Servant of the Dragon (31 page)

* * *

Katchin the Miller stumbled on cobblestones as he left Garric and the two women. The bridge's wavering light distorted the joins between stones, and Katchin was half-blind with tears of frustration besides.

What had happened? How
could
little Garric or-Reise, a boy who'd been exposed to Katchin's worth every day of his life, send him away?

Katchin heard the old woman mumbling behind him. Light flared, throwing Katchin's long shadow across the pavement. Suddenly frightened, he glanced over his shoulder. An upward-flaring cone of light surrounded the trio who'd just dismissed him; its blue glare filtered their bodies into figures of smoke. The air buzzed, like a cicada but louder. The note rose steadily.

Katchin started to run. He'd bought new shoes in Valles to be sure he'd be in style. The uppers were red leather; the toes curled like crooked fingers and were finished by little tassels of gold cord.

The soles were as smooth as the uppers, though, and these cobblestones had been polished like glass by ages of use. Katchin slipped and fell, crying out with pain and anger at the world's injustice toward him.

The light surrounding Garric and the others brightened further, but it no longer cast shadows. The cone started to spin. Cobblestones at the edge of the vortex rippled and began lifting from their bed. The sound keened too high to be heard with ears, but Katchin felt his teeth quiver.

He got onto all fours, wheezing and gasping. To be treated like some common peasant—and then this!

There was no one in sight. Katchin was close to the buildings, so the soldiers down the cross street couldn't see him nor he them. The windows facing the street were shuttered and the rooms behind them empty.

A vortex of whirling light spun off the greater cone which enclosed Garric. It wandered across the pavement, illuminating nothing but showing within itself glimpses of other worlds, other times.

Three more cones spat away from the mother cone, each turning its own drunken path into the night. One wobbled toward Katchin.

He got to his feet and ran, this time placing his feet with the care of a townsman trying to cross a plowed field. He was wearing his best clothing: his short cape had gold trim, and his saffron tunics were layered so that the appliqued border of the inner one showed beneath that of the outer. The sash of crimson silk around Katchin's waist had cost him the price of a dozen sheep. It was water damaged now because he'd had his wife Feyda wash the garment rather than asking his niece Ilna to clean it.

Ilna wouldn't have refused. No, she'd have sneered at Katchin, done the work perfectly as she did everything having to do with fabric, and sneered again as she dropped Katchin's payment back in the dirt at his feet. He loved money, but the insult of having Ilna fling it back at him would have been worse than the cost; though it meant half-ruining the sash as a consequence.

Katchin was the most important man in Barca's Hamlet! He was the bailiff Count Lascarg! How could everyone treat him with contempt?

Sometimes Katchin almost managed to convince himself that on his trips to Carcosa he dined with the count instead of being dismissed from the palace by an underclerk when he offered his report. But nobody else in the borough believed Katchin, even though he was the richest of them by far. He deserved respect!

He felt a buzzing, bone deep and as piercing as a rabbit's scream. He looked over his shoulder. A vortex skated toward him. He screamed. The vortex pirouetted as though it were his partner in a reel dance.

Katchin sprang away from it—

slipped—

and fell into flat, gray light with no color and no shadows. A woman stood facing him. She wore a robe of bleached linen, and her skin was painted with white lead.

"Where am I?" Katchin said. His voice didn't echo. The street, the bridge of wizardlight—the vortex itself that he thought had enveloped him—all were gone. There wa nothing but a woman as colorless as old bone. "Who are—did you bring me here?"

The shrill buzzing had stopped. It was as though the gray ambiance were a wall isolating Katchin from the world he had left.

The woman raised her right hand and dangled a human neck vertebra from her index finger. It hung on a cord of the particular red-blond color of hair growing on the heads of dead men.

The woman twitched the bangle with her other hand. It rotated sunwise, then widdershins, before Katchin's staring eyes.

