“I am not under false illusions, despite what you believe, Jarmon,” he muttered. “I just see no need to accept the inevitability of doom. Perhaps the king’s vision was wrong, or he misinterpreted it. Or perhaps the Sleeping Childis destined to rise, but the sea won’t consume the entire island; that didn’t even happen when the star fell to Earth in the first place. Certainly we will lose some coastline, but if we go to higher ground, as we have been telling all the others to do—”
“I pray thee, cease,” Cantha said.
The raspy dryness of her voice sliced through the wind, causing Sevirym to fall immediately silent. Cantha used words sparingly, as if doing so pained her. It was difficult not to obey whatever she said.
Hector stopped, turning to look carefully for the first time in as long as he could remember at his companions, four completely different souls with one thing in common: they had each willingly sacrificed whatever remaining time life would have given them to stay behind on the Island, assisting in his futile mission.
He was surprised by how much they had changed physically since the exodus of the Fleets, but was even more shocked by the fact that he had failed until now to notice. Jarmon’s beard, a famous shade of burnt red all his life, had gone gray enough to blend into the fog in which he stood; Cantha’s body, always thin and dark as a shadow, had withered to little more than a whisper on the wind. Her eyes stared unflinchingly back at him from the haze; the strength of her will was such that it held the space her physical presence had once taken in the air.
Sevirym was staring at the ground, the sting of Cantha’s words evident in his expression. Little more than a boy when he had rashly thrown his lot in with Hector, he had aged a score of years in the last five months, still maintaining an intermittent idealism that drove Jarmon to distraction. With each disappointment, each rebuke from an elder, the life seemed to seep a little more out of him, leaving him visibly older.
Hector inhaled slowly, then caught the look of understanding aimed at him by Anais as if it were a ball tossed to him. His closest friend, a brother in all but blood, Anais had always understood his thoughts without needing to hear them spoken aloud; perhaps it was their shared Lirin heritage that made their minds one while granting them opposite physical traits. Anais had been born with the traditional features of the Liringlas race, the silver eyes, the rosy skin, and smooth hair that reflected the sun; Hector had favored his mother’s kin, dark of eye and hair, the crown of curls atop his head reaching only to Anais’s brow. Now they looked remarkably similar—both had faded, their features dulled to gray colorlessness by circumstance and exhaustion and the heat of the boiling sea.
He watched for a moment more, still in the thrall of the silence that Cantha had commanded, unable to feel anything about the changes he had noticed. Then he signaled wordlessly for them to head out.
That silence held sway for the duration of the walk along the rocky shore until the group reached the spot where the horses waited, oblivious to the changes in the morning wind. Then Anais cuffed Sevirym across the back of the head.
“I discern the reasons for your reluctance now!” he joked. “You wish to get out of sandbag duty.”
Sevirym mustered a slight smile. “Can you blame me?”
“Certainly not,” Anais said agreeably. “I just might form an alliance with you, Sevirym; we can mutiny and call for abandoning this mind-numbing task.”
Hector chuckled as he mounted his roan. “A waste of time, that would be. The destruction of the Island may not be forgone, but sandbag duty remains as inevitable as death.”
“You are decorating the wind, Hector,” Jarmon said sourly. “But if it occupies your mind while we wait, I suppose there is nothing to be said against it.”
Anais pulled himself into the saddle. “Speak for yourself.I’ll gainsay it. If I had known this is how you were going to put us to use, I would not have stayed. It’s one thing to agree to face certain death with one’s best friend. It is altogether another to have one’s carefully cleaned fingernailsruined playing in the dirt in the never-ending pursuit of useless sandbag fortifications. It is too onerous to be borne. You owe me a night of very expensive drinking, Hector.”
Hector chuckled again and spurred the roan to a canter.
They rode without speaking down the northwestern shoreline to the outskirts of the abandoned fishing village and dismounted, to begin combing through what remained of the thatched huts and broken docks. Little effort had been needed to evacuate this place; fishermen knew the sea, and had been among the first to realize what was coming.
