Chronicles of the Last Days Chapter 17

Chapter 16

T

he city gates stood open through Midwinter night so the people of the valley could come in to watch the ambassadress’s return. The open gates also allowed the Defenders who’d been wandering the land in the waning year to return to the training hall in time to take part in the morning’s crossings. Thorat heard them come in and take their places beside him – first Sunna, then Forlan and Ferrent. As the first birds of morning began to sing, Sovara sounded the ceremonial gong to break the silence. They bowed to Anara together, then turned to greet one another.

Sunna reported that the gates of the dragons were all more or less where they’d last been, as far as she could tell, but that the roads had been rough in the north and that the villages were less friendly than usual, which was saying something. Many roadside shrines looked neglected or even abandoned, but that was nothing new. The waters had risen most in the northwest provinces and hardly at all in the far south, in Tiadun, Kiralun, and Getedun.

“Maybe they’ve suffered as much as they’re going to,” Ferrent said. “The keep at Tiadun seems secure enough, and the village chieftains seemed glad not to have Calar and the Cereans ruling over them.”

“Someone should go tell Darna,” Thorat said.

Sunna nodded. “Gallia and Vigda went straight to the temple. I’ll go later.”

“I hope they’re not too late,” Eppie said, and then had to explain again that Darna seemed to be in labor. After a while, Sovara looked around the room in a way that made them all fall silent.

I’ll continue my vigil here,” she said. “The rest of you may go down to the harbor, if you wish.”

Garren, Anot, Forlan, and Ferrent took masks from their hiding place and set off to help row the raft out to the island, to pretend to carry the ambassadress back to the shore, or whatever the priestesses were planning. Not even the Defenders knew for sure who the other masked oarsmen were. They were strange, masked figures who spoke in a language that Thorat couldn’t place, no matter how many times he heard it.

Thorat didn’t feel like going back to the palace, nor did he want to stay in the training hall with the shrine beneath their feet opening up to floodwaters.

“I’ll walk you down to the temple, if that’s where you’re going,” he said to Sunna.

Sunna nodded. “I should let the Aralel know that I’m back, and look in on Darna.”

“She looked pretty bad last night,” Eppie said.

“All the more reason to go,” Sunna said. “How about the other one?”

Eppie looked at Thorat. “Iola’s all right, as far as I know. She doesn’t talk to me much.”

At least Eppie got to see her and talk to her, Thorat thought. Maybe she would be out on the island. He knew how to get there through the secret passage. He’d only stood guard there once, and Iola hadn’t seen him, but he’d been able to see her, and that had made him feel better about her going to the dragons. Even though she’d been on the surface this past season, hidden only behind a few thin marble walls instead of under the crust of the earth, she might as well have been much farther away, for all that he’d seen of her.

The three of them walked across the city together. Despite the floodwaters in the shrine, the canal hadn’t risen in the night, but with every step, Thorat felt as if the ground were softening beneath his feet. Anara’s island tower came into view as they crossed the Pentangle and they stopped to look at it.

“Will there be anyone on the island?” he wondered aloud.

Eppie and Sunna frowned at him. “The raft will be going out. I imagine that the Aralel and the Most Blessed One’s attendants will be on it,” Eppie said.

Thorat realized belatedly that there were people all around them, listening. He didn’t think that he’d revealed any secrets.

“We shouldn’t talk about it,” Thorat said, but an idea began to form in his mind. He missed Iola. He missed her terribly. It was almost worse, knowing that she was so close. When she was with the dragons, he didn’t feel such frustration. When she was under the earth, she wasn’t quite human, but being on the surface for the season should have brought her closer, even if she was trapped inside the temple. He needed to see her.

He left Sunna and Eppie at the alley into the temple side house, then wandered down to see the raft at the end of the East Canal. Garren spotted him and shooed him away. The raft, which usually shone with polished wood and gilt, was dark and slick with rot, showing brush marks where the worst of the slime had been scrubbed away. It smelled as if it had been submerged all through the waning year. Perhaps it had been.

Thorat headed back toward the shore. There was not quite enough time to get out to the island, certainly not enough if the secret passage to it had been flooded, but he couldn’t stand idly, knowing that there was no one there to guard the dragon’s passage, or guard Iola if the Aralel brought her there.

