unwarrantedly bloodshot; yet a dignified majesty cloaked him all the same as he said, ‘Do you want to?’
The question hit hard. Driven to see into himself with uncanny depth and clarity, struck naked before his own judgement, Lysaer perceived that the confusion that had harried him since exile held a core of ugly truth. No longer did the glamour of noble purpose veil fact: that his brave resolve to Traithe in Althain’s storeroom had been rooted in vanity and pride. He had renounced a difficult path of study and vowed instead to redress the wrongs of a kingdom for his own personal glory. As though revolted by a foul taste, Lysaer sucked in a fast breath. He could hope his self-disgust was not exposed on his face, but Dakar regarded him strangely.
‘
Lysaer looked back, unflinching. However this spirit-cursed place afflicted others, his ingrained sense of fairness forced honesty. ‘My true heart stayed behind in Port Royal, I see, with my love, and my family, and my people. If that is a failing, it’s at least no more than human. The problems that beset this land are not mine. Yet I will do my best to help right them.’
The prince’s conviction was so far at odds with the future forecast by the strands that Dakar shied back, baffled. To cover his foreboding, he clambered back behind the dray’s buckboard and sorted his tangled loops of rein. ‘Ath in his mercy, but I could use a flagon of dark beer and a fire.’
‘That makes two of us, friend.’ Lysaer remounted his chestnut gelding, unsure whether the lingering traces of Paravian tragedy or the unendingly dreary landscape caused him to hurt as if the chill cut his flesh to the marrow.
At Asandir’s word, wagon and riders pressed onward through an afternoon that wept cold drizzle. Now the trail wound like tattered ribbon between Daon Ramon’s vales and downs, intermittently flanked by stone markers capped with lichens and moss. No trees grew, only bracken and tasselled grasses beaten down by wind and early storms. Dirtied ice lay scabbed in the hollows. Braced in his saddle against the cold, and resigned to yet another sleepless night on soaked ground, Lysaer did not realize their destination lay in sight until, rounding the crest of a hill, Arithon gasped and yanked his dun mare to a halt in the roadway.
She danced a piaffe at his roughness, her hooves clanging loudly on slate. Jostled in his saddle as his own mount bunched in reaction, Lysaer looked ahead.
Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, city of legend and seat of the high kings of Rathain.
The sight was one to stop the breath, even through the fog of Desh-thiere. No previous feature of landscape could prepare the traveller for the broad sweep of valley, slashed across by a rock-strewn scar of dry riverbed. At one time walls of rose-grey stone had arisen from the banks, but what remained lay torn to wreckage.
Landslides left less ruin.
The greensward beyond was overrun with briar, what had been orchards, gardens and tourney fields now choked by weed and bitter-root vine. A second wall had bounded the inner edge of the common. Embraced within gapped, half-gutted watchkeeps, the tumbled shells of townhouses clung to the hillside’s ever steepening pitch. Dismembered foundations marked off a tangle of narrow lanes and briar-ridden courtyards. As if a mighty army had once razed the buildings stone from stone with battering rams, the craftsmen’s cottages, market stalls and merchants’ mansions all lay jumbled in chaos. Gabled roofs had caved inward, beams rotted away in the sunless damp of Desh-thiere. A scatter of fallen slates in what may have been a market court reflected the rain like coins thrown out for a beggar.
The devastation of the lower tiers was total, a memorial to unbridled violence. Yet as if moved by some powerful unseen force, the viewer found his sight drawn upward, where, slightly north of centre, the native granite of the earth sheered up through soil and rock into a near-vertical outcrop. The triangular summit on the clifftop was encased by embrasures of seamless, blue-black granite. Inside, an unkempt eyrie of broken walls and spires marked the site of the inner citadel, the castle where generations of Paravians, and after them, the s’Ffalenn high kings, had held court.
There the eye hung captive, unable to draw away.
Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendour, of artistry spoiled by war in a cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward through the mist, tall, straight, perfect. The incongruity of their wholeness against the surrounding wreckage was a dichotomy fit to maim the soul: for their lines were harmony distilled into form, and strength beyond reach of time’s attrition.
The rain still fell relentlessly into soggy earth; the wind keened and stung like a dulled skive in a cobbler’s shop. No one noticed. Even the horses seemed strangely content to be stopped in their tracks in the roadway. The sordid, everyday miseries of winter and weather lost meaning. Into that suspended silence, Asandir began to speak.
‘Ithamon was raised by Paravians in the First Age of Athera. The outer walls were levelled twice, by Seardluin, hostile creatures native to this world that by the Second Age had been battled to extinction. The old races abandoned the city then, for its purpose as a fortress had been fulfilled. The lower tiers stayed in ruins until the dawn of the present age, when men rebuilt the double walls upon the remains. The third tier wall left standing and the four surviving keeps were part of the original city. Built by the centaurs, refined by sunchildren, they were Name-bound and warded by the unicorns.’
‘Don’t say any more!’ Arithon cut across, his bard’s voice queerly strangled. ‘I beg you, don’t!’ Bloodlessly pale, his hands clenched and shaking on the rein, he sat his mare and regarded the site where his ancestors had ruled as if he were held chained and in thrall. ‘Please,’ he finished in a whisper.
But Asandir might as well not have heard. ‘The Paravian towers have withstood three ages of strife, nineteen thousand years of history. Mortal men have called them the Sun Towers, or Compass Points, for their alignment and their dizzying height, but the ancients who laid their stones had separate names for each. The white one with the alabaster combing is Alathwyr, and its strength is Wisdom. The east, the black one, is endurance, which represents the Paravian concept of Honour. The south, of rose quartz, is Grace, and the last, of green jasper symbolic of renewal, is Kieling, Compassion. When civilization has abandoned any of these qualities, its respective tower will fail, for the power that binds their structure is the force of each virtue, renewed. “Ithamon” means Five Spires in the old tongue, and once this was so. Daelthain, the King’s Tower, for Justice, originally crowned the highest knoll in the city. That one cracked on the day his Royal Grace, Marin Eliathe, was murdered in his hall by an assassin. The last of it crumbled during the rebellion. Now just the foundation remains.’
Asandir’s speech ended, leaving the moan of the lonely wind to fill the emptiness. Lysaer discovered he must have been gripping his saddle too hard for some time.
Arithon looked tortured to his very core. Struck blind and deaf by the chord of Paravian mystery first tuned to his awareness in Caith-al-Caen, he had wheeled his mare in the roadway to confront Asandir. A betrayal too fresh
