and culture and centuries of history had been defeated. It all made him feel like he knew nothing about the fullness of the world and all the people and creatures that lived in it. Instead of frightening him, the battering of realizations he had received in Ushen Brae blew air into his lungs. He wanted to see it all…
Dariel strolled over to where the others huddled, though he did not take his eyes off the panorama. “Will the gates give us trouble?”
Mor looked up from the simple map Tam had drawn in the dust. “Why should they? We won’t be troubling them. Amratseer seeren gith’va.”
“Are the gates locked?”
“The gates are open,” Tam said, without looking up. “That’s not the problem.”
“Let’s go through, then,” Dariel said. “We could camp in one of the plazas. Oh, I’d love to explore…”
“We don’t enter seeren gith’va,” Mor said.
“Afraid of ghosts,?” Dariel asked.
“We are mindful of them,” Anira said. She rose from her squatting position and crossed her arms. She was Balbara by birth, very dark skinned, with a sensuously muscular physique. Instead of tattoos, she showed her Anet clan affiliation in scalelike plates beneath her eyes and on the bridge of her nose, subtle enhancements that one had to peer closely to see. “They are Auldek ghosts. They mean us no good.”
“You really don’t intend to go through it? That’s what you’re telling me? Who told you tales of ghosts? Your Auldek masters? Maybe they told tales because they were afraid to go back, and they didn’t want their slaves scouring their old cities for treasure.”
“Which is what you want to do,” Mor said. “Still an Akaran, I see. Still love to pillage and steal.”
“Just look at the place! I don’t want to steal, but aren’t you curious? Don’t you-”
Mor closed the distance between them with a rapidity that made Dariel step back. “No,” she snapped. “Amratseer seeren gith’va. I care about the living. About the People. We sleep here, and begin to skirt Amratseer tomorrow. That’s all. Birke, take the prince and fetch water for camp.”
If Dariel appeared to accept the dismissal it was only because his mind was already beyond it. He climbed down to a nearby stream and filled water-skins with Birke. He ate a stew made from dried strips of meat and fresh roots with the rest of them, and he asked questions as if the answers to them were enough to satisfy him.
“In the north there is an even greater ruin than Amratseer,” Tam said, in answer to one such query. He sat cross-legged, a small stringed instrument cradled in his hands. He played it in short bursts of plucked notes, as if he were writing, or remembering, a tune. He seemed to have forgotten the several blunders he had made during their operation to destroy the soul catcher. “It’s called Lvinreth. It was once the home city of the Lvin. They abandoned it centuries ago. Even now they say that snow lions live among the fallen stones. They walk the empty corridors and roar at night, calling for the clan to return.”
“Why did they abandon it?”
“The Auldek were once as numerous as the stars. This city proves it. But that was long ago. They killed one another off, suffered disease, even invasion from a race across the mountains that came, plundered, and then went home. Many things left them the weakened race the Lothan Aklun found huddling together by the coast. They never said so, but I think they were a scared people on the brink of extinction. The Lothan Aklun saved them from that. They gave them immortality.”
“And us,” Anira said. “They gave them the quota.”
“The Auldek are the ones who really think their old cities are haunted. It’s they who want a new land instead. A war has given them a new purpose in life.”
“And given us Ushen Brae,” Anira said. “It’s a blessing that they’ve gone.”
Mor said something in Auldek. The others received it in silence.
Dariel glanced at her. She sat with her back to the group, looking not at Amratseer but toward the east. Dariel did not ask her what she had said. He was convinced she only spoke Auldek to keep him out of conversations, to draw the line between them, and remind everyone of it. He had a mind to ask her why she chose her enslaver’s tongue at all, but he left it.
L ater that evening, Tam nudged him awake. The excitement that surged through Dariel was not anticipation of hours sitting quietly on watch, listening to the sleeping and alert for the sound of any creature that might make a meal of them. That was not what he had planned. Whatever was to become of him, being in this land was a part of it. He was here, in this foreign place so far from home. He needed to know it completely, to learn, if he could, why his life was entwined so deeply with the fate of Ushen Brae.
