Raven's Strike (28 page)

Everything they owned was wet or damp by the second day. Since they had been heading more north than east since they left Shadow's Fall, Seraph figured that they would be fortunate if they didn't run into more snow before they found Colossae.

In some places, Rufort's road had become so overgrown it was impossible to tell roadbed from undisturbed forest floor,
as it disappeared under years of soil and reappeared a half mile later. Following the old road was made harder when the forest thickened until it was difficult to see more than a hundred yards in any direction.

In the early afternoon of the fourth day of rain, Jes, who had taken Gura ahead to check out the trail, came loping back from his explorations.

“River ahead,” he said. “Road goes across.”

“We can't get any wetter,” said Phoran, with a grin. “I just hope it's shallower than the last river we crossed. I'd hate to float away when we've come so far.”

Seraph looked closely at Jes, who was even wetter than most of them from the waist downward. The dog panting happily at his feet was soaked through. “Did you try to cross it, Jes?”

He nodded. “It's fast,” he said. “Not too deep for the horses, though.”

“We could have sent one of the horses across,” complained Hennea. “You don't have any more dry clothes.”

Seraph, who had been about to make the same complaint, closed her mouth.

Jes looked down at himself and shook his head. “It's only water, Hennea. We are all wet.”

“Wait until you're chafed in all the wrong places from wearing wet clothes,” Hennea said. Then, “I'll try and dry out some things tonight when it isn't raining.”

Seraph smiled to herself.

As Jes promised, the road took them to the edge of a river, where the bank led gently down into the water. Upstream and downstream, where mountains arose on either side, the river was narrow and swift, but here it spread out to twice its normal width.

“They must have had a bridge here,” said Tier, riding beside Seraph. “In the spring you wouldn't have been able to ford it at all. I'd not want to try and take a wagon across here even now.”

“It feels as though no one has ever been here before,” said Ielian, just behind them.

“I feel it, too,” Seraph agreed. “Even the things that are man-made—the road and such—feel as if they've been around so long that they've been cleaned of human touch.”

“We'll find a good flat area to camp,” Tier told Seraph, when Jes, who had waited until everyone else had safely crossed, arrived dripping and smiling. Tier started up the rise of land that edged the river, still talking. “If Rinnie can put a hold on the rain for a few hours, we'll rig something to hang up clothes around a fire . . .” His voice trailed off, and he stopped his horse.

Seraph stopped her horse beside him and looked down into the valley stretched below them. It was a sight worthy of a Bard's silence.

Colossae.

C
HAPTER
13

If the trip had taught Hennea anything, it was the power of time.
Five centuries was enough to bury Shadow's Fall, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, had died—she'd forgotten which. She'd seen that a thousand years was enough to hide a road built to last through the ages by mages more powerful than the world had seen since before the dawn of the Empire. It was time enough to reduce a great city to rubble.

She'd constructed possibilities for what they would find in the wizards' city a hundred times on this trip. She'd been prepared for anything except what they found.

Three-quarters of the way across the lightly wooded valley, perhaps a full league away, a hillock arose, cliff-edged and flat-topped. The city covered the entire ridge of the higher land, and spilled out to the valley below, as perfect as it had been on the day the Elder Wizards had destroyed it to save the world from their folly. Rose-colored stone walls surrounded the entire city, protecting it from invaders who had never come.

Even from this far away, the city felt empty and waiting.

“Anyone could have found this,” said Ielian.

Hennea turned her head to look at the smallest of Phoran's guards. “No,” she told him. “Only Travelers.”

“Only if the city wanted to be found,” said Jes, in an odd voice. It wasn't the Guardian, not quite.

The gates of the wizards' city were built of polished brass and were nearly as tall as the wall. They looked just as they must have when the wizard Hinnum had spelled them closed so many centuries ago. Etched into the top of the left gate, in the language of the Colossae wizards, were the prosaic words
Low Gate
.

Hennea looked up at the gate towers that loomed on either side of the gate and could almost imagine a face looking down at her.

There were few cities in the Empire older than the Fall of the Shadowed, and few cities that old outside of it; the Shadowed King's claws had sunk farther than the boundaries of the Empire. The older sections of Taela were supposed to have been built by the first Phoran, and they proved that even well-built stone buildings shifted and moved over centuries. The stones in the walls of Colossae sat squarely one atop the other, as if they'd been placed there yesterday.

She shivered, and Jes wrapped a warm hand around her calf in a manner that had grown familiar. “Are you cold?”

