“I’ve got them,” she called. “But he’s put our Empire money somewhere.”
“And ours,” said Tahl.
“Wait,” said the stranger. “Find what I can.”
With the flaring rope held above his head he turned slowly round, and pointed with his free hand at one of the bound men, and then another.
“Cord round his neck,” he said. “His . . . his . . . under pillow . . .”
Tilja knelt by the first of the bound figures. The cord was tucked down inside the man’s jacket but seemed to be twitching vigorously as it tried to haul itself free, but the man himself was thrashing around, grunting furiously, so she couldn’t be sure, and when she laid hold of it, it seemed to be ordinary lifeless cord. She pulled out the purse and moved on. When she and Tahl had finished working their way round the cave, they gave the six purses they’d found to the stranger, who weighed them in his hand, passed three back to Tahl, kept two for himself, and tossed one down onto the floor of the cave.
“Good,” he said. “No more time. Cords’ll loosen when this burns out.”
He dropped the burning rope onto the floor of the cave and led the way out. Tilja gave Meena the green bag, but as she hefted the saddlebag to carry it down the slope she heard a movement from below and saw the dark shapes of three horses coming out from under the trees and starting up. She could tell which one was Calico from the fuss she was making. Then, as they came up the slope, she saw that the first two each had a lead rope wriggling ahead and was following it docilely up, but Calico was fighting against two ropes, which were taking it in turn to snake up the slope and wrap an end round a fresh hold while the other one hauled her on. Even in the thrill and terror of escape Tilja remembered how it had taken several strong men to force Calico onto the raft, and laughed aloud. The stranger joined in with a raucous bellow, more like a donkey’s bray than laughter.
“At least someone’s happy,” said Meena. “Now where’s my horse seat? Run down, girl and have a look . . .”
“On its way,” said the stranger, as the harness came scurrying up the slope, dragging the horse seat behind it. It stilled as Tilja picked it up and buckled it on, but the other two sets fastened themselves in place without human help.
“Ready?” said the stranger. “Bring the horse, child. Now, madam . . .”
Calico quietened at Tilja’s touch and let herself be led up. The stranger’s angular, big-boned arms hoisted Meena into the saddle with no apparent effort. Tilja held the saddlebags in place for him while he fastened them on. She had half expected him to do this by magic, but he used his hands, lashing and knotting as anyone else would have done, but very deftly, with none of the apparent clumsiness of his other movements.
By now Tahl had brought Alnor limping across. The stranger helped him onto one of the other horses, then bent and picked up several coils of rope that had somehow appeared, and loaded them onto the third animal.
“All ready?” he said. “Anything else? What, child?”
Tilja started. Unconsciously, from force of habit acquired over the last few days, she had patted the back of her head to check that her coil was in place, and found her hair all disheveled. Now she was feeling hopelessly around for the fastenings. She was oddly distressed by the trivial loss.
“My hairpin and tie,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”
“I put the pin in the back of your cloak,” said Tahl. “I didn’t feel the tie.”
“Wait,” said the stranger.
He stood for a few moments, bent and picked something up and handed it to Tilja.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “My hair’s too short. It keeps coming undone.”
“Give.”
She handed the hair tie back. He put it his palm and seemed to stare at it for a moment while he scratched at the back of his neck with his other hand. Then he rolled it briefly between fingers and thumbs.
“Turn,” he said.
She turned, and felt his fingers flickering through her hair, and the hair seeming to comb itself out, and braid and coil silkily under his touch. In almost no time at all he slid the pin home. Automatically she put up a hand to pat it into place, but he caught her wrist.
“Don’t touch,” he said sharply.
“I’m sorry. I . . .”
He stared at her for a moment, frowning, then gave that odd little grunt and let go. She realized that there had been something very peculiar about his grasp, as if she’d been able to feel its pressure but not the actual touch of his fingers. No, that wasn’t quite it, but . . .
“New one on me,” he said, flexing his hand as if he were trying to ease a stiffness out of it. “But don’t you tie it yourself. Won’t work. Get your grandma to do it.”
“Anyway, thank you,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”
“Sell a lot of hair ties,” he said.
His startling laugh was still ringing across the valley as he grasped his horse’s lead rope and strode off across the hillside.
