At the edge of a city.
We stood upon our points at the top of a little hill, green with grass and decorated with flowers. Each group of blossoms had arranged itself, pink against deeper rose, blue against white, lower blooms at the outer edges, higher blooms to the center, all against a bush of glowing green. A perfection that made one’s breath stick in the throat. I had no throat, but the feeling was the same. A kind of hesitation in the pulse; an inner voice crying, “Look at me.”
The white road beneath us went down into the city, became a spider’s web of roads running out in every direction. The city itself—I thought for a moment it was Pfarb Durim. Then I realized it couldn’t be. There was no cliff edge to the west of it. There were no walls. Only the shape of the doors and the style of the buildings had made me think of Pfarb Durim. That and the feeling of it, the feeling of elder times, of eternal stones, of history going back and back beyond any individual memory. Old, this city. Old, and as beautiful as the flowers upon the hill.
“Look at me,” said the garden walls, carved and decorated with tiles, topped with graceful crenellations. “Look at me,” the towers calling, slender and tall as trees, girdled with mosaic brilliance. “Here,” the buildings directed, rising on colonnades of arches, making a welcoming shade at their edges. “Here.”
And at the center of the city one tower higher than all the rest. It made me hurt to look at it, so tall it was and so perfect. White as milk, pure, undecorated except by its own perfect lines. At the top it rounded softly above a row of pointed arches opening into some high, secret room.
It was dawn in this place. A brightness lay beneath the eastern rim of the world.
“Listen, “ whispered Ganver. A bell in the tower rang.
No. No. This was not a bell. The Bell in the Tower rang.
The sound came from it like a color, not loudly, not vividly, softly as a flute sound, pure, pervasive, running out like a hue to stain the city and the hill on which we stood, out beyond us to the forests and the mountains, and beyond, to the edges of the world, until all within the world heard the sound, bathed in the color of the Bell. The Daylight Bell, painting the world. Within me something woke, stirred, looked around at the world with a feeling of enormous recognition, something there, within, which I had never recognized before. Beside me, Peter sighed, and I knew that within him, too, the wakening had come. From a door low in the beautiful Tower flew ambient flakes of light, settling onto every surface, every creature, on me, on all of us, and we glowed in that instant like angels.
“Listen,” whispered Ganver.
From the far northern reaches a sound came back, an echo, a resonance, soft as the first and as pure, slightly dissonant, pushing the color back from the north, past us upon the hill, into the city once more to leave it as it had been, and with it went the flakes of light to enter the tower once more. And at that instant, the first ray of the sun struck the Tower to shine, ivory gleaming, pure and trembling.
“The Shadowbell,” I sighed, peering into the north, from which that second sound had come. “Shadowbell rings in the dark, Daylight Bell the dawn. In the towers hang the bells, now the Tower’s gone. . . .” But it was not gone in this time, not in this memory. Here, in the mind of Lom, the Tower still stood and the bells still rang. . . .
And I stopped, distracted by a flood of recognition. I knew where I was! The line of hills was totally familiar. The way the land folded, the way the forest ran down into the valleys, the buildings before me in the city. I had seen them before; not as they were here, tall and beautiful, but as they had become: tumbled; broken.
I had seen them not far from Stoneflight Demesne in the ruined city of the Old South Road, the city of the blind runners. It was here the Daylight Tower had stood, here the Daylight Bell had rung. Here. There. Here in memory. There in reality. I wanted to cry.
“Come,” said Ganver.
We went down into the city.
I have had trouble describing that city. Among the skilled pawns there are musicians, singers, writers of tales. Some among them are called poets, and it is they who write lyrics for the singers, epics for chanting at banquets, or merely beautiful words to express things for which ordinary language is insufficient. I am no poet. I longed then for a poet, for someone to put words to what we saw. I have written these words over and over, trying to say what it was like. Any I write are not good enough. You must stretch beyond them. You must bring poet’s feeling to them, knowing the words are not enough in themselves.
I had been in cities. Not many, true, but some. I was in Schooltown when I was young. And in Xammer, of