“No, it's not that,” she told him. “This is wrong. Where are the cracks in the wall? Why is the brass still bright without people to polish or wizards to preserve?” She could feel the power here, but it was oddly distant—a memory of magic rather than the real thing.

“Illusion?” said Seraph, dismounting. “It doesn't have that feel, though there is some magic here, right enough.”

She touched the gates, then jumped back as they began to open. Not swinging inward or outward as the city gates of most places did; nor did they rise up like the smaller gates of a keep or hold. These slid back on oiled tracks set below the road surface and into the walls themselves until the only remnant of the gate was a handspan-wide bar of brass up the middle of the wall edge.

A wagon length in front of them was another wall wider than the gate, that blocked them from the city so people entering would have to go to the left or the right of it. On either side of it, set between the city walls and the inner wall were two
wooden gates of the sort a farmer might use to keep livestock in or out. One was open, the other shut.

Tier dismounted and crouched beside the brass door's track, bending down to sniff. “If this is an illusion, it's on par with the
mermora
,” Tier said. “This oil smells fresh.”

“There are people here,” said Kissel. He loosened his sword and tipped his head from side to side, loosening his neck muscles in preparation for battle. “This can't be a deserted place. Not looking like this.” He pointed at the dirt just the far side of the gate and Hennea saw what he had—there were lines on the ground as if someone had just finished raking the ground clear of debris.

“It's too quiet,” protested Toarsen. “A city is never this silent, Kissel. Not even a city the size of Leheigh. You can hear the sounds of Taela miles away.”

“It's magic,” said Jes quietly. “The city was left this way. That's what the Guardian says.”

“He's been here?” Tier gave his son a surprised look.

Hennea was startled as well. She knew the Guardian had been remembering things he should not have known, not if the Order had been cleansed after the death of the previous Guardian who bore it. She'd started to believe that might be most of the trouble with the Guardian Order.

If so, then when she and Seraph solved the mystery of what to do with the Ordered gems, they might also stumble upon a way to help make the Guardian Order less dangerous to its bearer. Not that she wanted to change Jes or the Guardian, just keep him safe. But if the Guardian knew about Colossae, then it wasn't just bits of the previous bearer that the Order contained—it was the first one, one of the survivors of the death of Colossae.

Jes stared determinedly down at the ground for long enough that she thought he'd not answer Tier's question. Finally, he said, “He doesn't know. He just remembers that the wizards left the city as it was.”

“Let's go in,” said Phoran, with all the impatience of a young man, reminding Hennea that, for all his cleverness, he was only a few years older than Jes. “Let's see what this wizards' city looks like.”

Tier got to his feet and stared at the rake marks before he nodded. “All right. Loosen your swords, boys, those of you
who have them. Be alert. Remember that according to Traveler stories there is something evil here. It may be bound, but the Travelers didn't trust those bindings.”

Jes didn't wait for the others but went to the closed gate and jumped over it; his dog followed him. Seraph led her horse through the open gate.

Hennea hung back. Let Jes and Seraph see to the front guard, she would take the rear. There were other people thinking about safety, too. She noticed Toarsen rode in front of Phoran and Kissel behind. Since Rinnie was riding next to Phoran as usual, that left the most vulnerable of their group well guarded from physical harm. Rufort and Ielian looked at her, and she waved them through ahead of her.

Lehr waited.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

He smiled. “I'm not telling Jes I let his lady take rear guard.”

She stiffened. “I can protect myself.”

“Doubtless,” he agreed, and held his chestnut mare where she was.

She smiled and shook her head, but urged her gelding through the gate ahead of him anyway.

The narrow passage dumped them in a large plaza cobbled in the same reddish stone as the walls. Water puddled in the spaces between the cobbles and splashed under the horses' hooves.

In the small houses that crowded together around the plaza and continued to line narrow streets were some of the signs of age Hennea had expected when they'd approached the city. The wood of the doors and windows was cracked, and weeds poked up here and there around the houses. Roofs looked as though they were decades beyond where they had first needed rethatching. Decades, though, not ten centuries.

By the time Hennea and Lehr arrived, everyone else had dismounted and was looking around.

“It still doesn't look deserted enough,” said Phoran, rubbing his stallion's neck absently. “There are places in Taela that look worse than this.”

“And it doesn't smell,” agreed Toarsen.

Lehr hopped off his horse as well and wandered over to one of the houses. “I can't get the door open,” he said in surprise.