The five walked in silence through the packed-sand and crushed-shell streets, leading their mounts, the only sound the whine of the coastal wind, the cracking of thatch or the groaning of wood, the skittering of dock rats and the occasional snorting of the horses.
At the remains of each building one of the group peeled off from the others and poked through the fragments; little was left, as fishermen were practical people and had harvested whatever was usable in their village before packing their vessels and heading out in one of the earliest flotillas to the northern continent, the nearest haven.
On two earlier occasions they had found squatters, wild-eyed men, women, and children who had come from places inland, seeking passage off the Island after the Fleets had already gone. These lost souls had taken shelter in the shells of the huts that remained, praying for miracles or wandering in aimless dementia. Luck had it that places for them could be found on the few remaining rescue ships that came in the wake of the exodus of the Fleets. Hector himself prayed that he would never again have to tell a living soul that the time had passed when escape was possible; the wailing that resulted was too reminiscent of the sobbing he had heard upon breaking other such news.
As always, his mind wandered to Talthea and the children. If he closed his eyes he could almost see her, her belly great with child, her hand on the shoulder of his son—
“Body,” Cantha called from within the ruins of the old salting shed.
Jarmon and Anais made their way over the litter of tin lantern shells and rusted iron hinges in the sand and opened the door. Cantha stood just over the threshold, her arms crossed, staring at the corpse, that of an old man who had curled up beneath what at one time had been the skinning table, its longboard missing. Flies swarmed in the heat.
“Wasn’t here the last time we passed through—that was less than a fortnight ago, was it not, Hector?” Anais asked.
Hector only nodded, pulling forth his tinderbox as the others stepped out of the shed. He struck the flint against the steel and set the spark to the fragment of brittle twigs that remained in the roofing bundles.
“Whoever you are, I commit your body to the wind and your soul to the care of God, the One, the All,” he said blandly, a chant he had intoned many times in the last few weeks. It was a Namer’s benediction, but without a name.
Cantha, Kith by birth and thus a child of the aforementioned wind, blew gently on the sparks as she passed. They glowed brighter, then kindled, igniting a moment later into a thin flame.
When the remnants of the shed began to fill with smoke, and the flames had started to consume the roof, the group turned away and continued their task. Finding no one else in the empty village, they mounted again and rode south, not looking back at the billowing smoke and flames behind them.
The cobbled streets of Kingston, the great port city that lay south along the coast of the fishing village, introduced the element of noise back into the journey as the horses’ hooves clattered loudly over the stones, echoing off the empty alleyways leading to the town square.
The stoicism that had beset the faces of the travelers seemed to wane somewhat whenever they returned to the capital city of the westlands, resolving into a quiet communal dismay. With each turn of the cycle, the shining jewel of the western seacoast looked more shabby, more broken, a desolate haven for ghosts and vermin that had once been a glistening city built by a visionary king centuries befor
e.
Upon reaching the dry fountain in the square, the group dismounted. Sevirym’s feet landed on the cobblestones first, followed by the muffled thuds from the others’ boots.
“Damnation,” he murmured, looking up at the place where the statue of that long-dead king riding a hippogriff had once towered over the mosaic inlaid in the fountain’s bed. The figure had been battered savagely, the formerly outstretched wings of the king’s mount shattered into marble shards that lay scattered in the dry basin. The statue’s stone head had been smashed from its shoulders and now lay in the street just outside the capstones, the pupil-less eyes staring blindly at the hazy sky.
Jarmon had given a lifetime’s service to the descendants of that king. He waded through the dust and gravel to the statue’s base and numbly brushed the grit from the inscription:
AN EMPIRE BUILT BY SLAVES CRUMBLES IN THE DESPOT’S LIFETIME;
ACITY BUILT IN FREEDOM STANDS A THOUSAND YEARS.
“Fell short by half, Your Majesty,” the elderly guard said softly, running his callused finger over the letters.
“What was the purpose in this?” demanded Sevirym of no one in particular. “What was the need? Did they not have enough to concern them that they had time forthis ? Is there not enough destruction coming that they needed more? Bloodyanimals .”
