I left the tiny commune around Isra’s well, and I left the serene face of the goddess, and I wandered across the desert to the lands of the West. Somewhere beyond the northern horizon lay the lands of my people, where our gods walked the plains of endless ice in pursuit of the great beasts that ever eluded them, and my dragon-headed ship lay beneath water cold and dark as death. My journey would not lead me back there. I had to press forward.
Once, my friend Aysulu had told me of the gods of the West. There were seven of them, she had said, like the seven Ascended of Phyreios, though they moved between faith and legend and metaphor and not in the streets of their cities. Isra was one of them. Like her, the others had wind-scarred faces and the faded implements of their stations held in their stone hands: a shepherd’s crook, a set of balancing scales, a scepter, a smith’s hammer. They towered over the dunes, their eyes long since etched away, the human hands who carved their figures buried beneath centuries of sand. At their feet, the remains of their temples crumbled into dust.
Bran and I walked under the endless blue sky, while the wind howled over the ruins and the dust spiraled in towering vortices. My eyes ached and my legs trembled as loose sand grasped at my feet. We walked in the early morning, as the sun climbed behind us and turned the world to fire, and in the evening, as it stained the sky blood-red and cast illusions of pooled water before us.
One evening, the shimmering band of water remained even as the sun lowered itself behind it, and it appeared again in the morning, widening as we crossed the last stretch of sand. I had come once again to the sea.
Distant white sails crept like low clouds against the horizon, but I had no time to wait for a ship to find its way to my remote stretch of beach. The ships drifted north, and so would Bran and I, until we found the port where they landed.
A city of silver spires and stone columns the color of old parchment emerged from the desert haze as Bran and I followed the coast. The sand gave way to a rocky shore and clusters of tall, sharp-edged grass. I cast nets in the surf for fish, and even found a freshwater stream emerging from the rocks one evening. With our stores replenished, Bran and I made our way to the city on the cliffs. There, I believed, I would find the answers I sought.
On the third day after I reached the coast, the sound of the harbor met my ears: a murmur of countless voices and creaking timbers, of clanging bells and crashing waves. The city grew larger with each passing hour, until it dwarfed even Phyreios, its spires as tall as the Iron Mountain and its borders sprawling out of sight. A hundred or more indistinct human bodies moved across the docks whenever I strained my eyes to look, and more filled the streets.
A week or more had passed since I had spoken to anyone but Bran, and as faithful of a companion as he was, he offered little in the realm of conversation. Already, my throat tightened at the thought of conversing with so many people after so long in silence.
It was better for me not to be alone, as accustomed as I had grown to solitude. And with so many people traveling here from distant shores, someone would recognize the evil book I carried. If one were to turn me away, then another would surely help me. All I had to do was ask the right questions, and I had time enough to find out what those might be.
Sitting beside my small fire on the fifth day, as the last light of sun pooled like burning oil upon the sea, I wondered whether my course of action was a wise one. I had been warned away from pursuing the book and its creator yet again. It had even cost me my safe haven at Isra’s well. I removed it from my pack and opened it to a page chosen at random; the drawing of a man, his skin flayed to show his blood vessels and the breath moving in inked whorls through his chest, stared back at me. Inscrutable characters danced in the space beside him. If I was able to interpret any of them, I would have had no need of any of the people in the vast, western city on the cliff before me. I would know, beyond any shade of doubt or fear, if this book would help me in my quest to find Khalim.
I stared at the page until my fire turned to dull embers, but still the writing remained a mystery. I would have to find an interpreter.
I dreamed of the undead that night, of the king under the city of Salmacha, his eyes clouded and staring. Blood pooled at his feet, and he raised his skeletal arms in a triumphal pose, declaring with a voice like a death rattle that he would live forever.
I woke, trembling with a nameless fear, to find the book open to the same page beside my bedroll.
I snapped it shut with one hand and buried it at the bottom of my pack, underneath parcels of dried fish and my spare set of clothing, and vowed not to remove it until I had found someone who could read it and was willing to do so.
I did not wish to live forever, I told the last fleeting memories of my dream, and neither did I wish for Khalim to live forever. I wanted one lifetime for him, one spent at my side. I had no plans to endure the ages of the world from an underground tomb, and certainly no intention to force Khalim to do so.
I was nothing like the ruined king of Salmacha.
With my camp packed up and Bran’s saddlebags returned to their places on his back, we walked the last miles to the city gates. The spires shone bright as tiny suns in the morning light, piercing my eyes whenever I lifted them from our narrow, rocky trail. We passed a pair of goats, chewing the spiny grasses, and then their minder, a boy of no more than ten asleep beneath a prickly shrub, his pale hair tangled in its branches. A tall man stood in the field, away from the shore, more goats gathered around him like white stones nestled in the grass. Vast, tilled fields stretched out all around the city walls, turning the seaside hills into a quilt of gold and green. The pattern was familiar—perhaps I had seen a similar one hanging on the loom of Khalim’s mother, in the now-distant village of Nagara.
