camped in caves in godless territory? In a
gorge full of guls and curselings?”

“That’s what I said,” Macchus put in, keeping his gaze
on those empty dark doorways. “Bunch of crazy people.”

“It was hardly wise,” Tolyi admitted. “But they were
able to mine the gold, and they came to no harm. At least, so they said.”

Ilias glanced back at her, hearing the skepticism in
her voice. “You think they lost people before this, and just never told anyone?”

Tolyi shrugged. “They knew to use the guls as a method
of execution. And it seems unlikely that of all the people they brought up
here, no one fell victim to them, or anything else, before this happened.” She
lifted a brow at Laodice. “The traders take many precautions, but they lose
people.”

Laodice nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. “A few a
year. If we lost more than that, we’d drop the route and look for trade
somewhere else.” She added, “We’d argued about this before, Tolyi and I, but
now I’m beginning to think she’s right; there must have been some warning of
this that the Taerae ignored.”

Oh, lovely,
Ilias thought, exasperated. Giliead flung his arms in the air, a silent gesture
of frustration at the general stupidity of some people, and crossed the plaza toward
the largest façade.

Three steps led up to a narrow portico with columns
and a broad square doorway. The painted carving was all very fine, with
stylized figures of miners carrying lumps of rock, and the letters for “Taerae”
repeated over and over again. Ilias’ mouth twisted, though he didn’t comment
aloud. He was beginning to form an even more cynical picture of the Taerae. He
vaguely remembered learning the name of the family who had first settled Cineth
from one of the poet Bythia’s stories, but he couldn’t recall it now. Whoever
they had been, they had paid more attention to placing their new city well
within a god’s territory than to carving their name over every public building.

Thias, one of the younger traders, took down a bowl
lamp hanging from the portico and began working with tinder and flint to light
it. Ilias stepped to another lamp, standing on tip-toe to look into it. There
was still olive oil – good olive oil, by the smell – in the bottom of the red
glazed pot. He went to the dark doorway where Giliead stood.

The daylight only reached far enough to show them the
red, black, and white swirls of a mosaic floor and the red walls of the foyer. Past
that the blackness was like a solid wall. With no windows, no atrium, nothing
to let in light and air, he couldn’t imagine living in it. Ilias could see
where the portico had been built onto the front of the cave, where stuccoed
blocks and mortar joined raw stone. The air inside was cool, carrying a hint of
incense, rotted food, and more olive oil.   

Thias and Macchus brought the lamps, Giliead took one,
and they moved forward into the dark house.

Past the foyer, the rooms were a warren of caves, the
walls smoothed with clay, with paint and carving. The pools of lamplight gave
them glimpses of fine furniture, carved silverwood and cedar, sheepskin rugs,
fine pottery lamps and water jars, a delicate alabaster wineset on a low table
inlaid with polished stones. At first it was all sterile, and Ilias had no
sense of this having been someone’s home. Then they moved from the public rooms
to the private, and the lamp caught a loom still warped for a half-completed
green and blue blanket. A child’s beaded rag doll lay on a cushion, an unrolled
scroll on a side-table, someone’s sandals with a broken lace at the foot of a
couch. A cup of water and a half-eaten seedcake, flies buzzing around it in the
stillness. Ilias felt his skin creep. Giliead stopped, looking down at a
discarded shirt draped over a stool. It was small enough to belong to a girl or
a young boy, and the sleeves were stained with dirt. He asked, “How many houses
did you go into?”

“I’m not sure,” Laodice said from somewhere behind
them. She sounded a little ill; Ilias could sympathize. “We went up and down
the streets, going into houses at random. It was all like this. We searched
again when we were driving the animals out. We called and called, and no one
answered.” She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself. Ilias looked back
and saw Tolyi squeeze Laodice’s shoulder, her face set and still.

Giliead nodded, biting his lip. “Did you go to the
mine?”

“Five of us went down into it,” Macchus answered. “We
thought the bodies might be there. But there was nothing.”

“That...must not have been easy,” Ilias said. The
traders had done things he wasn’t sure most Syprians would have been able to
do. He was fairly certain most of the population of Cineth would have sensibly
fled in terror at the sight of the empty city, and not searched it diligently
for survivors.

“It’s not very deep. They got most of the gold out of
the river.” Macchus shrugged uncomfortably. “We had to look; we knew them.”

“Show us where you searched,” Giliead said.

* * *

The sky was turning dark by the time they finished
walking the streets. It was all as Macchus and the others had said: Empty
houses, undisturbed except for what dust and wind and small scavengers had
done. At the far end of the town, they had gone down the short distance into
the mine, and to the river shore where the gold-panning had been done.  

They came back to the plaza finally and Giliead and
Ilias stood together, the others moving off a little to give them privacy to
talk. Macchus had lit a couple of torches and put them into the holders on the
portico of the Taerae house, but it only seemed to emphasize the deep shadows. Giliead
let out a long frustrated breath. “There’s nothing here. Not a hint of a curse.
It’s as clean of curses as the god’s cave at home.”

