The Realm of the Deathless, page 8
It had been eight days since they had last seen land of any sort.
On the fifteenth day, they saw the storm ahead. It blotted out half of everything, the mile-high thunderheads flaring fitfully from the lightning within. The ship, rather than slowing or turning to avoid the storm, instead hastened toward it with increasing speed.
The rain came, and then hail that grew worse until it was the size of apples. They huddled below decks as the silver ship rang like a bell without letup for three days. They ate, they played games, they slept. They pretended not to be going mad.
And on the fourth day, the pounding stopped. They went above to find it freezing, and the ship climbing what at first seemed to be a huge swell. But after several hours, it seemed there was no end to the wave. Aster wondered if it was some sort of illusion, but if so, it was good one. Every sense told her the deck was tilted from prow to stern. Billy placed a pistol shot on the deck and it rolled toward the back of the boat.
The sun was a tiny yellow spark in the mist. No other lights could be seen in the sky. The sea grew darker as they traveled, and sightings of land more common, and in all directions, suggesting that they were now in a large inland sea or lake. Whatever the case, the ship continued to see the coasts only as obstacles to be avoided, until it last it sailed into a bay, and then the mouth of a river. Marshland stretched out in all directions, a paradise for the waterfowl which they saw in vast numbers. It reminded her of the dream of birds she’d had when she was the captive of Vilken, the vision that had given her the hope she needed to live through that dark time.
Billy pointed out that they weren’t sailing against the river’s current, but with it; it wasn’t flowing into the sea, but out from it.
As they moved downriver and the banks grew higher, the marshland gave way to short grass prairie with tiny yellow flowers riffled by occasional breeze. Herds of shaggy horses foraged near the riverbanks, along with cattle and deer. Mountains lay on the horizon, white-capped but otherwise blue-grey with distance. Eventually they saw small villages—collections of domed tents and houses of earth, stone, and wood. Once, they saw some children fishing and playing on the banks, but as the ship approached, they quickly vanished into the scrubby growth along the river. A few times they saw riders on horseback, always at a distance. Once they passed what could only be described as a wagon train—seven or eight colorful covered carts pulled by oxen, accompanied by many riders and a herd of horses.
The land grew rougher, more mountainous, and the river dug deeper into the earth and stone, until they were in a steep-sided canyon, where small spidery trees clung to the stone. The tiny sun, always in the middle of the sky, began to move again; with each mile it grew lower, until they could no longer see it at all. A sickle moon rose over the canyon walls, huge but dim, dark blotches covering most of its light.
The flow of the river quickened, then became a rush. When they heard the hushed roar of a waterfall ahead, Aster commanded the silver ship to stop.
Obedient to her authority, it went still in the water, unaffected by the powerful current. Ahead, they could see the flat line where the river ended, and mist kicked up by its plunge into whatever deep lay beyond.
“What now?” Aster wondered.
“We could climb up,” Billy said, nodding his head toward the chasm wall. The scale had been so great she hadn’t notice it right away, but Billy had a keener eye for that sort of thing. His gaze indicated a stone landing and stairs ascending the side of the cliff.
When they pulled their ship up to the mooring, she saw the scale was still fooling her. Everything was big: the quay, the stone pillar for tying up the ship, the stairs carved into the canyon wall. All had been made for beings of more-than-human size.
“Did Giants build this?” Dusk asked Billy.
“Not my kind of giants,” he said. “We don’t build things. Besides, these people weren’t so big. Hardly bigger than you.”
He was right, Aster reflected. The stairs would be tiny for Billy at his full size. Each was about three feet above the one below.
“This is going to be fun,” Errol said.
Aster closed her eyes. She could feel the elumiris humming and rattling the air, like a symphony only she could hear. It was extraordinarily strong.
“I think I can make it actually fun,” she said.
They all turned to look at her.
“Just give me a few minutes,” she said. She kept her eyes closed, ordered her thoughts. Then she opened them again.
“All of you look me in the eye,” Aster said.
She waited until they had all done that and then she composed her Whimsy.
“Lenghyemas!”
The syllables weren’t even fully off of her tongue before she felt light, as if she’d been pumped full of helium.
“Oh,” Errol said. He flexed his knees and jumped, not too hard, but it carried him nearly a foot from the ground.
“I can think of some other times this would have come in handy,” he said.
“We’ve never been this far in,” Aster said. “I can only do what the elumiris allows me to do in any given place.”
“Maybe you should put us back the way we were before until we get our stuff packed up,” Errol suggested. “Otherwise, we might just float out into the river.”
She nodded and returned their full weight to them.
The boat would be okay on its own; it could guard itself. When she’d found it, her father had left it with the command to kill anyone who tried to board without the proper password. She wasn’t comfortable with that, so she simply told it to make anyone who messed with it unable able to see or remember it. She didn’t fancy cleaning up dead bodies on their return.
***
Aster was right; her spell was not only useful, it was fun. Jumping up the giant steps was like being in a dream, even with his armor and backpack on. Errol always wondered how the guys who walked on the Moon felt; now he thought he was getting at least a taste of that.
