CHAPTER 39
UNREAL CITY
“There was a lift, a long time ago,” Rag said, “but that was before the kings went away.”
“When was that?” I asked, feet scraping on the stone steps.
“No one remembers,” came the unexpected reply.
Rag had said the Well of Nahaman lay miles below the city, and we had climbed already very far. My knees ached, and more than once I begged Rag to halt. Saltus fared worse even than I. The creature’s wheezing breath followed me all the way, and often it would pause before hurrying after us. Still, for all its apparent age, the beast moved swift and smoothly when it moved at all, tending to ragged bursts rather than steady, constant motion.
“It was the kings that built the city,” Rag continued, high voice untouched by the labor of our climb, “but the Judicator says they didn’t build the Well . . . or the world.”
“The . . . world?” I didn’t understand.
Rag continued as if he had not heard me. “The men in the city, they say they were the last kings. The last ever. But the Judicator says the king will return.” He paused, peered down to where Saltus and I followed more slowly. “We’re nearly there!” he said, encouraging, “To the surface, I mean. Then we still have a ways before we reach the old church. This part of the city’s mostly empty. Folks have moved on up the cataract, to Castle Ward, mostly.” He turned to resume his climb, called back. “Should be daylight by the time we reach the surface!”
“For all the good that’ll do us,” Saltus huffed, clambering up from the landing below.
Thin streams of water ran over the stone wall at my left hand, dribbled down to the half-eroded steps and along them to the Well below. Touching the wet stone with my fingers, I looked from Rag to Saltus and back. “What does that mean?”
The homunculus looked up at Rag, who stiffened on the stairs above. “You better tell him,” the creature said, “he won’t believe me.”
Rag had one hand pressed flat against the trickling stone wall. A lantern fixed to the stone above him—stirred to life by our presence—formed an aureole about his head. As we’d climbed, Rag had told me how the mechanisms that powered the lights had been designed by the ancients, who made them never to go out.
So many had failed to light as we ascended.
“Our sun is dying,” the boy said, “it is said that soon it will go out.”
I looked at him with horror. “How soon?”
“A thousand years?” came the reply. “Ten thousand? Or only ten? No one knows the day or the hour, or so the Judicator says. Not even him. It’s said that once there were men—this was a long time ago—that could obtain such knowledge. Learn it, just by looking. But they’re long dead.”
Not for the first time that day, I found my words had forsaken me. If this Judicator truly was the Quiet—as I then believed—then he could not be the architect of our universe. A god would know such things.
“There’s more,” Saltus said, eliciting a sharp look from its boy companion.
My eyes went from the homunculus to the boy and back. “What do you mean?”
Rag hung his head, and from his hushed tone, I knew this was not how he had intended this to come out. “If you’re not going to tell him,” Saltus said. “I will.”
The boy’s eyes flashed. “You said he would not believe—”
“It’s the last sun,” Saltus said. “Leastways the last anyone knows about. This is the ass-end of time, cousin. That black energy the boy here was telling you about right before I came back? It’s stretched the universe out like an old whore, stretched it so bad light’s slower than the stretching.”
“You’re right,” I said to the homunculus, “I don’t believe you.”
The ape-man hooted with laughter. “Of course you don’t!” it said. “But you’ll soon see! There’s nothing in the sky but the moons and the weak, old sun. The stars are gone.”
The stars are gone.
Those words fell upon me like so many falling stones.
“The last sun . . . ” I said, repeating Saltus’s words. “The last sun . . . ”
“There could be others,” Rag said, “but we just don’t know.”
Leaning against the wall to steady myself, I said, “If what you say is true, then . . . then I am a trillion years gone.”
“Oh, more than that, I’d wager,” Saltus said, and Rag did not correct him.
“But there are still people?” I asked, incredulous. “How are there still people?”
Saltus shrugged, and Rag only shook his head, not understanding.
What they said was impossible. Three hundred thousand years there were between the dawn of man and the day of my birth—or so the scholiasts taught. We had left the gorillas to tread the path to godhood, they said. Those same scholiasts held that in much less time than that—despite the efforts of the Chantry and the High College to master man’s blood—man would himself be changed to some new shape, would breed himself into forms irreconcilable with the species I knew, or else would die by violence or by suicide. And yet this boy and his mutant companion would have me believe that somehow—in some way—mankind would remain, would endure in some form or fashion until the uttermost end of days.
