by Hobb, Robin
Rapskal tugged at her. “Hey? Are you all right? Get up, Thymara. Are you hurt?”
She took another deep breath and wiped her face against her shoulder. Those tears were from the wind in her eyes, not from terror, or gratitude to be on the ground again! She pushed Rapskal’s hands away and got to her feet. The knee of her trousers had torn a bit more, and she’d skinned both her knees from her abrupt dismount. But, “I’m fine, Rapskal. I just landed wrong.” She lifted her head to look around and stopped breathing as she took in her first view of Kelsingra in full daylight.
City. So this was what that word really meant. It wasn’t like the tree city of Trehaug where she had been born. This was a city built on solid earth. As far as she could see, in all directions, there were no trees. No open meadows; virtually no plant life at all. Here, all was worked stone. Straight lines and hard surfaces, broken by the occasional arch or dome, but even those were precisely shaped geometric figures. All around her loomed the work of human hands.
“Go hunt, Heeby. That’s my pretty girl. Go kill something big and have a nice meal. But don’t sleep too long afterward! Come back for us, my lovely red darling! We’ll be waiting for you down by the river like always.”
Dimly she was aware of the scarlet dragon lurching into a run down the street toward the river. In moments, she heard the slapping of her wings and then the sound faded. She didn’t turn to watch the dragon go. The city held her enthralled. All of this was made. None of it had grown. The huge buildings. The immense blocks that fit so squarely, one atop another, without a gap or a variation from perfectly straight lines. The interlocking stones that paved the street. All created by hands, all flawlessly shaped. But who could ever cut such large stones, let alone lift them into place?
She turned her head slowly, trying to take it all in. Statues in fountains. Carved stone decorating building fronts. All precise. Even the statues were perfect images of perfect creatures, caught and frozen in the stone. I don’t belong here, she thought. She was not perfect like these carvings, not precisely formed like the fitted paving stones and squared doors. She was lesser, deformed, unfit. As she had always been.
“Don’t be stupid. Of course you belong here!” Rapskal sounded impatient.
Had she spoken the words out loud?
“This is an Elderling city, built by Elderlings, especially for Elderlings. Just as Trehaug and Cassarick were . . . well, the true Elderling parts, the buried parts, were. That’s what I’ve discovered in my time here. And I want to show it to you because I think you can explain it to Alise. And make the others understand it, too. We, all of us, dragons and keepers, need to get across to this side of the river. That side over there, all those huts and things, those were built for the humans. The ones who didn’t want to change or couldn’t change. This side, all of this, this is for us. It’s what we need. And so we all need to get over here and make the city work. Because once we get the city working, then the dragons will be better, too.”
She stared at him, and then back to the city again. Dead and lifeless. Nothing to eat, no game, no growing food. “I don’t understand, Rapskal. Why would we want to be here? We’d have to go so far to get firewood or meat that we’d be exhausted just by those tasks. And the dragons? What is here for the dragons?”
“Everything!” he said urgently. “It’s all here, everything we need to know about being Elderlings. Because being an Elderling is a lot like being a dragon. And once we know more about being Elderlings, I think we can help the dragons. There was some special . . .” He knit his brow as if trying to recall something. “Maybe. Well, I haven’t found anything yet that would help with dragons who can’t fly, but there might be something here, and it would be a lot easier to find if I weren’t the only one looking for it, and if Alise wasn’t telling us all that we shouldn’t bother the city, we should just let it sleep. We only just started being Elderlings, so we don’t have the memories we need to make all the magic work. But the memories are here, stored in the city, waiting for us. We just need to come here and get them and start being Elderlings. Then we can make the city work again. Then everything will get better. Once we have the magic, I mean.”
The cold wind swept through the silent city, and she stared at him for a long time.
“Thymara!” he exclaimed at last in annoyance. “Stop making that face at me. You said we didn’t have much time, that you’d have to get back before dark to feed Sintara again. So we can’t just stand around like this.”
She gave her head a quick shake. Tried to find sense in his words, tried to make them apply to her. Elderlings. Yes, she had known that’s what their changes meant. The dragons had said so, and there was no reason to assume they would lie. Well, Sintara might lie to her, but she doubted that all the dragons would lie to their keepers. Not about something like that. And she knew that some of them had begun to resemble the images of Elderlings that she had seen in Trehaug. Not that she had seen many of them. Most of the tapestries and scrolls that had survived were things of great value, sold off through Bingtown generations before she had been born. But she knew what people said, that Elderlings were tall and slender, and that their eyes were unusual colors, and that the portrayals of them seemed to indicate their skins had been different also. So she had known, yes, that she was becoming an Elderling.
But a real Elderling, with magic? The magic they had used to build these magnificent cities and to create their wondrous artifacts? That was to be given to the keepers also?
To her?