He sat cross-legged for a time, but once Tam’s breathing slipped into its steady near snore, Dariel lifted his thin blanket from around his knees and stood. With his boots pinched between his fingers, he tiptoed across the stone, down toward the moonlit city.
The wall was massive. Draped with veins, fissured with cracks, cast in shadow and highlight by the moon’s gray glow, it dwarfed even the great wall around Alecia. Dariel had to walk along it for a time, climbing over roots and debris, around stone blocks that had fallen from the crumbling barricade. The night was loud with insect and bird calls, with scuffling noises nearby, and several distant roars, sounds that Dariel had heard before but that troubled him more acutely now. One of these rent the air in a way that he felt physically, as if it flew at him along the long stretch of the wall. The beast they called a kwedeir? Dariel had yet to see one, but he had heard about them, enormous batlike creatures the Auldek had domesticated and used to hunt fugitive slaves. They bite the head. Not hard enough to kill, Birke said, but just enough to get you screaming. They like that. Dariel had not believed the description. Now he wondered.
He reached a two-doored gate. One door was closed. The other-an enormous thing of old-growth trunks bound together with intricately worked steel-had fallen from its hinges and slammed back against one side of the entranceway. If he had not known better, Dariel would have thought giants had built this place.
The roar came again. He could not tell if it was closer, but it was certainly outside the city’s walls. He wondered if it would wake the others. Probably. Mor would rise, cursing him for a fool. He would not argue with her if she did, but when in his life would he ever stand before these gates again? What Akaran had ever been here to learn of the world as he was doing? None that he knew of. Of course he had to see what could be seen. Dariel crept into the shadow beneath the leaning door and entered the dead city of Amratseer.
The green stones of the place glowed with a low luminescence that Dariel could not figure out. As he moved through the cluttered lanes and alleys, he first thought the light was from the moon, but it was not only that. The glow seemed to fill even shadowed spaces, even the insides of houses viewed through the gapping mouths of doors and open crescents of windows. It was night, still dim and shadowy, but it was a different sort of night than Dariel had experienced.
He walked on the balls of his feet, careful not to trip on the vines or debris littering the stones. Just don’t get lost, he told himself. He proceeded straight ahead as best he could, sighting on the position of the moon and studying the shape of hills behind him for landmarks. Soon the high walls of the multistoried buildings blocked his view. Realizing this, he spun around. His heart pounded in his chest and a film of sweat slicked his forehead. This is absurd, he thought. I’ve only come a hundred paces. The way back is just there.
He decided to look around the buildings near at hand. Stepping into the entrance of one, he let his eyes adjust until he could see his way by the dim glow of the walls and floor. Intricately carved wooden chairs and benches took shape before him. No spirits, though. Not yet. An overturned bowl on the floor, a clutter of long rods leaning in a corner, a cloth hung from a hook…
He entered the next apartment down, a living space, chairs oddly arrayed in a circle, but with no table at its center. He found bedrooms and storage chambers, tiled rooms that must have been for bathing, balconies that looked out onto back gardens that were no longer gardens. They were overgrown enough that trees surged out of them and monkeys-several of whom Dariel startled as much as they startled him-climbed right from them to nest in shelter. How strange it was to walk into homes devoid of their intended inhabitants and yet so full of the signs of what had been.
Stepping out into the night again, Dariel noticed an arched gateway a little farther in. Framed by tall buildings on either side, he could not see where it led. He walked toward it, under the shadow of the archway, and through into a massive courtyard.
What must once have been a marvelous tapestry of paving stones stretched before him. There was a patterning in the colors, he could tell, but it was stained and scarred and faded. The stones were heaved up here and there by tree roots that had escaped their plots, sending out shoots that burst through to become new trees