The spell didn’t do anything to quell his vertigo, however, and even before they were halfway up the cliff, his gut and monkey-brain told him he was unacceptably far from the bottom. He wondered just exactly how deep the canyon was. As deep as the Grand Canyon?
He kept his eyes forward and tried not to look down. His upward leaps became far less experimental, and he settled on mostly pulling himself from step-to-step. Dusk, of course, had no such qualms, and by the time she reached the top, he was more than ten steps behind her. When she got there, she stopped, waiting on them.
“Anything?” he called up.
“You’ll see,” she said.
A few moments later he stood beside her.
The moonlight plain had been hidden from them, but it was still there, silvery grass rolling off to a horizon of snow-capped mountains that must reach most of the way to the heavens. To his left, the vast dark depths of the canyon wound off across the land. Just at its lip, a few steps from where they stood, apple trees grew, some gnarled and ancient, others just saplings. They weren’t spaced regularly, as one might expect in an orchard, but neither did they crowd one another. Many were laden with fruit of many colors—ruby red, yellow-gold, green and some that were as black as obsidian. From the top of the stairs and off through the trees a road ran, a big one. And the road followed along to the edge of the same cliff the river tumbled over. Beyond that, a castle floated in space.
It was golden, but not made of gold. Errol thought it might be amber, because it had a translucent quality, and light seemed to shine from inside of it. And on second look it wasn’t a castle, at least not the kind with lots of towers and pennants and crenelated walls. Palace or fortress might be a better word. Cyclopean gates opened from a circular outer wall. Within that, there rose a second, higher wall. It was big, really huge, but it was not all that tall relative to its width; he wasn’t even sure if the structure in the middle qualified as a tower.
But whatever you called the structure, it was massive, wider than several football fields.
And sitting on a freaking floating island. Or at least that’s how it looked. Maybe it was really on spur of rock, and the cliff in front of him just obscured that fact.
But when they got closer, he could see underneath it, and there was nothing there.
A lot of nothing. Standing on the edge of the precipice, he could see the river pouring over off to his right. He could watch the stream of water, which he knew to be at least two or three hundred feet in width—dwindle down to the size of a pencil, a lollipop stick, a sewing thread—nothing. It was as if they were standing on the edge of the world. But he had been someplace like this before.
“Is this the Hollow Sea?” He asked Aster, as she arrived.
“Maybe,” she said. “But it doesn’t feel like that. I think this is something else. Or maybe the place the Hollow Sea is a shadow of.”
The island was connected to the mainland by a bridge that looked as if had been spun from spider silk; it appeared far too delicate to be practical.
Everyone was up now. Aster murmured something and their weight returned to normal.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Errol asked. “We’re about to walk out on a floating island.”
“If the island holds that up,” Aster said, pointing at the huge building, “I don’t think it will notice us.”
“It seems sturdy,” Billy said.
Errol still hesitated at the edge of the bridge. What if the island was holding exactly as much weight as it was meant to? If he had learned anything about magic, it was it that it was not fair and certainly wasn’t always designed to be helpful. After all, the silver ship had killed a fair number of people who did nothing more sinister than try to board it. It was hard to believe a palace like this would be left unguarded.
The bridge didn’t collapse, nor did the island when they set foot on it. But when they approached the doorless gates, fire suddenly flickered in its threshold, quickly rising until it filled the entire opening with white-hot flame.
“There’s the catch,” Errol muttered.
But Aster didn’t hesitate. She spoke a sentence he didn’t understand, and the flames immediately dropped down. The air was still roasting hot when they stepped into the palace, but as they moved a little further in, it quickly cooled down.
“You think this place was built by the same people as the castle where we found the water of health?” Errol asked. That place too had been built for something larger than human. It had been made of golden metal.
“Not the same,” Billy said. “But—not so different.”
“Were you here before, too?” Aster asked.
“This place?” Billy said. “Maybe. I can’t say for sure.”
“I think I know where we are,” Dusk said. She sounded subdued, as if afraid to speak too loudly. “Ghartas Sauvens.”
“And where is that?” Aster asked.
“They say my great-great-grandmother ruled here,” Dusk replied. “My ancestors fled this place long ago.”
“Fled?” Errol said. “As in ‘ran away’?”
“Yes,” Dusk said.
“Why?”
“To avoid being eaten,” she replied.
“That’s a good reason,” Errol said.
“This is where Dad’s astrarium brought us,” Aster said.
“This is where we’re supposed to be. I’m sure of it.”
“What now, then?” Shandor asked. “Shall we explore this place?”
Aster nodded. “But we stay together. Don’t anyone go off on your own.”
“Don’t worry,” Errol said. “I won’t.”
EIGHT
ANOTHER QUEEN
The palace was a fortress within a fortress. Once through the first gate and its fiery defenses, there was another, with a ramp leading up to the central part of the building. Or they could go left or right and wander around the lower level, which they elected to do first.
