The Ale Boy's Feast (42 page)

Below, a bearcat—broad and glistening, dark as dried blood—slunk around a corner. The children converged on Emeriene as if she could defend them. But when the cat looked up and saw the newcomers on the wall, she lashed her flat tail and stood up, spreading herself to the full breadth of her body, wide and thin as a bed quilt. Then she turned and floated over the ground like the fan-rays Emeriene had seen in the shallows of the Rushtide Inlet.

In a haphazard crossroads, monkeys napped lazily in the bowls of multilevel fountains. Occasionally one climbed atop a fountain, beat his chest like a drum, and bellowed his defiance. “We have our work cut out for us when it comes to winning the hearts of the locals,” laughed the mage at Cal-raven’s side.

But Cal-raven seemed uninterested in the animals. Emeriene could see that his gaze was drawn to stone, to structure, to statues. Some courtyards were arranged around gigantic figures that had lost definition with the passing years and weather, though flaunts of sculpted muscle, proud brows, clenched jaws, and corrugated chests were still apparent.
They might have been based on actual men
, she thought.
If so, then history has been, for men, a steady decline
.

As they descended from the wall, the guards flexed their bowstrings, anxious. Cal-raven, listening to Irimus and Batey relate what they had discovered, led them
toward the grand hall, and she felt as if this were a royal procession—the king marching to his throne room.

Just outside its ivy-curtained gate, Milora, Luci, and Margi surrounded a raised block that no longer supported a statue. They spoke in urgent whispers, then moved along a shattered line of stone that was probably a fallen statue’s remains and started pushing one of those pieces back toward the block.

Already the dreamers are dreaming
, she thought.

“Do you boys want to help them with the statue?” she asked. But Cesyr and Channy snorted and puffed, strutting as if they were soldiers. “Where’s the city’s fight ring?” asked Channy.

Inside they moved through a low-ceilinged room that had turned into a forest of shallow-rooted toughstalks. A herd of miniature deer huddled among the slender trees, led by a buck the size of a dog, who shook his antlers in defiance, then retreated, leading the herd in a swift and silent departure through a hole in the wall. A cloud of deer-flies hung in the air, surprised, buzzing indignantly, then funneled out through the same exit.

Moving through an archway, they found the vast sanctuary they had anticipated. In the light of the broken dome, the floor rose in crescent-shaped tiers to a dais that was missing its throne. A stairway stretched up the center, and others ran along the sides. The company was quiet in awe, and the truth of what they saw made Emeriene feel watched, as if a monarch of extravagant powers might pronounce a judgment from an invisible throne.

Wind rushed in through the dome’s break, carrying snow-finches in clouds that exploded and imploded, then streamed out through windows around the remaining span of the dome.

Cal-raven remained silent while the others talked and made plans. He scowled up through the hall.
He doesn’t like it
, she thought.
He doesn’t like dividing people into levels and categories
.

Irimus Rain quickly volunteered to design a new throne. Cal-raven reminded him that there were far more urgent matters needing attention—like a rigorous examination of Inius Throan’s boundaries, a search for gaps that might let in a viscorclaw.
The less the people feared a Deathweed siege, the more freedom they would feel to chase out the ancient shadows and make it their home.

Hearing this, Emeriene began at once to organize those inspections. She approached Sparolyne, a soldier sent by Partayn who had for years made a circuit of Bel Amica’s bastions to ensure their strength and integrity. “We’ll reinforce any failing pillar,” he vowed, “and seal up any break.”

Cal-raven did not stay long in the royal sanctuary. He led them back out through a busy sprawl of structures. They moved through spiral-walled mazes—possibly galleries. The corners of some bunkhouses and the empty frames of greenhouses seemed to have been crushed, perhaps by a prowling Fearblind Dragon.

“Where is Reveler now?” Cal-raven asked his teacher.

“She’s gone home into the Eastern Heatlands to rest and restore the shields she lost in Jenta’s furnace.”

“You must have made quite a promise to win her help.”

