The Revenants (45 page)

Below them the city spread along the shores of the bay and on both sides of the wide river as well as upon the islands of the river, each part connected to the others with shining roads and bridges. On a low hill across the flood, a domed building stood. Jaer’s eyes were fixed upon it. Terascouros asked, ‘There?’

Jaer dismounted but still clung to the saddle, shaking a little. ‘Yes, I must go there,’ she said. ‘Quickly. It is there the puzzle ends, Teras. There that all the mazy lines bend in and knit together. I can feel it, like an itch that must be scratched, but my body fights me with cramps in my stomach. Shivering. My body wants something else.’

‘What else?’ asked Medlo.

‘I don’t know. Only to live, perhaps.’

‘We will all live, all of us,’ said Terascouros. ‘If you don’t want to go there, we won’t.’

‘No. We have to go. It’s there, and I must find it – whatever it is. The Gate, I think. Nathan’s Gate. Only something within me is like a child afraid of the dark.’

‘Well, if we are going, let us go as we would be remembered.’ Medlo dismounted, unlashed his pack and began to dress himself in his holiday tunic, ignoring their protests. When he had fastened the jangle on his fringed sash and wiped his boots with the dirty tunic, he mounted once more, a figure glittering in embroidery and stiffened satin, the honour cape of Rhees fluttering at his back. ‘If I go to my fulfillment, whatever it may be, I go as the scion of Rhees, Medlo of Rhees at last.’

He started away down the hill, letting them follow as they would.

They caught up with him halfway down the long slope. Except for the wind in the grasses there was no sound, no murmur of insect or bird, no cry or clatter, nothing to speak of life. The horses slowed of their own accord, began almost to tiptoe across the turf, ears forward. Away to the left a cluster of great grey stones thrust up through the turf, ragged growth around their bases looking like eyebrows. As they went past, they felt the stones turn, felt that something watched from beneath the earth. Among the stones a darkness quivered, reached out a clot of shadow, recoiled into itself.

‘It knows,’ whispered Jaer. ‘Whatever is here, in this city, waits for us. It knows we are here.’

In Orena the long-awaited attack began. On the western heights the quiescent mists began to move, coiling toward the cliffs. In the city, bells rang to summon those few still outside the walls. Black robes moved away from the great structure near the northern ramparts to disclose it at last-a drum, a drum so enormous that Leona gasped in disbelief.

‘What have they made the head of? No animal walking the earth is large enough.’

‘Perhaps they found one beneath the seas,’ said Hazliah, thrusting in beside her to peer into the depths of the far-seeing device. ‘By the most marvellous Lord of Fire, a troop of horsemen might parade upon it!’

‘Not for long.’ Grimly she pointed to a frame beside the drum, a tall scaffolding in which hung a sledge, a mighty hammer, its head taller than a tall man. Far below on the stony ground ropes tightened and twanged as capstans moved in circles of straining Gahlians. The red robes of Sybil and Lithos glowed against the dark bulk as the hammer jerked upward in tiny increments. Ropes jammed and snapped. The red-robed figures gestured in agitation.

‘Will our weapons fire upon that drum?’ Leona was answered by tight mouths and shaken heads.

‘We can see it, not fire upon it. The ridge is between.’

‘Can we fire upon the ridge, destroy it?’

‘If we had much time, and no other targets. But there are other targets.’ He indicated the shadowy bulks which stumbled slowly forward, the metallic monsters clicking incer feet as they reared up to the ramparts turning ideous heads to one side and the other.

‘Hazliah …’ He had been with her in her brief time in Orena tight as tick to dog, so he said, and she had laughed at that, a strange laugh in which he seemed to take delight. He had not said what hopes he had, what dreams of kindred and kindred. He had put nothing into words, but she had seen his face. At odd moments it had made her long for something long lost. There was no time for it, whatever it might have been. ‘Hazliah, if the battle goes against us, I will take the boy, fly away from the city.’ She thought fleetingly of Mimo and Werem who could not be carried, then refused to think of that. ‘Will you follow me, you and your people? There may be refuge elsewhere in the wide world.’

He shook his head gently. ‘We will go. But you have not seen what will await us.’ He moved toward another of the flickering glassy surfaces of the seeing devices with which the tower was furnished. It seemed to show nothing except open sky above the valley, but then she saw wings, serpent necks with narrow, fanged heads, tails with curved blades of chitin upon them, deadly as scorpion tails.