He soon reached the hidden opening to the passage on the canal. He tucked his sandals into his belt and felt his way down the bank, hoping that there would be a place where he could slip through and that, once in, there would be air to breathe. The entrance wasn’t even fully submerged. He waded into the chilly water and slipped through a crack between the rocks. He had to wade for the first stretch. Where the floor dipped to go under the harbor, the water rose, but the dragons’ currents warmed the passage and the water in it, and it came only up to his knees at the deepest point.

He waded through the interminable darkness, all the way to the dragon’s tower in the harbor. When he reached the opening, he paused. Sovara had said that she wouldn’t go, and she’d as good as told the rest of them not to go either. She wouldn’t be there to see him disobey her orders, but she wasn’t one to stand aside out of fear, and he was sure that she hadn’t turned her back on the dragons. Perhaps she sensed some current in the earth that Thorat had missed. More likely, though, she was only leaving the priestesses to fend for themselves, angry at the deception they were playing out. Sovara couldn’t have approved of their pretense of sending the ambassadress on her way when they’d done nothing of the sort.

Ignoring the knot in his gut, Thorat opened the door and stepped onto the lower ledge inside the tower.

He immediately wished that he’d left the door closed. Where there had been water at his ankles, tongues of flame snapped at him like hungry dogs leaping up to devour dripping meat. He pushed the door closed, but the frame had already warped. It would not shut. It was too late. The passage behind him shuddered and a single stone fell with a splash into the knee-high saltwater. Another followed it. The capstones were falling like hail.

It didn’t take an engineer to see that the vaulted way would crumble. A spout of water gushed in.

This was folly. He should have paid attention to the worry in his gut, or at least heard Sovara’s implied warning, not to mention Sunna’s. Death by water behind him – the passage was far too long to cross under water, even if it held, which looked increasingly impossible – or death by flame on the other side of the door, but if he went into the flames, he would have a chance of seeing Iola.

He sprang through, seizing the ledge above and scrambling for toeholds on the wall, the ones that had always been there. They were too hot, and few and far between. He fell back onto the cool, solid rock of the ledge he’d just been standing on. It was still wet from the harbor waters coming in through the door behind him. A rock fell from the tower above and he dodged it, but it landed on the ledge beside him. Though it rocked and threatened to tumble off the edge, he managed to use it to clamber up onto the ledge above.

Distracted by the roar of blood in his own veins, he’d hardly noticed how silent the fire was, though the falling stones must have made a noise. He perched on the priestesses’ ledge over the gateway to the other realm, full of silent fire and lava, white-hot at its core, too bright to look at. Overhead, the sky was deep blue, despite the coming dawn. He’d forgotten how that window on the sky was indifferent to the morning light.

As soon as he turned his attention to the outside world, he heard the raft coming, the swish of the oarsmen’s poles punctuating the reckless beat of the waves on the shore. The priestesses would come into the tower. They would come in to get the ambassadress, even knowing that she wasn’t there.

The entrance to the tower faced out to sea, away from the town. Only the Aralel held the key to that tightly shut door. He had to warn her, had to stop her before the flames surged up. He looked down again. Perhaps a dragon could pass through that. They were creatures of fire more than of flesh. Anara might come, but if she did…

The stones shivered around him, like a man flexing his muscles before a fight. Thorat leaped over the gap left by the falling rock and reached the inside of the door just as the Aralel fitted her key to its lock.

Pain seared his back and he flew out, knocking the old woman to the ground. Beside him, a younger woman screamed. Another blast of heat and the ground beneath him bucked, throwing him into the water. Just before he lost consciousness, he thought he saw Anara rising into the sky, all flame. He joined the water, joined the fishes. He’d been born to be a fisherman, once upon a time. The light faded.

#

The morning air was ominously still. Eppie thought she heard a scream as she skirted around the east side of the temple, but she wasn’t sure. The scream could have been anything, especially these days when even Ara’s Landing wasn’t safe from the outside world. She’d left Sunna at the side house, even though she knew that she should go see if Darna was all right, but she was no healer, and she wasn’t ready to see Darna dead. After the dragon flew, she would go in. She went around the back of the temple and down through the alleys of city’s southeast quarter, wading along the path by the wall until she reached the shore. She knew of a little boat hidden there that she borrowed sometimes. It was right where she’d left it last. She found a bit of wood to use as a pole and a broader piece to paddle with. She pushed it out between partly flooded buildings until she reached what had been the shore, at the near end of the old jetty. Its rocks lay mostly under water, as they had since summer, but they peeked out at low tide, reminding everyone that it was there. Anara’s island still stood.

