Stargate (41 page)

“There's water here,” Nenan said, his voice echoing. “In tubs. I suppose for slaves to wash in. It's dirty, but I don't care.” He bent and cupped his hands, and Danarion looked about him.

He was in a vast, square hall. At first he thought it was nothing but a cave and was crushed with disappointment, but then Chilka's eyes became adjusted to the dimness. The late light began to wink on walls and ceiling, little flickers of dull color that came and went as Danarion slowly turned his head. Rubble and dust lay about the floor, and the walls were uneven, but where they had been chipped back deeply, the stone revealed the imprints of an artist's work. Nenan had finished drinking and was studying the lintel under which they had passed. His hand went out. “Oh, come and look!” he said wonderingly. “What does it mean?” Danarion ran to him. The copper was black with age and decay, gouged and streaked. In places it had suffered some terrible conflagration, for it had melted and the reliefs had run into one another, but in patches the old Sholan artistry could still be seen, and a metal Shaban rose, tier upon mighty tier, to the roof.

Danarion craned upward. The constellations winked at him, black, stone-bound, yet in places showing clearly where the workmen had labored to expose the grooves some ancient hand had carved. Danarion fell to his knees and, taking up a stone, began to chip at the uneven stoop of the door. All Chilka's strength went into his blows, and presently a small slab of stone cracked and lifted. Danarion threw it behind him. There was a Sholan ship sailing a copper ocean, serene, hot, the color of bronze in a drowsy noon. When Danarion rose, he found his legs trembling. He peered into the hall. “There will be other doors,” he breathed aloud. They were never closed, and beyond them the universe hung, black and crystal. He walked deliberately to the opposite wall, Nenan stumbling after, and found to his surprise that his cheeks were wet. He knew that Chilka had no share in this grief.

The excavators had found the doorway. Nothing remained but the lintel. The huge copper doors emblazoned with Sholia's likeness and the twin suns had gone, whether melted away or broken and mixed with the floor or carried into the city, he did not know. He ran his hands over rough stone, and his fingers glided and bumped as they encountered the cold smoothness of copper. The diggers had eagerly pierced the rock that had blocked the door, thinking perhaps to find some ancient treasure beyond, but there had been nothing. Only the solid finality of more rock. The marks and hollows of their tools showed they had picked at it halfheartedly for a while, but they had apparently sensed that only mountain lay beyond. How foolish, they must have thought. How pointless to build a door giving onto nothing but stone. The ancestors were an enigma, were madmen who said and did things without purpose. Yet, Danarion thought, his hands caressing the door, if they had but known it, Shol's greatest treasure did indeed lie beyond this tall doorway. Above his head there were notches in the wall, and grooves in the ceiling. The roof had been of haeli wood, he remembered.

“What is this place?” Nenan whispered with awe. “Some vast royal house? How was it buried? Is it so old that time has covered it with the mountain?”

“It is indeed old,” Danarion forced himself to reply past the lump in his throat. “It was built at the dawning of this world, tens of thousands of your years ago. But time meant nothing to it, once. It was protected from decay by spells.”

“What is it? What spells? Are we safe, so close to it?”

Danarion turned to him, wanting suddenly to embrace his ignorance, his innocence. He himself felt old and thin in his essence. Nenan was fresh and young in this ravaged place. He did not deserve the fruits of what had occurred here long before he was born. For all our talk of protecting and saving, he thought, did we really know how to care for the mortals under us? Was our love really only a blind love of ourselves? Did all our spending of ourselves, our frantic efforts at defense mean only a cosmic selfishness in the end? I love you, Nenan, but it is not the love of sun-lord for mortal. It is something greater, for in Chilka I am no longer perfect. I love you as my son, as like to like, the wounded clasping the wounded. Your own small sufferings mean more to me now than the eternal pain of my own sun-kin. I do not know if I have the strength to simply find the Gate and then go away.

“It was Shol's Hall of Waiting,” he answered. “This”—he slapped the twisted frame of the door—“was the Gate itself.”

“I do not understand,” Nenan said. “There is nothing. Only mountain.” He looked at Danarion, and even in the half-light the skepticism of his father was evident in his eyes.

