Chronicles of the Last Days Chapter 20

Chapter 19

R

aina told them how Sovara had sent the Defenders to the gates and told them to leave the priestesses to fend for themselves. “I couldn’t leave, though, and I told her so. She didn’t seem to mind,” Raina said. “Now that you’ve found your way here, I think I’ll go back out to the farm, to make sure that the children have gone.”

“Where will they go?” Darna asked.

Raina sighed. “Away from the valley. Some of them went to the hills with Ferrent – they’re going looking for Harron among the bandits and I’ll go after them as soon as I know that the other young ones are away. They’re going with Ganie to a place in Calandria. Where they’ll go from there, I don’t know. If there’s any place to come back to after this, I should be able to get word to them, but I don’t think there will be. The tide is rising, and this is a tide that won’t turn.”

Myril heard the clash of metal on metal and a shout from the streets outside. “Some more of the Cereans are going up to the palace now,” she said. “I wish that Lerat had come. I never would have thought that I’d wish to see him so much.”

Raina stood and dusted herself off. “I’ll just go, then. You two can stay here if you like. It’s probably safer than anywhere else, even without the Defenders.”

“Are you sure the others won’t come back?” Darna asked.

Raina shrugged. “The only things I’m sure of are that the city is sinking and there are too many foreigners for me to fight off. I climbed up to the roof and I saw them coming. I don’t want to be in their path,” Raina said. “May the winged ones guard your journeys.”

“And yours,” Myril said.

As Raina disappeared into the hidden passage out of the courtyard, Myril tried to imagine how the priestesses would leave their temple.

“I’m going to climb up on the roof to see what I can see,” Darna announced.

“You can’t! You’re not well enough. You’ll undo all the healing in your stitches. Stay down here.” Myril took a deep breath. “I’ll go up myself. Then we’ll go back to my room, get what we need, and hope that Lerat comes.”

The fact that Darna did not insist on climbing up with her told Myril that she was, indeed, still a bit weak. She could learn a great deal from the sounds coming up through the walls of the neighboring houses, but she needed to see, too, to scan the horizon for ships, whether they were hostile or friendly. She didn’t like heights, but if she could keep her balance, she would manage. She focused on the tiles under her hands and feet. Her limbs were shaking, but they were strong enough. She climbed until she got her leg over the ridge of the roof, and only then did she look up.

What struck her first was that she could see so much of the sky. It was blue and clear. Pretty wisps of light clouds drifted over the mountains, promising a sunny day. A little smoke spiraled up from Na’s peaks, whether from a fire or from lava erupting, she wasn’t sure. Some of the forest there was burnt black already. The fire had reached into the valley’s high pastures before being put out.

Anara’s island was a smoking cone in the wide bay that had once been a harbor. Its delicate thread of a tower was long gone and the dragon nowhere to be seen. The temple looked much the same as it always had except for the water lapping at its gates and the red-robed priestesses scurrying to and fro, keeping out of sight as if the clear sky might fall on them behind their locked gates. Across the harbor, the new temple the foreigners had built was already half-submerged, as was their brothel. Myril hoped that the women there had left it before they were taken to Cerea as sham priestesses.

There were ten Cerean ships in the harbor, each carrying between thirty and fifty men, and a handful of Ganatean ships about the same size. About a hundred foreigners were marching up to the governor’s palace. Its gates stood open. Out on the harbor, Parnet and Tiagasa were boarding the Cerean king’s ship. Girizit was with Parnet. He was wearing so much gold that it hurt to look at him, even from so far away. He handed Tiagasa onto the ship, then, over her protests, headed back to the shore while the sailors on the king’s ship raised their sails.

Giri was rowed back to shore. The few remaining palace guards surrendered to the Cereans and fled. Myril steadied herself and looked away.

The horizon shimmered with pale, jagged shapes where there should have been only the bright line of the sky meeting the sea. More ships were coming. Myril raised one hand to shade her eyes, but they were too far away to make out. The sound of the wind and the waves masked whatever voices were there, and the sounds of the city, hushed and afraid, drowned out the rest.

“What do you see?” Darna asked.

Myril looked down and almost lost her balance. “Wait,” she said. She slid awkwardly down and let Darna guide her feet onto the railing, then onto the landing. Once she had solid footing, she shook with delayed terror.

“I think I’d better go see the Aralel,” Myril said. “More are coming.”

“I’m not going back down there,” Darna said. “Can you get back here on your own?”

“I don’t know,” Myril said, “but I’ll find a way.”