At first they hurried along in moonlight bright enough for them to pick their footsteps on the rough path. Tahl led the second horse, ridden by Alnor, whose ankle was now almost too painful to take his weight. Tilja, Meena and Calico came behind. For once Calico was no trouble, with the other horses to follow. She didn’t even balk when the stranger turned aside and started down the slope.
As soon as they were in the darkness beneath the trees he stopped. After a brief pause a light flared, like the one he’d lit in the cave. He handed a piece of blazing rope to Tahl and lit another for Tilja. As soon as she touched it it went out. He gave one of his expressive grunts—not of surprise this time, but something else—took it back, lit it with a flick of his wrist and handed it up to Meena without a word, then lit a third for himself and led the way on. The light was just enough for them to see their way but seemed to strengthen when they dipped into the fog. As they reached the bottom path Tilja heard a rustling noise close by her feet. Looking down, she saw several lengths of rope flowing rapidly past her. The stranger stopped.
“Don’t wait,” he said. “Don’t think the fools will follow, but never know. Catch you up.”
The knowledge that the bandits were now free gave Tilja’s weary legs fresh strength. Hurrying past the stranger, she saw one of the ropes start to climb up his leg like a twining vine while another one was already coiling itself into his hand. As soon as they were well ahead Tahl slowed his pace and waited for her.
“Listen,” he said. “In the cave, when I untied your wrists, as soon as I’d got it loose the cord came alive, but when I touched your hand with it it went dead. The man told me to drop it before I could try again.”
“He says it’s something about me. Just before that he was trying to make the cord undo itself, and I got a funny numb feeling in my arms. I’m going to ask him as soon as I can.”
“Be careful. You know the rope that tripped Calico? It felt like the ropes in the cave—alive, I mean, until I’d got it loose. Then it went dead.”
“Because you were touching it?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it was because it had finished what it was there for.”
“Are you sure of this, Tahl?” said Alnor.
“Not dead sure. I think it was like that, but it was only a moment or two. I just thought . . . Tell you later. Here he comes.”
Tilja dropped back and to the side to let the stranger come striding past.
Night and the journey seemed unending, unchanging, the darkness, the dripping trees, the fog. Tired beyond tiredness, Tilja plodded on. For the first few miles fear of pursuit had kept her going, but by now she had used up all those reserves of energy and knew she couldn’t travel much further without rest. Then the path dipped, they came out of the fog as suddenly as they’d walked into it, and she saw a vast plain stretching in front of her, with the first pale wash of dawn showing along the eastern horizon. At the foot of the hills a few spots of light pricked the darkness. The stranger halted and they stopped on either side of him.
“Way station,” he said. “Be there by sunrise.”
“We owe you our thanks, sir,” said Alnor. “Without you we would still be prisoners. And yet we do not know your name.”
The stranger laughed.
“No name,” he said. “Don’t use one. Just Ropemaker.”
“You must’ve got one, though,” said Meena. “Just you’re not saying.”
He laughed again.
“Well,” said Meena. “Like Alnor says, we owe you a bit, but I’ve a question to ask you all the same. I know it’s dangerous to talk about this kind of thing, but it strikes me we’re all in this together. That was a lot of powerful stuff you were doing with your ropes back there up the hill, and none of us felt a thing, not like we’d expect to, Alnor and Tahl and me. When something like that’s going on, we get this kind of a feeling . . . doesn’t happen where we come from, so we’re not used to it, but there’s no mistaking . . . you get what I’m asking you?”
He didn’t answer at once but turned, not to her but to Tilja.
“You felt nothing, girl?” he asked quietly.
“No. I don’t. I can’t . . . it doesn’t matter.”
Perhaps it was just that she was so exhausted, so far from home, so shaken by their adventure, but she could hear the bitterness and sadness in her own voice and knew she was lying, and knew the others knew. It was as though she had been standing under the cedars with Anja all over again. Her inability to feel the presence of magic, in the same way that the others felt it, truly did matter, for reasons she was quite unable to grasp.
The Ropemaker’s huge head was a dark mass against the paling stars. She couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed to be staring at her. Then he gave a brief, yapping laugh and turned to Meena.
“Not warded, ma’am?” he asked her.
“Don’t know how,” she told him. “Like I say, it doesn’t happen where we come from.”
“Spoon of yours—that’s warded.”
“Lananeth did that for us. She said it would be safer.”
