Citadels of the Lost (22 page)

Ishander scowled, but Drakis had a hard time taking the boy seriously. He was not yet “in his beard” and despite his considerable bravado and unquestionable skill at survival while they were escaping Pythar, there was a greenness to the boy's manner and movement that the seasoned warrior now remembered seeing too many times in young Impress Warriors: eager, fearless, and all too often short-lived.

Ishander squeezed back between two woven reed mats that passed for walls. Any concept of a path had vanished altogether, and Drakis found the smells overwhelming. The young man stopped again.

“Remove your shoes before you enter,” the youth commanded.

“Enter where?” Drakis asked.

“Honored ground,” Ishander said with a look that, not for the first time, told Drakis that it was common knowledge to everyone but him. When both Drakis and the chimerian had loosened their sandals, the young Far-runner pulled back a woven mat and beckoned the outsiders within.

Drakis stepped barefoot onto the clean mat flooring and was at once confused and astonished. The room was small and had a low ceiling, but it was carefully organized and well ordered in complete contrast to the chaos outside its walls. Yet, even in its order, it was an explosion of contradictions. Low tables displayed a dizzying array of art alongside broken bits of mechanisms and intricate devices the purpose of which Drakis could only guess at. On one table there lay scattered a pile of small, metallic wheels with jagged edged teeth that seemed to have once fit together inside a bent, green-crusted metal casing. A box encrusted so thickly in rust that it seemed barely able to hold its shape sat in one corner of the small room. There were tubes of copper leaning against another corner beyond a set of carefully arranged pillows that were in a hopeless tangle. Several statues had been placed about the room. Some of them were partial and others complete. Some were so small as to be able to rest in Drakis' palm while one statue of an enormous winged creature with four legs and no head was far too large for the room with one of its wings sticking through the side wall.

But it was the large stone throne, the back of which ended abruptly in a jagged, shattered edge, that commanded his attention, for there upon it sat the master Far-runner.

He had no legs below the knees. He was an old man; the oldest Drakis had any memory of ever seeing. His carefully kept white hair had been pulled back from his forehead into a long, tightly woven braid that fell down his back. His body was strong but the tone in his muscles had started to fade. He had chiseled cheekbones and his pale eyes were unfocused, seemingly trying to look everywhere at once. He turned toward the sound of Drakis and Ethis as they followed Ishander into the room.

“Outsiders!” the elder Far-runner exclaimed, his face bursting into a smile of childish delight though his eyes did not seem to find them as they stood before him. “A human who smells of distant blood and a rubber-man! Oh, how wonderful!”

Drakis glanced at Ethis, but the shapeshifter's face remained impassive.

“Come to hear, have you? Come to see?” the old man cackled. “Come to be led by the runner who cannot walk?”

“We have,” Drakis answered. “We need to know . . .”

“Of course you do!” the old man laughed, slapping his bony hands on his thighs. “You're running far, young man! Farther than anyone has ever run before. You have to know? Why, my son, you have to know better than any of us!”

“Sire, you're confused. I'm not your . . .”

“Sire be damned, you can save that for the clan-witch and her puppet show down on the point,” the old man interrupted again. “My name is Koben Dakan, I'm the best damn Far-runner that ever lived, boy.”

“But your legs,” Ethis asked, “how could you . . . ?”

“And a chimerian!” the elder man exclaimed. “Never have met one of your kind before, though I've seen plenty of likenesses of your clan out in the Lost. Thought your kind were all made up by the loretellers but I guess I was wrong. Well, I'll tell you, rubber-man, why this great Far-runner is stumping around on what's left of his knees. I was running in the north, down the left branch as it were of the River Aegrain past the Divergence Falls. I had seen some markers that looked like an old road to Kesh Morain—the City of Delights as it was known in the Time Before—and was holding my path as close to the river as possible without losing the markers taking me farther into the . . .”

“Grandfather,” Ishander grumbled under his breath.