The ambassadress’s raft was just setting out with a tent pitched across the stern to hide the ambassadress’s condition – or absence – when they returned. Eppie wondered if Iola had managed to sneak aboard, but she didn’t think that the Aralel would have allowed it, not after Midsummer. Eppie and her boat stayed in the shadow of the buildings as the raft moved out into the open water. The Aralel sat beside the tent, her embroidered robes shining richly in the thin morning light. Her veil parted just enough to show a little of her pale gray hair. Some other priestesses sat around her, young ones, Eppie guessed, but no one she recognized. Sovara said that she had warned the Aralel to stay away, but the Aralel didn’t answer to her, and at least there would be someone there to greet the dragon.

It felt strange, knowing that there had always been Defenders there to mark the dragon’s crossing at the ambassadress’s return, and knowing now that the Enatel had turned her back on them. It was wrong. Someone should be there.

The raft had almost reached the island. The tower shone in the light of the rising sun, like a beacon of fire, brighter than it ever had been. Fragments of quartz in its stone walls like diamonds in a trick of the light, it was brighter than a reflection.

The oarsmen poled on. Eppie pushed out, hurrying to join them as fast as she could with her makeshift paddle.

The raft reached the island’s shore as the sun rose. The Aralel stood, going through the tent on her way to the prow of the raft. One of the oarsmen handed her out. From where Eppie was, out on the water, she could just see a young, thin priestess shadowing the Aralel. Whoever she was, Eppie was pretty sure it wasn’t Iola. The ambassadress was taller and would never scuttle along like that.

The men and women on the boat rested their oars.

Now

the sun was rising. Eppie realized belatedly that the tower had been shining from within. It had not done that before, not that she’d seen. The light hadn’t been the light of the sun at all. It was the dragon’s own light.

Then everything exploded. The tower blasted open, scattering rocks as big as grown men like scattered pebbles into the harbor. The earth rocked, the waves rose, and screams cried out. Then there was a pause.

For a moment, silence reigned. Eppie heard the moans of an injured man, or maybe a woman, but apart from that, there was nothing. Even the birds were silent. The waves seemed to freeze, to gather themselves. And then the tower exploded yet again, throwing molten lava into the sky, and brimstone.

Anara was made of fire and lava, shedding pieces of herself as she flew up into the sky, raining her body down over the city. The burning rocks hissed into the canals, mostly, raising a mist so thick that it blotted out the shore.

From her little boat rocking on the wild waves, Eppie saw a few fires flare up before the mist closed in. Anara’s fire slid off the tile roofs, but here and there it found ready tinder in one of the remaining thatched roofs or on the shingled roof of a shed. Fires sparked, then smoked, and only added to the fog that had begun to hide the city from her.

“You there!” One of the always-silent oarsmen was shouting to her. It wasn’t one of the Defenders. “Come help!”

Eppie poled over to them. The island was erupting, leaving no trace of the quiet place it had been moments before.

“I have her.” One of the oarsmen had his arms under the shoulders of a burned and mangled body in red robes.

“She’s lucky that man fell on top of her.”

“Not lucky enough.”

“What happened to him?”

“Thrown into the water, I think.”

There’d been a man on the island? How?

Eppie thought.

“I don’t think she’s going to make it.” Another of the oarsmen was carrying a thinner, younger-looking red-robed body back to the raft.

“Put them inside the tent.”

One of the oarsmen looked up at Eppie and waved her away.

“I can help,” Eppie offered.

“Too late for that.” It sounded like Garren’s voice, and it was definitely a dismissal.

Eppie looked back as the oarsmen got the two priestesses – or what was left of them – under cover of the tent. A few of the oarsmen were bleeding too, and two seemed unable to sit up. The rest took up their oars to push the raft back to shore, far more slowly than they’d come.

Eppie turned her little rowboat back in the general direction of its hiding place. She couldn’t see the shore very well except for a few slender towers rising up above the fog, but she could see the choppy shallow waters over the breakwater and follow the line of it back. It wasn’t until she was looking at the mostly submerged breakwater that she noticed the body caught on a jagged bit of rock as it floated out to sea. The familiar curl of the brown hair on its head was singed and sodden.

