Havenstar (56 page)

She inclined
her head as if she shared the same memory that had prompted his
sudden amusement. ‘Do you know,’ she said softly. ‘I have a strong
desire to see this Havenstar before you destroy it? May I come with
you?’

He stared at
her, and then started to laugh. ‘Tell me another. What you want to
see is the end of Edion, not the marvels of Havenstar.’

She smoothed
down the satin of her stole. ‘So?’ She looked at him steadily.
‘Take me with you, Ru—and you’ll have your vote.’

‘Bitch,’ he
said softly. But he smiled.

It was only
later that he stirred uneasily in his chair, as he remembered
another aspect of Edion’s character he’d almost forgotten. The man
had been subtle…

~~~~~~~

True tragedy
comes not from dying, nor yet from living, but from loving; ’tis
loving that grinds the soul.

—old saying of
the Margravate of Malinawar

Keris halted
her horse and sat, transfixed. Before her was Shield, the main
settlement of Havenstar. She’d thought she had come to an end of
the surprises, but Shield was far beyond anything she had ever
expected.

Shield was a
celestial city.

Shield floated
in the sky.

Shield was
anchored to the earth by a group of central pillars, slim elegant
pillars, pillars that soared impossibly high, pillars that widened
out at the top to support the base of the city, like a tray
balanced on the palm of several hands. A tray stacked with
buildings.

They’d been
riding through the rain, becoming thoroughly wet and uncomfortable
and depressed, hoping to see Shield and the end of their journey
ahead of them any moment, but all there’d been was endless grey
cloud and misty drizzle.

And then, the
rain stopped. Ahead the cloud lifted, there were patches of blue
sky, and there was Shield above them, floating in the sunshine,
high above a lakeside. A shining, sparkling city of ley…in the
sky.

And blue water
underneath. Blue water that went on and on.
Blue
.

Keris felt her
heart miss its beat under the impact of the sight. What an expanse
of water! There were lakes in the First, but they were just puddles
compared to this. Here it was only just possible to see the
opposite shore, and the lake was large enough to contain islands.
It had boats with sails.
Sails
. She had never seen those
before either, except on children’s toys scudding across a village
pond.

But her gaze
kept drifting back to Shield. It was not just an optical illusion;
it really was up in the air, balanced on the pillars.

Speechless
with wonder, she urged her horse closer. There were whole streets
and squares up there, as well as buildings, buildings that shone
with living ley, that glowed in the sunlight.

Impossible,
she thought.
It can’t be true
.

There were
also buildings on the ground by the lakeside, port buildings, she
guessed. There was a quayside, with ships tied up, their flapping
sails luminescent with shifting ley.

She did not
know which way to look.

‘How?’ she
asked, suddenly aware that she’d been gaping.

‘Why?’ asked
the Chameleon, beside her, craning his neck.

‘Forget the
how and the why,’ Corrian grumbled, refusing to be impressed. ‘Just
don’t tell me we have to go up there.’

Meldor
answered Quirk with off-hand casualness, ‘Why scar the land with a
town if one can build it in the air?’

‘But how?’
Keris repeated.

‘Switchen and
his fellow builders extended the possibilities of building with
ley-impregnated brick to the limits.’ He smiled at them. ‘Here a
pedestrian bridge-mender has learned to soar. He found that whole
streets could be supported by a single column, so why not?’

‘It was as if,
once the restraints of the Rule were removed, there was a whole
lifetime of experimentation to be crammed into a few years of
construction,’ Davron added. ‘And, when using ley-impregnated brick
and stone, there are few limits to what can be done.’

‘I trust ley
doesn’t leech out of the brickwork,’ she said.

Meldor
laughed. ‘Fortunately, no. Just out of the soil because of
Carasma’s past unmaking of the earth. And if it’s any comfort, a
city that sounds much like Shield is mentioned in Predictions as
lasting a thousand years.’

‘I’ll be
tainted,’ Corrian muttered. ‘But how do we get up there? I don’t
see any stairs, and it’d be quite a climb anyways. Too much for my
old bones.’

‘Stunning,
isn’t it?’ Davron said. ‘It never fails to take my breath away, and
I’ve seen it all before. And as for getting up there—well, let’s
