by GJ Kelly
When finally they reached the north side of the roundtower the sun was climbing high, and they paused, shielding their eyes against the glare. The blue-stone seemed bluer, the white-stone whiter, and the twinkling and glittering seemed somehow subdued now with the sun overhead. The view, however, seemed much the same as from the south side, though if anything, more unsettling for the lack of shadows.
“I wonder…” Arramin sighed, and trailed off.
“You were wondering if anything within the library survived,” Allazar said softly, knowingly.
“Yes. Yes I was, Master Allazar. Can you imagine the treasures which once reposed there? Treasures today, though doubtless commonplace tomes when Calhaneth thrived.”
“You would venture there? In truth?” Gawain gasped, and he and the others eyed the old wizard with a mixture of incredulity and respect for his courage.
“Well…” Arramin shrugged.
“There are no signs of fire damage, not that I can see,” Allazar whispered, shielding his eyes against the glare and gazing anew at the round tower.
“And they built domes like that in the old days, did they?” Gawain muttered, “Just to give the impression of it being a breakfast egg fresh opened for dippy soldiers?”
“Clearly the dome is damaged, Longsword,” Allazar conceded, “But it was likely of simple construction and for visual effect. Wood, with copper sheeting I would guess, judging by the verdigris shade of the remaining parts. Its destruction may have occurred long after the fire. Weather, perhaps, wind and lightning.”
“And you think a thousand years of weather would fail to affect any contents of that tower which managed, by some miracle, to survive a fire which razed the entire city?”
Allazar shrugged, but there was a twinkle in his eyes, and in Arramin’s. Gawain shook his head sadly.
“Look about you, wizards,” Gawain said sternly. “Behold the destruction, observe the sickliness of the growth here on the verge of the Wheel. See the impossibility that is the survival of that,” he nodded towards the tower, “That mausoleum you wish to explore.”
“I hardly think mausoleum appropriate, my lord,” Arramin protested gently. “Monument, perhaps…”
“And you would trespass there?”
Allazar leaned expectantly on his staff. “It wouldn’t take long. A quick walk across the pavement, up the steps and through the colonnades. A peep into the roundtower beyond and if all is destroyed, then back again. If anything survives, however, an hour or two of exploration can hardly make a difference to our journey to Ostinath.”
“Then you’re fools. Or mad. Or both. I’d wager there’s not so much as a speck of pigeon-plop on those statues up there, and you’d go where not even birds dare to venture? Not for all the precious ore in Threlland would I set foot upon those stones. Nor shall I permit my lady to go there.”
And as if in silent agreement with Gawain’s stern assertion, Rollaf and Terryn, and Tyrane, took a single step backwards, away from the spectacle before them.
Arramin sighed. “’Tis a pity, indeed. Certainly ours are the first eyes to gaze upon this marvel in centuries, and our feet the first of all the kindred to tread this path.”
Gawain eyed the old wizard solemnly. The sadness he beheld in Arramin’s eyes was no doubt real. Here, within reach, stood the undeniable and stony fact of Calhaneth, almost as it must have been in the wizard’s mind all the years since first he read of this fabled place.
Allazar seemed to guess the younger man’s thoughts. “You must understand, Longsword, to us, as wizards, the roundtower of Calhaneth is symbol of the highest aspirations of our kind. To us, Arristanas was himself a towering figure, representing as he did the purest and noblest of Zaine’s ideals. To see the destruction all around us is painful. To see the tower preserved almost intact and not to venture there is an agony which will haunt us to the end of our days.”
“If it is a monument to reason, Allazar, then use your reason. There is certainly a reason why nothing lives here. Not even moss, nor weeds, nor lichen. Every instinct tells me to flee this place.”
Gawain folded his arms and stared at the two wizards before swivelling his hips to gaze once more at the roundtower. Breezes stirred the air around them, but there was no sound, no leaves rustled, no flapping of wings, no buzz of insects.
“Your lady has seen nothing either of darkness, or of light,” Allazar prompted gently.