Curse him to Na!

Eppie paddled to him. His back was burned mottled red and blackened, raw, with the white of bone showing through in one place. He was face down. Drowned? Most likely. She leaned over to reach toward him, and he moved, a reflexive jerk bringing his face up. He gasped for air and his eyes blinked open, not long enough to focus before they shut again. He was not dead. A wave rolled him over, but the rocks kept him from drifting farther away, at least for the moment. Eppie grabbed him.

She set one foot on the barely submerged breakwater and hooked the body with her paddle, then pulled it up into the boat.

“Breathe, damn you!” She wrestled him up over the half-sunken gunwale, pushing the water out of his lungs and into the bottom of the boat along with the harbor water that was gushing over the side. She got him in and righted the boat as well as she could.

She couldn’t see the shore and she doubted that anyone there could see her. Out on the bay, a single merchant ship raised its sails and put out oars, making way for the open sea again as fast as its prow could push through the rising foaming waves as panicked deckhands threw water onto a fire on its deck.

Eppie thumped Thorat on an intact bit of his back. He groaned. “Good, you’re not dead yet,” she said, and by the incoherent noise he made, she thought that maybe he might have heard and understood her, but she wasn’t sure. She needed to get him to a healer. “Probably should be dead, though. What were you thinking?” She didn’t really need to ask, just wanted to keep him half-awake if he was still conscious, still listening. Maybe he wasn’t, but he was breathing, so at least there was that. She hoped he’d keep breathing, but she couldn’t spare him much attention. The waves were rising, making for hard paddling.

There was a wooden scoop in the boat and Eppie used it to bail out the water she’d taken on. More waves washed over the edge, threatening to swamp them again. She got enough out that she could get the boat to creep toward shore, hoping that they would get to a healer before it was too late.

#

Myril pulled out the corners of the blanket that Darna had been lying on for the birth. It was bloody and gory. Darna needed to be moved to a fresh bed, one that was better protected. She couldn’t stay where she was, not with the roof shaking like that. The dome above was strong and light, like an eggshell, but maybe not strong enough.

“Take the corners,” she ordered. Sunna had just arrived to lend her strength to the effort, along with Iola, Raina, and Vigda. Geta clucked and smoothed a bed for Darna in the second sleeping nook, which was under a thick arch, much stronger-looking than the dome. The nook was big enough to hold them all if they hunched together shoulder to shoulder, where they would feel each other’s heartbeats and shallow, frightened breathing. As soon as the shaking stopped, Myril checked Darna’s pulse.

“She’s all right for now, I think,” Myril said. “I have to go see what happened outside.”

“I’ll look out for her,” Sunna promised. Vigda gave her a nod, and Geta shooed her out.

“Bring the news back to us,” Iola said. She had a pleading note in her voice, as if she suddenly cared what was happening outside her chamber. She seemed to really want to know.

“I will, as soon as I can,” Myril promised.

The peresi’s courtyard was silent in except for the drip of water from a broken pitcher that had rolled to its side on a bench beside the fountain. A tile slid off the roof, shattering on the marble walk below. The spell of the temple, the oppressive sense of being pushed into a haze of trance, remained unbroken. She wanted to escape. She was still wearing the plain tunic of a healer, not priestess robes, but she went out through the front to join the procession back from the shore. Fog rolled up from the harbor. She could hardly see across the street, but she could hear voices coming from all directions.

“I can’t see a thing!”

“Where are the priestesses?”

Someone began a chant.

Myril looked up. Above the street, the fog was thin, so thin that she could see the blue sky above and a distant spiral of smoke. A flame shot across the narrow arc of sky. Someone screamed. She stood as still as she could, closed her eyes, and trained her attention on the harbor. She heard the splash of oars, moaning, and worried whispers from the same direction. The raft was still close to the dragon’s island. Myril decided not to wait, in case Anara was going to rain down fire again.

She heard and felt her way through the fog, doing her best to ignore the people around her and avoiding the occasional flashes of fire. The normally short walk took a long time, and by the time she got to the base of her street, Anara had flown. Crossing the bridge, she saw that the water had risen again, but only very slightly. She couldn’t even describe how much it had risen; it was only that she had the feeling of sinking into that cold winter water, salty like the sea, the wells going bad, the water taking them all back to itself while fire came from the hills.