#

She went to her room first to gather up a supply of food and medicines, and while she was there, she thought she might close her eyes for a few breaths, but she was more tired than she’d thought. By the time she opened her eyes, the sky was already growing dark. She shook herself awake and listened. Leaning out of her window, she could hear the ships in the harbor. Two more of the Cerean vessels had gone. The women on her street were crowding into fishing boats. The waters were choppy and rising more quickly. She put on her sandals and hurried to the temple. The side house door was barred from the inside, so she had to go around to the back, where the priestess at the gate recognized her and let her in.

“Do you go to the infirmary, healer?” she asked.

Myril nodded. She didn’t like to lie, but the truth was that apart from going to see the Aralel, she might be going anywhere. Crossing the elders’ courtyard, she could hear that someone else was already with the Aralel, a man. They were in the inner room, as if Jasela were taking a petitioner there.

“Nakedness suits you, slave,” Jasela said.

“My shame is covered,” said the voice, still with a bit of an accent, speaking carefully. Was it Girizit? It had to be. No one else had that voice.

Jasela tsked. “Really, now. A year of tutoring and you still will not use the proper name of your male parts.”

“You’ll learn what proper is when you’re back in Cerea. Now give me the things you promised.”

“I’m not going back to Cerea, and I promised you nothing.”

“You promised me the texts showing how to use the dragons’ stones to bring the life back to a land, or to a man’s…manhood, and I think you will come. You’re too practical to let yourself drown.”

“There are other options. Also, I only told you that I would see what I could find here in the temple. I did not in any way promise to give it to you.”

“You implied it,” Girizit said.

“You imagined that. I tell you now – and heed me – I tell you now that I did not find what you seek, and if I had, I wouldn’t give it to you. Do you understand?”

“Her Highness will not be pleased. I’ll tell her to call off the guards.”

“Tiagasa? She’s gone. Give me credit for at least knowing who has sailed out already. If she comes back, she’ll share the fate of her fellow priestesses. She knows that, and she would do the same for me.”

“We do like to see a woman who is too proud brought down, but not by you, by a man.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Bring her down?”

Myril couldn’t see Giri’s face, but she could hear him breathing faster. “She and the governor have an arrangement with the king. They will take command of the Southern Reaches if they can defeat the duke. The king will control them better than him, ignorant as they are.”

“He controls you, too. You’re a nation of timid fools and traitors.”

“Not as foolish as you, who worship worms with obscene acts.”

Jasela snorted. “You’d better go now.”

Girizit responded by going to the door. Myril slipped around to the corner so that he wouldn’t see her.

“May the fates keep us apart,” he said in parting.

“May I never see your face again,” Jasela replied.

She peeked out as Girizit passed. He looked much less imposing in a loincloth, without his cloth-of-gold coat. Two treasurer priestesses, the biggest and strongest of them, met him at the base of the stairs and hurried him away. Myril went to Jasela’s doorway.

“Who goes there?” Jasela said. “I can see your shadow. Announce yourself.”

Myril stepped in.

“You heard us, then,” Jasela said. “So, now you know my secret. I was in the court of the Cerean king for a year, teaching that fool our ways.”

“No wonder he’s so much better-spoken than he was as a scrappling.”

“I heard about that too, but not from him.” Jasela led the way back into her inner room.

“The ships that were on the horizon this morning, did you see them?”

Jasela nodded. “They’re still too far away to tell their intent, but Girizit is nervous. He didn’t expect them. He wouldn’t have come here in such a hurry if they were friendly to him.”

“From what I could hear, I think they may be Lerat’s ships or allied with him. None of them looked or sounded like Cerean ships. Some of them are Enomaean, too.”

“I hope you’re right, but just because they’re enemies of Cerea doesn’t mean they’re friends of ours. They could be raiders from the far coasts of Enomae or more Ganateans. In any case, we’ll know in the morning.”

The Aralel’s private chamber was in some disarray. Papers were down from their shelves, boxes lay open with their contents spilling onto the floor.

“Were you really looking for it?” Myril asked.

“I suppose I was, though I’m not convinced that it exists.”

“It does,” Myril said, “but it would be no use to them without a living dragon. It’s just a very old text which says what we all know, that the stones have power only by grace of the dragon, and the way to cultivate their power is to become kin to the dragons or to do homage to them. Here, I’ll show you.”

Myril went to the corner of the room and lifted up the carpet. She pushed on the corner of the flagstone and it swung up heavily. She propped it up and took one small packet from inside, handing it to Jasela. She put another packet under her arm and closed the lid again.

“Take this with you if you escape this land, and take it to wherever the priestesses go,” she told Jasela. “The guild stored some of the old texts at another place in the city. I’ll go get them. I may not have time to come back for these in the morning.”