The wall around the city was yellow stone, worn smooth by the wind and faintly encrusted with salt. Two heavy wooden doors, painted a soft sky-blue, formed its gate. Two men dressed in turbans wound round their pointed helmets examined my bags and my weapons.
“What’s this?” the first man asked, gesturing to my harpoon. His accent was strange, but the words I recognized from many a tale told to me by the crew of the Lady of Osona. Perhaps this city was one of the many ports that fair ship frequented. Perhaps I would see them again, if I lingered long enough here.
“A fishing harpoon,” I told the watchman, and it wasn’t quite a lie. Attempting to fish with the lightning weapon would cause more trouble than it might be worth, but it was the same size and shape as its mundane kin.
He hefted the harpoon and, finding nothing amiss, handed it back to me. His companion opened my pack, and removed some rations and my desert cloak before returning them to their places. If he noticed the book, he said nothing. I was permitted to enter the city.
Once, I had passed through the gates of Phyreios, and I had marveled at its grandeur; now, the sight of a great citadel could not move me to awe. I could only wonder at what terrible sickness the shining spires and towering columns concealed, and what evil lay beneath the windswept streets.
I wandered from the eastern gate to the sea, underneath temples to the almost-familiar seven gods of the West. Here, their carved faces had been spared the ravages of time and weather, and the king maintained his detailed beard, and the queen, Isra, had soft eyes framed in curls of hair. Others flanked them, always in the same pattern, a smith and a merchant, a warrior and a beautiful girl, and a figure in a hooded robe. I saw these effigies on two different temples, and a third time on the face of a magnificent palace, beneath a high, sweeping arch.
A flock of gulls darted screaming overhead, announcing the arrival of a well-laden fishing boat. Stands selling food and trinkets from beneath colorful awnings lined the docks, with merchants adding their own cries to the cacophony.
“Spices from the southern isles!” proclaimed one. “Silks from the east!” declared another.
The silks shimmered in the sun, and the spices mingled with the salt in the air to form a heady, intoxicating haze. I had missed the sea, in the long weeks I spent crossing the desert, and I had missed the company of others. I half-closed my eyes and peered out at the horizon, hoping that I might catch a fated glimpse of Captain Hamilcar’s ship.
The Lady of Osona did not appear, not that day, but I would see it again before long.
“Buy a charm, my lord,” the high voice of a young shopkeeper said, piercing through the din of the harbor. “For yourself, and for your lady. You’ll live forever and never grow ill.”
I turned. A young girl, tall and thin as a reed, held out a clever device of knotted silver wire hanging on a fine chain. It glinted in the sunlight, and a dazzling pattern of reflected light fell across Bran’s flank.
“It’s a pretty thing, but I have no lady,” I told her, “and nothing can make a man live forever.”
She smiled, showing a gap between her front teeth. Her dark hair was gathered in two braids that fell to her waist, and she wore a plain dress of a dull, dark green color. Her bare arms were laden with silver bands and dangling chains. “My master can,” she said. “All of these charms are made by his own hand. This one will protect you from storms at sea, and this one will hide you from the eyes of your enemies.”
“Who is your master?” I asked.
A jangle of metal sounded as she folded her arms over her chest. “You must be new to Gallia,” she said. “My master is Deinaros the All-Knowing. He can cure any sickness and see the future. Ask anyone, and they will tell you.”
I doubted most of these claims, but it mattered not. This girl had given me the knowledge of a self-professed prophet, who surely lacked the scruples of the nuns of Isra, given that he sent a child out to exchange promises for coin. As far as I could see, the trinkets she carried were valuable only in that they were crafted of silver. “Does this Deinaros know how to read?” I asked.
The girl’s face turned to disdain. “Of course he does. He’s all-knowing.”
“My apologies,” I said. “I would like to meet your master. Where does he live?”
“I’m not supposed to tell just anyone that,” she said.
“But I am a champion of the great tournament of Phyreios, and I have traveled a great long way to meet a sage such as this one. Surely you could make an exception.”
She considered this, sharp dark eyes examining me in a way that was too like the appraising gaze of the priestess Fenin. “We shall see,” she said. “Follow me, then, great champion. If you can keep up, maybe you will meet my master.”
Back to Chapter XL: Isra’s Well
Forward to Chapter XLII: The Sorcerer’s Tower
If you recognize the name Isra and the seven gods of the West from The Book of the New Moon Door, good eye! Thanks for reading!
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