ride on to the port. We take the transport from there.’

‘Oh, Chaos.’
Keris’s thoughts were taking her in directions she didn’t want to
pursue. ‘Davron, tell me you were joking about the wyverns.’

‘I was joking
about the wyverns,’ he said obediently.

‘Then
what?
’

‘Something
called a wildbell. We used them for the building of the towers, for
transporting materials to build the city, and now they’re our
transport. You’ll see.’

He urged his
horse onwards towards the cluster of buildings at the quayside, and
the rest of them followed. As they rode under the edge of the town,
they all looked upwards, flinching as they crossed from sunlight
into shade.

‘Unnatural,’
Corrian said, still muttering. ‘Humankind weren’t supposed to live
up in the air like a turkey perched in a tree.’

‘I’ve got a
bad feeling about this wildbell,’ Quirk added in a mutter of his
own. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to like anything that’s capable of
getting me from
here
to
there
. Oh, Keris, I really
wasn’t born to have adventures.’

There was a
notice on the wall of one of the buildings that read, WILDBELL
TRANSPORT, TWO COPPERS PER HEAD. A sleepy-eyed man was sitting on
an upturned fishpot underneath sign. He was untainted and wore
silver rings. Next to him there was a huge wicker basket big enough
to hold a dozen people, strongly built, with several handles. Keris
could not guess its purpose or see how it could be used to
transport people upwards, but a couple of wooden steps next to it
indicated it was meant for people to occupy.

‘Lamri,’
Davron said. ‘How’s business?’

The man jumped
up and made a stiff bow. ‘Margraf, welcome back. How’s my business,
milord? Excellent! Lots of newcomers been coming to gawp. Your
animals going upside too?’ He waved at a row of paired horse
stalls. They too were made of closely-woven wicker.

Davron nodded,
Lamri called out to someone inside the building and soon there were
people bustling about, blindfolding the horses and leading them
into the stalls. Lamri waved a hand at the steps. ‘Would you be so
good as to board the basket?’

Corrian looked
dubious, the Chameleon horrified. ‘Is that a joke?’ he asked.

‘Tell
me
what it is that picks this thing up,’ Corrian said, and
balked, until Scow approached her as if he was going to lift her
over the edge of the wickerwork. She hurriedly scrambled up the
steps and stepped down into the inside. The others followed.

Davron tried
to hand over some money to Lamri, but it was firmly refused.

Once inside
the basket, Quirk was openly nervous. Corrian contained herself
better, but only just. Keris was more curious than fearful.
Whatever was about to happen, it would certainly be no worse that
falling into a ley line from a cliff.

‘Hold on to
the rope looped around the side,’ Davron advised. ‘And watch
Lamri.’

The man had
turned to face the water and was now letting ley drift out of his
hands in a ribbon-like band, towards the surface of the lake.

‘I know I’m
not going to like this,’ Quirk moaned.

The surface of
the lake erupted. A round hump pushed out from underneath the
water, grey and smooth and glistening. It was also huge, the size
of a room. Water poured off it as it thrust upwards like a mushroom
pushing through soil…

Quirk closed
his eyes. ‘I knew I wouldn’t like this.’

The creature
broke free of the water and hovered above it. It was round and
fringed with hundreds of white tentacles, each the length of a
man’s arm. The grey canopy rhythmically contracted and expanded,
keeping the creature otherwise stationary in the air. Jets of air,
expelled with an almost subliminal hum, churned the water below its
undulating edges. From the centre of the underside hung twelve or
so long trailing feelers, purple and tuberculated, that tangled and
untangled like writhing worms. Lamri’s twisting line of blue ley
now connected these feelers to his palms.

The Chameleon,
peeping through his fingers, groaned again and then managed to
stutter, ‘What—what does it eat?’ He sounded hoarse.

‘Fish,’ said
Davron. ‘Don’t worry, Quirk. Lamri has it under control with that
ley of his. And here come his brothers to call up some more to
transport for our horses. Wildbells, like most pets, are attracted
to ley, and they can be pushed and pulled and directed with it.
Perhaps they are open to suggestion from the mind as well; we
really don’t know how it works. It just does. Anyway, Lamri and the