“Right. Won’t get it into Talagh with you, though. Need more than that. Might meet someone on the way, too. . . . Only country stuff, those wards. . . . Give it to the girl, ma’am. There’s something about her—don’t understand it myself. New to me. Don’t know if it’ll stand up to the wards they’ve got at Talagh, but it’s the best you can do. Strap it against her skin, under her sleeve. May be safe like that. All right? Got to be getting on now, heading north, convoy to catch. No hurry for you—yours goes tomorrow. Day’s rest for the old ’uns. And you take that horse, sir. Be more than a day or two before you can walk on that leg of yours. Sell it when you’re done with it. Been a pleasure to meet you. Luck be with you, then.”
Meena’s mouth had barely opened to protest before he had turned and was striding down the slope, waving a spidery arm in acknowledgment as they called their farewells after him.
8
The Walls of the City
Talagh. There was no grasping it, no way Tilja could imagine it as just a particular place in the world. It wouldn’t fit into her mind. It was like the Empire itself, too huge, too strange, too, somehow, vague.
By the time they reached it even its name had become uncertain. In the Valley it had been Talak; north of the Pirrim Hills Talagh; but in the twenty-seven days of travel since then she had heard it called Talarg and Dalarg and Dhawak and Tallak-Tallak, and Ndalag and several other names, by travelers who had joined the traffic on the Grand Northwest Road by one of the scores of roads that fed into it from north and south.
And the speakers had been just as different as the names they’d used for the city. Tahl, who could make friends with anyone, had hit it off with a boy his own age whom he’d met while he was haggling with a dealer over a price for Alnor’s horse at one of the way stations. These were huge by now, with booths for a thousand travelers, more or less grand according to their grade. Tahl’s friend, Cinoquo, had a clear, coppery skin, thick lips, a snub, spread nose, and high, prominent cheekbones, just like his parents, who were on their way to a provincial capital to be witnesses in a legal dispute between their Landholder and a rival which had already dragged on through five generations. They were nomadic cattle herders and drove a creaking oxcart—they had no other home—and spoke in an accent so strange that until she was used to it Tilja could understand only one word in three.
But some things didn’t vary at all. Cinoquo’s father was a chief in his tribe, so he was a fourteenth grader and wore a cap like Alnor’s, and Cinoquo’s little sister had just started to put her hair up, braided and coiled and fastened with two blue beads and a blue-headed pin showing, and she was having just the same trouble keeping them in place that Tilja used to have until the Ropemaker had done his trick with her hair tie. These were the people who called the city Tallak-Tallak.
Tilja saw it first as a dirty smudge spreading along the south-eastern horizon. The Grand Northwest Road truly lived up to its name by now. For the past nine days it had been fifty paces broad, well paved from ditch to ditch and marked off into separate lanes for travelers of different status and speeds, the ordinary traffic plodding along at the outer edges, while imperial messengers, high officials and their like sped through in the middle. (When the Emperor traveled, Tahl had heard someone say, the road was closed to all traffic for a day’s march before and behind him, and it took his retinue a morning to pass by.)
For most of the time they had journeyed across plains or among gentle hills; for the last day and a half they had wound up through precipitous valleys, beneath cliffs, over passes, and down by thundering streams until, abruptly, they came round a spur, and there lay Talagh.
Tilja didn’t at first notice it, because her eye was inevitably caught by the river. The one by which they had left the Valley would have been a trickle beside it. Nevertheless those waters were here, one of the hundreds of tributaries that mingled into this mile-wide gleaming flood, snaking down from the north, close below the hills, and swinging away east across the plain.
“Talagh,” said someone, and pointed. Tilja peered into the distance and saw the smudge spreading along the horizon, a smudge in the clear spring air from the dust and fume of several million lives, a smudge on the patient earth from centuries of such lives building their houses and workplaces and temples and palaces and towers of fortification, and then rebuilding and rebuilding on the rubble of them. A smudge on time itself. From where she stood she began to feel its power.
That was at noon. In midafternoon they crossed the river on one of a pair of wooden bridges built upon massive piles. (What forest of giants must have been felled to provide such timber!) They slept at the last, thronged way station with the city still a few miles distant. From here they could see the low hill at its center, where the twenty spindling towers of the Watchers rose above the haze of dust and smoke, marking the heart of the Empire, the Emperor’s palace. Here too, as Lananeth had warned them, they were pestered by touts offering to guide them through the bureaucratic maze of entry and the dangers of the streets to wondrous places of pleasure and profit within the walls of Talagh.