"We have things to discuss, Katchin the Miller," the woman said. Her voice was toneless. "You will come with me."

"I will come with you," Katchin's lips said. His voice was a dead echo of her own. "We have things to discuss."

The woman walked into the grayness, her steps as slow as a pallbearer's. She held the neck bone at her side, spinning one direction and then the other. Katchin followed, his eyes on the bangle.

"I will come with you," his lips repeated.

* * *

CHAPTER TWELVE

The courtyard Garric stood with Tenoctris and Liane was big enough to swallow the Field of Monuments in Carcosa. Sand had swept in from the west, covering whatever walls or buildings had stood on that side.

"Is this a city or all one building?" Liane asked. "It looks as though it's all connected."

"It's both, really," Tenoctris said. "A vast building to contain all of mankind. The builders called it Alae, which meant Wings in their language, and it was man's last city."

Though Tenoctris had claimed she could walk by herself, Garric made sure his left arm was taking most of her weight. He breathed deeply but his lungs didn't seem to fill properly. He certainly wasn't going to let her strain herself physically if he could help it.

"The last?" Liane said. It was hard to hear her voice. The air didn't carry sound well, but Liane was speaking softly besides. The thought must have disturbed her. Garric was too focused on his own problems to worry about those of a city long dead.

"The last of mankind on this world," Tenoctris said quietly. "There has to be an end some time, you know. What we must do is see to it that it's a natural end, not because chaos triumphed and wiped life away before its time."

She squeezed Garric's biceps affectionately and reached out to pat Liane's arm with the other hand. "That's what we have to try to do, I mean."

"Evil won't win while I'm standing," Garric said, echoing the thought of the king in his mind. He laughed and added, "While any of us are."

Though hidden, the western structures stabilized the dune and prevented it from devouring the remainder of the plaza with a single sinuous bound. Tendrils of glistening sand had squirmed to the first of the five terraces rising from the central hollow, but the small-leafed bushes rooting in cracks in the pavement were visibly different from the vegetation that grew on the dune itself.

They mounted three steps to the first terrace. Garric had seen fields where the ground was shored up to hold rainwater and to flatten the surface to make cultivating easier. This—changing the contours of the land on an enormous scale merely to create a vista for those beholding it—was new to him.

From Carus' memory cascaded images of the great cities of the Old Kingdom. Carcosa, Valles, and a dozen metropolitan centers had structures built on an impressive scale, but no single unified artifact like this one.

At about every twenty yards around the edge, as though looking down into the pit, were statues of crouching beasts. They'd been heavily worn by blowing sand.

"Are these lions?" Garric asked. There were humps on the backs of the stone creatures.

The moon was well up. Though it seemed larger than the orb which shone on the world to which he'd been born, its light was reddish and not as clear as he expected.

"They're sphinxes, Garric," Liane said. "Winged sphinxes. They couldn't fly with little wings like that, though."

She looked at Tenoctris. "Could they?" she added. Garric wasn't sure from Liane's tone whether the question was serious.

"The statues are just a decoration," Tenoctris said, eyeing them as they climbed past to the next terrace. "Though the men who carved them could fly. At least they could have flown if they'd wanted to. They'd given it up long before the last of them had died."

Garric missed a step in amazement. "How could anybody give up flying?" he asked.

Often while minding sheep he'd put down whatever book he'd brought and watched instead the gulls gliding above the sea. Land birds didn't impress him. The little ones darted from place to place with no thought but safety or another bite to eat. Vultures wheeled all day above a sunlit field, but their circles were even more obviously empty than the punctuated fluttering of their lesser brethren.

But the whole world belonged to the gulls. Their gray wings coursed from island to island, and they made their home for the night wherever they chose.

"The people who built Alae had other concerns," Tenoctris said. She looked back at the rank of downward-looking sphinxes. "Perhaps they'd have been better off to remember flight," she added. "Though I shouldn't judge other people."