Gawain sighed. “I cannot deny Arramin of Callodon his right to choose his own path. I can only appeal to his reason. His knowledge of the canal and the great boat-lifts he’s spoken of is needed. I certainly can deny you, Allazar, you are the First of Raheen and I am the crown. Yet I will not. If Arramin abandons all reason and ventures where even the worms of the earth will not go, then for the protection of the knowledge he carries you must go with him. Your hands aren’t burned and won’t flinch at the prospect of using a stick if you have to.”
Allazar nodded. “Then, your Majesty, if Arramin of the D’ith Sek and Callodon chooses to lead, I shall follow.”
“Oh dear me,” Arramin sighed, “My lords I am far from accustomed to being the cause of such conflicting feelings. I am a simple old fellow who has spent his life in books in the study of history. Yet standing before me is history itself, preserved against the ravages of time as if by some kindly providence. I do understand your reservations, my lord, I assure you, I do. But I could not bear to end my days not knowing. And if it is to war we go in the north, and I fear it is, then I also fear I shall not see Calhaneth again.”
Gawain took a deep breath, and then simply nodded, letting out the breath slowly, casting his doubtful gaze first at the wizards and then all around. Elayeen, flanked by Kahla and Jaxon, stood off to his left, with Tyrane further on. They too seemed anxious, even the impassive stare of the eldengaze was betrayed by the rapid movements of Elayeen’s head, scanning for dangers only she might see.
Tentatively, Arramin stepped forward, and then inched his boot further onto the cracked paving stone at the fringe of the Wheel of Thought. Nothing happened, and so he eased it a little further, and then stepped on to the pavement. He paused, and took another pace, and when likewise nothing occurred, he let out his breath and smiled nervously. Another pace, and then two more, and the white-stone paving gave way to blue-stone, the bands of different paving material alternating, giving the whole circular pavement a chequered appearance.
Allazar took a deep breath and with a last glance and a nod to Gawain, he strode without hesitation to catch up with Arramin, and side by side, the two wizards began their slow and cautious walk across the Wheel. Only the sound of their booted heels and Allazar’s staffing rapping on the stone accompanied them; there was not a bird in the sky, not an insect in the air.
Gwyn snuffled. She was nervous, and so were the other horses. It wasn’t a snort of alarm or a warning, simply a snuffle to express her discomfort with this place. Gawain understood completely. The heart of Calhaneth was simply and entirely wrong.
A sudden calm seemed to descend over the centre of the city, the air still and oppressive, and there was a sense of pressure rising. The horses shuffled nervously, backing away little by little towards the gloom of the woodlands, north, away from the tower. Gawain felt it too, and so did the others if their nervous glances were any sign. He looked up, and thought he saw a faint shimmering around the broken eggshell dome of the roundtower, as though something lay within, heating the air and making it waver.
Allazar and Arramin were thirty or forty yards away now, walking purposefully, caution apparently abandoned. From the corner of his eye, Gawain spotted a large pigeon speeding west to east across the city and he turned his head to watch it. When the bird flew over the clearing wherein the heart of Calhaneth stood preserved, it gave a sudden lurch and a twist, flapping violently, attempting to turn away and speed as fast as it could from the centre of the city. But it was too late. As it neared the colonnades girdling the roundtower, a single, pencil-thin streamer of
lighting flicked from within the broken dome, leaving nothing but a wisp of smoke where the pigeon had been.
“Back,” Gawain said, instinctively, and turned his gaze to the two wizards walking oblivious to all, the top of the tower hidden from their view now by the entablature of the colonnades.
“Back!” Gawain cried, sudden alarm surging through him, and the wizards stopped and turned their worried gaze towards him.
Gawain remembered the whistling kettle that had been the surge of ancient power in the Great Hall of Raheen before the circles had unleashed their great blast of light. And though he couldn’t hear the pressure rising now as he had then, he felt it. He felt it as surely as if the sound were blasting his eardrums, wave after wave of pressure slowly building.
“Back! Back!” he screamed, “Run! Into the forest!”
Kahla and Jaxon, fear etched suddenly on their faces, spun Elayeen around and lifted her bodily, but Gawain simply pushed them aside and heaved her over his shoulder.
