by Ted Neill
He took another bite of bread, crumbs gathering in his beard. “The faithful,” he scoffed. “They pray, then convince themselves what they wanted came true, that the dead or the gods are looking out for them. They see patterns where there are none. Intent where there is randomness. Meaning where there is nothing. Let me tell you, Gabriella, there is no one watching. No one cares about you but you. Like I said before, money and force are the only gods worth serving. And right now, they are on my side.”
Gabriella felt as if something fundamental to her life had just been thrown into doubt. Her heart physically pained her. A series of memories, summonings at night, trips she took with her mother to leave flowers against the wall of the tower for their ancestors, gazing down at the tower from the hills above with a mixture of fear, awe, and pride. Now all those feelings of attachment, her entire sense of certainty regarding the tower, her entire purpose for this trip, were crumbling. She did not know what to believe.
Mortimer was not without compassion. He touched her shoulder and spoke in a tone of a friend teaching another a hard lesson. “You should be grateful I am sharing this wisdom with you now,” he said. “You should be grateful for your brother, too. Burden that he is, at least you have family.”
He took another piece of bread and handed the rest to her. He had plucked some of the flowers out of Naema’s hair. He took them now and stuck them through the buttonhole in his jacket, making a little half smile as he returned to the wheel.
Gabriella could not bring herself to look at her brother or Adamantus, although she felt the elk close beside her. She wanted Adamantus to say something, to tell her everything Mortimer had said was wrong, but he said nothing.
“What if he is right?” Gabriella finally asked. “What is left for us to believe?”
The elk was silent a long time. Every second that he did not refute Mortimer’s words was another moment that the trapper’s statements gained power and weight. Finally Adamantus answered. “I believe in you, Gabriella. So does your brother.”
“I want a serious answer.”
“I gave you one.”
“But that’s just the problem,” she said, angry now. “You believe in something you should not. You are making me into something I’m not. I’m a fool, a girl. The dead are dead. Gone. We don’t turn into gods, we make them up. I was a feverish idiot.”
“Nicomedes did not believe in gods either,” the elk said. Gabriella turned to the elk in surprise. It was incomprehensible that the man whom she had begun to venerate, whom she felt such admiration for, would not be a believer. “It’s true. Nicomedes once said that ‘the seeds of gods lie within us.’ Nicomedes believed that if we treated others with the love and devotion we usually reserve for the gods, that the world would be a much better place.”
Gabriella’s mind reeled. How could she find fault with a man who had done so much in the service of others, who had indeed been better to his fellow neighbors than many who believed fervently in gods had been? Ghede’s words about mystery came back to her. What had he called the gods, a riddle? And life a mystery? Perhaps there were no sure answers in this life.
Was that what Ghede meant?
But if all belief was indeed all superstition she hoped that the Vasani might live.
“Will the Vasani die?” she asked. When the elk did not answer her, she repeated her question.
“It is their belief,” the elk said, looking at the skull, which seemed silly and inert on the deck. “Some would rather die than give up their beliefs.”
Gabriella knew she would take life and mystery over death and certainty. She also felt ridiculous, simple, and childish. “I just don’t feel worthy of this anymore. Am I a fool for believing in the dead, in the gods?” She held her head in her hands. “What do we do now?”
“I believe,” the elk said, stressing his words, “that we must survive. It is our first priority. All questions will be answered when needed. Now let’s study the map of the labyrinth.”
Gabriella did not feel like eating, but her growling stomach reminded her that she needed to. Guilt weighed heavily upon her as she finished the loaf of bread packed by the Vasani. She did not eat much, and although she tried spreading some green jelly on the bread for her brother, he did not seem to like its novel taste. I should have known better, she thought as Dameon spat it out on the deck and said it tasted like grass. Gabriella provided him with a plain piece of bread and cursed him under her breath for being difficult.
Chicken eggs on Vasan did not seem too different than those from Harkness. Gabriella and Dameon helped themselves to some that had been hard boiled. She noted numerous packages of tea, but Gabriella could not bring herself to open them.
As she dropped the egg shells over the railing, Gabriella studied the coast. The sun was past its zenith. A haze hung over the hills inland, but the shore, swept by sea breeze, remained clear. She searched the coast for recognizable features from Chas’ map but found none. A single island to the north was shaped like a farmer’s wide-brimmed hat. Gabriella remembered that according to Chas’ map, two islands waited just south of the inlet to the bay of Dis. There had not been a lone island on the map. She wondered if they had already gone too far or if Chas’ memory was failing him.
Mortimer had the hand-drawn map in his hands. He looked back and forth from the coast to the paper.
“Perhaps it is only one island after all,” he said, looking to Gabriella for some type of reassurance. She gave him none, angered as she was.
“No use sulking over the ways of the world, girl,” Mortimer grumbled, turning back to the wheel and dropping their altitude. He spun the wheel, slapping the handles with his bony hands. The Elawn banked towards the island. Mortimer brought them low enough over the water that Gabriella could smell the sea and hear the waves breaking on the beach. The island loomed closer.
Adamantus suggested that they swing their direction westward, into the open sea to change their angle of approach. “Perhaps what appears to be one island is two when seen from the west.”