The old man looked over at the youth. “Well, perhaps I'll tell that another time. The tail of the tale is that Clan Drevoll found me and thought I was poaching on their past. They had the idea that Shurih was their ruin to pillage and wanted to say so clearly to our clan. So they took just enough of my legs to make sport of me. But I got them back, you see, after I'd been there several months and gotten used to getting about on these stumps . . .”

“Grandfather!” Ishander snapped.

The elder man screwed up his face in disgust and turned back, his blank eyes looking toward Drakis. “He's my grandson, and yet he treats
me
like a whelp. You can just call me Koben as long as Audelai is out of earshot and you don't make me mad. So she sent you to me, did she?”

“Uh, yes,” Drakis said, clearing his throat. He was beginning to think he would not be able to fit his questions edgewise between the elder's words. “We need to know . . .”

“What happened?” Koben said, his eyebrows rising. “What happened in the Time Before when the magic was stolen from the land, when the Citadels went dark and the plague from the south robbed the life from our land? Is that what you want to know?”

“Yes, Koben,” Ethis said.

The elderly Far-runner nodded sagely, then sat back against the broken throne, pressing his long, bony fingertips together.

“Haven't the slightest idea,” the old man said.

Drakis blinked. “But . . . we were told that . . .”

“Young man, I may not be much to look at now but I was the best in my day,” Koben said. His blank eyes seemed to be looking onto a different place and a distant time. “I ranged across the Desolation. I've seen the canopy trees stretching over the borders of Armethia itself. I've scowered the Mnaros ruins and tempted the drakoneti of Pythar. I've climbed the God's Wall Mountains and seen the dragons on their crags. I've tread with quiet respect past the towers of Aegrain and left the ghosts to sleep there undisturbed. I've even seen the towers—those incredible, heart-breaking towers of Khorypistan still standing bright in the distance. No man has gone further, seen more, and been more disappointed than I. No man alive knows more than I do about the past, and I'm telling you that all I know is that it's gone . . . it's all gone forever.”

“Then you have no idea what happened in the Time Before,” Ethis said, deliberately frowning.

“Oh, there are the stories and the legends,” Koben shrugged, opening his hands casually. “They tell of the time when the plague of long-headed demons came from the south and stole the magic out of the land. They say that men and dragons were brothers in the Time Before, together guarding the secret of the great magic that protected them both. There were some who, at least one legend says, took this brotherhood too far and tried to use that same magic to remake humans into a semblance of their dragon neighbors. That is the explanation we have of the drakoneti although we have no real knowledge of it. All this happened so long out of memory and the records were lost in the calamity when the Towers of Light went dark. The power of Aether—so the legend says—kept our land strong and the demons of the southlands in fear. The Fordrim down the east fork of the Tyra tell a story where the dragons betrayed their human brothers—I spent some time with them before the Drevoll took me—and that it was their betrayal that caused the Aether to be stolen from the land and the glory of humanity to fall in a single night.”

“What if the magic were to return?” Drakis asked. “What if someone found a way to bring it back?”

The old man pondered for a time before he spoke. “That the Aether is gone is sure, and now there are none left who might use it even were it to return. Even so, who can say what might happen? The long-heads from the south believed that we were extinct and after they had their fill of feasting on our land, left it like a rotting carcass. Yet the fathers of our fathers before us—few as they were—still managed to survive. We are still here. We may be a flickering flame in the winds of terrible times, but we burn still. Who is to say what we might be if the great fires were rekindled among the Lost Citadels?”

“Can you tell us the way?” Ethis asked.

The old man smiled. “No . . . not even I can tell you that.”

“I know the way,” Ishander said, folding his arms across his chest.

The old man turned to the youth, a pained expression on his face. “No, Ishander! You must not. It is farther than even I have run. Your father was foolish to have tried . . .”

“I will take you,” Ishander said, ignoring the old man and addressing Drakis directly. “I have seen the Towers of Light. I have walked the Lost Citadel. I know the way.”

