Days of Air and Darkness

by Katharine Kerr

  “No! It can’t be true.”

  And if it were true? All his life one thing had defined Rhodry—death and his ability to deal it. He saw it very clearly, that night, how his honor, his rank, his very manhood had always rested on his talent for war. Yet if death meant nothing, if war settled nothing, if old hatreds lived and old feuds haunted like ghosts no matter how much blood was poured out to propitiate them—well, then! what was he, who was he?

  He leapt to his feet and walked, pacing round and round, staring at the stars that glittered high above him, cold and utterly indifferent to the fate of men and elves alike. He would talk about it with Jill, he decided, once the siege of Cengarn was lifted, and he could reach her. He would ask her outright this time; he would take up her wretched hints and her challenge. He’d never been a coward before. Cursed if he’d be a coward about this!

  Once he made the decision, he could put his mind at rest, could kneel down and spread out his bedroll as if this were a night like any other. He put all his trust in Jill and what she would tell him, just as a sick child puts all his trust in his mother to heal him; and trusting in her, he could sleep.

  It was just at dawn, and a long way west from Cengarn and south as well, so far away, in fact, that it would have taken men and horses half a year to march there, that Evandar materialized on the shore of the Southern Sea, at a cove where a river ran down from the north to form the harbor of Rinbaladelan, City of the Moon. Most of the river still flowed in the stone conduits that the elven folk had built to contain it, but here and there Time had broken the levees and allowed the water to spread. On top of the stone banks, shrubs grew in windblown soil; flowering vines draped old stairways and ramps; here and there, trees put down roots that would in time crack apart the masonry. Soon, Evandar supposed, the original swamp would reclaim the estuary and spoil the perfect crescent of the harbor.

  He walked along the white sand at the tide line until he reached a mound of sand-covered stone, some twenty feet high, where once a lighthouse had stood. A slippery climb up broken stairs brought him to the top and a good view of the ruined city. Behind him the blue sea broke over water-worn stone, the drowned bones of jetties and seawalls; ahead, forest in green waves lay over mounds and gullies that had once been buildings and streets. On the highest hill, like a fist, the ruins of the observatory poked through the trees, still dominating the city in death as it had done so in life. From where he stood, Evandar could just pick out a few stone structures, each well over a hundred feet tall—a crumbling stairway clasped by underbrush; a peculiar curving track, like an upside-down arch, that had once guided light from important stars to the eyes of learned men; slender pillars that still marked the rising and setting of equinoctial suns—though their positions were a bit off after this lapse of time. Each pillar stood crowned, these days, by the untidy nests of herons and storks, while lesser birds dwelt in the star tracks.

  It was from the observatory hill that the founders of Rinbaladelan had first laid out the city plan, an elaborate scheme of circles and ellipses, drawn from the movements of the so-called “wandering stars.” Since the city had fallen some eleven centuries earlier, tree roots and winter storms had effaced the pattern, just as the sleeve of a careless scribe wipes put half of what he’s written. Evandar was the only being left who knew where a map lay. Fetching it, at the appropriate time, would constitute a crucial turn in the maze of schemes he’d set himself to walk. The conquering Horsekin had called the observatory a palace of magic, if Evandar remembered rightly, and believed that the elves used it to summon demons.

  They were all dead now, the Horsekin conquerors, wiped out by their very victory. After the city had fallen, and its few surviving defenders been tortured to death, the Kin had thrown the corpses of friend and foe alike into the harbor to rot. They settled down in Rinbaladelan to live in a city for the first time in their lives, crowded into the ruins of their conquest with broken sewers and not the faintest idea of the need for same. They’d never seen a ship before, either, and harbors were a mystery to them—except for fishing in. The sea had given them a fine crop that next year, with the suppurating dead to feed it.

  It had been an interesting little plague, all in all. Evandar smiled as he remembered the dying of the Hordes, the Meradan, as the elves had termed their enemies. The women and children died first, crawling on hands and knees while their swollen bellies poisoned them. Later, Evandar walked among the dying warriors and taunted them as they lay puking and sweating in their stolen jewels. The survivors of the first plague fled north to infect the Horsekin living in the ruins of Bravelmelim, who had died in turn, and its survivors fled again until a chain of death wound round the brief Horsekin empire and strangled it.

