City of Night (53 page)

He raised a brow. “Have you met?”

Evayne did not answer. When she did, it was not the question he asked, or knew to ask. “The last time you spoke to her is not the final time you will see her.”

He stopped walking, and she touched his sleeve. “No, you will not see her tonight, and you will not see her in Averalaan again. She will not be in the danger you are in.

“But if you can, remember this: You will speak one final time. I do not know what she will say to you, nor, in the end, what you will have—if anything—to say to her. That is all I can offer you, Ararath. I am not known for either my kindness or my mercy, with reason.”

 

Ararath Handernesse did not leave the maze again.

He thought it fitting, in the end, although he did not expect it.

He walked the streets of the undercity in the glow of Evayne’s light. Magelight, when carried by hand the way Rath carried his, was an individual illumination, and it required proximity to reveal the things that otherwise lay under the blanket of absolute night. Evayne’s light was true magery; it was like the glow of dawn, before the sun has fully crested the horizon, and it opened the streets up, depriving them, momentarily, of familiarity. Familiarity returned as he walked; he felt the same solid ground beneath the slightly worn heels of his boots; saw the passing crevices and the cracked stones, and knew them as they approached. She did not once leave his side as he walked, although he had expected her to lead. Minutes passed. Perhaps an hour. Something was wrong.

His smile was a bitter twist of lips. Of course something was wrong. But he needed to quantify it, pinpoint it, understand it. That had always been his way, and the night’s journey only sharpened the need. It took him some moments to understand what elusive thing had caught and worried away at the edges of his attention.

It was Evayne, of course. Not the woman herself, not even her light, but the way her light cast shadows. His own, he knew, and he expected; they were an ephemeral but constant part of the geography of this maze beneath the City of the living. Hers? They were too long for her height, and too wide for her style of dress, and as he walked beside her midnight form, he fancied he could hear whispers just beneath the sounds made by their footfalls, hissing and struggling to be heard.

He glanced at the shadows she cast perhaps once too often, and she flinched. “It is Scarran eve, the night before the darkest night of the year, when the Old Roads are open, and the host is hunting.” She shivered as she said it, and drew the folds of her cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “I should not be here.”

He caught a glimpse of silver at her neck, some hint of pendant or necklace; she touched it, briefly, before it was lost to a surge of blue light. Her robes twisted free of her hands. The shadows in the folds of fabric grew, and as they did he heard, for a moment, the distant call of horns, and he felt the chill of a Winter so cold it existed only in imagination.

He heard her cursing, the flat neutrality of her syllables broken by brief, harsh sounds. The light which had shone so brightly around her
shattered
into a spray of colors, sharp and harsh, that might in a different sky, in a different place, have resembled a rainbow.

Before they faded, he drew his magestone from his pocket, whispering it to a brightness that now looked dim. The shadows across the ground, stretching now like a slender path, groped toward him, devouring the steady, gentle glow. Winds howled, here, and he felt them as a stinging caress on his cheeks; he lifted his arm to protect his face. It didn’t help. There had never been even a breeze in the maze; the velvet silence of an empty, ruined city had been so much a part of its character he had almost failed to recognize it until it was broken.

But this darkness, he had never seen in his life. He felt it now, and he knew it was as much a threat to life in this city as the demons he had played his deadly games with in the streets above. And as if it
were
demonic, he reached for the hilt of a dagger, drew it, and held it.

In the dim light, the blade was glowing, the runes, carved and enchanted by some magic he did not understand, searing their way into his vision. “Evayne!” He lifted the dagger, edge toward her, and the gale broke against it. But the runes dimmed as it did, and he understood that the Summer magic which could devour a demon whole would fade and diminish here against merely the wind.

Evayne’s eyes, as she turned to look at him, were all of black, as if she had swallowed shadow and it had filled her. She did not speak, but lifted her hand, her fingers shaking, trembling. In the mound of her palm, the seer’s crystal rested, and the light it shed was striated, broken. He remembered his legends: the crystals were some part of the Seer’s Soul, extracted and bound. By who, or what, those legends did not say; nor, at this particular moment, did he care.

She spoke, struggling with words.

“Ararath! Come, stand beside me!”

He took one step, one slow step, and then another, but it was hard; instinct told him to flee into a familiar darkness that was in every way a comfort in comparison. Horns sounded again, closer, clearer.

“Evayne—”

“Don’t touch me!” She cursed again, softly. “I should have known,” her voice was the bitter chill of the Winter that kills. The instincts that had preserved his life for long enough that he could be called Old Rath screamed as he took each slow step. He fought them; what did it matter, now?

The line of her jaw whitened. Her hand became a fist around the crystal, and her robes billowed, flying higher and higher as she stood her ground. He did not want to stand beside her while cloth flew in that wind, because the twisting of cloth suggested life where life shouldn’t be. But that was fear, and fear could feed either caution or hysteria. Rath had never had any use or respect for hysteria.

“Whatever lives in the undercity,” she told him, “will hear those horns. Hold your dagger,” she added, “and wait; we will not, now, travel to Cordufar.”

“Evayne—”

“We will not, now, have any reason to do so.”

As he listened, he heard one note above the horns; it was not a horn call, but sounded instead like the low peal of a great bell. And in the distance, against the fallen walls and the standing facades, he saw a flicker of red that suggested fire.

T
HIS HAD BEEN A CITY OF GHOSTS, of things dead and absent, the detritus of history preserved beneath ignorant streets above. It had suggested, the way a dignified age suggests, the passage of a beauty that, at its height, must have caused men to stand for a moment, awe-struck and shorn of words, because words would never be equal to the task of describing what was seen and felt.

