Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (69 page)
“Then you’ll have it as a title, along with the land, which you won when you killed her. I hope you won’t require me to put her family to death.”
“Heavens, no. Could I?”
“Under some of the oldest laws, you could. But I probably wouldn’t do it.” He was chuckling, but Gaelex came up with some other matter from the pouch Karsten had sent, and we were distracted.
I copied out a letter for him, the night nearly balmy, the quiet stars gleaming, a moonless night, which is rare. We have watched the stars, the moons, for many ages, and no one has ever seen a pattern to when the stars are there and when they are not, though Luthmar speaks of this in the passage that says at the end of the first war YY removed our land, Aeryn, from reach of starlight. I was thinking about that, looking up at the stars, at Aryaemen, which we recognize by the color and by its halo, called Ajhyaenus, the Four Hundred Boys. I was wondering whether a moon would rise. He asked me what I was thinking when Gaelex had packed away the writing board, and I told him.
He looked up himself. He was seeing something I was not, and I understood, as I had at times, that he saw more deeply into the nature of the world than I. “We aren’t like other places. We’re hidden from all the rest. Though I was told, a long time ago, that after I go through the Gates to Zaeyn, we’ll no longer be hidden. Maybe you’ll still be alive.”
He was teasing me, fair enough. I said, “By then, I’ll be long gone from the world and you’ll have someone else to say that to.”
A flicker of something, of puzzlement. A moment of anger. He made the sign against the evil eye and whispered a word for luck over his shoulder. “Don’t ever say that again,” his tone changed, and I knew he meant it. “You’ll understand better after a while.”
I hadn’t made him angry lately and wasn’t used to the feeling; neither was he, so we worked to get over it. I remember it as the last moment on that march when we had the luxury for such a trifle.
5
We slept by the riverbank two days and then, the next day, barges appeared upriver, approached us, and I guessed riding on one of them was Evynar Ydhiil from the fact that neither Kirith Kirin nor Imral betrayed the least surprise at their appearance. Evynar had commandeered barges to bring the whole army easily and peacefully down river, escorted by mounted parties on the two shores. This had been part of the plan from the start, one of the chief reasons for taking Teliar, where a lot of barge traffic docks.
We chose to ride along the shore rather than get on one of the barges; I wanted to stay on Nixva’s back, and I don’t think Kirith Kirin had much stomach for a boat ride either. We accompanied the barges through the Hills of Slaughter, around the edge of the sacred precinct, into which no Jisraegen has walked since Falamar laid down the stones. This was country sacred to YY, who is said to have loved Falamar greatly, who mourned his fall, which began here.
A change in the pulse of Fimbrel when I was riding along the shore, careful never to stray even a step inside the boundary markers. The voices that were woven through the fabric grew stronger, the cloak shimmered with a light like one of the shrine lamps, and because this happened of its own accord I made no move to change it. The cloak was woven of Wyyvisar, and as the language changed near the Slaughter Hills, as the tone of the song within the fabric shifted from one voice to another, I understood the work of it better than before, a thing of language like a standing tower, a wrap of words, all of Wyyvisar spun into it, as those same runes are spiraled on the inside of the kirilidur all the way from the base to the High Place. Each thread of the Cloak’s weave was a chain of Words; I had been at Illyn Water to hear the song that made the threads. We were near a place precious to YY, a ground she had marked with her step within memory, and the Cloak, which was all woven of Words, in changing revealed more of its nature.
We were headed toward the Ajnur Gap, where Osar crosses a narrow, flat plain beneath the Slaughter Hills, before spreading out across the delta that has become the city of Charnos. It was in this place, where our armies were to converge, that we expected to meet resistance from the Verm, and this was the case when at the edge of the sacred precinct the barges landed and our troops marched off.