other members of his family know how to handle wildbells just as
skilfully as Minions handle their pets. They haven’t had a single
fatality yet, or even a bad accident, and remember, we had these
creatures help us with the building of Shield, a much more complex
task than just lifting us up to the city.’

The wildbell
shivered, still humming, and a shower of water droplets pattered
down into the lake. When Lamri deemed the beast sufficiently dry,
he directed it to a position above the basket, and he himself
stepped in with his customers. ‘Hold tight,’ he advised.

Quirk went one
better: he slid down on to the floor of the basket and put his arms
over his head.

Keris looked
upwards at the underside of the wildbell. It was neither an
attractive sight, nor a reassuring one. In the middle of the ring
of central tentacles there was a beak-shaped mouth with razor-sharp
edges. ‘Do you think it ordinarily uses these tentacles to lift
things into its gut?’ Corrian inquired.

That might
have been the case, but Keris didn’t want to think about it.

With
surprising gentleness, the creature looped its tentacles around the
basket handles, then in apparent answer to some change in Lamri’s
ley, it squeezed its canopy and jetted upwards, the hum becoming a
louder whoosh. A few drops of water trickled down to splash on to
the wickerwork and the basket floated away from the land. Keris’s
heart lurched in sympathy. She felt like a hapless rabbit seized by
a hungry eagle. The analogy appalled her, but then she looked over
the edge and saw the tops of port buildings below and the lake
spread out before her as if it was one of her own maps and she
forgot her fear. Further out, over the lake, she could see several
other wildbells. These seemed smaller and they carried no baskets.
Instead a single man stood within the cradle of central tentacles.
One of them lifted a hand and casually waved. Possibilities began
to flood her mind.

She turned
towards Davron, a question hovering. He grinned at her, and
answered before she could ask, ‘Don’t get too carried away.
Wildbells can only survive out of the water half an hour or so,
therefore they can’t be ridden too far from the lake. But there’s
no reason why you couldn’t ride them to map the lake edges.’

‘How do you
know what I’m going to say?’

He bent to
whisper in her ear. ‘I know you.’

The basket
lifted over a waist-height wall and was lowered down to a patch of
grass. They had arrived in Shield.

‘You can open
your eyes now, Quinling,’ Corrian said.

‘Won’t the
horses be terrified?’ Keris asked Scow as they climbed out of the
basket.

‘What they
can’t see they don’t worry about. Besides, they rather like the
smell of wildbells, for some reason or another.’

While they
waited for the horses to arrive, she looked around, almost
overwhelmed with a simultaneous desire to laugh with joy at the
sheer light-heartedness of it all, and to cringe with fear at what
Chantry would think. As she absorbed the details of what she’d only
grasped in general from the ground, she decided that even for the
ley-unlit, Shield would be pure magic. Humble houses were
buttressed with flying filigree, arches thrust skywards in
impossible shapes to decorate ordinary shop-fronts, domes and
towers and vaulted roofs flaunted themselves across the skyline.
Everywhere there were oddities and ornamentation: external
staircases up to upper floors, cowled pots over ornate chimneys,
oriel windows, stained glass, carved tracery, copper roofing,
architraves, pargeting, pilasters… Nothing was overly large or
high, for the emphasis was more on the delicate than the grandiose.
It was a joyous place of absurdities and delight, as if the people
of Havenstar, freed from Chantry’s strictures, had become wildly
uninhibited.

Yet it was
also shocking. They’d been brought up in a world where architecture
was austere and utilitarian, and never changed. Where nothing was
ever new, or different. Where, although the occasional sod-roof of
a house may sprout spring flowers in season, most buildings were
old and crumbling, lichen-covered or dirt-grey. In the stabilities
only Chantry buildings had colour and decorations, only Chantry
Houses had carvings, only Chantry shrines had murals, only Chantry
devotion-halls had towers. Here everything was new, everything was
different, everything was decorated. And everything was lambent
with ley.