Circle at center sc-1

by Douglas Niles

Z ystyl’s nostrils were clogged by dust, his flesh bruised by the rocks that had dropped from overhead. Still, he was alive, and finally these unnatural quakes seemed to be over. Furthermore, he could tell by the clicks and shouts made by his warriors that many of them had survived, and were now fanning out to discern the layout of the new shoreline. He absorbed their senses as they moved, drawing a map in his mind as he heard the echoes return from Delver cries, sensed the presence of water and dust in the midst of new formations of ground.

  He, meanwhile, stood on the slope high above the water, which had now settled to lap placidly against the multiple shores. Already he had discerned, by sound and echo, that there were many more obstacles on the water than there had been before. Rock jutted here and there, large islands pushed violently up from the sea. Furthermore, he had deduced that this was not necessarily a bad thing. After all, most if not all of his boats had undoubtedly been destroyed or sunk by falling debris, and it would be very useful to find a way that his warriors could get off this island by foot.

  Or, even more tempting, what if they could get all the way to Axial by foot? Like all Delver arcanes, he knew that the Seer city had survived through the years for two reasons: One, the light of coolfyre gave the Seers a significant advantage over the Blind Ones, and second, their homeland was an island, reachable to the Unmirrored only by boat. As a result, the two great invasions his people had launched during Zystyl’s lifetime had both been defeated in furious battle as soon as the Delvers tried to come ashore.

  This last time, it should have been different. He, himself, had planned the attack, and it was to begin with the destruction of each of these watch stations posted on Axial’s approaches. The greatest army ever assembled had departed Nightrock in more than a thousand boats, with the advance elements quickly, silently, landing on the isolated watch stations. That part of the operation, in fact, had been proceeding appropriately, until the utterly unprecedented rocking of their world had changed everything.

  The Delver didn’t know whether or not the Seer watchman and his woman had escaped the earthquake. He would have liked to take time to search for them-something about the woman, in particular, had touched him on a deep and visceral level. Not just her scent and her sound, but that taste of her cheek he had stolen, the tartness of sweat and fear, now tingled in his memory like a living thing.

  “I seek you, lord.” The words came from a dozen paces away, and he recognized the voice of his chief lieutenant.

  “Porutt-what have you found?”

  The other Delver made his way over the rough ground to Zystyl, where he could speak in a pale whisper, and only his listener could discern the sound.

  “We have identified a ridge of rock extending a long way from the island, negotiable by foot. My dwarves advanced more than a mile, and echoed another similar distance.”

  “Very well. How many of our regiment survived?”

  “More than two hundred here. There has been no word from any of the other regiments.”

  “Of course not-but we shall not assume they have perished. Use the horns, and we will commence the march.”

  “Yes, lord!”

  “And Porutt, one more thing.”

  “Lord?”

  “Let the men know I’m in the mood to toy with a captive… female, preferably. There will be a reward for anyone who can provide me with a little entertainment.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  Zystyl heard the sly smile in Porutt’s reply, and knew that his lieutenant would claim a portion of that reward. No matter… a good commander knew how to see to the morale of all his troops.

  He started after Porutt, anxious to explore the dry route that would lead them away from here, and perhaps bring them closer to a successful attack against the Seers. At the same time, a part of his memory lingered above, remembering the taste and the terror of a victim who had escaped.

  K arkald watched the Delvers march away, a long file snaking into the darkness of the Underworld. They followed the crest of a newly formed ridge that rose like a serpent’s spine from the swirling water. The Seer had pivoted the lone surviving beacon, and now used the illumination to observe the column moving in the general direction of Axial.

  Except that, to all appearances, that city no longer existed.

  Numerous cuts and bruises wrapped his body in a cocoon of pain, but Karkald forced himself to move. He climbed down from the lens of the beacon to find Darann still staring into the distance, as if she willed some glimmer of light to sparkle on the dark horizon. But, as it had been since they observed the city’s destruction, there was not a single glint of illumination, or hope.