“Run! Run! Now!”
And run they did, headlong, the horses whinnying and charging before them, crashing through the spindly saplings and miserable twisted ferns and weeds, dodging larger blocks of stone and statues and debris.
Behind him, Gawain heard a hissing, rising, becoming almost deafening, becoming a sizzling and humming which seemed to penetrate his chest, making the air in his lungs vibrate with the low harmonics of the note, and he paused for a moment, and stooping under Elayeen’s weight over his shoulders he turned to look back. He saw the faces of Allazar and Arramin, eyes and mouths wide, gripped by the panic Gawain had inspired with his yelling as they crashed into the tree line, such as it was. And he saw the broken dome of the roundtower of Calhaneth, glowing, and glimpsed a malevolent white light within it, streamers of lightning flickering, striking out at random, arcing down to dance upon statue, column, and pavement.
He turned again and carried on running, but then other noises grew, terrifying noises, swelling over and above the sizzling bolts of lightning fizzing from the tower. Screams.
Screams of terror from men, women, and horses. The shattering crack of a lightning blast followed by screams of agony, cries for help and boots on flagstones, running, hundreds of them. Names, names being screamed all around them, the air filled with the sound of a city gripped by catastrophe.
Theo! Theo! This way! Run! In Stanas’ name run for your life! A sound like a flag snapping in a gust of wind, and a scream…
Eyan, leave it! It’s too heavy! And then a crash, and a cry which ended abruptly. Eyan!
Names! Men screaming for their wives, wives for their husbands, mothers for their children and children for their mothers. The unmistakeable whoosh of fire billowing, and screams of agony from people and beasts alike. The shattering of glass, the cracking of wood, splintering of stone, cries of warning and then the rumbling roar of a wall coming down.
In the gathering gloom of the thicker growth of trees Gawain stumbled and lost his footing, barely managing to stick out his right leg to break an otherwise nasty fall. He swung Elayeen off his shoulder, eased her to the ground and covered her body and head beneath his, clutching her close as the sounds of horror rose around them. Before he screwed his eyes tight shut he caught sight of a statue toppled from its plinth to their left, three quarters buried in the forest debris, and then, with his eyes tight shut, he heard the sound of wheels, and a carriage, the dreadful, gut-wrenching screams of a horse thundering clear over the top of them, and then the splintering collision of wood against stone as that carriage collided with the plinth and the statue upon it.
Yathami! Yathami! Eem fyeran! Eem fyeran! From no more than ten feet behind and to Gawain’s, and the crackling of fire, screaming, deafening, the elf burning alive in the wreckage of the carriage which had toppled the statue.
Names, and screaming. Peeta! Peeta don’t leave me! from in front of them, then Leeyana! Leeyana this way! to their right, and then the crackle of white lightning and the roar of flames, a brief cry and the shattering of glass. Horrible cries, people and animals burning in the intense heat, the sounds deafening. Wood beams exploding into flame, fire leaping from building to building not by lick of flame or fall of ash and ember, but flashing across narrow alleys and streets such was the intensity of the heat. Sizzling blasts of white lightning, and sickening thuds as it rent people asunder, people running back into the Wheel away from the searing heat of fire in the colleges before them only to be struck down by that dread white fire from the tower.
A gathering, swirling roar as the rising heat and circular passages began churning the air, a malevolent wind growing, fanning flames, carrying the noises of death and destruction from afar, spreading the horror further out from the centre of the city. Gawain covered his ears, trying to block out the sound, but to no avail, it was all around them, and it was rising from the ground beneath them, all the terrible, indescribable horror of a great city in flames, its thousands of inhabitants, men, women, children and animals choking and dying, trampling over each other to escape the surging, swirling maelstrom of fire that was sweeping them away.
And then, as the screams and the roar of the flames reached its deafening crescendo, it stopped.
Silence.
Total silence.
And then the sound of weeping, and Gawain’s realisation that the weeping was his own, before the realisation that Allazar and Arramin lay weeping nearby, face down in the dirt, clutching handfuls of leaves and dirt to their ears in their own futile attempts at drowning out the names, the screaming, the sounds. The sounds that had been Calhaneth and all its inhabitants, dying.
oOo
8. Water
Gawain clambered to his feet, and gently lifted Elayeen to hers.