“This was the physical Gate,” Danarion tried to explain. “To expect to step from a physical Shol into space would be impossible. But as well as a physical Gate there was the essence of a Gate, which took the people into another dimension and set them on Shon or Sumel, where there were other Gates.”

“Then why can't I see the stars through here?” Nenan's voice was harsh, unforgiving.

“Because Sholia closed the Gate. But more—if she had closed it and its essence was still here, we should see the door filled with a silver wall set with Shol's symbols, the bells of Shaban. And you would be unable to approach it.”

“You talk very glibly,” Nenan retorted. “You have such tricks as perhaps the philosopher-priests of the two-minds have, but I still wonder just who you really are.”

Danarion did not reply. He stood back from the Gate, raised his arms, and touching the buckled lintel, uttered a word. There was a low rumble which rolled through the ground, making the lintel quiver gently, but nothing else. Again he spoke, more loudly this time, but again there was only a vibration in the rock. He sighed. “The Gate is not here, just as Janthis feared.”

“Then this was not a House?” Nenan was still grappling with Danarion's words.

“No. The palace was there”—Danarion waved at the rock wall—“some hundred steps.”

“Strange,” Nenan murmured, “this is not a haunted place. I feel safe here.”

“You can be certain that the people of Ishban do not!” Danarion smiled grimly. “Only Yarne would have dared to uncover this place. It is your inheritance, Nenan, but to the two-minds it means the terror of their first coming and their long imprisonment here.”

“Then they did not come willingly?”

“No, and neither did they really wish to conquer Shol. Their sun-lord and their own need drove them. They belong to Ghaka.”

Nenan's shoulders drooped. “It all seems like a jumbled child's tale,” he said. “They are there in the city, and I am here in this ruin, and that is all I know.”

“I can do no more here.” Danarion turned from the blackened lintels, the picked and broken rock. “We must go. I think the birds will be settled on their nests now, Nenan. We can hug the foot of the cliff and then skirt the wall and climb over it in the dark.”

Nenan said nothing. Deep in thought, he followed Danarion out under a late afternoon sky. The sun was westering softly. The road lay quiet and empty. Danarion turned sharply, and soon he and Nenan were walking with the cliff on the left and half a mile of scree, jumbled stones, and sand on their right between them and the road. The land lay peaceful around them, and in the hours it took them to walk to the city they saw no other being.

The sun went from yellow to a fat, shimmering purple and slid over the horizon, and with its going a vagrant breeze cooled them and put new life into their step. Light slanted over the plain, turning the road to a ribbon of blood, striking the wall of the city and painting it also an ominous and sullen red. Danarion watched it grow taller. Only the tops of its towers showed over the wall, and they seemed to be modeled artlessly on the saw-toothed, jagged tips of the mountains themselves. Spires huddled together as if jostling for space. They reminded Danarion, suddenly and vividly, of the crystal icicles of Lix, but they were undressed stone and did not sparkle in the last sunlight. They were full of tall, thin windows, and their walls were spiraled by curling, guardless ramps and walkways that made him, aware as never before of his body, slightly dizzy. Familiarity nagged at him. He had seen just such an arrangement of unblunted peaks before. Then he knew. The city had been built to resemble the cave-hollowed peaks of Ghaka. With the knowledge came cold shock that such a small thing could be so hard to bring to mind. To whose mind? he wondered. As Danarion my recall is perfect. But as Chilka … I am allowing myself to meld with Chilka, even as Janthis warned.

Darkness came, and they reached the wall. Danarion laid a hand on it.

“It is far too high to climb,” Nenan whispered, “and must surely be guarded.”

Danarion searched his mind. “The guards are one-minds trained from birth and are therefore alert at night,” he said. “There is only one gate, the one that leads out onto the plain, and it is already shut, but on the ocean side, where the fall is very steep, the wall is not watched. That is where I climbed over when I escaped. The wall seems high there, but inside it the houses are built right against it, and because of the lay of the land the roofs come almost to its top. We can get in there.”