“It’s not possible . . . ” I breathed.
The end of time. The thought roiled in my mind, but still belief would not come. It was a thing harder to accept than my own death. My second death.
The end of time.
“We cannot stay here,” Rag said. “We must keep moving.”
In a daze, I followed the boy up what little remained of that interminable stair. Before long, we reached that piteous gate, a high and narrow opening, little more than a crack in the living rock of the world. Immediately beyond lay a withered garden, its beds dry, its trees bare.
I hardly saw it. My eye was caught, dragged through the creaking branches and over the iron palings of the fence to the city beyond.
Beyond . . .
“I know this place . . . ” I breathed the words, brushing past Rag to stand beside the ruin of a great, white tree planted in the center of the cobbled path that split the garden into quarters, its roots upturning the nearest stones.
Beyond the fence, a paved road ran. A short wall ran along its far side, beyond which could be seen the shingled roofs and pointed gables, the short turrets and buttressed walls of houses, shops, and temples. We were on higher ground, and looking out over a rolling cityscape that retreated unto the uttermost horizon. Turning, looking up, I saw an immense face of rude stone, crowned by halls and towers grander still. A profusion of Gothic spires, pointed arches, buttressed walls, and crumbling statuary black beneath a milk-blood sky.
It was the city from my dreams, from the visions the Quiet had showed me.
Looking up, I saw the others had spoken truth. It was day, but as thin and sick a day as I had ever seen. The sun—a bloated star—hung low above the margins of the world, away over the farthest reaches of that black cosmopolis. The morning seemed little better than twilight.
“You can’t know it.” Saltus had sidled up behind me. “You’re full of sh—”
“I’ve seen it,” I said, silencing him.
I knew where we were going.
“This was Llesu,” Rag said, coming to stand beside the dead, white tree. “Last City of Kings.” He pointed out over the city toward that cold, red sun. “The Wall is that way. You can see it from the old church.”
He left the white tree, hurrying toward the gate and the high road.
“You said the kings were dead,” I said, following.
“Yes,” Rag said, stopping at the gate to peer around the post, his posture suddenly furtive, as though he feared to be seen. “Long ago.”
Mirroring his care, I lingered in the shadow of the garden gate. “Who rules the city, then? Your Judicator?”
“No,” Rag said. “No. This part of the city is dead. Mostly abandoned.”
“But who rules?” I asked.
Rag looked up at me, and for the first time I marked fear in his eyes. “You know.”
That halted me in my tracks. “The Watchers?”
The boy grabbed my arm, sank nails into my new flesh. “Speak not their name.” For the first time, I understood his haste, why he was so eager to reach his Judicator. “We were safe underground. Not even their vision can penetrate the Well. But we are exposed here, and will be until we reach the churchyard. Come.”
He seized my hand, and led me up the winding street, past shuttered doors and smashed windows, with here and there a lamp still blazing with red fire or white sparks. Once or twice, a curtain twitched, and a face peered out a moment and was gone. Many of the buildings to our left were hewn into the hill itself. We were climbing, following the curve of that rock higher and higher, the cobbles rough edged beneath my feet.
Passing a tower of smooth, black stone, we reached a place where a broad avenue bisected our narrow lane. To our left, it rose up a hill—mounting above the rise of rude stone toward the acropolis—while to our right it ran down to the lower parts of the city. The way was wide, and paved with arcing cobbles, and but few lights in the somber windows of empty houses and dead shops. There was a timeless art in those crumbling buildings, in the white statues of angels and heroes whose cracked and broken limbs still held up roofs and walls. The style stirred something in my soul, a memory of the ancient world—not of some far future age.
We turned left, the three of us hurrying up the road.
I moved as a man in a dream, permitting Rag to lead me. Indeed I felt the city was a dream, that this whole impossible time were nothing more than madness playing out in the final instants of my life. I saw my own face dissolving in blood and melting suet, the skin tearing like tissue paper.
I was dead. Rag himself had said as much.
I had hoped to see Valka again in death, to find her in the Howling Dark. Instead, I had passed through that darkness and been recalled, summoned to that terrible place, that city at the end of time, that city of the Watchers—of the Watchers Victorious.
“Stop!” Rag threw out an arm to block me. Just behind, Saltus nearly slammed into me.
The boy had gone still as stone, cocked his head, listening.
I listened too.
Ahead, there was a rattling, grinding sound, the noise of mighty engines marching.