“So, you have a plan to save the Chronicles of Anamat as well as our priestesses?” Jasela chuckled. “That is good work, for one who was so quiet as a novice.”

“I only did what came my way.”

“You should go now before I ask you to stay and help us instead of rescuing your dry scrolls.” With that, Jasela shooed her out. “And may the winged ones know who assaults them, and who would lift their wings.”

#

It took Thorat many days to reach Tegana’s gate, walking and climbing along rough roads that were sometimes almost impassable because of new rockfalls. He met very few other travelers along the way, and those that he did see were headed for the coasts or far up into the hills. It was a lonely, rainy walk. If Iola no longer flew to the dragons, if there was no ambassadress any more, then what use could the Defenders be? He didn’t know. Sovara had abandoned them, gone on her last quest without naming a successor. With no Aralel and no Enatel, the orders of the dragons were gone.

Tegana’s gate was on the border, well into the mountains and only a little way off the main road to Anamat. The temple that had once guarded it stood abandoned, its empty towers looking out over a sweeping plain. He hadn’t seen a dragonlet since Anamat valley, and there he’d seen only one on the road near the mountains, as if even the dragonlets were abandoning the lowlands.

Tegana had been Iola’s home dragon, the first dragon she had seen and touched, the first dragon that had carried her on her back. Her colors were reflected in the hills, but all he could see was the pale luminosity of Iola’s skin and the raven-black fall of her hair reflected in the sullen light, in the misty rain, in the wet branches of the winter-bare trees against pale marble polished by time.

The gate was open and empty. He sat in front of it as night fell, an angry streak of orange sunset showing through the clouds. He sat through the darkness of midnight and all the way to the gray cold light of dawn, and he felt nothing from the gate. Tegana was gone, into the hills or to the depths of the earth. He couldn’t reach her, except that in his half-sleep he thought he’d glimpsed a dragonlet running around a bend in the path, back to the Anamat road, back to Iola.

Tegana might be gone, but for all he knew, Iola still lived. He shook out his stiff legs and scratched what he could reach on his healing back. He would forget the dragons’ gates. Sovara could guard them; they could guard themselves. He was going back to Iola.

He thought that the gate flickered for a moment and he almost changed his mind, but then he imagined a ship’s mast far out on the horizon, bronze gleaming in the sun. To stay in the hills would be to betray Iola, and that he could not do.

#

Thorat reached the valley’s edge late in the afternoon on the fourth day. His return journey had been swifter than the way out, either because he was getting stronger again or because he knew what waited for him at the end. He had a good view out over the valley as he crested a small rise. He could also see the foreign ships ranged along the sea’s horizon, closing in to take whatever they could of the last of the treasures of Anamat. The priestesses would not be safe, especially not the ambassadress. Thorat pressed on across the valley through the darkening night.

Reaching Anamat’s walls after dark meant that the gates would be closed, a custom that had held firm as the city watch thinned, a last bastion of control over the increasingly chaotic comings and goings. Thorat thought of trying to go through one of the old secret ways, but the rising water had flooded most of them, and he’d never been very good at finding them to begin with. He knew the one by the West Gate best, having come and gone that way to Raina’s farm, but that gate was ringed with campfires, probably foreigners’. The palace gate was no better, so he made his way to the low-lying East Market, which had become too soggy to provide much of a place to camp.

He was footsore and road-weary, but he was almost there. The road leading up to the gate was a mess of planks and stepping-stones on mud. Moonlight glinted on puddles. He passed by the cave-like overhang where he’d once gathered around a campfire with the other East Market boys in between bouts of mischief. It was cold and dark, not even a scrappling in sight. He hoped the scrapplings were all out raiding the Cereans’ ships, or else that they’d gone back to their villages, or found some other, better place to live, a place that wasn’t sinking.

He crept along the wall to the place where the gap had been, feeling for it as he went. He was almost upon it when a voice called out.

“Halt, there!” A watchman. Thorat cursed himself. If he’d had his eyes open instead of concentrating so much on the feeling, if he’d been listening at all, he would have seen the watchman coming or at least heard his boots splashing through the mud.

Thorat squinted into the torchlight and held his hands out, away from his sword belt.

“What’s your business, man, creeping in the dark?”

“I’m sorry. I just got back to the valley. I’m looking for a place to camp.”

“Awful late for that. Come on those ships, did you?”

“The Cerean ships? I think not!”

“No, the other ones. Rumor says they’re making landfall up the coast toward the Lemirun hills. Are you scouting for them?”

“No. What ships are those?”

“I don’t know, just that they’re there. I’ll take you in to the guard house, just in case. The watch master might want to question you. Give me your sword.”

