Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the fourth book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: Darkbridge.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
The World Beyond
SHE STRODE along the silver, snow-clad strand. The sound of the waves upon the ice and gleaming rocks was fragile and lovely as the tortured voices of flawed crystal bells. The salt mists ate into the stepped faces of ice above, and the delicate twisting ribbons of meltwater slid across the hard sands to be swallowed by the sea.
The little people had left her when she gained this other shore.
‘Have we not provided you with food, the best of our kitchens and catches?’ they asked. ‘You will find your road, never fear, tall one. Pray to God, He has traveled all the paths before us!’ So they bowed their little bodies and bade her farewell, uttering many a long and curious salutation, and went back on the bridge of ships.
After some hours she encountered what seemed like a road cut through the snow, and she followed it up a great cliff of black and violet stone whose facets were sharp as sword-points. Changeful God gleamed greenly off His sea below. She followed her shadow where it danced across the rock, beckoning her on.
For some passes she followed this path, taking back a sense of land that did not move to greet or flee her feet.
On that dark path she met nor men nor beasts. These lands were yet more barren than those where Estar Kane ruled. Snow fell in heavy drifts and the footing was cruel. Once she fell and the deep, hungry whiteness almost swallowed her. But beckoning her on always was the purple glow at the black sky’s edge, a dim and distant witness to the bright horizon.
Brighter and wider the jagged skyline grew before her, until she reached a hilltop and stepped once more into light. Far, far away through stark woods upon a distant hill, the halo of the Sun shone against the clouds.
Allissál sat in the snow, covering her eyes with the Madpriest’s robes. When she had blinked away the last of the pain and tears, then she turned back like a little girl, and laughed and cried at once.
§
THE FIRST CITY that emerged from the horizon stood out bravely above the sea. It struck her as beautiful and strange in the distance. A curious, quiet excitement stole over her. What sort of people would she meet in this new world? Would they have heard anything of her world? Others had gone this way before her, yet perhaps they, like her, had wished only to let their past sicken and die behind them. Here were new lands, new lives. For the first time she knew the full meaning of the myths of the Blessed Shores.
But when she was nearer, she saw that the towers of the city were gutted and the great buildings fallen in ruins. Once a huge white mole had run the length and breadth of the harbor: now only its pieces emerged from the waves, like teeth, and the sea washed freely past the gaunt shipless masts that stood in drunken postures like long-dead trees. Something about the scene struck her as vaguely, dreadfully familiar.
Within the city walls everything was still. The broken streets were void. The city had been taken and ravaged recently, and more than once.
A shadow crossed a side-street to her right. She shouted and made after it. It was a man short and ragged, dreadfully thin. She overtook him in a field of burnt stones that once had been an inn or a merchant’s house. The man fell against a stone and Allissál stood over him, the sword bright in her grasp.
‘Pray, pray, do not harm me, my lady! I have nothing, I swear it to heaven!’
She put up the sword. ‘I mean you no evil, man. I would but ask you some questions.’
‘But I don’t know anything!’
‘You know the name of this city. Or were you dropped out of the sky?’
A confused, or perhaps it was cunning look crossed the man’s features. ‘The name? Which name, my lady? Once we were called – but that is forbidden now by our masters. Are you not one of them? By God, I am loyal to the King! But listen, if you are not one of them – can you not hear them? His warriors ride nearby!’
‘Whose warriors?’
The man’s black eyes widened like chorjai flowers. He flung his arms so that they took in sea and sky and earth. ‘His – his – Ara-Karn’s!’
She let fall the sword beside her. The man saw his chance and slipped behind a blackened wall. Allissál scarcely noticed.
It had not even struck her that this man of another world should speak Bordo. Now the knowledge of it began to grow big in her like a tree, the leaves and branches blackening the bright sky. Now she knew what city this must be: knew it from wall-paintings in Tarendahardil of the varied fastnesses of Elna. In all the world, only Tezmon of the purple-weavers had boasted that great white mole. She looked with new eyes at the town where Ampeánor had twice gone and been twice disgraced. How like fate’s cruel humor, she thought, to bring her to this doomed place!
She heard hoofbeats nearing and mindful of the gaunt man’s words, vanished in the shadows of the ruins.