‘When did these come?’

‘The red-robed ones rode in upon them. Others came then, larger ones. We do not know how many.’

‘The Remnant? Your people? Did they …’

‘They got away unseen, Lady. Went like the wind, east and north to Tchent, there to stop from purpose of their own, then perhaps to go even beyond the Concealment. No, these air serpents came after, we think.’

‘The sky is full of them.’ She brooded over the sight, then turned again to the great drum. The hammer was inching upward once again. Behind them in the valley rose the song of the massed Choirs, a music as much felt as heard. One of the people watching on the devices in the tower room said ‘Ahhh’ in satisfaction as the mists on the western cliffs grew quiet. The haihmer came up a bit more.

‘You did not tell me about the winged things. They are half dragon, half scorpion. Hideous. You did not tell me.’

‘There was nothing we could do. If it had been important, you would have known of it. The Crown would have told you.’

Leona shook her head, felt a boiling mixture of laughter and tears threatening to come bubbling out of her throat. ‘Oh, Hazliah, I do not believe it is the Crown of Wisdom at all. Either that or no one can be wise in such a trap. I would trade all its wisdom if we might only be invisible.’

And she turned again to watch the hammer inch upward toward the top of its cradle.

In Tharliezalor, Medlo’s horse had reached an outlying street of the city: cracked and fissured pavement, dusty growth furring the breaks with nettles. Ancient arches gaped at them, windows stared after them, ghosts of movement caught at the corners of their eyes. They heard spirits of sound down empty streets, a high keening which made the skin ache but barely reached the ears. Jaer and Medlo rode with naked blades in their hands, Terascouros between them. Two of the horses trembled, but Jaer’s tall black beast looked calmly at the world from yellow eyes and paced steadily forward.

At some corners, the black horse would not move in the way Jaer desired. It backed away, turning into other streets. Jaer allowed herself to be taken, hearing behind her in the streets they had not entered a humming sound, as though some monstrous harp string had been plucked.

Terascouros reached out to them blindly, her eyes unfocused. ‘Shhh, they are coming. Lead my horse.’ She began to sing in her high, whispery old voice, very softly.

They did come, pouring out of every opening like serpents from a burst sack; grey, fanged, silent. They came very near, just outside the circle of Terascouros’s song, eyes burning with hunger. They heaped upon one another, scrambling toward the trio. The horses moved within a circle scarcely two man heights wide, walked among fiery eyes and dripping teeth and shrill screaming, but they did walk while Terascouros sang.

Medlo thought, ‘This is impossible. Her voice is only a whisper, and yet I hear it in harmony, strong as though it were many voices.’

The answer came from Jaer. ‘Old Aunt. The Sisterhood of Gerenhodh. They are here, singing us forward. They have sent their mind to watch over us. They will not abandon their Ahl di. I am to go find them their way, will I ornilll.’

It came to Medlo as a revelation. This was why Terascouros had come, of course, to serve as an outlet for those voices, a focus which they might use. Well, he could help them. He brought the jangle from his back to rest it on the horse’s neck, setting his mind and heart into the song, joining it, remembering all he had learned in the vaults under the Hill.

They turned into the wide avenue which led to the bridge. Medlo bit back an exclamation of horror, for it stretched ahead of them in a living carpet of serim which the song must hold at bay. They went forward, slow step by slow step, a distance of hours – a distance of forever.

On the ramparts above Orena the hammer reached the top of its cradle. A red-clad arm gestured sharply downward. The hammer fell upon the great drum to cry DOOM upon the cliffs, in echo repeating and growing across the valley to return once more; DOOM to crash among the pillars of immemorial stone which stood at the gates of the valley, making them crack and shatter, raining boulders upon the walls and the gates of the highway, echoing back once more; DOOM against the high tower of the Temple so that it shivered beneath the sound, reverberating within in the place the Choirs were assembled; DOOM upon the voices of the maidens and the Sisters; DOOM upon the song of the Choirs of Taniel so that they were deafened and made mute – so that silence came.