“Peace,” said Hector quietly. “It is but a statue. It doesn’t matter now. The ideal remains.”
Sevirym choked back a bitter laugh and seized the reins of his mount, leading the animal away from the dusty fountain.
“Must be hard on you westlanders, riding this continuous loop,” Anais said after a moment, once Jarmon and Cantha had followed Sevirym away from the town square and were now combing through the remains of their assigned streets. “At least those of us who dwelt to the east beyond the Great River are spared watching the gradual destruction of our homelands.”
Hector said nothing but clicked to his roan. He and Anais fell into routine, joining the others in their search through the empty city.
He walked numbly past the abandoned shops where as a child he had delighted to linger, maneuvering his horse around the mounds of broken glass and grit that had once been the window of the Confectionery; the shop had produced baked goods so exceptional that the populace believed them to be imbued with magic. He allowed himself to linger again, one last time, trying to recall the scent of the flaky pastries, the sight of the castles rendered entirely in cookies and sweetmeats, the chocolate carvings of winged horses and dragons with strawberry scales, but he could only see the hollowed shell of the building with patches of light on the floor sinking in from the holes in the roof, could smell only the odor of pitch and oil and destruction.
How long he had stood, staring futilely back into the past, he did not know, but when Anais’s voice finally reached his consciousness, it was like a bell rousing him from a deep sleep.
“Nothing save for some stray dogs and a murder of crows that has taken refuge in the eaves of the old prelate’s office.”
“A murder of crows?”
Anais adopted an aspect of mock seriousness. “Aye, big uglies, too. One of them may have been the prelate’s wife.”
Hector smiled. “She certainly had quite a caw to her, but alas, none of the birds could be she. May God the One, the All, help my father—she sailed on his ship.”
Anais shook his head in sympathy. “Poor MacQuieth. As if he did not have enough to contend with.”
Hector nodded, abandoning the attempt to summon better memories of the Confectionery. “My father’s greatest burden in the last days before the exodus was the irony of it all. He spent his youth fighting the Seren War to spare the Island from the fires of the Underworld, to keep the demons born of that fire from destroying Serendair. And now that the F’dor are defeated, the last of their kind sealed forever in the Vault of the Underworld, the Island is going to succumb to fire after all—fire from the sky long lodged in the sea.”
“Somehow I doubt that the irony was your father’s greatest burden,” Anais said, kicking the broken storefront sign away from the cobbled street.
“Did you look in on the stable?”
“Aye.”
“Are any of the horses still alive?”
“Remarkably, all of them are, the poor beasts. Most have withered to skin and bones. Cantha is feeding them the last of the hay.”
Hector loosed a deep sigh. “I think we should deviate from our regular route, Anais. Before we leave here, let’s take them out of the city to the fields at the crossroads and turn them loose. Surely it is kinder than leaving them in their paddocks, to be fed only when we come through. They can find grass and water there.”
“Agreed,” Anais said. “The human population is gone now. What’s a delay in a route that guards no one, anyway?”
Hector looked back over his shoulder up the main street that led at its terminus to the entrance of the Gated City in the north of Kingston.
“Not all of the human population is gone,” he objected quietly. “Only those who were free to leave.”
Anais followed his gaze, then exhaled deeply.
As the sea wind blew through Kingston’s desolate streets, whipping sand into their eyes, both men thought back to earlier days, after the exodus of the Fleets but before the rescue ships from other lands had stopped coming to Serendair. The young king, Gwylliam, newly crowned and the architect of the evacuation that had saved most of his subjects from death in the cataclysm that was still to come, had sailed on the last ship of the last Fleet, and so believed that every Seren citizen who wanted to leave had done so.
He had forgotten completely about the Gated City.
It was really not surprising that the City had been missed in the inventory of Gwylliam’s conscious thought. Though it occupied geographical space in his realm, it was a world unto itself, a former penal colony of petty thieves and cutpurses that had evolved into its own entity, a dark and colorful society with layers of governance and threat that were incomprehensible to any but those who lived within its locked gates.