Under other circumstances, Thorat could have taken the man in a fight. The watchman was bulky and muscular, but he hadn’t had Sovara as a sword master. Thorat was tired and it was dark, the ground muddy, and he didn’t want to waste his strength fighting an ordinary watchman who could well be an ally.

“You’ll give it back, won’t you?” Thorat asked as he unbuckled the sword.

“This is a good piece. Enough to pay for passage to Calandria, I’d think.”

Thorat almost wished he’d fought to keep it. Another watchman was coming.

“What’s this?” the newcomer said.

“Taking him in to Pannen.”

Thorat laughed. “Pannen. That’s right; he’s watch master here now, isn’t he?”

“He is. You know him?”

“I do,” Thorat said. “He might even do me a favor.”

#

At first, Pannen was not inclined to give Thorat his sword back. “I still don’t see why you’re creeping around our old haunts tonight. There’s foreigners afoot, lots of them. I don’t like it, and half the men are over in the Cerean camp, trying to buy their way out. That farm out there, first one past the market? You remember it. Their spring went to saltwater. Another week like this, there’ll be no freshwater in all Anamat except what the rain brings.”

Thorat took another sip of the very good ale that Pannen had poured for him. “I was on a journey up to the north. Coastline looks like it’s changed there, too,” he said.

“Were you in the mountains?”

“Lots are going there these days, I was just… Listen,” Thorat said. “I came back for a woman. You remember that girl, from when we were scrapplings?”

“That quiet, pretty one? Didn’t she go into the temple?”

Thorat nodded. “I want to get her out before the Cereans go in. I can’t do much else for anyone, I don’t think.”

“You might be able to help us somehow. I have hopes that the new fleet that’s landing east of here will take passengers to some place other than slavery in Cerea. The women, they might survive if the Cereans take them. They’ve got no use for us men except as oar-slaves.” He shuddered at the thought.

“If you call that surviving.”

“They call it worse than death,” Pannen said. “You remember I had a friend at the harbor temple, too? She left a long time ago, went to a village. I’d like to go look for her, but I don’t know where to start.”

“You could go to the village where she went.”

Pannen shook his head. “It’s abandoned.” He leaned out of his guardhouse door and stood there for a while.

“It’s getting light,” he said. “Maybe you should go. Take your sword, I suppose. I hate to let it go, it’s a good piece, but I can find another way to buy passage.”

“Thank you,” Thorat said. “May we live to see another day.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Pannen said.

They both emptied their jars and Thorat set out for the temple.

The morning was misty and rain clouds blocked the light of the rising sun. Thorat went to the front of the temple first and found one of the palace guardsmen there, watching the gate.

“Don’t bother,” he told Thorat. “They’re not letting anyone in, and on the off chance they do, they’ll want half the governor’s treasury just for a fuck.”

Thorat eyed the locked gate. There wasn’t even a priestess at the gatehouse. “I’ll take that advice, then,” he said, and hurried away before the guard recognized him. He couldn’t think of any reason they’d let him in at the back gate, either. His old secret way into Iola’s chamber was flooded, he knew that, but it was the only thing he could think of. He took off his sandals and waded down the alley to the canal, near where the entrance had been. It was all but completely covered, with only its hidden capstone showing. He tucked his bedroll and sword under the eaves of a house overhanging the canal and hoped they would be there when he returned. He dove under the water. The gap between the stones was closed, inpenetrable.

He came up for air. He had learned to swim as a boy but hadn’t practiced much in years, and the water was cold enough to take his breath away. He looked again at the little gap between the capstone and the water and decided to try again. On the second try, he slipped into something…and it immediately closed behind him. Water. No air. He blinked into the pitch-dark water. The phosphorescence was gone, too. He tried to go back but couldn’t.

He would die trying to reach Iola and no one would ever know. Except Pannen, maybe, but that hardly counted. He kicked toward the temple, upstream; it was the only possible way. He opened his eyes once or twice just in case there was a light. Then, finally, he touched a pocket of air along the ceiling of the passage. He gulped it in and dove again. He reached another pocket, and after that, the ceiling rose. There was a whole long stretch where he could get his face out and pull himself along with his hands. His fingers and toes were going numb. He almost missed the opening. He’d passed it. Something was different, unfamiliar. He pulled his way back, then dove again.

Three strokes up the side passage and he could get his whole head out of the water. Another three, and his feet could touch the steps below. By the time he got to the entrance of Iola’s bath chamber, he was out of the water except for his feet. Dripping with muck but wading and alive. He reached the grille. It was locked.

He cried out with every bit breath he could summon. “Iola!”

#