“Even now,” said the smiling mage, “my ravens are luring muskgrazers from their burrows and driving them across the sands in a herd so large they could drink Deep Lake down. They’ll go right to Reveler’s doorstep so she can fill her belly for days. She would never go hungry as it was, but the event will attract the attention of the males. She’s a lonely dragon. Thus the temper.”

As the explorers proceeded, plump grey birds that sheened when they caught the light—the people had taken to calling them “merchants,” all except the merchants, of course—waddled complacently under their feet, oblivious, stalling the explorers. But a passing cloud-hawk or the shadow of a lurking zooey-cat startled them and they hiked up their feather skirts and fled on long legs that were surprisingly sturdy, surprisingly blue. A pack of yipping, rabbit-eared lurkdashers chased their tails and ran down a litter of gorrels that had sprawled lazily and stupidly in a sun-dazzled yard.

The wind played upon the ruins as if they were an orchestra out of tune, and howlermice gathered on piles of rubble, thrusting their long snouts skyward as if inspired to sing their lonesome dissonance. “Make a note,” said Emeriene to Irimus. “We’ll want to be sure those rodents are soon a part of Inius Throan’s lost history.”

Jes-hawk, one arm in a sling, still carried his arrowcaster. And as the king’s party left the sanctuary to move through an overgrown orchard, the archer shot a large stag as it leapt between curtains of berryvines. Bel Amicans quickly carried it to the kitchens.

Entering a formidable library that had lost its south-facing facade, they found many levels lined with rows of shelves that had been overrun by a pride of viscorcats who bathed themselves, hissed and swiped, and watched the newcomers from the shadows. As the company watched them, they vanished one by one, tufts of fur from their hurried departure drifting in the air like clouds of moths. Some wooden shelves had rotted, leaving only metal brackets from which vines swayed like the king’s own hammock.

They ran their hands along trickle-sculpted walls rough as tree bark. Cal-raven handled doorknobs that snarled or leered or laughed with animal faces. Some were inviting to the touch, molded to resemble a small pumpkin, a thrush, or a beetle with an iridescent veneer. Others he would not touch, thrusting the shutters or doors open with a boot. They opened moth-shredded draperies, sometimes to windows, sometimes to stone, sometimes to shocked cliff-chickens sitting on egg-crowded nests. Emeriene quickly collected those eggs for Adryen and Stasi in the kitchens.

Walking in a single-file line around the library’s upper echelons, in trepidatious steps, Cal-raven drew back a curtain that concealed a high window. Wild red chickens scattered from the sill in a panic, revealing a view of the courtyard below, where Milora, Luci, and Margi had somehow raised a boulder onto the statue’s foundation. They were hard at work, sculpting.

“Will you sculpt another gallery in honor of the lost?” asked Irimus.

“No,” said the king after a moment. “Our minds have been too long on death.”

At once he interrupted the tour and announced he would pay a visit to Say-ressa and the wounded.

The healer was busy as ever, shooing a Bel Amican guard out the door and strictly instructing him to rest and to drink only the invigorating waters from the river beneath Inius Throan. She told the king that Jes-hawk had not yet returned to
have his dressing changed. And Tabor Jan was struggling, his breathing ragged, his coughs still bloody. He went into a spasm with every absent-minded swallow. Cal-raven knelt beside him, but the captain still would not meet his gaze. Meanwhile Say-ressa was bending busily over every patient, every pallet, the drape of her silver hair trailing softly over those who slept and suffered.

Departing this temporary infirmary, their solemn silence was interrupted as Kar-balter, who had marched boldly into the ground-level entrance of a low, stout mill tower, ran back out screaming as if his cloak were on fire. The tower shuddered with a muffled cacophony. A stream of fork-tongues flew from the windows that pocked the tower’s sides to reel shrieking away over the city walls and into the mist.

“Apparently,” Kar-balter said when they could calm him, “I’ve found the king of this blasted zoo. He’s a fangbear. And so well-fed by volunteers who have crawled or flown into his den that he’s grown too large to leave it.”