Despite the appearance of being contained, the Gated City clearly had as many tunnels out into the world beyond its fortifications as a beaver dam or a nest of rats. Even in the days prior to the Seren War that had ended two hundred years before, the City had been divided into the Outer Ring and the Inner Ring. The Outer Ring contained a flourishing market of exotic goods and eccentric services that citizens of the outside world could visit as long as they were checked through the gates.
They entered on the middle day of the week, known as Market Day, at the sound of the great brass bell, to shop in the bazaar, clutching the token that would allow them passage back out of the City again when the bell sounded at closing time, buying perfumes that could transport the mind to places beyond the horizons of reality, linens and silks of indescribable colors, jewels and potions and soothing balms and myriad other wares from the far corners of the earth. The mere existence of these exotic goods was a broad hint at how porous the thick walls of the Gated City really were.
The Inner Ring was even more mysterious, a dark place to which none but the permanent residents of the City had access. Within its windowless buildings, in its shadowy alleys, another sort of business was conducted that those who lived outside the Gated City could only imagine in the course of their nightmares.
When Hector and his companions first realized that the Gated City had been overlooked, they had sought to offer its residents refuge on the first of the ships that had come in the wake of the exodus. He had gone to the City himself—its massive gates no longer were guarded from the outside. He had sprung the lock and thrown the gates open wide, issuing an invitation to the startled population he found on the other side to flee, to save themselves from the destruction that was surely to come when the Sleeping Child awakened and rose, taking the Island of Serendair back beneath the waves of the sea with it, as the king had prophesied it soon would.
The Gated City was teeming with
people then. They stared at him as if he were mad, then turned away, averting their eyes, and went about their business as if he were not there.
The next day, when he returned to entreat them once again to reconsider, to explain once more the cataclysm that was coming, he found the gates closed again. A polite note was pinned to the outside, declining his offer with thanks and wishing him well.
The thought of the thousands of souls on the other side of those gates had haunted Hector for weeks afterward, as he and the others carefully packed the remaining stragglers that came from the lands east of the Great River, or had somehow missed the exodus, onto the last of the rescue ships. Ofttimes he found himself walking outside the City’s walls, wishing he had a way to make whatever governing force was within them change its mind and spare its people.
After a while the point became moot. The ships stopped coming as the temperature of the sea over the gravesite of the Sleeping Child grew increasingly warmer, causing bilgewater to boil in the heat and some of the ships to burst at the seams. Hector no longer could summon the strength to think about those who might still be on the other side of the wall, condemned now to remaining on the Island to the end, just as the populations east of the Great River who had chosen to stay were condemned.
Just as he and his four companions were condemned.
It was far too late to worry about it now.
Hector blinked; the afternoon sun had shifted, blinding him. He shaded his brow and looked over at Anais, who nodded toward the docks.
“Come,” his Liringlas friend said, his silver eyes glinting in the light.
Without a word, Hector clicked to his horse and followed.
Bonfires burned along the wharf, the ashes mixing with the steam from the sea. Cantha, Jarmon, and Sevirym must have found more bodies, human or otherwise, Hector knew, or something festering that warranted the spending of precious fuel in making the pyres.
The irony of the infernos no longer choked him. In the weeks since the last ship had come and departed, there had been many such bonfires along the route they traveled, a long south–north loop of the lands to the west of the Great River. They had only ventured into the eastern territories once—that wide expanse of land held the subkingdoms that had chosen to stay, either because they did not believe the king’s vision, or, even in accepting it, preferred to remain in their birthlands to the end. Because the final departure of the Third Fleet had been launched from the port of Kingston, it was to the westlands that the stragglers had come late, and so it was this part of the realm that Hector had seen fit to guard, to maintain a futile sense of order in the last days. The rioting and looting had dwindled as starvation and disease had set in, and the western coast burned with cleansing pyres that would have made marvelous signal fires, beacons of distress, had there been any ship out on the sea to answer them.