by Ian Irvine
“Whenever he was wrestling with a problem, Rulke worked unceasingly with his hands. He constantly made strange devices, never saying what they were for, and casting most of them aside as soon as they were done. And Pitlis spent each night with the cast-offs of the day, feverishly examining them to conceive Rulke’s true plan.
“Picture the two of them together. Rulke was a giant, a great black-bearded bear of a man, his hair so dark that it gleamed blue. He would have been head and shoulders above me and twice my weight. He was inhumanly handsome, and charming too. You could not but like him and want to be in his company.
“And Pitlis was a big man too, his thigh the equal of your waist. Long and lean in the face he was, with a broad nose and a square chin. Not handsome, not in the least, but he had a will of iron. A brilliant man but not a likeable one.
“But even yet his caution prevailed. Pitlis watched Rulke for the smallest slip, and tested him in various ways, but Rulke made no mistakes and took no advantages. For tens of years they worked, for time was of no moment to either, and Pitlis became obsessed with his creation—a work more subtle, more harmonious, more magnificent even than Tar Gaarn. A city utterly different, the epitome of the Charon. He knew it was his greatest work.
“Piths often met with the Council, yet no one could fathom what Rulke was up to. But in the times when Rulke had to go away, Pitlis took a petty revenge. He made tiny changes to the plans—changes that twisted Rulke’s conception ever so slightly, though always ones that made it more harmonious, more hauntingly beautiful, more complete. And at last the design was done.
“But somehow it was not quite right. Some detail was lacking for its perfection, though neither could tell what it was. Rulke was visibly distressed. ‘In the past I’ve walked in the cities of the Aachim,’ he said, ‘and each had about it a fusion, a coherence that is missing here, that I must have. If only I could see what it was.’
“ ‘How was it solved in Tar Gaarn?’ was always his final question. ‘If only I could see Tar Gaarn. But I do not ask that’ And he turned to other matters and never mentioned it again.
“As the days passed Rulke became more and more distressed at the failure. And at last Pitlis—”
“No!” cried Karan involuntarily.
Llian gasped a breath and wiped the carmine gloss off his mouth. “I don’t think I can finish it,” he croaked, and there were tears of shame in his eyes.
“No matter,” said Karan, unsuccessfully trying to hide her disappointment. Though it had been years since he had told a tale so badly, it meant everything to her.
Llian struggled on. “ ‘I would not have you betray your people so,’ said Rulke, and Pitlis was shamed and relieved. Then came the blow! ‘Besides, I have learned you so well that yesterday I took your shape and went right through Tar Gaarn undetected.’
“Pitlis was struck with horror at his folly, and Rulke’s arrogance, and the genius that could allow him to do such an impossible thing. Yet the work had become a drug that he could not give up. Soon Pitlis went back and worked anew on the plans, effecting subtle changes that enhanced the beauty and perfection of the work.
“Months went by, and Pitlis slowly realized that Rulke was still not happy, that something still troubled him. ‘It is here and here and here,’ he said, pointing to certain subterranean structures. ‘Such tiny details that I scarce dare mention, only that I know you strive for perfection in all things.’
“Pitlis looked where he indicated, on all the dozens and hundreds of plans of the great city, and indeed saw tiny imperfections there, insignificant asymmetries and disharmonies, though only in structures that would never be seen. Now he began to think Rulke’s criticisms trivial, knew that they were of no moment, yet so humbly were they offered and such was his pursuit of perfection mat he set to and came to alternative, more harmonious solutions.
“Now Pitlis was exhausted, but he knew that the city was the most perfect thing he had ever designed, or could. ‘I am weary in body and soul,’ he said. ‘I can do no more.’
“Rulke thanked him, proclaiming the work perfect, and looked through the plans one by one. But then he frowned. ‘What is this,’ he cried, pointing to one. ‘This spoils the whole. I cannot accept it.’