“Are you hurt?”
“I am unharmed. I have lost my bow. You knocked it from the grasp of my weakened hand when you lifted me,” Eldengaze growled, and as Gawain wiped away his tears with the back of his hand, he realised there was anger in her voice. And not a single sign of fear, or dread, or sorrow on her face.
“Did you not hear the sounds…?” he gasped, staring at her with fresh horror.
“I did. Yet there was no threat from them. Before your brightness blinded me as it does now I saw nothing dark. Nor light. I have lost my bow. If I can see the darkness, I can help to destroy it. But not if my bow lies in the dirt, and others are too busy to find it for me. As you said.”
“I will find it, Eldengaze!” Gawain hissed at her, shaking her by the shoulders, anger at her complete indifference to the horror they’d experience ballooning in his chest, his emotions in turmoil.
Elayeen simply flicked her gaze up from the safety of his chest and pinned him with her stare, forcing him back a pace. “Do so,” she said menacingly, and held him a moment longer in the grip of the eldengaze before turning on her heel and facing north into the woodlands.
Tyrane appeared through the trees, blood on his knee from a fall, Kahla and Jaxon behind him and holding each other tightly. Tears stained their faces, horror leaving them pale and wide-eyed.
“My lord,” Tyrane managed, “I… I sent the lads to round up the horses. Might be a while, the animals were running wild last I saw.”
Gawain nodded, and drew in a deep shuddering breath. “Which way to the canal, Arramin?”
“My lord?” the elderly wizard was still trembling violently, debris clinging to his ears and shoulders.
“The canal?”
“Oh dear, yes, yes, to the northwest of the centre, yes. I have my north-needle here somewhere, I… I have it here somewhere.”
“Go, let’s go. I cannot leave this place fast enough. I need to fetch Elayeen’s bow. The rest of you, move on, I’ll catch up in a moment.”
“Should I accompany you, my lord?”
“No, Tyrane, it’s not far, back at the edge of the clearing. The danger is past now, I think, until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“The sound we heard yesterday along
the southern avenue, not long after noon? That was the sound we heard just now, just after noon,” Gawain turned his back on them, and strode off through the forest towards the dread heart of the city, breathing hard and, when they were out of sight, allowing the full horror of the city’s death and his lady’s complete indifference to it unlock the floodgates of his tears.
He found her bow, undamaged, where she had been standing before he’d flung her over his shoulder. He brushed a little loose dirt from it, and then wiped his eyes, and flicked a glance towards the broken dome of the roundtower. Everything was as they had first seen it, as he’d known it would be. The broad and squat roundtower of Calhaneth, girdled by its colonnades, a monument to catastrophe, and, some intuition told him, a monument to the stupidity of the wizards and elfwizards who had, unwittingly or otherwise, caused it.
Gawain turned his back on the tower and made his way north through the forest. He’d been surprised at how far they’d managed to run before the lightning from the dome began striking at everything within its range, everything from the centre of the tower to the thin and spindly tree line. He was less surprised by how much further they’d gone by the time he caught up with them. He handed Elayeen’s bow to Jaxon and then fell back, and gave a low whistle to call Gwyn to him.
When the Raheen charger let out an answering whinny and shortly afterward came trotting through the trees, a wave of relief washed over Gawain.
“Ugly, where’ve you been then?” he patted Gwyn’s neck and tugged her ears. She bobbed her head and nickered. “I know, Gwyn, I know. We all heard it too. It’s all over now. We’ll never hear it again. Never. I promise.”
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against Gwyn’s neck, and drew a deep breath through his nostrils, filling his senses with the scent of horse and leather, trying to settle nerves, stomach and hammering heart with the reassuring odours he’d known all his life. He still heard the names of the dead, the seemingly endless litany of names being called in fear, names being called in pain, names being called for help, names being called in the agony of loss… but with each breath he and Gwyn took, they grew quieter in his mind, slowly fading.