Then the ghosts of Gahl upon the cliffs were restrained no more but boiled into hideous life, pouring over the cliffs like a rain of bats onto the valley floor. Lithos and Sybil turned aside from the great hammer, mounted upon two of the winged beasts and swept away to the north. Behind them on the heights, the Tharnel worms reared into towers of segmented, grisly death. Along the walls, guardsmen shouted and screamed, ran for the safety of the enclosed towers. Doors slammed shut, weapons masters sweated and swore in the half light of the screens, rays of red light flicked from the towers. Where the worms were directly hit they glowed, burned, and died, but between the worms and die weapon intruded those bulks of shadowy darkness, shapeless and edgeless, into which the burning lights fell as dew into a pond. Into these shadows were guardsmen sucked up and lost as though they had never been.

Leona watched it all, heartsick and unable to turn aside from it. This vaunted Crown does not help us,’ she whispered to Hazliah, ‘except to make me sure we must not be taken by those shadows while we live.’ Behind them in the valley the song of the Choirs rose once more, faltering and hesitant. Still, it was enough to slow the advance of the mists on the valley floor, to slow the shadows on the heights so that weapons could fall upon the worms and their masters once more. To the rear of the massed hordes of Gahl, a curious turbulence began, a whirling movement, a troubling upon the ramparts as in a confusion of ants when their nest is destroyed. ‘Hazliah? Are they being attacked? Have we guardsmen behind them?’

‘You know we have not, Lady. No man, however armoured, can stand against the worms or pull them down.’

‘They are being pulled down, nonetheless. Look for yourself.’ She thrust him toward the screen of the seeing device where the distorted, jerking images swayed and spun. Even through the thick walls of the tower they could hear a change in the sounds outside. Then they heard nothing, for the great hammer had fallen again, DOOM reverberating across the shivering valley, the song from the Temple shattered into silence once more, and away to the west the mists piled into tottering towers which fell and rebuilt themselves and fell again, forward, toward the city.

The song rose once more, haltingly. For the moment the bulks of darkness which had swallowed the ramparts to either side of the tower were dissipated. Leona eased through the door to peer at the confused struggle going on among the rocks, unable to see more from that vantage point than she had in the screens within. Men were shouting. Not the Gahlians, who fought silently and fell as silently into fog. She watched them fall, watched the mist ooze away from each fallen, black-robed heap, running like living slime against the tug of the earth, uphill to the cliff edge to fall in terrible rain on the rocks beneath, to assemble, to flow again to the west of the valley where the other mists towered and fell like knotted measuring worms. Where they passed no herb grew green, no branch showed leaf, no small furry thing hidden in the thickets lived on. Only bones showed there, gnawed and grey, powdery as dust.

The shouts grew louder, were lost once more in the monstrous call of the drum, DOOM onto the Temple recincts and the city. There in the streets people fell eneath the stroke of that drum. The sound of the Choirs began waveringly once more, so weakly that those on the heights could see the mists still moving, unslowed.

On the ramparts, Leona could hear the shouting voices clearly now. They were separated from her by only one last spine of standing stones.
‘Widon, Widon, Widon.’
She glimpsed a knot of warriors, green-clad as in spring leaf, burnished and mailed, glittering behind blades which made a terrible tally of the hosts of Gahl. The warriors were pressing toward the great drum, leaving behind them piled heaps of the dead. Around the drum, the struggle increased, and Leona darted into the tower to hang over the screen once more, hearing the sounds of battle swell through the open door behind her. From the clustered warriors a mighty form leapt up to “catch the edge of the drum with hooked fingers, huge legs kicking at the black robes dancing in fury below. He rolled onto the drum head, thrust down with a spear blade, then ran across the drum, slitting it from edge to edge with a sound like cracking earth. He stood triumphant at the edge of the drum as the great hammer fell again–to crash wood upon metal as the mallet broke and made no sound, no sound as the hosts of Gahl fell in their thousands, no sound as the Tharnel worms were cut to pieces by ten thousand blades, each the very likeness and image of the blade carried by the warrior on the drum, no sound but the shout of ten thousand voices, Thew-son, Thew-son, Thew-son!’

Leona vaulted from the wall, ran through clots of struggling bodies toward that triumphant figure dancing victory upon the drum rim. Thewson! You come timely! We had no hope, but you have come….’ Then, when he had dropped to her side, she added, ‘Though I fear you have slain one army only to build another.’