An archer, glad to be useful, marched forward with a ready arrow, but the king raised his hand. “We’ll consider a way to release the poor creature. Let’s build a cage to hold him and wheel it to the threshold, where we can send him out into the canyon.”

Cesyr and Channy stood open-mouthed, disappointment quickly warping into anger.

“Boys,” whispered Emeriene, her arms around them, “tell me this. Who is stronger—the man who attacks what looks dangerous, or the man who dares to control his fear and find a better way?”

A strange unease curdled her awe as they wandered web-strewn halls. Fading murals still displayed simple, idyllic village scenes—comfortable cottages and castles filled with light in a world devoid of decay or destruction, intolerant of imperfection. Each mural was being invaded by the tentacles of mold and moss.

Surely these portrayed a world that this city’s residents had longed to know. But they were such selfish dreams. The pictures offered no sense of history and no sense of future, no awareness of suffering or brokenness—no vision. And no sense of story. They reminded her of a traumatized woman she had found among Abascar’s
survivors in the Bel Amican infirmary. This woman had sung sweet little songs to herself, rocking back and forth, her mind fixed upon forgetting what had happened, determined to ignore her present difficulty, unable to move or acknowledge her wounds, much less accept help for them.

As they moved on, Emeriene began losing her sense of direction, dizzied by the mazelike arrangement that led them in circles and to frequent dead ends. But it was as if the designs were only intricate indulgences of line and motion. Inius Throan was a wonderment, and yet there was a wrongness, as if each street had little to do with the next, had half turned its back to the other, declaring its boundary.

So she was relieved when she heard Cal-raven murmuring to Scharr ben Fray, “It’s like one of Yawny’s mealtime mistakes—a bite into a sweetberry cobbler souring against a knot of salted grazer jerky.”

As they moved quietly back out into dusk, the aggressive, angular textures of the streets seemed to shout for a passerby’s attention, to keep her from lifting her gaze to the emerging stars as she walked.

“It was the first city,” said Scharr ben Fray. “Raak’s people were eager to give shape to everything they could imagine.”

“Artists learn by imitation,” said Cal-raven. “Teacher, surely you cannot think that this was the world’s first city. What we’ve seen here—it’s full of advanced invention and craft.”

“It was the first generation of Tammos Raak’s descendants,” said the mage. “They had gifts we cannot imagine.”

“But they didn’t work together well, did they?” Cal-raven countered. “There’s no guiding sense here reconciling this city into a whole.”

Scharr ben Fray nodded, but his slight scowl suggested impatience. “If any cities existed before this one, Tammos Raak left them behind. No doubt for a reason.”

“And why,” Cal-raven continued, “do we never hear tales of Tammos Raak’s origins? Who were these children he made the residents of Inius Throan?”

“Perhaps we will find answers here, beneath the ivy and rubble. I’ve always marveled that there seems to be no story about the mother of these children. There
are no stories of a queen within these walls.” Then the mage glanced back over his shoulder at Emeriene. “Not yet, anyway,” he laughed.

Emeriene stopped in her tracks, terrified as others glanced curiously in her direction. Cal-raven did not turn around, but his pace seemed to quicken as if he were eager to outrun the suggestion. Feeling the blood rush to her face, she knelt down and pretended to fix a tear in Cesyr’s shoe.

“Give them a goal, Cal-raven,” Scharr ben Fray continued. “Wonder and hope will quickly burn out. Exhaustion is coming. Then impatience. And anger. They need to see their king’s vision.”

“An event,” said Cal-raven. “To mark the end of one journey, the beginning of another.”

As Cal-raven looked out his citadel window and watched dawn’s long arm paint the mountaintops, he wanted nothing more than to forget it all and go to Emeriene. She was like a deep well of clear water in this filthy, crumbling house. And he was so very thirsty.

Why did you risk your life, and your sons, to come here?

He knew the answer. It terrified him. It was one of two secrets he carried. And both were dangerous.