“I
T IS A VIOLATION OF CLAN-LAW!”

Philida, a female Hunt-runner, stood before Urulani with her bare feet planted resolutely wide and firm against the track of packed dirt that ran its serpentine course through the thick jungle growth that all but obscured the collapsing ruins around them. It had previously been Armenthis Road, but once they had passed the Near Gate beyond the Ambeth wall, the ancient avenue had nearly disappeared altogether.

Philida was almost a full head shorter than Urulani but had a muscular build that reminded Urulani of Jugar. She was unquestionably strong, as she had demonstrated only three days before when she had found Mala and the Lyric walking up this same street toward the Near Gate through the town's defensive wall to the north and had summarily picked up both women and carried them back into the marketplace where, apparently, clan-law dictated they should remain. Her hair was a mousy brown, what little there was of it, since the woman preferred to keep it cut less than a finger's width in length. She had a strong jawline, which was often set in defiance of Urulani's wishes and small, gray eyes that peered at the Captain of the
Cydron
with perpetual suspicion. Her skin was deeply tanned and leathery from exposure, leaving it wrinkled and old in appearance. If the woman had a love interest, Urulani would have liked to meet the person just out of curiosity to see what kind of companion this woman could successfully bring to heel that she would bother with enough to keep.

“Violation of clan-law?” Urulani yelled back at the Hunt-runner. Her own people—the Sondau of Nothree—had little in the way of material possessions except those that they “liberated” from their gnome, goblin, or elven neighbors whenever the need arose. The Sondau were a happy people, living life on their own terms to come and go as they pleased; these Ambeth humans were plentiful, it was true, but seemed in a perpetual state of anxiety and desperation. They hunted but took no joy in the hunt. They brought in fruits and vegetables gathered from the forest but never seemed satisfied with what they found or how much they brought in. The Clan-mother counseled peace but beneath her words was a perpetual message of fear. Urulani's own people were dark-skinned sea raiders who had the sense to take only what they needed to live and spend the rest of their time enjoying the living of that life. These light-faced northern people seemed to have lost all their senses along with their color: they were afraid of everything, driven to have more of everything than any of their neighbors, and so busy getting everything that they had no time to enjoy anything. And all for what? So that they could fill their lives acquiring a hoard of possessions only to die and get no use or pleasure out of what they had spent their lives acquiring.

If this was the great human empire of the ancients, then it was no wonder they were nearly extinct.

And now Urulani was facing perhaps the most stubborn example of northern human thinking in the compact body of Philida Creve, the so-called escort assigned to Urulani, Mala, and the Lyric.

Only Mala and the Lyric had disappeared, which had made Philida more intractable than usual.

“Just which clan-law are you thinking is being broken right now?” Urulani seethed at the Hunt-runner who looked as though she were holding her breath. “The clan-law that says that we are all supposed to stay within your sight or the clan-law that says we must remain within the town walls? Or perhaps you're thinking of the clan-law that says guests must be kept safe from harm? Well, Mala and the Lyric have managed to get through the gate without you stopping them and they're out there . . . somewhere.”

Exactly where in the somewhere had become increasingly difficult to ascertain. Their trail was easy enough to follow when Urulani or Philida picked it up, but it often led into the ruins and seemed to wander back on itself from time to time. Urulani felt sure that it had led her and their escort both no more than a few hundred strides beyond the town wall and yet Urulani had not been able to see the wall for some time and was feeling slightly confused by the tree canopy overhead that blocked her view of the sun.

“Their being out here is a violation of clan-law,” Philida said. “
You
being out here is a violation of clan-law! You must go back!”

“I'd be delighted to go back,” Urulani said, reining in her anger and trying to penetrate this woman's thinking by speaking slower. “As soon as we find the Lyric and Mala.”

“No,” Philida responded. “You are in violation of clan-law. You must go back now.”