“Come on!” Rapskal commanded her imperiously. He took her arm, and she let him guide her and tried to listen to his rambling comments about the city. It was hard to keep her mind on his words. He had become inured to what surrounded them, or perhaps it had never stunned him with its strangeness and beauty as it did her. Rapskal tended simply to accept things as they came. Dragons. Becoming an Elderling. An ancient city that offered its magic to him.
“And I think that one was just for taking baths. Can you imagine that? A whole building, just for getting clean? And that one? A place for growing things. You go inside and there’s this big room with all these pots of earth. And pictures made out of little bits of rock, um, mosaics, that was what Alise called them. Pictures of water and flowers and dragons in water and people in water and fish. Then you go into another room, and there are these really, really big tanks that used to have water in them. But they don’t now. But I learned from the stones that they used to have water in them and one was really hot and one was only warm and another was cool and then one was cold as river water. But here’s the thing. There are tanks for humans, and then, on the other side of this building, there’s an entrance for dragons, and there are tanks in there with sloping bottoms that dragons would wade right into to soak in hot water. And the roof on the other side is sloped and it’s all glass. Can you believe it, that much glass? Do you want to come inside with me and look? We could look, just for a minute, if you want.”
“I believe you,” she said faintly. And she did. It was easier to believe that a building that size had a sloping roof made of glass than it was for her to believe that Elderling magic could be hers. Or anyone’s. Could any of the keepers gain it? She thought of Jerd possessing Elderling magic and repressed a shudder. She halted suddenly, and Rapskal stopped, too, with an exasperated sigh.
“Tell me about the magic, Rapskal. Will we really learn it? Is it written down, like spells we could memorize, like in the old magic tales from Jamaillia? Is it in a book or a scroll? Do we have to gather magic things, the liver of a toad and . . . Rapskal, this isn’t about using dragon parts, is it? Eating part of a dragon’s tongue to be able to speak to animals and things like that?”
“No! Thymara, that stuff isn’t real. Those are just stories for children.” He was incredulous that she would even ask such a thing.
“I knew that,” she said stiffly. “But you were the one who said we would have Elderling magic.”
“Yes. But I mean the real magic.”
He spoke as if he had just explained everything. He tried to take her hand again, and when she allowed him to do so, he tugged on it, trying to get her moving. She didn’t budge.
“What is the real magic, then? If it’s not spells and potions?”
He shook his head helplessly. “It’s just the magic we’ll be able to do because we’re Elderlings. Once we remember how. I don’t know that part yet. I think it’s one of the things we have to remember. I’m trying to take you to what I want you to try, but you keep stopping. Thymara, if I could just tell you about it and you’d understand, don’t you think I’d have done that? You have to come with me. That’s why I brought you here.”
She looked into his eyes. He met her gaze squarely. There were times when Rapskal still seemed to be the slightly daft boy she had met on the day that she left Trehaug. Times when he rattled on endlessly, chattering about nothing, seemingly fascinated by the most trivial of oddities. Then there were times when she looked at him and saw how much he had grown and changed, not just as a youth who had suddenly attained the beginnings of manhood, but as a human who had crossed a line and was now an Elderling. He was red now, as scarlet as his dragon. His eyes had a gleam in them, a lambent light that was visible almost all the time now. She looked down at the hand she clasped and saw how her blue-scaled hand fit into his scarlet one. “Show me, then,” she said quietly, and this time, when he broke into a jog and pulled her along, she ran to keep pace with him.
He spoke as he trotted, his words broken with breathlessness. “There are a lot of memory places. Some, like some of the statues, they have just memories from one Elderling. And it’s like being that one Elderling for the time that you touch them. Those are the best kind, I think. There are other places that are all about everything. And some that are just telling the laws or who lives in a house or who a business belongs to. There are some that are poems and music. And then there are some on the avenues that are, well, everything that has ever happened there. I think you could just stand there, day after day, and see everyone who ever passed by and hear what they said and smell what they ate and everything. I didn’t see much use in that myself.”
He turned from the main avenue, away from the towering buildings, down a more modest street. These structures were homes, she found she knew. She tried to imagine a family requiring more than one door, and sometimes a second or even third story. There were balconies on some of them, and some had flat roofs with railings around the edges. Thymara had grown up in tiny structures built high in trees. If she stood and stretched out her arms in her bedchamber in her father’s house in Trehaug, she could touch both walls. And the ceiling. How could people need or use so much space?
Rapskal turned a corner, and she hastened beside him as he followed an uphill boulevard. The paved road was wide; she had never seen such a wide path. The houses here were staggered, looking out over one another toward the river. Gigantic pots held the skeletons of long-dead trees. Troughs of earth by doorways had once been small gardens. Dry bowls had cupped fountains.
She knew these things. Knew them as if someone had whispered them into her ear the moment she wondered. The gleaming stone, black with sparkling veins or sometimes gleaming white threaded with silver, spoke to her. They tugged at her with memories. She shook her head and focused herself on what Rapskal was saying to her.