“Pitlis proposed alternatives. Rulke rejected all angrily, as though Pitlis sought to cheat him. Pitlis was desperate, intimidated. Would nothing satisfy him? ‘Show me the plans of Tar Gaarn,’ Rulke demanded. ‘I would see how the problem was solved there.’ And by now Pitlis was so weary of the project that he could think of nothing but a way to end it, and so cowed by the sudden imperiousness of Rulke that he agreed.”
Karan jumped. Her mouth was round as an O.
“ ‘So!’ said Rulke, and stared at him for a full minute. ‘You would betray your people after all. I thought as much. That is the defect that allowed the Hundred to take your world from you. But I do not need the plans after all. There is no more harmonious solution.’
“Then he thanked Pitlis with great courtesy and went away to his own lands. But after he was gone Pitlis, aimless now that the project was completed, came across a small chart fallen (or perhaps deliberately left) behind a cupboard. It was a detailed drawing, in Rulke’s hand, of one of the most secret defenses of Tar Gaarn. Rulke had learned Pitlis’s mind so well that he had been able to deduce the secrets of Tar Gaarn without ever having seen the plans.
“Now the veil was snatched away from Pitlis’s eyes and his folly became clear to him. Rulke had been playing with him-the city, the devices, the excuse of the Forbidding, all had been just a ruse. All along his plan had been to break Tar Gaarn. How foolish Pitlis’s petty revenges seemed, the tiny changes to the plans that Rulke had never noticed. And all through that brutal and interminable winter he lived in dread, tormented by a negligence so great that he could not bear to speak it.
“And in the spring his fears were realized, for a great army came out of the south and besieged Tar Gaarn. The Aachim called on their revered leader, but Pitlis was paralyzed by shame and dread, and told them what he had done. And though they resisted valiantly, Tar Gaarn was doomed, for despair had fallen on them like a shadow, and Rulke knew their secret defenses. Within a matter of weeks the city was taken and the Aachim put to the sword. Only a remnant escaped, fleeing into the high mountains. Pitlis followed behind them, a tormented husk of a man, reviled, abandoned. After that he lived alone, never having a home, wandering through other lands, longing for death but unable to find it.
“Years later, as he wandered even in the lands of Rulke, a beggar on the roads, he heard rumor of a great new city. Alcifer it was called, the most magnificent in all Santhenar. A sick horror tore at his insides, but he must see it, and he made his weary way there. He came into the city, and there was confronted by Rulke.
“ ‘See what you have created,’ Rulke said with a smile. ‘Never was the character of the Charon more perfectly realized. Soon I will put my hands to the levers and hurl the power of Alcifer at the Forbidding, and it will shatter like window glass. No more will the Hundred be paralyzed by the dread of extinction. Our seed will flower across the Three Worlds.’
“Pitlis understood at last. Alcifer was magnificent: a city vain and proud; cruel and predatory; majestic; perfect. So he had made it But it was also a construct—and all its alchemists and engineers, scholars and toilers, and Rulke himself, made up a single living machine dedicated to a single end, the breaking of the Forbidding. Rulke had deceived him with the only story that he could never have believed-the truth!
“Never had he hated anything more, or anyone, and he staggered at Rulke in a rage. But Pitlis had aged and withered since Tar Gaarn. Rulke defended himself with his scepter and Pitlis fell broken on the road.
“ ‘So dies the greatest of the Aachim,’ said Rulke, ‘and their dreams with him. Such genius, such folly. Their fatal flaw.’
“ ‘Put your hands to the levers then,’ gasped Pitlis, and what might have been a smile of triumph broke through his
death rictus.
“And so ended the hopes of the Aachim. They withdrew into the mountains and the past, nursing their hopeless revenge, and took no further part in the affairs of Santhenar. Just one of Rulke’s many betrayals, though possibly the most subtle; so he was known as the Great Betrayer. Thus the tale ends.”
The worst I have ever told, he said to himself.
Karan was silent. That story is the Aachim, she thought. Magnificent. Tragic. Doomed. She opened her eyes again to find the mist gone and the sky teeming with stars. “Some of them came and built Shazmak after that,” was all she said, wrapping the cold covers around her.