  The watchman turned away, fearing that the heaviness of his heart would reflect in his eyes. Some instinct told him that he had to be very strong now, that he and Darann would need all of his abilities, every ounce of his confidence, in order to have any chance at survival. Despite the agony that ripped his back, that burned in his legs, he could not yield to his weakness.

  Even with the departure of so many invaders, Zystyl had left several dozen of his warriors on the island of the watch station, including many waiting on the portico or hiding in the nooks and crannies nearby. Clearly, whatever part of the den hadn’t been destroyed remained unattainable to the two Seers.

  Again Karkald found himself looking at the departing Delvers, amazed that so many of them had survived such rampant destruction. Several of the Blind Ones bore long, golden trumpets, and periodically raised them to broadcast a blast of sound through the First Circle. This time, a few seconds after they brayed another call, an answering blast rang through from the distant darkness. Moments later still another sounded, making it clear that the Delvers were all around them.

  “Is there something strange about the water?” Darann asked softly. She had turned her attention to the Darksea below them. “Should it be so far away?”

  Karkald was about to answer that the island’s shoreline had expanded, but when he looked again he saw that she was right-the water level was very low. It seemed that a patch of the surface farther out spiraled like a whirlpool. He limped up to realign the beacon, and there was the proof, clear in the light of coolfyre.

  “The Darksea,” he whispered, awe and caution combining to mute his voice. “It’s draining away!”

  Over the next half hour more and more of the sea bottom came into view. He passed the beam back and forth, and though the light reflected from many pools and lakes, it was obvious that most of what had once been the Darksea was now dry land. Even more alarming, his beacon had picked up numerous companies of Delvers, all using the trumpets to coordinate a gathering on a low rise a few miles away.

  “It’s an army,” he breathed softly. “This was the start of a full-scale invasion!”

  “What are we going to do?” Darann asked. The dwarfwoman’s voice was calm, but he supposed that she was still numb from the shock. At least she remembered to speak in a whisper, since many Delvers remained only a hundred feet below them.

  “We can’t go down there.” Karkald stated the obvious.

  “Then we go up, right?” she replied.

  He nodded. It was, of course, the only option, but at the same time it made for a daunting prospect.

  “We’ll have to climb for a mile or more,” he warned. “But with luck, we’ll find some caves overhead, some means of getting”-he realized with a stab of grief that he didn’t even know where they were going-“away from here,” he concluded, knowing from the pain in her eyes that Darann had experienced the same realization.

  “How far?” she asked, her voice even more hushed than her usual whisper.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, panicked at this failure of knowledge. He tried to think quickly. “The beacons have a range of a few miles, and when they’re tilted upward they can illuminate the ceiling… That puts it two miles away, perhaps.”

  “Can you climb that high?”

  “It’s been done before,” Karkald replied, knowing that he was
avoiding her question.

  “And then what?” Darann asked, her bright eyes shining in the nearly pitch darkness.

  He felt rising exasperation and worked hard to stay calm. “There are lots of caves up there, cracks in the ceiling leading up, into the midrock. There’ll be fungus there, and bats… maybe even pools of fish!” Karkald’s mind veered away from the dangers, the savage wyslets that prowled in the darkness and preyed on isolated dwarves, the vast stretches of bare rock with no food or water. Or the most horrible prospect of all: that they would be blocked by a thousand feet of bare, seamless rock. Such a barrier would end their hopes as certainly as any Delver blade or wyslet fang.

  “The midrock.” Darann blinked, whispering slowly. “How thick is it?”

  Karkald almost snorted his irritation. “How should I know?”

  By the sight of her eyes he knew she was shaking her head. “You don’t understand… to Nayve. How far is it to the Fourth Circle?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever measured it,” he replied, amazed at the audacity implied by her question. “Dwarves have made it that far in the past-though not, perhaps, since we got the coolfyre.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time some dwarves tried to go there again!”