  By then, Rinbaladelan, the first thing on earth that Evandar had ever loved, lay long past help or repair—or so he’d always thought, until some seven hundred years later, when he met Dallandra, the second earthly thing he’d come to love. She’d spoken of the crafting of fine things that lasted beyond the moment of their imagining; she’d turned his eyes to the lands of men and dwarves, where master craftsmen still understood the smelting of metals and the quarrying of stone. Dallandra had given him ideas, grand ideas full of vast imaginings, and he’d begun to scheme out ways to realize these ideas, not in his own shifting empire of images, but upon the solid earth and in the world of Time. After all, if souls could die and be reborn, why shouldn’t a city do the same?

  Evandar needed more than craftsmen, of course, to make his city live—he needed citizens to settle Rinbaladelan and do the work of the rebuilding. Most of the descendants of the elven people now lived out on the high plains of the Westlands as nomadic horseherders, remembering their former splendor but sharing none of it. A dying race, worn out with loss and danger, soon they would be gone, a memory blown on the winds of Time, unless somehow and against all odds he could revitalize their race and bring them souls willing to be born among them. For three hundred years now, he’d been braiding a complex net of schemes to do just that.

  “And then the bitch nearly goes and spoils everything,” he said aloud to the ruins. “That charming harridan, that hag of great strength, she who was once my wife, Alshandra.”

  At her name he spat onto the sand. The siege of Cengarn was only the beginning of her troublemaking. She’d promised her followers new conquests as their reward and turned their greedy eyes to Deverry and the rich lands of men. Where was he going to get the artisans and settlers he needed, if the stupid shrew plunged the whole country into war? And what would happen to that third thing he’d come to love, Rhodry Maelwaedd?

  Evandar disliked acting directly upon the earth. He preferred to give a charmed gift here, utter an oracle there, pretend to be a god to the Gel da’Thae, a Guardian to the elves, a mysterious dweomermaster to men and dwarves so that he could say cryptic things and set obscure riddles—in short, to play only the most subtle melodies upon the harp of Wyrd. Yet, if he refused to act, if Cengarn fell, what then would happen to all his plans? He would have to decide soon whether to act or no. Decisions and haste were two things he particularly hated.

  Muttering to himself about the injustice of it all, Evandar walked down to the tide line, picked his way through the driftwood and strings of dead kelp to the water, but instead of walking into the quiet waves, he stepped up above them and strode along the dapple of sunlight upon sea until, in but a few moments, he disappeared.

  The wind rose. Up on the hill, the trees nodded over the ruined observatory, as if reminding it of Evandar’s promise, that someday the city would be reborn.

  PRESENT, RISING

  The Northlands, 1116

  FORTUNA MINOR

  In all lands of our map this figure does bring aid to those in distress and a turning for the better in many things, yet always at a price, which, depending upon those figures nearby, may be far higher than the querent wishes to pay. In the land of Quicksilver it also denotes a going out into strange ways.

  —The Om
enbook of Gwarn,

  Loremaster

  “WHERE ARE WE GOING, master?” Arzosah said.

  “What do you mean, where? To the dwarvehold, of course. Lin Serr, just like Evandar said.”

  “You’d follow his orders?” She slapped her tail against the ground with a boom and a roil of dust.

  “Why not? He knows things I can’t see. Now hold still. I’ve got one last knot to tie.”

  With a whine, she settled down and let Rhodry finish arranging the ropes for the riding harness. He tied on his gear, then considered. Although out of habit he was wearing his sword, he decided that they’d flown close enough to the war, now, for him to consider combat. The sword, securely lashed, went into his bedroll. He slung a quiver of arrows at his hip and a curved elven hunting bow over his back.

  “You’d best tie yourself on if you’re going to be using that thing,” Arzosah said. “They take both hands, don’t they?”

