The Care and Feeding of Griffins (38 page)

48.  The Dead City

T
aryn walked through the woods for what could have been minutes or hours.  She had no thoughts and only a vague awareness of place or direction.  When she emerged into the plains, she was struck first by how low the sun now hung in the sky—had she really spent all day with the magus?  Doing what?—and then by a wave of humiliation and panic.

Aisling dropped from her arms as she staggered toward the lake, but she only made it a few steps before she fell to her knees and was violently sick.  The act of disgorging  brought on a rush of terrified tears, baffling in their intensity.  She crawled away from the mess she
’d made and collapsed where the grass began to turn to sand.  There, she sobbed herself dry, curled into a ball of human misery, closed to the disapproving stare of the sun and Aisling’s repeated efforts to comfort.

When the storm passed, she continued to lie on the ground, her eyes shut and glued with tears, but her hand found Aisling and began to pet him.  This quieted his anxious squawks and ouch
’s, but started him kneading at her breast.  That was okay.  It was grounding.  She had no idea what had come over her.

It hadn
’t been anything the magus had said.  Taryn searched her memories, but found only a pleasant afternoon passed in small talk and tea.  The cat had stayed in the back room the whole time and nothing at all had been said or done that upset her even a little, much less enough to bring this on.

‘
Must be about to hit the rag,’ she thought glumly, not believing it for a second.  It was far more likely to just be the same stresses of living in this alien place all alone, brought to a frantic head simply by having to look at the only other human face this whole world had to offer her.  Well, no, there must be other humans somewhere, because she kept hearing about how murderous and horrible they were.  She wondered if she was starting to subconsciously hate herself.

Taryn rose up onto her hands and knees and crawled down to the water
’s edge, suddenly compelled to see her reflection, to be reminded of exactly what she looked like.  It seemed tremendously important that she know, as though her soul were somehow tied in to her self-awareness, and that she could be lost (or taken) if she forgot enough. 

She crouched in the damp sand, her hands sunk in the freezing water, and stared down at the dark mirror of the river.  The face she saw was not familiar at first, not at all.  Then it was her mother
’s face, almost, with a little of her father around the chin and the eyes.  Seeing that, seeing them, she felt better.

A little griffin stuck his feathered head up next to Taryn
’s in the water.  He puffed, gaping at his reflection, and hesitantly peeped.  She watched him gather his courage and finally pounce at the water-griffin.  Splash.  He leapt back, shaking his head, and peeped again, this time at her.  He didn’t seem confused at all.  He’d tried to pounce and got a face-full of river.  There was no griffin in the water.  The griffin in the water wasn’t him.

And that was good to know.

Taryn stood up and brushed tears from her face and then sand from her clothes.  She picked Aisling up, gave him a quick nuzzle, and headed upriver toward home.  The afternoon was almost gone.  She needed to get her fire going, find a little something to take the awful taste of biscuit and bile out of her mouth, and go to bed. 

But when she came to the bridge, Taryn found herself turning in.  The hour was getting late, but she didn
’t want to go home just yet.  She didn’t feel good—not sick, not exactly, just sad and confused and somehow ashamed—and she couldn’t face sitting around her lonely little campsite just yet.  Of course, she’d be just as alone wandering in the woods on the far side of the river, but maybe if she had something new to look at and explore, she wouldn’t feel it as much.

There were trails leading off the bridge and into the woods, wide trails that had been well-walked and well-maintained.  Roads, almost.  She followed one of them at random, winding her way on a steadily-rising slope that twisted gradually west.  She tried not to think as she walked.  Her thoughts had a way of looping around to the magus.  His broad smile as he opened the door to her in particular.  Such a friendly
—

(predatory)

—smile he had.  Every time Taryn thought about it, she felt a tiny tug in her heart, something that wanted her to turn around and go back to him.  At the same time, she felt the burn of tears in her eyes, something that wanted to pull the covers over her head and hide from him.  So she didn’t want to think.  She just walked.

But it really was getting late.  Not evening yet, not for a while, but definitely headed that way.  The forest was thinning out; she could see that odd, heightened look of the sky where the sun was sinking.  In another hour, the colors would come out to paint a sunset.  She ought to go home.

There was a clearing up ahead, though.  She could see a vast field of blue that was the lake beyond, and sheets of gray rock that was the mountain.  A nice view.  She wanted to step on out and see it clearly, maybe sit down there in the clearing looking out over that peaceful lake at the woods on the other side where the magus lived, and have herself another good cry.  So Taryn walked on.

The trail under her feet was thinner here, but it did continue on, right up to the edge of the clearing, where it vanished under a thick carpet of moss and grass.  Taryn stepped out of the trees.  It felt like stepping out into a stadium.  The rich, green ground was vast and fairly flat.  The mountain at her right hand was high and slightly concave as it marked out the northern border of the valley, and it rose in jagged peaks that could remind a girl of bleachers if she wanted to be so reminded.  The sparkle on the lake even simulated the flashbulbs of spectators and their cameras.  It was pretty, but somehow not very natural, and it made Taryn homesick for reasons she couldn
’t understand.  And she was too tired to want to understand, anyway.

She was about to turn around and head back for the bridge when she realized that she could see the shadow of a straight-edged block there on t
he rocky side of the mountain, and nature, as her father had so often said, did not come with straight lines.  Even this idle interest was a far better friend to her than her other thoughts had been; she continued on to investigate. 

She soon left even the straggling fringe of the forest behind her, but as she made her way toward the rock, she could see charred stumps dotting the clearing, overgrown by creepers and thorny vines.  She stopped
—what the hell, she didn’t have anything better to do—to clear the growing debris from one of these stumps and found that she was not walking on grass after all, but on cobblestones, deeply overgrown and also blackened by fire. Her curiosity had been rewarded, it seemed; she was walking on an old road.