“And yet,” rasped Llian, “it leads inevitably to the next tale. One day Rulke did grasp the levers, compelled Alcifer to his will, and directed all its force against the shimmering wall of the Forbidding. At once the wall bulged outward, a great tumor pressing into the void. And if it were not for those tiny changes Pitlis had made long ago, he would have broken through. But at the last moment the tumor turned inside out and pinched off a fragment of the void. Then the Council of Santhenar, who had long bided their time, struck, using the Proscribed Experiments.”
“The what?” said Karan.
“Sorcerous procedures that were forbidden long ago because of the risk that they would get out of control. They forced Rulke inside, severing his control of Alcifer. The tumor collapsed to a bubble, the unbreakable prison of the Nightland, that touches everything and nothing equally. A thousand years later Rulke is still trapped there. So Pitlis had his revenge after all.
“And that is where the great enmity arose between Mendark and Yggur. But that is yet another tale.”
Coughing woke her soon after from a dream of Rulke and his great city. Karan was almost overcome by the magnificence and malevolence of the Charon, and afraid to sleep again, for fear of her dreams.
Then, brooding about the tale, she was struck by a horrible thought. Tensor is just like Pitlis, she realized in the belllike clarity of the night. Suddenly all that she had ever known about Tensor turned inside out. The dour, obdurate face that she had always seen was just a mask. Underneath was a vengeful, implacable, impossibly proud man; not reserved but calculating, not so much a leader as a manipulator.
She must never let Tensor get the Mirror—it would only fuel his hate and rage, give him the chance of power that he had never dared reach for. Llian had solved her dilemma after all.
Llian was sleeping now, breathing rapidly, almost panting, but as she listened his breathing slowed right down and suddenly stopped. She waited, holding her own breath, but he did not breathe again.
He’s dying! she thought, and it felt like a fish-hook had been dragged right through her belly. She flung her covers out of the way, crying, “Llian, wake up!” but just then he started breathing again and soon was gasping, as fast as before. There was frost in his scrubby beard. She stroked the hair off his brow tenderly, and he turned, smiling up at her, but the smile was ripped off his face by another fit of coughing that left him limp as a rag and his lips red. Then he turned over and drifted back to sleep.
Between her fear that Llian would die, and this sudden new terror of Tensor, Karan could sleep no more. But Tensor was not in Shazmak, she realized, for he had come through Bannador early in the summer. He was going all the way to Stassor, in the far east, and would be away for a year.
By the time the morning came, Karan had managed to convince herself that it would all be right after all, that Rael and her other friends would be there in Shazmak, and that anyway Tensor could not be as bad as she had painted him. I know he cares for me, she thought in the lassitude of her weariness, unable to cast away the loyalty that she had always owed to the great Aachim. If Rael is there, and Tensor is not, I will give the Mirror to them. But if by some chance Tensor has returned, I will take it with me.
Llian was no better in the morning, and so weak that he could barely stand. His throat was so inflamed that he could not eat. Terribly thirsty, he drank half a bottle of water and promptly heaved it up again.
In the cold, clear air they saw how the land of Chollaz was outlined by the range of mountains on which they stood. They ran in a straggling oval to the south, the far end of the oval being completed by a rampart of jagged and unclimbable peaks. The land was cut across by a chasm whose path was traced out by the early-morning mist—the gorge of the River Garr, which looped its way from below them south-east and through the encircling mountains into Bannador. There was no sign of life—not a village, bird or bush.
“Where do we go now?” Llian croaked.
“This way. Come!”
Llian took her arm, and she led him down the pass along well-made and cunningly concealed paths that drew them eventually into the gorge of the Garr, which at this point was a scant forty spans across. Down, down they plunged. Now the way was a narrow shelf carved from the living rock, hardly wide enough for one person. At intervals a passing bay was cut into the cliff. The shelf bore neither handhold nor rail, and fell away to dark, unguessable depths on his right, where the sun penetrated only at midday, and in the winter not at all. Llian’s fear of falling was numbed by his illness, otherwise he would never have made it.