It had been all of it a lie. Darkbridge did not lead into another world, but back again into the same one. Elna’s Sea must narrow after it left the lands of men. Where the bridge of ships stretched from shore to shore, the sea must come to a narrow neck before widening again into the vast sunless sea. Estar Kane took her jewels knowing full well that what she sought was no more than smoke; doubtless he bade the little ones to carry on his jest.
Her first thought, as she flitted like a shade among the broken walls, was to flee the city straightway. But hunger assailed her. She put her back to the fallen craft-halls and followed the slopes to the high hill overlooking the harbor, where the merchants’ palaces had stood. She went carefully, hiding from the riders. They were more frequent where she went.
In the high old core of the city, the barbarians directed the last Tezmonians in labor to clear streets and rebuild palaces. The bruit of the labor held no voices raised in song or cheer. The dust rose in great dun balls, masking the Sun, raining dirt on the dark backs of the slaves.
Allissál watched them from the window of an empty tower. She turned over in her mind how to go on. In the Darklands she could have stolen bread and meat under the cloak of darkness, yet here the light went on forever. It would be needful to wait for the next sleep. She heard sounds in the corridor behind her, and hid in a cluttered corner.
Three barbarians, two men and a woman, entered and stood at the window where Allissál had been. The men had long hard arms much-scarred; the woman was red-haired and wore many jewels and little else. They spoke guttural, halting tones; the men pointing out the work to the woman in a way that indicated she was no common concubine. The woman nodded and said something in reply, at which the men left the chamber. Their heavy footsteps rose hollowly from the steps below. The woman stood quietly at the window looking out at the many men toiling.
Allissál crept up on her, dagger in hand. She gripped the woman’s shoulder. ‘Stay and do not cry out, or I’ll cut you,’ she said in the tongue of the far North.
The barbarian turned and regarded her with widening eyes. Then with grace she abased herself and exclaimed in courtly Bordo, ‘Your majesty!’
Allissál staggered back.
‘Your majesty will not recall this one, surely,’ the woman went on; ‘I was called Kiva, and was a woman of the High Town. Your majesty granted me shelter in the Citadel for the year of the siege. I was never presented at court, yet even so, so many times have I beheld your majesty in procession in the City, that I would know her even in rags.’
‘And are you the couch-slave of those barbarian lords now?’
‘Oh no, your majesty. Those men are mine. I am the chieftainess of Orn now, and my tribe rules this region, with Tezmon for our chief city.’
‘And whose plan was this?’
‘Ara-Karn’s, your majesty.’
Allissál put back the dagger. It was not what she would have expected of him, but now that she heard of it she was not surprised. There was no denying the woman’s prettiness. The hair was dyed, of course.
‘Your majesty, I know not how you have appeared here, or how many of your followers have accompanied you; yet howsoever many they may be, your majesty will not be safe here. I may call these men mine, but in truth they come from different tribes, and are jealous of one another. I do not rule here: only the fear of Ara-Karn quells them. Even so they compete for honors and boastfulness at all hours.
‘Your majesty has become a great prize in the world. The Riders of the King travel all roads South and North in search of you. Who finds your majesty and delivers you safely to the Black Citadel is promised the greatest treasures and power above all others. If there were but a whisper of your majesty’s presence here, these men would lay the city waste a third time in their efforts to bring you to the King. You must go, and do not, I pray you, tell me where you are bound; yet if there is aught else you would require of me, speak and it shall be yours.’
Allissál looked out across the rooftops of the blighted city.
‘Bring me then what I should need to travel a long way alone. I have nothing now but what you see. I should like a bow also.’
‘Certainly, your majesty.’
‘And Kiva, before you go, tell me – how goes it with Ara-Karn?’
The lovely red-haired woman lowered her long, darkened eyes. ‘Your majesty, I do not like to say. He has been good to me, for reasons only he knows, and so I should be grateful and loyal to him now. But there are strange tales the merchants bring us of what goes on the Black Citadel.’
§
THAT SLEEP, encamped on a high flattened hill in the cold, snow-flecked wilderness near the dusky border, Allissál drank wine and tended her little fire, and thought again of what the chieftainess of Orn had told her. There was no doubt of it, that one had been a superb lady of the couch. Allissál lifted her head and drew the warm, hooded hunting-cloak about her slim shoulders, and looked northward. Even more than after finding Emsha’s stiff body upon her or hearing Kis Halá’s death-struggles in the cold oily waters, she felt alone in the world.