Ilias rubbed his face to conceal his expression, and
said, low-voiced, “It’s supposed to be easy. You’re supposed to show up, follow
the curses, kill the wizard, and go home. You’re not supposed to have to
unravel mysteries that will have poets guessing for generations to come.”

Giliead was still deep in speculation. “If a wizard
had come and cursed them all to follow him, he would have had to take them down
the pass into the Uplands or walked straight into the territory of the god of
Sareth, and we would have known of it. And one wizard couldn’t take upwards of
two hundred people. Some of them would have escaped, or the traders would have
found bodies littering the road.”

“Maybe it was a very powerful wizard. Or two of them
working in concert.” Though that was very rare. Wizards usually preferred to
kill each other or turn each other into slaves rather than work together. “But
that doesn’t explain where they went. Unless they didn’t take the road, and
they’re still in these mountains somewhere. There’s a lot of country to get
lost in.”

“I know, but... That doesn’t feel right.” Giliead was
staring at the open gates. “Whatever happened, it happened here.”

It probably should have turned his blood cold, but
Ilias just felt relief. Giliead might not be able to see any curses here, but
he was sensing something. He kept quiet until Giliead scratched his head, frowning
absently, the moment of abstraction over. Ilias asked, “So what do you want to
do?”

“Stay here tonight,” Giliead answered immediately. “Look
for shades.”

* * *

They camped in the center of the plaza, collecting
wood from the stores near the empty houses to build a large fire. The night was
clear, so they wouldn’t need the tents the traders had brought, and Ilias found
it better to have an unobstructed view of the dark doorways. They had talked
over the idea of closing the gates for the night, but Giliead had pointed out, “Anything
that’s likely to come at us isn’t going to be stopped by a gate, locked or not.”

Everyone had nodded glumly, and Laodice had added, “I
suppose if we have to run for our lives, it would only slow us down.”

While Nias and Liad, the other two younger traders,
were making a dinner of graincakes and dried travel meat, Giliead and Ilias
went to look for shades.

The best place to look was usually in abandoned houses
and out of the way corners, places where the shades might linger without being
noticed. If they were noticed, someone would always try to find their remains
to do the rites, or send for a Chosen Vessel to lay them. With the town being
nothing but abandoned houses, it didn’t narrow the search.

They decided to start with the most obvious spot, and
headed for the rocky flats near the mine and the river, where the Taerae had
buried their crematory urns.

The moon was full enough that they didn’t need a
torch, and the firelight would interfere with Giliead’s ability to see curse
traces anyway. It was odd, walking through the dark empty town. Ilias was used
to dark fields, dark forests, dark beaches, and the limitless sea, but the
sensation of walking past houses and wells and stables, without a hint of
candlelight or a banked fire under a bread oven, without a murmur of human or
animal sound, made his flesh creep in a completely new way. It made him want to
talk, though he knew it was foolish. “If there aren’t shades-- never mind.” The
people of this town were dead; he shouldn’t imagine they were here to rescue
anyone.

Giliead’s eyes were on the dark windows and doorways. “There
are guls here.”

“Of course there are,” Ilias said under his breath,
feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

Giliead stopped him with a hand on his shoulder,
pointing toward the upper story of a house. “There. See it? It’s making itself
look like Irissa.”

“Motherless bastard.” Sighting along Giliead’s arm,
Ilias studied the darkness cloaking the house’s eaves. He couldn’t even tell a
window from a shadow at this distance, much less see a figure imitating their
older sister. “I can’t see it, but that’s just as well, really.”

Giliead moved on. “They’re all through here now. They
must have crept in at dusk.”

Ilias shook his head, trying to distract himself from
the fact that the empty buildings all around them were full of shapeshifting
curseling guls. “At least the traders know you’re really a Chosen Vessel now.”

“What?” Giliead stopped, staring down at him.

“Oh, they believed it, they just didn’t--” Ilias
wished he hadn’t brought it up. “Tolyi thought we were young, and I think the
others did too.”

He couldn’t see Giliead’s expression, but he sounded
incredulous. “We are young.”

“Too young,” Ilias clarified. “Young enough to be kept
at home.”

“Oh, fine.” Giliead rubbed his forehead, annoyed, and
started walking again. “That helps.”

The street opened up into the flats, and soon they
were facing the burial ground. In the dark it was just an empty rocky field,
distinguished from waste ground by the lack of scrub. Moving out over it, Ilias’
boots kept knocking against plates and cups set out with offerings to the dead,
long ago rotted away. Giliead stood for a moment near the center of the space,
then abruptly veered away toward the hill where the ground dropped away toward
the distant rush of the river.

Ilias followed more carefully, wrinkling his nose at
the odor as broken crockery and glass grated under his boots. They were drawing
near the town’s midden.

The piles of garbage were just low mounds in the dark,
and he could hear the buzz of nightflies. Giliead stopped abruptly and Ilias
froze in step with him. After a long moment his eyes found movement among the
piles of trash.