  “They do, and you’re right. Here, I should think you’d be glad if I fell to my death.”

  “Of course I’d be glad. I’d be free, then. But you ordered me to do all in my power to keep you safe, and giving you good advice is within my power. Alas.”

  “Ah. I see. Well, my thanks.”

  On impulse, Rhodry reached up and first patted, then scratched her scaly brow, which curved round her eye sockets, in the same way as you’d scratch a dog on the head. She rumbled and leaned into his touch.

  “You like that, eh?”

  “I can’t reach to scratch there myself. Oooh, do the other side, please?”

  He walked round her head and obliged, while she let her eyelids droop and kept rumbling till he was done.

  “Now, if you’re good,” Rhodry said, “I’ll do that again tonight.”

  “Done, then—a bargain, Dragonmaster. So we fly south today?”

  “We do. And keep a good watch for Horsekin.”

  Ever since they’d left the place that had once been Haen Marn, they’d been following the track left by an army. Once they were flying again, Rhodry could see it clearly. Across the scrubby downs, it ran like a road, a muddy wound bitten into the grass by the hooves of hundreds of horses and the wheels of many wagons. Just ahead, though, lay forest, as the hills dropped lower and lower toward the plateau when Lin Serr stood. The track led straight into it and disappeared. Rhodry could assume that the raiding party had found the trees rough going; they would have had to chop a road for their wagons and scrounge fresh fodder for their stock.

  “Drop down! Let’s take a look at the forest.”

  Arzosah allowed herself to glide until she flew only a few yards above the trees. Sure enough, Rhodry could see clearings and two wagons, as well, left shattered in the improvised road. Farther on, he could just make out another wagon and a scatter of objects.

  “Big clearing over there!” Arzosah bellowed. “Shall I land? I don’t smell any Horsekin near here.”

  “Then let’s go down and see what they left behind.”

  As Arzosah settled, a cloud of terrified ravens flew up squawking, but these were ordinary birds, come for the dead horse he could see near the shattered wagon, which lay half in a stream. As soon as Rhodry slid down from her back and looked round, he recognized the little valley. Only two months earlier, he’d hiked through it. During that last visit, he’d found a road marker, a slab of black basalt, polished glassy and graved with dwarven pictographs that announced it stood on the road for Haen Marn. Rhodry glanced round and at last saw it, half-hidden by underbrush at the valley’s edge.

  “Rhodry?” Arzosah said. “I don’t suppose you’d mind if I finished up that horse.”

  “Yen! It’s all gassy and overripe!”

  “I rather enjoy meat that way. It’s a savory, like.”

  “Well, it’s no good to anyone else, sure enough. You’ll be able to fly, though, if you eat it?”

  “After a bit of a rest, not much more than one of your hand’s breadths of the sun moving in the sky.”

  He’d ridden to war too often to risk starving his mount when combat lay ahead.

  “Eat away. Just watch out for maggots.”

  “Why? I like maggots.”

  “Whatever pleases you, then.”

  Even though the dragon was a tidy feeder, slicing her meat with a delicate fang, then chewing quietly, Rhodry preferred to get away from the smell of rotted horse while she ate. He wandered over to the marker stone and swore aloud. Moss and the pitting of weather had mottled its once-slick face with white and green; rain had worn the slab itself away, shrunk it down and dug out its shoulders. He had to run his fingertips over the pictographs to find them and trace them out. It seemed that a thousand years had passed over this stone while he’d spent but the turning of two moons away from it. If Evandar hadn’t told him of the siege of Cengarn, he would have panicked, wondering if he’d been cast into a magical sleep like the heroes of old tales. As it was, he supposed that everything linked to Haen Marn had suffered at its leaving.

  “No hope for it now,” he said aloud. “Angmar, my love, I only pray you’re well, wherever you may be.”

  Tears burned in his throat, but he choked them back. With a toss of his head, he strode back to the broken wagon to see if he could learn anything about the enemies he was facing.