“Is it locked?” asked Tier, going to see.

Hennea dismounted slowly, still waiting for some danger or attack. The vast emptiness of the city gave her chills.

“I tried that. I can feel locks, and there are none here, Papa,” Lehr said. “It just won't open.”

Hennea bent down to look at weeds growing along the edge of the wall between them and the gate. A raindrop fell on a leaf, joining a puddle that had formed there. The weed was knee high and fragile-looking, but it didn't bend at all under the weight of the rain. It didn't move.

She reached out to touch it, and it didn't give under the weight of her finger either, even when she pressed down on it.

“Try the window up there,” she heard Phoran say to Lehr. “It's got an open-air window.”

She glanced behind her and saw Lehr jump to catch the lintel of a window and chin himself up. He dropped back down after a moment. “There's a curtain across, but it feels more like a wall.”

“I know what's wrong with your door and the window,” she said, standing up and looking around the streets again. When she knew what she was looking for it was obvious. The thatch on the houses was dark and grey with age, but not with rain. The wood of the walls of the houses was not wet either—and none of the horses were nibbling at the weeds.

Seraph frowned at her.

“The Elder Wizards somehow froze the city in time,” said Hennea certain that she was right, though she could barely feel a trace of magic. “Everything is exactly as it was the day the Elder Wizards sacrificed it. You'll have to find an open entrance if you want inside these buildings because there isn't a door that will open or a curtain that you can move.”

They spent a while exploring the little square. None of them seemed to feel the way Hennea did about the city—except for Gura, who whined and settled in the middle of the square with his muzzle on his paws. It made him sad, too. She left Jes and Lehr trying to figure out how to get across a small yard full of grass time-stiffened to sharp spikes so they could take a closer look at a shed with an open door.

Seraph had taken the map satchel under the overhang of a building for protection from the rain. When she saw Hennea wander back toward the square, she called her over.

“You're the only one who can read this,” she said, handing Hennea the city map. “Can you figure out where we are and how to get somewhere that might do us some good?”

Hennea took the map and looked at it. “The gate said ‘Low Gate,' so we must be here.” She pointed. “It calls this area Old Town.”

“I'd have thought they'd build first on top of the ridge,” said Seraph, distracted from her original question.

Hennea looked around again and saw, not the dilapidated buildings, but how they once had been built against the solid wall of cliff face that curved around them protectively.

“They might have wanted to be near their fields,” Hennea said. “Or maybe the oldest sections had been on top, but were razed and built over.”

Seraph grinned at her, an expression Hennea still wasn't used to seeing on the face of a Raven—but Seraph herself admitted that she didn't have the control she ought. It didn't seem to hamper her—much, thought Hennea, remembering the table that had slammed the floor when Ielian had made Seraph too angry.

Seraph's expressions tended to be sudden, breaking out of the cold reserve that should have been a Raven's calm like the sun from a storm cloud or lava from a volcano, then gone just as quickly as they had come.

“Tier will make up stories for us,” she said, then lost her grin, and, at first Hennea thought it was because she'd remembered that Tier had quit telling stories or singing.

But then she said, “Tier?” and thrust the maps at Hennea.

Hennea looked over at Tier, who stood near his horse looking at nothing, his face as empty as any she'd ever seen. Hennea shoved the map back in the case and set it on the dry ground beneath the overhang before following Seraph. Not that there was anything she could do to help.

He'd been having this kind of episode a couple of times a day. Nothing as dramatic as the thrashing fit he'd had a few days before they'd come to Shadow's Fall, but frightening even so.

“Tier?” Seraph's quiet voice was pitched so as not to disturb the happy explorations the boys were pursuing. Jes, Hennea saw, looked up anyway.

Seraph touched Tier's arm. “Tier?”

Gradually, personality leaked back into his face, and he blinked, looking slightly surprised. “Seraph, where did you come from? I thought you were looking at maps with Hennea?”

Seraph smiled as if there were nothing wrong. “This is Old Town, Hennea says. These buildings were already old when the city died.”

Tier must have seen something in her face Hennea had missed because he touched her cheek, and said gently, “I did it again, didn't I? That's the second time today.”

Third,
thought Hennea, but she didn't correct him.

“Let's look at the map and see if we can find the library,” he said, when Seraph didn't speak. “If we're here looking for information in a wizards' city, the library is the place to start.” He looked up at Hennea. “Can you read the city map well enough to tell us how to get there?”