It took them an hour to half-circle the wall, and when they came to the lip of the plain, where the ground suddenly fell away and far below, invisible save for a thin line of crooked white foam, was the ocean, they sat with their backs to the wall and rested. There was no sound from the other side, no bark of dogs or rattle of carts, no torchlit crowds pattering laughing in the streets. Yet Danarion, senses keened to any movement, could hear an undercurrent of whispering, private and constant, a low rise and fall like the soft hiss of water on pebbles far below on the beach. Finally he stood and craned upward. The wall was not well maintained here. The people's fear of the ocean had battled with their love of heights, and the fear had won. The wall was eaten by salt winds and time and though terrifyingly high was not unscalable. “You go first,” he told Nenan, “and I will be right behind in case you fall.”

Nenan was standing also, peering into the darkness with eyes wide open and a small smile on his face. “The smell of the ocean,” he said. “It is sweet and very winsome, and it beckons me like an old friend. I would like to have been a fisherman like my fathers.” He turned and began to climb, fitting fingers and feet into the crumbling stone, Danarion following. Strange, he thought. I risked my life to get away from the city only a few days ago, and here I am struggling to reenter it, my hands and feet using the selfsame cracks and niches.

It seemed to him that he had been reaching forever, fingers prying and testing, arm muscles beginning to ache and the sweat to run, breath rasping and coming quick and hard, when he heard Nenan grunt. There was a scrabble of sound, and he found himself lying on top of the wall. For a moment he closed his eyes and let himself loosen, and then he rolled under Nenan's steadying hands onto the roof of a small house.

Suddenly Nenan clapped a hand over his mouth and pointed. They were not alone. The dark silhouette of a man stood out against the stars. He was perched loosely and easily on the slates with feet apart and arms hanging at his sides, and the wind stirred in his long hair. Nenan's grip trembled, and Danarion put his own fingers over Nenan's cold ones. He understood the fear. It was not of discovery but of something intangible, and though the eye saw a man, a shape without detail in the starry darkness, yet the mind heard a frantic flurry of wings against a cage. “I don't think he can hear or see us,” Danarion said. “Take heart, Nenan. We will ignore him.”

He led Nenan to the eaves and sprang lightly into the garden. Nenan followed, then turned and looked up. The man still had not moved. “You should pity them, not fear them,” Danarion said aloud, but that part of him which was Chilka thought of a swift knife sliding through the unresisting flesh. “We must press on.” Chilka knew the way. He slipped quickly along the streets with Nenan huddled close to him.

Ishban at night was a city of walking dead. They thronged the streets with sightless eyes. They stood on roofs, in the spreading trees, and high on the tight-twisting spires of the towers, and the sound of their despair was a moaning of loss and misery that fanned Nenan's fear into panic. “It is a city of birds!” he whispered hoarsely to Chilka, hardly able to walk for the weakness in his legs. Chilka nodded, his own eyes, Danarion's shocked mind on the frilled iron gates, the shop fronts, the fretted iron fences. Everywhere there were wings where once there had been bells, and Danarion realized that it was the absence of Shaban's constant trilling that had been nagging at him ever since they had scaled the wall.

Often they walked alone through star-silvered, deserted streets whose unlit buildings stood like hollow mounds in a graveyard, but just as often they would turn a corner to find themselves in the middle of a quiet, slow-weaving throng. Yet they were ignored.

They stopped once. There was a woman standing alone before her gate, face lifted to the dark sky, and Danarion took her hand and stroked her cheek, murmuring in some language that Nenan did not understand. But though the woman strove to answer, her lips working, her eyes remained opaque, and no words came. Danarion kissed the hand and let it fall, and it was then that Nenan's fear left him.

Much later they came to a halt before a wall within the city, gated in copper doors upon which two vast wings reared. Chilka drew Nenan back into shadow. “This gate is guarded by one-minds,” he whispered. “Beyond it is the House. To get in we must overpower the men but not kill them, for they are our kin. Can you do this?” Nenan nodded. Together they approached, and Chilka unhooked the massive padded striker that hung on the wall and struck the gate. The boom reverberated through the street and the courtyard beyond, then faded. They waited.

Presently one of the doors inched open, slowly and cautiously, and Chilka did not wait to be scrutinized. He put his foot to it and leaped inside, talking the man with him. His hands found the throat, and he slammed the body onto the ground. Only when he stood did he remember who he was and that he could have quieted the guard with one soft word. Aghast, Danarion looked at Chilka's flexing fingers and then to the man groaning and half-conscious at his feet.