“But then I found these two, and I listened to him for a while and I thought, Yes, that’s what I want to know and who I want to be. And she was right there next to him, and he told me all about her and I thought, Well, that’s almost like Thymara, and she could be her. And once we both take all that, then we’ll know more, to make the city work and maybe help the dragons.”
She was losing her breath as she trotted alongside him. “I still don’t understand, Rapskal.”
“We’re here. They can explain a lot better than I can. See? What do you think?”
She stared where he pointed and saw nothing unusual. The street ended in a cul-de-sac on the top of the hill. The entrance to the house at the top was framed by a series of open arches supported by stone pillars that glistened black and silver in the winter sunlight, marching in pairs toward the entry. To the left, they were marked with smiling suns. Those on the right each bore a gleaming silver medallion of a full moon smiling with a woman’s features.
“Let me show you. It’s so much easier than talking about it.” Rapskal pulled her forward. When they reached the first arch, he halted.
Thymara looked around. There were urns full of earth by each arch. “Vines,” she said, and abruptly she remembered them, the glossy dark leaves and the multitudes of tiny white flowers in clusters. They had bloomed in the heat of summer every year, and their sweet fragrance had scented every room in the house. There had been a fruit that followed, tiny clusters of bright orange berries that had no name in her language but were “gillary,” and every autumn, they had made a wine from them, one that kept the orange hue of the berries. It had been potent and sweet.
She swayed a little on her feet as she blinked her way back into her own life. She tried to take a few steps backward, but Rapskal tightened his grip on her hand. “Not like that,” he told her. “Well, you can, but then it’s all in pieces. Like coming up to a storyteller at a trunk market when he’s in the middle of telling the tale and only getting a part of the story. That’s not how they saved it for us. It’s all here, in order, in the pillars. We should start with the first ones. The moon ones are for you.”
“How do you know?” She still felt disoriented. For a time, long or short, she could not tell, she had been in another time. More than that, she realized. She had been another person. She pulled her hand free of his and took two steps back. “Drowning in memories! That’s what they meant. Rapskal, this is dangerous. My father warned me about stones like this! They pull you in and fill your mind with stories and you forget how to come back and be yourself. After a while, you’re just lost, not in that life and not in this one. How can you even think of doing this? You’re a Rain Wilder! You know better than this. What is the matter with you?”
She was horrified. It was bad enough that he would indulge in such a dangerous pastime. And monstrous that he had tried to drag her into it.
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
She turned away from him.
“Thymara, please, just listen to me. Everything you know about memory stone and drowning in it is wrong. Because the people you learned it from, well, this wasn’t for them. It’s for us, for Elderlings. Look around the city and see how much there is of it. You’ve heard the whispers; I know you have. Would they have put this stone everywhere if it was so dangerous? No. They put it here because, to Elderlings, it’s not dangerous. It’s important. We need these stones. We need to use them to become who we are meant to be.”
“I don’t need them. I have my own life, and I won’t lose it to something stored in stone.”
“Exactly!” He looked delighted at her assertion. “You don’t lose it. You find it. Think about the dragons, Thymara. They have memories that go way back, to their mothers and great-great-grandfathers. But they don’t lose their lives. They just have what they need to know how to be dragons. Elderlings needed the same thing, but they weren’t born with it like dragons. To be companions to dragons, they needed to remember a lot more than just one human lifetime. So this is how they did it. They stored it. They stored their lives so that other Elderlings could have their memories.” He shook his head, his eyes wide and his thoughts far away. “The special stone can hold so much, do so much. I don’t understand it all, yet. But I’m learning a lot, every time I come here. And one thing I do know is that because I’m an Elderling, I’ll likely live a long time, so I have time to learn things. The stone tells you things fast, like a minstrel singing the whole song of a hero’s life in just a few hours.” He shifted his pale gaze back to her, and his whole face was lit with excitement.
“Here’s the thing, Thymara. I’ve done things in these stones
that I’ve never done in this life. I’ve been places, faraway places where their sailing ships used to go. I’ve hunted for big deer and killed one all by myself. I’ve been over those mountains, trading with the people who used to live on the far side of them. I’ve been a warrior and a leader of other warriors. I live in their memories, and they live in me.”
She had been caught up in his words, tempted wildly right up until he said that. “They live in you,” she said slowly.
“A little bit,” he dismissed it. “Sometimes, in the middle of something else, one of their memories will pop up in my mind. It doesn’t hurt anything; it’s just something extra for me to know. Or maybe I want to sing a song he knew, or cook some meat a certain way. Thymara”—he cut in hastily as she tried to ask more questions—“we don’t have that much time here. Just try it with me. Just one try, and if you don’t like it, I’ll never ask you to do it again. You can’t drown in memories if you only do it once. Everyone knows that! And because you’re an Elderling, I don’t think you can drown at all, even if you do it a thousand times. Because we’re supposed to. That’s what the memory stone in the city is all about. Just try it.” He looked deep into her eyes. “Please.”