Mortimer turned the Elawn again. The island slid slowly across the starboard bow. It had two distinct hills. As the ship moved alongside, it was clear that while the hills sloped towards one another, they actually did not touch, and were separated by a narrow channel. The two islands shown on the map!
Mortimer cranked the wheel to turn the Elawn towards the bay. “Then we are here,” he said, his breath catching.
As the ship banked, Gabriella looked behind them to see the mother wyvern swinging her wings sideways to alter her course as well. Since leaving Vasan, the mother had flown nearer to the Elawn, yet she still did not chase as closely as she had on the open sea. The wyvern’s distance prompted Gabriella to consider the stolen goat’s skull glinting on the mid-deck.
Could it have power? she wondered. She did not know what to believe in anymore. Mortimer was supposed to be dead, but he wasn’t. The Vasani thought they would die, so they were dying. If the gods and dead were figments of their imagination, how had she known the name of Nicomedes? She did not recall hearing it ever before. But perhaps she had and perhaps she had made the entire prophecy up? Perhaps it was as silly as her hope of Dameon being cured.
Cured or not, she knew she needed to get him home. It was her fault he was in danger. She turned her attention to the bay. She wished she had not eaten. Arriving here, in this place, was supposed to have been a triumph, an achievement. Now everything had gone wrong. Her stomach felt sick. Her head began to ache once more as it had when she had not drunk for days. When she rubbed her temples, she realized her palms were clammy and wet.
She joined Dameon and Adamantus at the bow. Below, there was little that distinguished the coastline of the bay. The land was wild—no villages, no planted fields, waited below—only sheer cliffs with tenacious red heather growing and clumps of brightly colored trees, their branches already half stripped by the sea’s winds.
Everyone was silent, but if it was with expectation or disappointm
ent, Gabriella was not sure. Perhaps a bit of both. In the northern most corner of the bay, tall cliffs leaned over the choppy, dark waters. Birds circled above the gray rock faces. The cliffs dropped directly down into the water. There was no place where a city might fit.
But the land had more to reveal. As they neared the cliffs, it was clear that one cliff wall was much closer than the other . . . the bay continued to open up around the corner of the promontory. Time seemed to drag as they moved past the first cliff. Beyond the headland, the bay was sheltered from the sea and placid as a lake. It was the perfect natural harbor. In the northwest, the unwelcoming walls of the mountains gave way to gentle slopes, with red fields of heather broken by the occasional apron of rocks that had avalanched down from above. A waterfall threaded through a deep cut in the slope. Much closer, where the water met the shore, Gabriella could see trees, trees growing over stones, stones piled in rows, rows of what used to be structures.
Dis.
“It has to be,” she whispered. Gabriella studied the cliffs above the city. The buildings were in a much more advanced state of collapse than she imagined. But where was the tower on the cliff that was once Nicomedes’ workshop? Was it destroyed too?
Not seeing the remains of a tower, Gabriella searched for something more humble, perhaps a foundation or pathway, she reasoned. Most of the stone on the promontory was natural and raw except for a splotch of white, as if mortar had bled down the cliff face. Gabriella studied the stain carefully. Above it was a shape that was too regular, too rectangular to be natural.
“Could that be it?” she asked Adamantus.
“We will have to move closer to find out,” the elk said.
“Is that the wall the fisherman spoke about?” Mortimer asked. The Elawn was just passing over a wall that ran from one cliff to the other. On one side of it rested the waters of the bay. On the other side was a mixture of mud and marsh reeds.
“This was once the harbor wall, not the city wall,” Adamantus said. “The city itself was never walled, but the harbor was. In the centuries that have passed, the harbor has silted up. The swamp you see before you was once the harbor of Dis.”
The ground close to the city was flat and grass-covered, but nearer to the wall, it became a mixture of stagnant water and reeds and mudflats. The tracks of small animals—probably fox, beavers, and otters—crisscrossed between cattails, water glittering in the bottom of the prints. Mortimer brought the Elawn along the wall so Gabriella could look for the map symbols the fishermen had mentioned. They were not hard to find. Only the symbols beneath the water were illegible, covered by swaying moss and algae. Where the carvings were above water, they were etched so deeply that they were easy to read, though their meanings were still unclear.
The Elawn floated into the city, above the ruined buildings. In ancient times, a small river had run between the stone buildings and along streets through a series of channels. Gabriella wondered if this was the same stream flowing from the bottom of the waterfall on the mountainside. Now, no longer tamed, the river had flooded its canals and flowed freely down the streets of Dis and through the doorways of abandoned houses.
At one time, the river would have rushed into the bay through the mouths of great stone spouts carved to resemble faces. These were not human faces but rather something crossed between humans, fish, and gargoyles. Now the mouths were choked and blocked with debris, and the river had escaped from its boundaries. It swept over the quays and poured over the faces, drawing long strands of canal grass and algae over the sad eyes and cheeks. Below the spouts, a deep pool emptied itself through a meandering stream that cut through the silted harbor in countless bends and twists.