  “All the way to Nayve? What makes you think we could do it?”

  “What choice do we have?” Darann spat back at him. “Stay here, and starve? Go down there, and get killed by Delvers?”

  “We-we won’t starve, at least not right away,” Karkald said, even as his mind, unwillingly, started to grapple with her suggestion. He gestured along a narrow ledge leading away from their perch, a path toward a barely visible crack in the rocky face. “I stored some supplies in there a half dozen intervals ago, in case I got involved in a project up on the cliff and had to spend a few cycles up here.”

  “Supplies?” His wife looked hopeful. “Like what?”

  In a few minutes he had retrieved the cache, a small backpack that he dropped to the ground between them. “Spare boots-they should fit you,” he announced, remembering Darann’s bare feet. “A few sacks filled with water, an empty pouch or two. Not much.” Karkald felt apologetic as he looked at the meager stash.

  “That’s good!” The dwarfwoman was already pulling on the boots. “At least enough for us to get started. I can carry this, and you can carry your tools.” She stood, lifting the backpack, nodding in satisfaction as she tested the feel of the supple boots.

  Karkald, meanwhile, had stopped thinking of objections. He was heartened by his wife’s enthusiasm, determined to do what he could to maintain her rising spirits. “Let’s go to Nayve, then,” he declared. “Are you ready to climb?”

  With a resolute motion, she nodded, cinched the straps of the backpack, and looked up the steep cliff overhead. “Can you brighten the first stretch for a minute, so that we can see the best way to go?” she wondered.

  “Yes… and we can take some flamestone along with us, enough to light our immediate surroundings for a few intervals.”

  “Good. Then let’s go.”

  Karkald too looked up, running his hands over his tools out of long-trained instinct. “Hammer, chisel… I don’t have a hatchet!” He almost raised his voice when he encountered the empty loop on his belt.

  “It’s planted in a Delver’s forehead, remember?” Darann said wryly. She pulled something from her own waistline, and he saw that she had one of the cleavers from the kitchen. “Will this do instead?”

  “I… I guess it will have to,” he replied. The cooking implement was neither as heavy nor as well-balanced as his own hatchet, but it had a similar shape and, in the back of his mind, he admitted that it would perform many of the same functions.

  “Hammer, chisel, hatchet, file.” These were now in order, arrayed in leather loops around his belt. “Knife, pick, rope, spear.” And his final tools were also in place, knife and pick in chest pouches, rope around his shoulders, and spear in its tube on his back.

  “One more thing,” Karkald said, as he led Darann up the ladder beside the beacon. He scooped up some of the flamestone in his hands, then trickled as much of it as he could into the loose pouches of his tunic. His wife held out a watertight sack, and he filled that as well. Then he turned the gauge on the feeder down to its tightest setting. The beacon faded to to a pale spark, barely brighter than a candle flame.

  “It will last for years at this setting,” Karkald informed her. “It might let some other Seers know, sometime, that we were here.”

  She nodded mutely, and he knew she was remembering her family. Could they be alive? Given the utter extinction of Axial’s lights, he knew there was very little hope.

  But then Darann put her hand on his arm. “Shouldn’t we leave a message… some kind of note, to let people know what happened-to us, and with the Delvers?”

  “You’re right,” he agreed immediately. “I know where to write it.”

  He reached into the door of the feeder and pulled out the upper hatch, which was a thin sheet of pure gold. Removing his file, he poised it over the surface. “What should I say?”

  “Give the date.”

  “Year six hundred and seventy of the Tenth Millennium, interval three, cycle thirty-two, right?”

  She nodded-Darann had always been better than Karkald at keeping track of dates.

  “Attacked by Delvers… World rocked by tremors… saw Axial darken…” He murmured as he wrote, painstakingly engraving each letter into the soft gold.

  “We are climbing away from here. Signed, Karkald and Darann, Clan Watcher.”

  “And Clan Silkmaker,” added Darann, stating her family’s clan. “Put that there, too.”