We came ashore at Twar Ford, a small village still in the highlands where the barges dock before returning the long way upriver to Teliar. Below Twar Ford, the land drops and the Osar runs too fast, over rocks, for barges to pass. Freight is hauled by cart or wagon from Twar to the city, and when we came ashore the village was buzzing, because, we were told, a battalion of Verm were marching toward Charnos to hold it against our arrival. They were arriving too late for that, of course. But when we got the word that Verm were marching so close, Kirith Kirin nodded to me, and he and Imral and I broke away from the main army, which was disembarking from the barges and thus vulnerable.
We rode toward the main road and along it, and I put rings on my fingers and formed ithikan wind to carry us, these horses all accustomed to the shift out of the normal world. The three of us headed toward the Verm, and I made certain we were invisible to their eyes, hurtling along the road and down the long descent. We rode across the Osar bridge and saw the Verm soldiers. When I counted their white banners, saw the size of the Verm, and the number of their horses, I understood that the moment had come, and so we pulled up short of the road, still hidden under the shadow of the trees. I sent myself to the Verm as an eidolon on a mist, my eye within it, so that I was watching them as though I were the ghost, seeing the impossible shoulders, the thrusting bone of the elbow, the gray skin and shining eyes. The Verm soldiers riding at the head of the column saw me at the end of the bridge, and word went backwards along their ranks. I said, a voice out of the ghost image, “Turn and go back the way you came if you want to live. Kirith Kirin has already landed at Twar Ford and you are not permitted to pass beyond me here.”
They were confused, the ones at the head of the column, but their ranks parted and a human officer approached, saw me, wheels of light spinning around my head, and hung back. He wore the jewels of a Nivri house, I could not recognize them, but he spoke to the Verm, and when they pressed forward I spoke the first Words of Soul Eater, Soul Devourer. One can see it in the eyes first, that the Words have begun to work, that the legs are full of lead, followed by sharp pains, laces of death that race through the tissue, death rising out of the ground, followed by Soul Devourer, which cannot be reversed when it is begun, and so these first ones died. The Nivra saw them go down. I spoke again. “Go back beyond the bridge, you’ll have safe passage on the other side of Osar. Kirith Kirin comes to claim the city and he will soon cross the river too, and when he does, I will sing you all to sleep if I have too, you’ll hear my song as the last sound of your lives, all of you including the Nivra, so tell your siblings as many as are in the Ajnur Gap. Kirith Kirin says go home to your houses in Antelek, to your farms in Briidoc. Go home and he will not remember that you marched against him when he was going to Aerfax to become King.”
The words would trouble the Jisraegen in them, and the deaths of the score or so at the head of the bridge convinced the Nivra I meant business. I moved the image toward them, swelled a mist around it, and they fell back from the bridge, the Nivra giving the order to retreat. I could feel, through Fimbrel, that Drudaen was aware of this moment, that I had revealed myself; but he was loathe to let me know where he was, even yet, because of some thought he was hiding from me, some place in his thinking that he was protecting. The Verm fell back from that spinning, shining creature that was me, a moment that I saw from the eye of the ghost and from my body’s eye, under the trees not far from the bridge, watching with Kirith Kirin and Imral Ynuuvil.
We waited at the spot and Evynar led the army, by now formed up in good order, with archers in the trees and on the road, the infantry protected, coming up as if they expected a fight, bows strung and pikes lowered. A group of infantry took the head of the bridge and detachments of mounted archers and swordsmen flanked them. We made camp on the flat ground where the Osar, having descended from the hills, slows to a gentler pace again. Our campfires were visible in Charnos, as we meant them to be. Kirith Kirin had come south.
1
The sight of the city in the distance entranced me, white walls rising over the mouth of the Osar where the plain was still dry, Chunombrae rising from the rock at the center, framed against the Bay of Anyn beyond, shining blue. Charnos is the city most of the Anynae will point to as their heartland, built on the place at which, as they tell the story, their boats first came ashore in the long ago. Jisraegen live mixed with the Anynae here, but the flavor of the city remains Anyn, no matter that a Jisraegen-style house with corners and angles appears here and there.
