Camped on fear’s ground … in terror’s tents …
among life’s shattered monuments …
Drinking alone, from horror’s cup …
with all of hope used up …
used up. …
The voice sang to Medlo, telling him that it was time to give up hope, to stay in the dreary land and listen to the sound of weeping. He tried to draw his hand from Jaer’s, but was held with iron fingers.
Terascouros chanted silently to herself, words of negation against the voice crying from the sky. ‘Hope not gone, not ended, never ended.’ She stumbled and would have fallen, silenced, except that Jaer’s hand drew her on. Above them the voice sang again and again, but the hand led them into a pall of grey, a sightlessness, and then out once more.
They stood at the bottom of a flight of great stairs. Above them the sky was pink with dawn. At the top of the stairs they fell to their knees, exhausted, to look eastward at the land beyond the Concealment.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
BEYOND THE CONCEALMENT
Days 17-18,
Month of Wings Returning
They half carried Terascouros, she protesting, across a few paces of grassy meadow to the bank of a brook which flowed over smooth stones. Away to the north the same line of mountains reached from west to east; the same river ran westward. Nothing behind the Concealment seemed immediately different from the place they had left. There was, perhaps, more bird song, more rustle and squeak of small creatures in the grass, a clearer air as though some oppressive force had been left behind. Jaer smiled at the thought, stood over Terascouros to gesture toward the horizon.
‘We’re going there,’ he said. ‘To Tharliezalor. To the most mysterious of cities.’
‘There are said to be monsters beneath Tharliezalor,’ said Medlo. ‘At least there were in Sud-Akwith’s time. Have we not come through enough monstrousness that we must now confront the – what were they called, Teras? – “serim”?’
‘There is no need to frighten ourselves with what might be in Tharliezalor. There are no serim here, now.’
Terascouros pulled herself to her feet, tottered around in a circle to get her blood moving again. ‘Medlo’s point is well made. There were serim there, hard to kill, in uncounted numbers. But they are easy enough to subdue, so I have learned. Be careful with me for my song is your weapon against the serim.’ She pantomimed extreme age, toothlessness, the hunched back. Jaer laughed, then became abruptly serious when he saw the pain it caused her to straighten that back. ‘I have no real wish to encounter the creatures. I think that land we came through, the ashy land within the veil, I think that was the time of the serim. It is told that when Sud-Akwith returned to his army with the sword of power, in one place he found only the minstrel alive, all others dead, and he liked not the minstrel’s song. I liked not the song we heard. However, we go with you where you go, and if you must go to Tharliezalor…’
‘Yes,’ Jaer answered her. ‘I must. As for you, Medlo, I can let you back the way we came.’
Medlo made a grimace of annoyance and began to rummage among his odds and ends looking for something he could use as a snare. Tall ears bobbed above the grasses here and there and he intended to eat hare as soon as possible. Terascouros lay down again on the blanket Jaer spread for her, content to rest for a time and drink hot tea. ‘How many days were we under there?’ she murmured, surprised when Jaer answered.
‘Only one. One day, not even a whole day, and one whole night. Not long, Terascouros, but long enough that I, too, am weary. Let Medlo snare us something to eat, and let us rest while he does it. I think we will travel little today.’
They did travel very little, stopping at the first sign of approaching darkness to build a comfortable fire and cook the hares, augmented by fresh herbs and the starchy roots which Terascouros pulled up as they travelled. They slept early, deeply, and it was not until dawn separated the horizon from the sky that Jaer woke to see a dark, winged body silhouetted against the dimming stars.
The form turned, furling a wing, crouching like a cat, smiling into Jaer’s face from so close a distance that Jaer pulled away in discomfort. It was a sphinx, terribly near, ideously familiar.
‘I have come,’ she said, ‘as is my right, human, to ask a question. It is our custom.’
Jaer drew the blanket around her shoulders, noticing as she did so that she had changed in the night, without dreams, without the feeling of being sought. ‘I was not aware of that.’
‘It does not matter what you are aware of. We do not care what you are aware of. For all the generations of man, my people have dwelt in the hidden places of the earth, on the edges of great deserts where basilisks bake in endless sun, at the roots of mountains beyond the memory of those who pass, letting those who answer go free with our blessing, letting those who do not answer end their lives with us in the desolation.’
Jaer cleared her throat. ‘It hardly seems a profitable relationship for man.’
The sphinx laughed, a metallic sound. ‘We have no relationship with man, changeling. To riddle and be answered is all our life and reason for being. There are many among mankind who would undo us, uncreate us. Are you one of these?’
Jaer thought about it. ‘No. For if you were unmade, brutal sister, who would hiss the hard questions in the black