  Quite a lot, as it turned out. Behind the heap of slats and shattered wheels lay smashed wooden boxes and a long narrow bundle, covered with a cow’s hide that had been painted with strange runes. Rhodry flipped the hide away, then staggered back, Underneath a dead man, and a human being at that, lay on his back, but he was no victim of the wagon accident. As battle-hardened as Rhodry was, the sight nearly made him retch. The fellow had been stripped naked, then staked out, hands and feet pierced through with iron-tipped spikes. From breech to breastbone he’d been slit, then opened like a book, a few inches at a time, it seemed, and his internal organs pulled free to lie in tidy rows to either side—guts by his hips, liver and stomach to either side his waist, lungs split and laid beside his chest. His heart, however, was missing. Judging by the agony still graved into his face—his tongue and lips were so caked with black blood that he must have bitten them repeatedly—he had lasted a good long time. Ants swarmed over everything.

  Rhodry shuddered like a wet dog and moved away. He swore a couple of times, spat on the ground for good measure, then looked up to find Arzosah considering him with one coppery eye.

  “That’s how they send messages to their gods,” she said. “After they stake him, they chant the message over and over, then send him off to the Deathworld to deliver it.”

  “If I were him, I’d lie, just for revenge. What do they do with the heart?”

  “I have no idea. Eat it, maybe, or work magic with it? I watched them do the message rite once—up in the mountains, that was—but then they put the heart in a box and took it away.”

  “I see. Here, can you fly a little ways? I don’t want to stay here with this thing.”

  “I can manage a few flaps, but then I’ll have to rest.”

  “Fine. Let me just wash my hands in the stream.”

  “Why? You didn’t touch that thing, did you?”

  “Of course not. I just feel like I need a bit of a wash.”

  Worse lay in store for them later that afternoon. After Arzosah’s rest, they headed south again, flapping and gliding at a pace slow enough for her to keep testing the wind. The Horsekin, she assured him, had a distinctive scent, traceable from a long way off. The land here dropped steadily down in a long roll of foothills to a wide plateau, where dwarven men worked communal farms to feed their underground city of Lin Serr. Some days past, Rhodry had seen from far off a pall of smoke hanging over this rich farmland. Now he found his fears justified. From his high perch on dragonback, he could see, among the green fields and pastures, the irregular swathes of black cinders that meant pillaged farms. Nowhere did he see a single cow or sheep. Nothing moved but the wind, rising as the sun sank toward the west.

 
“Land!” he called out to Arzosah. “At that first burnt farm there. Maybe someone’s left alive.”

  No one was, and in the event, he was glad of it. When they landed in another huge scatter of ravens, he found the ruins of house and barns cold, with only wisps of gray ash, not smoke, blowing in the evening wind. Over everything hung the sickly sweet reek of burning, tinged with dead flesh. He walked back and forth, his silver dagger in his hand just for the comfort of it, saw here and there a dead man, lying hacked or broken, killed, all of them, from cuts of some bladed weapon wielded from above—he could postulate a horseback charge with long swords. Some of the corpses still clutched flails or wood-cutting axes, the only poor weapons they could grab. Some the flames had reached, but whether they were mercifully dead or only wounded when they’d caught fire, he couldn’t tell.

  Beyond the largest heap of timbers and crashed walls he could see what seemed to be poles of some sort, standing stuck in the ground, and he could make out shapes attached to them. His stomach clenched, anticipating.

  “It’s not pretty,” Arzosah said. “What they do to prisoners they take alive, I mean. I found some once, flying over Horsekin country.”

  With the dragon padding after, Rhodry forced himself to walk round and see for himself. He’d been expecting severed heads; what he found was much worse, a thicket of death, twelve poles and corpses in all, each pole stained black with old blood. Each prisoner had been stripped and then impaled, while still alive judging from the agony in their twisted faces, on long spears that had been thrust into each man’s anus and straight on through, so that the iron tip now stuck out between their shoulder blades just at the neck. Each corpse hung half-eaten by ravens, the remaining skin a mottled gray, and the flesh the maroon of cut meat.