Next morning for a while they saw no sign of any such walls. They walked past fields of vegetables, clusters of shabby houses and barns, more fields, more buildings, and then they were trudging along a tree-lined avenue with pompous statues and fountains, but still with dingy and ramshackle warehouses and yards on either side. Some kind of building blocked the road in the distance.
Nearer, this turned out to be an immense triple archway built of dark red brick. Beyond it they came to an empty space, two hundred paces across and stretching out of sight on either side. Ahead, in the same dark brick, heavy as a thundercloud at sunset, rose the gates and towered walls of Talagh.
They passed under the arch around noon, and joined the lines for entry. Many of their fellow travelers would still be waiting by dusk, and have to camp in their places all night and wait for the clerks to start work again next morning, but Alnor was wearing the uniform of a fourteenth grader, so one of the officials controlling the lines (two drin before he would even look at them) told them to join the shorter line at the left-hand gate. Nobody questioned their identities. The fees and bribes seemed to be all that mattered. Even so Tilja found herself sighing with relief when at last, late in the day, they stepped under the massive arch of the great gate of Talagh.
At once the whole of her left arm went numb. It wasn’t ordinary numbness such as she might have got from sleeping on it too long. She flexed her hand and her fingers moved, but it didn’t seem to be her, Tilja, moving them. She had two left arms, this strange, new, different arm, full of a kind of glowing chill which blanked out all other feelings, and inside that her own everyday arm, helpless, a sort of ghost. The feeling spread through her whole body, filling it, taking it over, more and more intense. In a moment it was going to come shrieking out—
No!
she thought.
This is me! Tilja Urlasdaughter of Woodbourne
Farm. No!
Deliberately she shaped the picture in her mind, herself in the kitchen at home, just having climbed out of bed and now leaning against the stove as she repeated the fire charm and listened to the crackle of twigs and the swelling roar of flames into the flue. Blindly she clung to that image as she forced her feeble Tilja legs to shuffle the alien body forward and out on the other side of the arch, where she halted, sweating and gasping as the numbness flowed back the way it had come, out of her body into her left arm and then down from the shoulder to the place where Axtrig lay against her skin. It swirled into the old wooden spoon and was gone.
Magic,
she thought. Yes, Talagh, the warded city. Wards of immense power, built into its walls by the greatest magicians in the Empire. And she, Tilja, had just carried Axtrig through them. The Ropemaker had said he didn’t know if she could do it, but she had. The wards had tried to stop her, to break through her own mysterious defenses, and they had failed. Though she was still shuddering with the remembered strain and terror, beneath them she began to feel a strange sort of dazed exhilaration at the understanding of what she had done.
“Get a move on, girl! No time for daydreaming!”
Meena’s snarl from above her head yanked her back into the everyday world, and she led Calico on.
Again they had to force their way past a mass of touts, keeping close together, knowing what easy prey a blind old man, a lame old woman and two children might seem to these street jackals. Tilja had anything she valued beneath her skirt, and the others had taken similar precautions. Besides, the jackals had misjudged Meena, perched above them, watchful as a house dog. Twice Tilja heard the swish of her cane, followed by a yelp and guffaws from the other jackals, as a hand had reached for one of the saddlebags.
On Lananeth’s instructions they pushed through into a courtyard beside the main gate and lined up at yet another booth, where Alnor hired one of the official guides, a silent, unsmiling young man. He seemed quite unimpressed when Alnor asked him to take them to the house of Lord Kzuva, one of the great nobles of the Empire. He took the fee and bribe and extra without a word of thanks, told them to keep up, and strode off, using his staff of office to lever a path though the mob. They would never have found their way without him.
In one sense Talagh was roughly what Tilja had expected from the account of it in the story of Asarta. They had entered through one of the twelve great gates and were now on a broad avenue that led, gently rising, up to the Emperor’s palace at the center. On either side of her, just as in the story, she could see crooked lanes and alleys running off into the maze of streets that lay between this and the next avenues. She was even prepared, she’d thought, for the crowds and the noise and the smells.