The third terrace was surrounded by a railing. Blowing sand had sculpted its spiral bannisters thinner yet; some had been worn to stubs reaching toward one another like pairs of stalactites and stalagmites.

An ornamental gateway, square and massive, framed the steps. Its flat surfaces were carved in low relief. The wind must always come from the northwest because the figures on the sheltered angles were still sharp. There were willowy humans, nude but sexless, carrying out rituals that involved pouring fluid from basin to basin and over one another. Their faces were almond-shaped and without expression.

Liane carried the collapsible desk that held her writing equipment and whatever documents she felt she'd need for her present endeavors. Though the case was no heavier than a traveller's wallet, she paused to switch the strap from her right shoulder to her left. Garric was tiring fast in the thin air, too.

"Alman is the last of his race, then?" Liane asked.

"Alman bor-Hallimann was a wizard in the time of King Lorcan," Tenoctris said, smiling faintly. "He was horrified by the upheaval that attended the founding of the kingdom and wanted to go somewhere where he'd have peace for his studies. He came to Alae after other men were gone from the city."

She looked around at the windswept magnificence. "He has a scrying glass made from the lens of the Behemoth's single eye," she added. "I want to borrow it to view the other side of the bridge."

"Will Alman help us?" Liane asked. "If he came here for peace...?"

"He'll help us because he's human and mankind needs help," Garric said. "Or if Alman no longer cares about humanity—"

He touched his swordhilt, reassuring himself that it was where he knew it was.

"—then I don't care very much about Alman's willingness."

The slabs paving the fourth terrace were a material different from the ruddy stone of which the remainder of the city was made.
Water
! Garric's eyes told him, but a dusting of sand had blown onto even this relatively high surface. Aloud he said, "Is it glass?"

The surface was smooth, dangerously smooth. Garric placed his feet carefully, stepping straight down, because he knew that otherwise he'd fall and take Tenoctris with him. Sand grains scrunched beneath his boots.

"It's too hard for glass, Garric," Liane said. "The blowing sand hasn't etched it at all."

She swallowed; the thin air seemed to dry throats abnormally fast. "It could be sapphire, though," she added quietly.

Garric frowned, trying to see the pavement as a creation rather than an obstacle as dangerous to cross as a narrow ledge. The surface was flat: it reflected the surrounding buildings without distortion, and on it the stars glittered as motionless points in the same relation to one another as they had in the cold heavens.

Garric wasn't sure whether the pavement had color. Perhaps it was blue or blue-black, but he might be seeing the sky echoed deep in a crystal of white purity.

They reached the highest terrace. Garric sighed with relief as he set his boot on the border of pale sandstone. It was hard and originally highly polished to judge from corners which blowing grit hadn't scored, but it was safe to walk on so long as it was dry. "How did they get across that without breaking their necks?" he complained.

"Mostly they didn't leave the building," Tenoctris explained. "Toward the end, everyone stayed in his room, being fed by the beings they'd created. And finally, of course, the last of them died."

"How can anyone choose to live here?" Liane asked. "Alman could have gone other places for privacy. Alae isn't just dead—it was never alive."

"The men who built it didn't think as we do," Tenoctris said. "For which I'm very thankful. And as for Alman, I can't say; but he has the power to leave at any time, so this is where he wants to be."

"Still, it's beautiful," Garric said. "I don't think I'd be comfortable here myself, but it's very peaceful."

"Which you are not, lad,"
King Carus said.
"There were wise, peaceful folk in my day too—priests, some of them; philosophers; even ordinary people who'd decided that they couldn't live with themselves if they took away the life even of someone bent on their destruction.
"

The ancient king saw more through Garric's eyes than Garric himself did: a niche that would conceal an assassin, a parapet from which bowmen could step to rain arrows on those in the courtyard below; a sand-sawn cornice that even a child could lever down on an enemy approaching the wall. With a harshness that Carus rarely showed, he added,
"Perhaps the Lady delights in their presence; but by what they were afraid or unwilling to do, the kingdom and the lives of their neighbors all went smash."