Myril found her doorway blocked by her downstairs neighbor and a sodden-looking person pushing a wounded man in a wheelbarrow.

“I told them they couldn’t go up,” her neighbor said as she approached. “Where have you been? I didn’t see you in the procession.”

“I was in the temple,” Myril said. The sodden-looking person was Eppie, looking very tired. “Who’s that?” she asked, but then she realized who it was. “Both of you, help me get him upstairs, carefully.”

Thorat groaned and thrashed as they lifted him, but he didn’t have any strength to shake them off. “Be still,” Myril told him, and he seemed to hear her, or maybe he had only fainted again.

As soon as they got him inside and laid him on his belly, Myril’s neighbor hurried away to take care of the person pounding at her door below. A glance out the window made Myril glad that she’d taken her sign down. People were already lining up at her neighbors’ doors. Most of them had only small burns or bruises from where they’d run into things in the fog, but she saw one man on a stretcher, apparently with a broken leg. She glanced out of the window. The fog was lifting, but it was leaving a deep chill in its wake that seemed to come from the bones of the city itself.

“Uh, Myril?” Eppie said. “Do you think he’ll live?”

“I don’t know,” Myril said. “Let’s see.”

The burns on Thorat’s back looked like they’d eaten away half his skin, but he was strong and in his prime, and if the dragon had wanted to kill him outright, she was sure that he would be dead already. Slowly, as she pulled the charred and salty-wet cloth away, Eppie told her the story through chattering teeth, how Thorat had been on the island, in the tower. Through the last wisps of fog, she could see that the island now looked like a small mountain. Away in the distance, smoke rose from the larger mountains, too, as if the whole land was splitting at its seams.

“I think he was thrown into the water,” Eppie said.

“Amazing he survived that,” Myril mused. She turned away from her patient to find the herbs she’d want for the poultice. She fumbled a bit because she was already so tired from the night’s labor, even though her body hadn’t been the one split open. She hoped Darna was still breathing well, that she was still alive. She’d had the pulse of someone who would live, but Myril was too tired to know if it was real or only wishful thinking. Geta and Vigda were with her, though, and Raina, and Iola, and Sunna. She hoped that Gallia would stay out of the way.

“What are you muttering about?” Eppie asked.

“Sorry, nothing. You’re shivering. Get yourself some dry clothes. There are some in the chest under the other bed.”

“All right,” Eppie said. She sighed. They were all tired. The Midwinter vigil was the longest, and it was looking like they wouldn’t sleep that day, either.

Thorat’s pulse steadied a little as the morning wore on. He didn’t wake up at all. Around midday, Eppie ran out, returning a little while later with a jar of stew, courtesy of Garren’s wife.

“Did you go back to the training hall?” Myril asked.

Eppie shook her head. “Garren said that the Aralel and the other priestess were wounded, but that they got back to the temple all right.”

They ate, then took turns keeping watch or napping. Myril had barely fallen asleep when the bells woke her, the same bells that had rung out for the death of the governor so many years before.

“Did the governor die?” she asked as she came back to waking consciousness.

Eppie snorted. She looked exhausted. “I don’t think so; it started from the temple.”

“Not Iola; I was just with her. Who, then?”

Myril wracked her brain, but she was too tired to think.

“Could it be the Aralel?” Eppie said.

That had to be it. Not the Aralel. She wasn’t young, but… Eppie was talking.

“They just loaded her and that other young priestess onto the raft. She looked even worse than Thorat, from where I was.”

Myril held up her hand. “I’m going back to sleep,” she said. “Don’t wake me until they come for me. You should stay here. Change the poultice at dusk and again at dawn and get help from downstairs if you need it.”

“Sure,” Eppie said.

Myril closed her eyes and was asleep instantly.

It seemed that only moments passed before she heard the messenger’s feet on her stair. “Lord Chronicler says to go to the temple, take down what’s said.”

“For who?” Myril asked.

“For the Chronicles, what else? You need more parchment? He sent parchment.”

Myril took the bundle, put her sandals back on, and set out for the temple again, leaving Eppie to care for Thorat. The girl had nursed him through an injury in the wilderness; she could manage this one with a fully stocked apothecary on hand, even if it was worse. It was going to be another long night for everyone, and the city was sinking.

#