Between the outer and inner fortress ran a broad curving corridor, open to the sky. The Moon and stars provided a little light, but the amber glow of the walls allowed them to make their way. Numerous rooms and compartments opened from the passage, many of which were empty. Those with contents were disturbing. The first of these, Errol recognized almost instantly, was a huge stable, with stalls, feeding troughs, and so forth, all oversized. There were no living horses, but there were plenty of bones, mostly of very large horses, all laid out in piles as if the animals had collapsed and rotted in place without being disturbed by scavengers. Leather bridles hung on pegs, along with ornate felt blankets and what he guessed were saddles, although they definitely weren’t the western-style saddles he’d grown up with. For one thing, they didn’t have stirrups.
The horse bones predominated, but there were human-looking ones, as well. If a human stood nine feet tall.
They found more oversized bones in some of the other rooms. One held something what appeared to be a stove or a furnace. The swords, knives, and spears hanging up an on the tables suggested it was a foundry. Another space was full of half-built, two-wheeled wagons. Others held looms or tools for working wood. Some were obviously apartments, with bedrooms, courtyards, kitchens, and stairways that led up to the flat roof. Like the horses, the people in those rooms seemed to have died in the middle of their daily tasks.
“It’s a good thing this isn’t creepy,” Errol said. “Or else I might be creeped out. I mean, at least in the other Kingdoms, the adults had changed into things. Monsters, statues, birds. This is a little too ... real.”
Aster shot him a funny look but didn’t say anything.
Crap, he thought. Aster’s father had turned into stone and been swallowed by the earth—while she was holding his hand. That was pretty real.
They didn’t explore the entire outer part of the citadel— it was the size of a town and seemed to be more of the same. When they saw another ramp moving up to the second tier, they ascended, through a corridor carved in panoramas of chariots and wagons, some carrying spheres with rays shooting from them, others depicting warrior men and women. In what seemed to be the dead center of the palace was another open square, maybe a hundred yards across. It was paved in white stone, but the core must have been filled with earth, because a magnificent tree grew in the center of it. Its massive, gnarled trunk twisted up, tapering sharply as it went; its limbs sprawled everywhere. Some of the thicker, lower ones had come back to earth and taken root, where smaller trees had sprouted. On its limbs hung round, coppery fruit.
The inner palace had four entrances from the courtyard.
The rooms in the upper palace were bigger. One full quarter of it was a single huge throne room. The ceiling vaulted high above, and in the domed center of it was a huge sun made of what appeared to be gold. The sphere sent out waving rays of metal, veined into the amber, radiating across the arched ceiling and down the walls, which were themselves carved and painted with cranes, hawks, geese, swans, deer, bulls, lizards, snakes, bees, butterflies, dragonflies, flowering trees, bushes, and vines, each stylized blossom resembling smaller versions of the sun. The floor was inlaid with images of hundreds of fish and sea creatures carved from many sorts of stone.
The throne was also of gold, and by contrast with the rest of the room, rather plain.
A giant woman sat the throne. Her robe was white, hemmed in flowing gold patterns. She wore no crown, but the shimmering yellow of her hair cascaded in ringlets. She wasn’t a skeleton, like the others they had seen, but her skin was almost as white as bone. Her eyes were closed, and her head tilted down to rest on her chest. Despite the colors and her fair skin, after he had been looking at her for a few seconds, Errol felt his sight dim, as if darkness were emanating from her somehow; not shadow exactly, but the opposite of light.
“Is she alive?” Errol murmured.
“There is something there,” Shandor whispered. He seemed in awe, which was out of character for him. “Something more like death than life.”
Aster spoke a few words and took a step forward, but the darkness suddenly intensified; Aster gasped and stumbled. Billy caught her before she could actually fall.
“Out,” Aster said. “Everyone.”
“What happened?” Errol asked, once they were out of the room.
“I’m not sure,” Aster said. “I felt something watching us. And then it reached for me, touched me. Something terrible.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to find here. But I hope it isn’t her.”
“Let’s look around some more,” Errol said.
The rest of the upper story was filled with lavish banquet halls, vast bedrooms, and baths. A staircase led to the roof, which—aside from the dome above the throne room—was flat. There they discovered fountains and gardens full of withered flowers and trees, along with a very large, four-wheeled wagon made to be drawn by draft animals of some sort—horses or oxen, maybe. But they would have to be the size of elephants.
In all of this, they found no sign of anything actually living. Not a bird, lizard, or bug.
“Where are the children?” Delia asked. “I understand the lack of adults, but everywhere I’ve been, the curse spared the children.”
“Yes,” Dusk replied. “Usually, anyway.”
“The city of pyramids,” Errol said. “We didn’t see anyone at all there, not in the city itself.”
“They were there at first,” Dusk said. “My brother Hawk conscripted them all, either keeping them in his entourage or sending them elsewhere to fight his wars.”
“Maybe the ones here left, too,” Aster said. “Maybe they didn’t want to stay here, with the skeletons of their parents.”
“Yeah,” Errol said. “I can understand that. On the other hand, we haven’t searched the whole place yet. Have you figured out why we’re here?”