The city rose upwards with the land so the Elawn did as well. They passed over avenues and boulevards now filled with centuries’ worth of rubble. The forest had taken over the city. Like sand dunes that cover desert ruins, drifts of leaves were piled deep along walls, burying doorways and window ledges. Trees were now the permanent masters of Dis. They had taken root in chambers, on walkways, even atop crumbling walls. A city square, once open to the sky, was now hidden beneath a canopy of dense, colorful leaves.
One tree, however, had lost its leaves completely already. Its bareness allowed Gabriella, for an instance, to glance into the depths below. She saw a doorway and a window, the edges softened by moss. Tumbled stones and pieces of a statue lay among tree roots. There was an arm, a foot, a flowing robe.
Then the Elawn slipped forward, and the statue was gone.
The ground rose, and a rocky hill lay straight ahead of them.
“We’ll find the ruins of the palace there,” Adamantus said,
Gabriella could see that it would have been the perfect place for a citadel, with its commanding view of the harbor and the city. The palace was even more impenetrable now, since the only road leading up to it had been obliterated by a landslide. This collapse appeared to have been more recent than some of the other decay, for small trees grew out of the detritus that had flowed down the slope. On the crest of the hill, some of the thick palace walls still stood.
Trees had invaded the palace as well, and vines scaled the walls like leafy ladders. Weeds grew thickly in pots that once had held houseplants, their roots bursting out of the cracked bottoms.
A silence had settled over the walls that Gabriella imagined was similar to the silence that came to mourners visiting a graveyard or sailors passing a shipwreck. She was swept by a looming sense of mortality, the passage of time, and the proximity of loss. She was awestruck by the power and patience of nature, which had undone so many of these things that human hands had created.
Then, as they turned back toward the city, an aqueduct appeared out of the ruins at the back of the hill. It stood alone, some of its sections crumbled away, but its arch still soared over trees that had grown beneath it for centuries. Gabriella felt a flood of pride for Nicomedes. This structure of his had remained. He was long gone, and so were all those who had once dwelt in his city, but his ideas endured.
Not all is lost to time, she thought.
“Where will we find Nicomedes’ workshop in all this wilderness?” Mortimer asked. Did the aqueduct remind him of the inventor as well, Gabriella wondered.
“His workshop was above the city,” Adamantus said.
“I think I may have already found it, Mr. Creedly,” Gabriella said and pointed to the white stain on the mountain above Dis.
Mortimer praised her sharp eye, but his compliments failed to move her. The trapper, whom Gabriella had begun to think of increasingly as their captor, leaned on the levers and the Elawn drifted upwards. Gabriella was surprised at just how high the tower remains were as she swayed at the return of her vertigo. It was like those first few days on the Elawn when she had yet to adjust to the height. For many weeks, the vertigo had not troubled her—with so much else on her mind she had not had the time to be bothered with it. The necessity of survival had been a sort of cure. But now with her stomach already in knots over the Vasani, she watched the ground recede with increasing sickness.
What she had initially thought was a crumbling wall when she looked up was actually an intact building with windows and doorways still visible. The building’s doorway faced the mountain, but it opened up many feet above where anyone could have placed a foot. A few piles of mortared stone remained, spaced equidistantly along the mountain outcropping, leading towards the body of the mountain itself.
It was Adamantus who recognized what they were seeing. “This was the loading dock,” he said. “We must remember that in the day of Dis, airships were used regularly. They would have moored here. The building you see here would have been a guard house and a shelter from the elements while goods were loaded and unloaded. A wooden walkway would have led to the workshop within the mountain there. The footings for the wooden bridge are still visible. Like his hidden workshop at the waterfall, Nicomedes preferred living stone for his structures. It was more secure. We should turn our attention to the m
ountain itself.”
The naked stone of the mountain was dark gray. Far below, its base spread out in gentle slopes like the edges of a skirt. Grass grew plentifully there, and Gabriella imagined it an ideal place for grazing sheep. Higher up, the mountain was less forgiving. The walls were sheer, so much so that not even birds appeared to be able to build nests there. The top was crowned in natural piles of rocks, like spokes on a menacing headpiece. The only forgiving terrain was a sharp grassy slope that ran down from the back side of the peak. But even this patch of vegetation was perilous, for it was steep and ended abruptly—a misstep anywhere on its face would turn into an uncontrollable tumble that lead to a drop that ended on a shelf of jagged boulders hundreds of feet below.
“Look,” said Gabriella, pointing as they flew toward the dock.
Where the spur of rock met the body of the mountain were two iron doors as tall as five men. The footings of the walkway led directly to the doors, rusted to a dull reddish-brown, the stone beneath them stained from the metal’s runoff.
Runes, written in relief, covered the top half of the panels. Adamantus translated, “ʻHere, the only currency is knowledge; the prime principle, equality.’” He was silent for a moment. “There is no doubt … this is Nicomedes’ tower.”
Mortimer pulled the Elawn up beside the heavy doors, immobile as stone, gapping open just wide enough for them to enter. Cold air drifted out from between the iron slabs like the mountain’s breath. Gabriella could see that the tower was not completely dark within with sunlight slanting down from windows lining the ceiling.