Garric looked at Liane, then Tenoctris. Aloud he said, "The world has room enough for peaceful folk. I think they're as likely to be advancing the cause of good as ever I am when I put my hand to my sword."

The women looked at him—Tenoctris knowingly, Liane with a quizzical lift of the eyebrows. In Garric's mind, his ancestor laughed approval.

They entered the building through a portal that was perfectly square and high enough for a giant. The doorleaves were of silvery metal that the sand had worn more than the stone in which they were set. One valve hung on its hinges; the other was a tangle of scraps half-in, half-out of the hallway beyond. The metal surfaces were chased, though the patterns might have been those of the skirling wind using sand for burins.

From a distance the building seemed monolithic, unmarred and unchangeable. Closer by, Garric could tell that sand had burnished off the fine detail of the lower carvings, and that many woody-stemmed, spiky plants had found cracks in the stonework in which to grow. The walls would trap dew in the mornings and channel the droplets down to niches at the margins, providing a constant source of water in this barren waste.

A first glimpse of the vaulted hallway showed that time's tendrils of destruction had worked on the interior as well. Even so, Garric touched his sword and Liane gasped to see gigantic faces smiling at them from the walls.

A black beetle the size of Garric's little fingernail scurried out of sight in the joint between the blocks forming the right and left side of the nearest face's lips. It was the first form of animal life that Garric had seen in this place.

"Who are they?" Liane asked. Moonlight filtering from openings high above gave the ten faces—five on either wall—a sinister cast, but their expressions were probably intended to be serene under proper lighting. Their lips were fleshy, their noses broad, and their cheeks heavy in contrast to the epicene grace of the figures on the terrace archway.

Tenoctris looked at the carvings with only the general interest she showed for all that came her way. Each wore a complex headdress of porticos and dancers. Despite the dim light, Garric could tell that the sculptors had distorted the figures to compensate for the foreshortening of seeing them from the floor.

"I suspect they're meant for mankind as a whole," Tenoctris said. "But I can't be sure."

She smiled at her companions. "The only one who knew anything of Alae were Alman himself and the student from his own time who helped him as he studied the city," she explained. "The student—we don't have his name, he's just the Acolyte from Shengy—left an account which others copied in part for their almagests."

Tenoctris coughed in slight embarrassment at what was for her boastfulness. "I'm not a powerful wizard," she said, "but there are more ways to learn things than by wizardry. I connected several accounts that didn't mention Alman by name with one that did, but which didn't say anything about him viewing Alae. I realized that it was here that he must have taken refuge from the Wars of Unification, carrying his paraphernalia of art. I was very proud of myself."

She looked at the towering faces about them, her own expression oddly similar to the stone smiles despite the contrast with her fine-drawn, birdlike features. "But I never thought," Tenoctris said, "that I'd be able to see Alae with my own eyes. I don't have the power to view this place, let alone visit it in the flesh. The bridge draws the cosmos to a single flat sheet in which all time is one time. That made it possible for us to be here."

Liane nodded. "And makes it necessary for us to remove the bridge," she said, "before Alae and Valles and all time mix. I don't know exactly what the result would be, but I suspect—"

She grinned and squeezed Garric's hand, reassurance for both of them.

"—a repeat of the way the Old Kingdom ended would be preferable."

"Well, that's why we're here," Garric said carefully.

Tenoctris laughed. "Yes, indeed," she said. She paused to cough and clear her dry throat. "I'm so used to thinking of myself as a scholar that sometimes I forget the times require me to be a person of action.

"Now, how to find Alman?" she went on. Her eyes darted toward each of the three hallways leading from the anteroom. "The incantation I spoke should have brought us by the principle of congruity to the point where Alman entered this plane: the same action in the same medium will cause the same response. That doesn't tell us where he may have walked after he arrived here, however."