  Karkald stifled his urge to object. She had joined his clan with the marriage… but still, it was only practical to put as much information here as they could.

  “Very well… Clan Silkmaker.”

  He placed the sheaf of gold against the hopper, and stood. “There are stairs leading partway up from here-they’ll take us some way toward the roof,” he said, indicating the narrow stone steps.

  Darann started up, while Karkald’s hands moved through the routine.

  “Hammer, chisel, hatchet, file. Knife pick rope spear.”

  And then he, too, started toward the highest reaches of the only world he had ever known.

  6

  The Tapestry

  Threads of life and lovers, colors bright or gray, a picture made of human life,

  And warriors born to slay.

  From the Tapestry of the Worldweaver, Chronicles of a Circle Called Earth

  Tamarwind and Ulfgang came to her rooms as Belynda prepared to attend a meeting in the Senate forum.

  “Just to say goodbye,” Tam explained. Once more he was dressed in his green traveling clothes and boots of soft leather. Ulfgang pranced around, white coat groomed to a cottony fluff. The dog was clearly anxious to go, but the elven scout seemed inclined to linger. “And I wanted to tell you that it was nice to see you again.”

  “Yes…” Again Belynda felt that unusual flush spreading up her neck. “I… me, too. May the Goddess watch over your journey.” She felt jumpy, unusually worried-which she took to be a lingering reaction to the quake of several days earlier. “Do you know if the road to Argentian suffered any damage?”

  “A few rockslides in the hills-that’s what the enchantress saw. Even if they’re not cleared out, we’ll have no trouble getting over them. The elves of the delegation are gathered and waiting for us on the Avenue of Metal. They’re anxious to get back home-I think the city has overawed them a bit. In any event, we should get across the causeway by midday.

  Ulfang, who had been quivering, tail wagging while he tried to stand still, suddenly uttered a short bark, then hung his head in embarrassment. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s just that I haven’t traveled in a long time… I guess the excitement of departure got to me.”

  “Well, you have a good trip too,” Belynda said, touching the dog’s tufted white topknot
. “And hurry back.”

  Tamarwind took her arms in his hands, startling Belynda with the embrace as he stared into her eyes. “I would like to see you again… I hope that I can.”

  “Yes!” she replied, holding absolutely still until he turned and, with an easy wave, ambled away. Ulfgang, tail still wagging, trotted ahead, then waited impatiently for the elf. In both of them she perceived-and envied-the eagerness to be starting on the journey that would carry them halfway across Nayve.

  Belynda felt a sadly contrasting emotion as she joined several other ambassadors in the slow, dignified procession to the white-columned building that rose in stately majesty beside the College. Here the Senate convened in Grand Forum once every interval of forty days. The sessions were held in the great chamber, and were attended by elven sage-ambassadors as well as at least one spokesperson from the druids Grove. Normally Belynda found the sessions tedious and time-wasting. She had long ago determined that the more people involved in a process, the slower and more frustrating that process became, and there would be very many people indeed in the Grand Forum.

  The senators themselves numbered nearly threescore, as every race of Nayve was represented by anywhere from two to twenty senators in that august body. Of course, it was the elves who had the twenty-the next most numerous group were the eight gnomish ambassadors. Some groups, such as the dryads and goblins, were limited to only a pair of senators. In theory, however, the Senate gave voice to every one of the cultures inhabiting Nayve.

  As to the sage-ambassadors, there were more than a hundred in attendance. Each represented an elven community in the Fourth Circle-or at least a part of such an entity. Indeed, twelve of the ambassadors represented neighborhoods in Circle at Center, while the others, such as Belynda, were there in the interests of more rural realms like Argentian. The eldest of the local representatives was Rallaphan, a silver-haired patriarch who had held his seat for nine centuries. Belynda dipped her head as he marched past, honoring her with a cool nod. The sage-ambassador, like everyone else, stepped back to allow the regal senator to go by.