Rath had never paused to imagine what might have dwelled here, because he assumed that he knew: it was a city, and a city meant a press of huddled people, some too poor to survive long, and some too wealthy to fall. He had imagined, in the shadows of privacy and the almost smug sense of ownership he had felt in the undercity, how those distant—and long-dead—people had lived, where they might have worked, what they might have eaten. He had guessed, haphazardly, at who they might have worshiped, assuming in the end that that worship would involve the gods in their Weston guises. It made sense, after all; the written language that was left along the base of pedestals, broken walls, and the small bowls and household items that occasionally remained was the precursor of the Weston that traveled through the city’s halls, high and low.

But he knew, as the flicker of distant red grew longer and deeper, that he had been wrong. What had walked these streets, when the city was open to sky and knew sun and rain and sea squall, had not been some simple variant of what walked above them now.

“Ararath, stand.” Evayne gestured, and light, a pale blue strand in the shadows, scrawled a brief, hasty circle across the ground; it encompassed both of them. “Stay your ground for as long as you can.”

“Lady.” He watched light grow in the streets, red light, dim and visceral, like a heart exposed to sun while flesh still clings in places. “Against what comes, I do not think I will stand for long.”

“Against what comes,” she replied, “you will not stand at all, but it is not, in the end, for you that they come. You will see Dukes, here, Ararath, and a brief, brief glimpse of the whole of Winter.

“They will be weakened by this,” she continued. “They will be weakened enough that we will still have time.” But the words lent her no hope, and no peace; her lips were a thin, white line.

Who are you, Lady?
He did not speak her name because of a sudden the syllables seemed too insignificant to contain her.

“Evayne,” she whispered, indicating that he must have spoken aloud. “But I know the old and hidden ways, and some part of the Winter road is in me. Some part, as well, of the Summer Road, but it has not been traveled for millennia, and even were it, it is not to be feared. Hold your dagger, and if the light gutters, wield the other. Do not touch me, or I will devour you, and we will fail.”

 

Snow came from the shadows. Snow and silvered light. What it touched, it transformed, briefly, in his vision; he saw forest, trees as thick as columns rising, black, into the sky, branches splayed like gnarled, ancient fingers. Nothing grew on those trees but ice; nothing sheltered beneath them.

But through them? The notes of the horns, louder now than wind, but wilder in their keening.

Snow lay like shroud across the stone of the undercity, piling in drifts, but its reach was not the storm’s reach; it was bisected by a single line, invisible but present. On one side, forest continued to unfold, and on the other? The familiar: the columns and walls, the facades, the fallen rock. But these, too, were transformed by burning light. Not Summer light to Winter, but fire to ice.

Out of the fire came living flame. Tall as the buildings from which it seemed to emerge, it gestured and wings rose, pinions stretching between facades, which crumbled at the casual contact. The air around its body eddied as it moved. Rath did not step back, but it took effort. This death was not the death he sought, and it
was
death. No weapon—no meager dagger with its engraved, pale runes—could touch the creature that stepped through these streets, dragging in its wake the smaller and paler demons that had, until this moment, been the whole of his experience.

But he came to the snow, to the sharp edge of it, drifts piling against unseen wall, and he gazed across it to where Rath stood. If he noticed Rath at all, he gave no sign; he noticed, instead, Evayne. He stepped across the snow line and raised his arms, dropping them suddenly as if tearing at the very air. Snow evaporated, rising from his feet as sudden clouds of steam. Where he walked, snow melted, and if he did not walk quickly, it mattered little.

“Stand,” Evayne commanded again. She lifted her arms, crossed them above her face, and spoke three sharp words. The texture of those syllables hung in the air, but Rath could not grasp them, could not even repeat them seconds after they left her lips.

“Do you—do you know this creature?”

“Yes. I saw him once, when I was younger. We will not defeat him tonight.”

Fire flew through the air, like the lash of whip; it banked the moment it hit Evayne’s arms; she did not even tremble at the impact. Fire struck again, and again, it fizzled.

The demon—and the word felt wrong to Rath, because it felt too small—roared. It was not rage; it was laughter. It was brief, savage joy wrapped in the crackle of heat and power.

Evayne’s arms came down in that instant, and light flared in her empty palms, traveling the length of the snow-strewn street. It struck creatures too small and too slight, and the laughter was joined, for a moment, by twin cries of pain. Creatures such as Patris AMatie, creatures who might have been twin to Lord Cordufar, strode the ground by the winged demon’s feet in the wake of a fire that did not burn them. They were not human in seeming, but taller, darker, possessed of arms that glistened like polished obsidian; some had jaws the width of a shark’s, and some, eyes the size of fists. They walked on two legs, or four, or more, and they carried no weapons; nor did they require them.

The winged creature barely seemed to notice them. For a third time, fire raced above the snow, and for a third time, it faltered.

There was no fourth.

The demon paused, and snow melted beneath his feet, turning to ice at the edges of his steps’ imprint. He lifted one arm, and he spoke a single word; the earth rumbled with the resonance of that voice, and the winds banked, for just a moment, as a shield came to his left arm, and a sword to his right. The sword was red, and long, its hilt obsidian. The shield, glowing red, was rimmed with runes that were the color of Evayne’s eyes.

“Karathis, Duke of the Hells,” Evayne said, and her voice was carried by the wind, strengthened by it. “You are far from home.”