“I can’t,” he said, as Karan tried to lead him onto the shelf. “I’ll fall.”
“You must. There’s no other way. Hold my hand and walk behind me. Think of nothing but the next step. Look neither down nor up.”
Llian stood up and took her hand. The warmth helped, and her presence reassured him a little. She squeezed his hand, smiled and, still holding him tightly, took a step backwards. He shuffled forward one step. She took another but he did not.
“What is it?” she asked gently.
“I’m afraid for you now.”
“You needn’t be. I lived here for six years. I’m used to these paths.”
“Turn around. I can’t bear to watch you walking backwards.”
She laughed. “Oh. All right!” and she did so, still holding his hand.
The ledge wound back and forth down into the ravine until, reaching a level, it flattened out and followed the meandering course of the river downstream. The frequent spurs were cut through by narrow tunnels, their walls like polished glass, but undecorated apart from carvings, so weathered that they were unidentifiable, over the entrance and exit of each. Llian looked around him. There was nothing to see but the smooth dark walls of the cliff looming above and the river foaming far below.
“Surely we must be near now?” he asked in the mid-afternoon.
“We’ve gone perhaps two leagues as the river winds, but less than one in a direct line. We won’t reach Shazmak until tomorrow afternoon.”
Karan had expected Llian to get better as they went down, but he coughed up bloody froth until the front of his coat was stained red with it. She felt as though she was marching him to his doom.
And when she thought about Tensor, it might have been her doom too. If Tensor was in Shazmak after all, she would not be able to hold out against him. He was overwhelming. He had always seemed to know when she had done something wrong. She would never be able to keep such a secret from him.
If only Llian wasn’t with her, she would have been two or three days further on by now, and only days away from food. She would have crawled all the way on her belly, eating snow and stones, just to be home again.
They now found the path to be in poor repair, the edges crumbling. Several times their way was blocked by heaps of broken rock, one of which they were unable to scramble over and had to clear laboriously by hand, in spells, for there was room for only one to work at a time. Water flowed down the cliff, showering on their heads; the stone under their feet was slick with pink slime. Further along, the path had broken away and they had to creep across the raw rock on their bellies. Llian was like a zombie, stepping where Karan told him to step, waiting when she told him to wait, allowing her to place his hands on the right handholds. He knew with a certainty that was absolute that the next step, or the one
after, would fail, the next handhold would crumble within his grip and he would fall silently into the chasm. So the day passed.
The light had begun to fade when they came around a gentle curve in the gorge and looked down on a straight stretch running toward the south. Not far ahead, where the gorge narrowed, the path was joined to another from the east by a slender bridge built of metal and wires; a strange, delicate thing.
“That way leads to Bannador and Gothryme, my family home,” said Karan.
“Why do we not go that way then?” Llian gasped.
“We’d never get there. Gothryme is at least a week away, at your pace.”
As they drew near, the sight of the bridge raised Llian from his torpor. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It is built the way a spider would build—so delicate, so beautiful, so irregular. No engineer of Iagador would ever make such a thing.”
“That is the way the Aachim have always built,” said Karan, looking at it with a kind of satisfaction. “Many times have I stood here and gazed at it, the link between my two lives.”
“The road is better here.”
“Yes. Of the three paths into Shazmak, this is the only way still used.”
Across the gorge the path continued downstream for fifty paces or so before sweeping east along the side of a tributary gorge. The ravine was sufficiently broad and open here that, though they were well below the rim, they could see the tips of the eastern ranges in the distance.
They camped near the end of the bridge, where the cliff had been cut back from the ledge, leaving an open space perhaps five paces across. In one corner a jumble of boulders, where part of the cliff had collapsed, offered shelter from the wind. And shelter they needed, for with nightfall the breeze had intensified to a frigid gale that howled in the structure of the bridge and chilled them even through their thick clothing.
“It’s going to be a grim night,” said Karan, as she struggled to make a shelter with their cloaks. There was nothing to make a fire with.