A delegation from the present Mayor of Charnos, Aniwetok, daughter of somebody, came to meet us the first morning after we encamped at the bridge. There is a ceremony which the Mayor of Charnos undertakes at the time of the Succession, since the Successor always passes through Charnos on the way to Aerfax. Mayor Aniwetok invited us in words that Kirith Kirin had heard many times before, I suppose, when he rode south to Senecaur. “The King is welcome to his city Charnos, and the Mayor and all the boats will meet him at the gate.”
Kirith Kirin sent word he would come straight to the gate, and as soon as the delegation had ridden away we broke camp and formed up for the march across the bridge and down the paved road that runs along Osar to the walls of Charnos. Another bridge crosses Osar there, and a huge gate rises over the bridge to engulf it, on either side the immense walls of the city sunk deep in the earth, water rising along the edge where the wetlands begin, a natural moat. These walls are a wonder and are prophesied to stand as long as the walls of Inniscaudra, since the Tervan built them out of pity for the Anynae after so many were slaughtered in Falamar’s war. Walls like these, of joined stoned quarried from the deep gorges of Jhunombrae, could never be taken by any army, could never be broken by any magic, and the Tervan had intended the gift of them to make a place where the Anynae could always defend themselves. The stones were worked with images of the Anynae, their arrival in boats, the building of the walls and Chunombrae, the digging of the canals, the slaughter when Falamar brought the Jisraegen army down from the north. The walls and the reliefs on them run for stades in either direction, circling the city and stretching far out into the bay, enclosing a protected harbor with huge sea gates that can be closed when the need arises.
Ajnur Gap is narrowest where the main gate stands, and our foot soldiers made the march in a day, stopping for the night at the walls. We camped on the dry ground near where the Tervan causeway raises the road above the wetlands. Boats were gathering on the other side of the walls, we could hear them calling one another.
At dawn, when we were ready to enter, boats large and small lined the waterways, the winding river and the irregular canals, as far as the eye could see toward the center of the city. Kirith Kirin rode at the head of his Nivri and Finru escort beneath the maw of the gate. I stayed on the other side of Osar until the whole army had crossed the bridge, the thousands who had come south with Evynar, including the Verm party, whose presence was noted with much consternation by the burghers and citizens. My attention was elsewhere, to the south, where Drudaen’s army had camped.
When Kirith Kirin was settled, in the house named Chunombrae, after the Tervan city, he sent Imral and a party of riders across the bridge to find me, and I rode into the city behind the last of our infantry. When we were inside, at the request of Kirith Kirin and for the first time in the memory of anyone living, the Tervan gate was closed across the causeway, and our army manned the gatehouses. With her sea gates open, Charnos could exist as an island indefinitely. The silver portcullis slid downward and the walls of hardened glass slid inward, a cunning arrangement said to be like the one at Krafulgur, which will be closed in the battle that precedes the Breaking of Worlds, according to Curaeth. We marched along the causeway escorted by the remaining boats, stragglers, some with oars, some with sails that seemed able to catch the least breath of wind. Anynae were good sailors before they came to Aeryn, as they will tell you, but they are all the better now for good Jisraegen cloth to make their sails. As they will admit as well. The road led to the old city, to the high mount topped by a mansion in the northern style behind a wall that would have done justice to a minor city. The Tervan built this house as well.
The house rose out of what would have seemed a ridge of land if such a thing were possible on a river delta; the Smiths built the rock along with the house, which circles the narrow summit, rising to the peak. The lower series of halls are for public ceremony, but above is a well-appointed palace with rooms scrupulously maintained by the city burghers, used for meetings when neither King nor Queen are in residence. Words in three of the Anynae tongues are carved over the main gate to the house, all saying the same thing, “Chunombrae is the heart of the Anynae in this world.” Imral translated for me, since these were languages I did not know.