But what, then, were the stone-like protrusions littering the landscape?  Taryn could see dozens of lumps under the grass, and having stumbled over one or two of them on her way over here, had just assumed them to be rock.  But rock wasn
’t the sort of thing to just be lying over the well-paved area that this had once been.  And if this place was in the habit of having rockslides as part of its natural course, there’d ought to be a few on top of the grass as well as underneath it.

Uneasily, Taryn approached one of the mysterious lumps and knelt down to clear it.  She unearthed what at first glance appeared to be a severed hand, petrified with age.  It took only the span of an eyeblink to realize that she held part of a statue instead, badly pitted by moss and other growth, so weakened that it flaked under even her careful touch.  She turned the stone hand over, thinking that it looked (to her uneducated eye) vaguely Greek.  It had the highly-detailed and realistically-rendered look of an ancient Greek statue, anyway.  The hand was about five times the size of her own and was clenched into a fist that in turn wrapped the broken hilt of some weapon or another.  The wrist was encircled in a protective band.  The forearm was powerfully-muscled right up until it had been shattered.  Looking around, she supposed it was fair to say that the rest of the statue lay in piece
s all over the clearing.  If she had the inclination and a pot of super glue, she could probably reassemble it.  But where had it stood?

She moved on, up a slope that now she saw clearly were overgrown stairs, until she stood before a massive stone archway, crowned by two oddly-shaped juts that on closer inspection proved to be a pair of feet, broken off at the ankle.  So the mystery of the statue
’s origins were solved, but here was a much better one.

Each of the gateway
’s supporting pillars were wider through the middle than she stood tall, and they reached some twenty feet or more overhead.  The archstones themselves had been carved with markings she thought were letters, although they were completely alien ones.  There had been doors at one time; she saw the hinges still attached to the pillars, but there was no sign whatsoever of what they’d attached to, unless one considered the blackened smudges along the sides to be evidence of burnt wooden doors.

On the other side of the gate was a city.

Not a village like Tonka’s kraal, but a city.  The main road stretched out and out for what seemed like miles before the enclosing mountain walls enfolded it.  Other streets branched away in an orderly east-west and north-south grid, with signposts at every intersection.  Stone buildings, many as much as five stories tall, loomed on either side.  Glass windows reflected the evening light.  Some of them were broken.

But there was something odd here, something so bizarre that it took Taryn several minutes of studying the demolished gate before her eyes could even process it.  The grass and creeper vines grew thickly right up to the archway.  There, they stopped, leaving a perfectly straight line right across the place where the doors would have closed. 

Taryn set Aisling down and knelt to run her fingers over that manicured line of grass.  It felt wet and fresh and vibrant.  There was absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be growing like all get-out right through the gateway and into the city.  She stood up and stepped under the archway onto the stone street.

She was struck at once by the absolute quiet of the place.  Nothing moved that she could see.  There were no bird
’s nests in the ornate eaves, no hoppers infesting the open doorways and alleys.  There were no spiders spinning webs on the signposts.  For that matter, there were no buzzing flies or droning crickets for them to catch.  The city was still.

Taryn started walking.  Her sneakers threw out echoes, as did the four-step click of Aisling
’s toenails and talons.  He peeped at her, flattened as the street peeped back at him, and then cautiously stretched out his neck and peeped again.  In moments, he was hard at play, peeping, screeching, squawking, and too-ra loo-ing, sometimes leaping to throw his voice from a better height, so engaged that he hardly seemed to notice as Taryn moved off down the road.

What had happened here?  She saw burned patches
here and there, but not many, and they didn’t look too serious.  Some of the doors stood open, but none of them looked like they’d been beaten in.  Ancient tapestries and blankets (time-rotted but not moth-eaten) still hung out for display in shop windows.  Wooden carts had been abandoned in the street, their contents still whole and upright.  She passed a jeweler’s store and stopped to examine strings of pearls and gold bands behind grimed panes of glass.

“
Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured, and the city breathed it back at her in dusty agreement.  Taryn glanced back at Aisling, decided he was entertaining himself admirably, and gave the nearest open door a push.  The hinges had rusted, but they gave with a good shove, abrading her ears with stuttering squeals. 

She saw her own shadow fall long on a stone floor within, and then Aisling
’s as he joined her, but the interior offered no more clues than the street-side.  It was just a room, wide, clean, lifeless.  Tiled mosaics and hanging tapestries decorated the walls.  Carpets still lay flat and dust-dulled on the floor.  There was a book lying open on the table at what appeared to be a reception area, the unfamiliar writing still legible, although the ink in the open jar beside it had long since dried up.  Nothing was overturned, nothing broken. 

There were stairs leading up to the next floor and Taryn took them, Aisling clambering after her.  She found perfectly recognizable apartments
—large rooms, well-furnished—and all of them sound.  The beds were still covered in decayed furs.  Glass jars and boxes of food, long turned to crust, filled the kitchen shelves.  There were necklaces of silver and bracelets studded with gems sitting in open view on a vanity table whose mirror had tarnished beyond the power to cast a reflection.

But there were no dirty dishes on the table, she saw.  No dishes in the sink, no wine goblets stained with the tannins of a half-filled cup slowly evaporated.  Everyone had left, all right, but they
’d had the time to clean up first.  Of the three apartments that she explored, she found only one thing out of place, a thing that she noticed first as just a lump in the thick carpet of dust on the floor.  When she picked it up, her fingers sank into soft cloth, stiff and brittle with age.