But she wasn’t. In her mind, perhaps, but not in her imagination. Not for the overwhelming
pressure
of it all, all those hurrying people, the mass of different lives and purposes, the bellowing vendors, the infants—jackals in the making—wheedling pitifully for a quarter drin but with eyes sharp for anything they could snatch, so street skilled that when some bigwig was borne through, shoulder-high on a chair, with baton-wielding attendants thwacking a pathway, these urchins ducked under the blows without even turning to look. And the rattle of drums and the high bleat of bagpipes calling the scurriers’ attention to a troupe of five near-naked contortionists who’d tied themselves into a knot so intricate that no one could tell which arm or head belonged to which body. As Tilja passed, this knot began to dance, rolling itself from foot to foot that stuck out at random from the mass. And just beyond that another raucous ensemble advertised a woman whose gross body was so covered with different-colored scorpions that not a scrap of her flesh could be seen, and every one of them deadly poisonous, so the hawker beside her yelled. And another such sight, and another, and another, every few paces, and the lamplit stalls glittering with trinkets, or great mounds of unknown fruit, or wicked knives and daggers, or sickly-scented salves. . . . Oh, the reeks and odors of Talagh, familiar and strange, honest leather mingling with cloying spices, rots with roses, heady smokes, bitter, cleansing acids, furs and furnaces, people and creatures and stuffs and objects, the very bricks and plaster of the buildings seeming to pour out their own bricky and plastery essences into the dusty, pungent air.
Along its whole length the avenue was thronged from side to side, and at first the going seemed no easier when their guide turned off along one of the broader side lanes. They threaded their way on, crossed two of the main avenues, and came as night was falling to an area of much grander houses than they had so far seen. Here the side streets were almost empty, many of them guarded at either end by men with the tasseled caps and staffs that showed they were the servants of some great lord. At one of these places their guide halted.
“Speak to these fellows,” he said. “I go no further.”
Tahl offered him the three drin he had ready for the tip, but the guide shook his head.
“My father is also blind,” he said. Still unsmiling, he turned and strode away.
One of the guards laughed.
“My father has excellent eyesight,” he said. “Whose household do you seek, my rustic friends? The Lord Kzuva’s? This way, then . . .”
He led them past ornate entrances, beyond which fountains played in lamplit courtyards, and rapped with his staff on a small door in an otherwise blank high wall. Without waiting for an answer, he took his three drin and left. A bored servant opened the door, yawned as he took his bribe, barely seemed to listen to Alnor’s message but held out his hand for another three drin before he would open the main gate to let Meena and Calico through.
He told them to wait and slouched off, but almost before Tilja and Tahl had helped Meena down he came hurrying back, accompanied by another man, middle-aged, pale and plump, wearing the braided silk jacket that meant, Tilja knew by now, that he was a fairly important official. This man rushed eagerly up to Meena, threw his arms round her and kissed her on both cheeks.
“My dearest Qualifa!” he purred. “What a pleasurable surprise! And Qualif! And both grandchildren—long way from home, my young friends, eh? And have you grown! See to the horse, Carran, and have the east-court guest rooms made ready. Send food to my room. This way, my friends. Ah, Qualifa, my dear, your hip is troubling you? Shall I send for a litter?”
“I’ll do, thank you kindly,” said Meena. “And it’s a pleasure to see you again, sir.”
“Take my arm then, and tell me what’s happening at home. You left my wife well?”
He took Meena’s arm and led them through a couple of lamplit courtyards, up a few steps and in through a door. The room beyond glowed with colors and had a strange but pleasing smell. On one side piles of cushions ringed a low table. On the other was a work table covered with ledgers and documents. A large caged bird squawked at their entry.
Their guide closed the door and let out a sigh of relief. He shook his head as he studied his visitors. He had, Tilja thought, a guarded look in his eyes. He had stopped smiling.
“And your true names?” he asked in a voice just above a whisper.
Alnor answered just as quietly.
“We are Alnor Ortahlson and Meena Urlasdaughter, and these are our grandchildren, Tahl and Tilja. We came to your house, where your wife questioned us and gave us food. We needed to come to Talagh, for our own purposes. She needed four people, two old, two young, to come to Talagh and buy death-leaves for the two whose names we assumed. She could not get word to you sooner than we could come, but she said you would understand, since you and she had talked of this possibility. Now we are here. If you have no use for us after all, we will go and do the thing we came for, and trouble you no further.”