“It’s them,” Saltus hissed, pawing at me. “Off the road!” The homunculus tugged at my arm, pulled me hard enough to break young Rag’s grip. I followed Saltus into the nearest alley, a narrow slot between tall houses.
Rag had not followed.
“Boy!” Saltus croaked, returning to the mouth of the alley.
Rag had frozen in the middle of the broad street, his gown flapping in the gentle wind.
Something crested the top of the hill, a great hulk of metal so red it was almost black. My first thought was that it was a colossus, but it was entirely unlike any of the great war machines of the Empire. It had no legs, nor walked like some vast iron scarab, relying instead upon a pair of mighty treads, belts of black and bronze. What should have been its deck was instead a warped, gnarled surface, asymmetrically mounded so that anyone attempting to board might lose his footing and fall, and great spines—projections of red-black metal—bristled from it like the sparse quills of a hedgehog. Inexorably it advanced, followed by another, and yet another of its kind. Each of the colossi’s mighty guns lay quiescent, locked and pointed off to one side.
They were like no weapons I had ever seen, their barrels ribbed and fluted, and between those ribs I could see pulsating tubes like veins, the organs of some hideous beast in machine form.
Rag stood before them, apparently paralyzed.
The colossi gave no sign that they had noticed the boy, advancing as inexorably as they had since they appeared, and yet the sight of those hulking, inhuman machines advancing on the lone boy affected me deeply, and yet I knew it was not courage that screwed him in his place, but fear.
“Boy!” Saltus shouted again.
“I’ll get him!” I said, and darted back into the street. The machines must have seen us—they were little more than two dozen paces away. I seized the boy beneath his arms and lifted him. Sensing there was not time enough to return to the alley where Saltus cowered and unwilling to sacrifice the momentum of my run, I hurled Rag and myself into the alley opposite, landing with the boy beneath me.
We lay there, waiting for the machines to pass. They did, not ceasing, not slowing their march. I watched them go, looking back over my shoulder, marking the fleshy, organic texture of the thing caged inside the metal hull. When they were gone I stood, and offered Rag my hand. “Are you all right?” I asked.
The boy was shivering.
“Rag?”
He nodded, permitted me to help him rise.
“What were they?” I asked.
“Servants of the enemy,” Rag said, swaying.
“Then why didn’t they attack?”
The boy could only shake his head. “Sometimes I think they’re blind.”
“Blind?”
“The enemy has eyes to see,” Rag said. “Their servants need none. But those things are not the only servants the enemy has. There are men and . . . other things.”
I did not ask.
“You saved me,” Rag said, eyes shining.
I looked back across the street to where Saltus was peering from the alley opposite, looking down the hill toward the retreating hulks. “Think nothing of it.”
Rag pressed his lips together. I thought he was about to cry. “You should have left me. They might have seen us. They should have seen us.”
“Well, they didn’t,” I said.
“Saltus could have taken you to the churchyard,” the boy said. “We risked so much to bring you here. To bring you back . . . ”
“You’re the only one who seems to know what’s going on.”
Saltus had crossed the road and was standing just behind me. He tugged on my loose robe. “We should get moving,” he said, and to Rag, “Their patrols are getting closer. It’s only a matter of time before they find the place.”
Rag shook his head furiously. “They never will, not so long as the Judicator defends it.”
“Forgive me if I don’t share your faith, boy,” Saltus said. “Let’s go. It’s not far now.”
More carefully then, we returned to the main road and hurried along it. We saw but few signs of life as we went: a line of drying clothes flapping in the wind, the sound of a door slamming shut as we moved along the street. Once, I saw an old woman seated in the shadow of her portico.
She did not move, and might have been a corpse.
Above us, the crumbling ruins of an ancient citadel loomed, its black towers long fallen, their metal bones scratching at the sky. The place reminded me of many a bombed-out city I had seen. The crumbling devastation was the same. I expected Rag to beeline for the hilltop, but to my surprise, he turned aside, proceeded along a narrow and crooked street whose lamps still shone despite the newly arrived day.
“We’re near the heart of the old city,” Rag said, stopping in the middle of the road. “The city is very old, each layer built over the last.” He seemed to find what he was looking for. “This way. The gate’s not far.” There was an alley between tall buildings, hardly wide enough for one of us to walk square-shouldered. I expected it to angle upward, toward the summit of the hill, but it ran down, and before long became a tunnel.
We were going back underground.
Rag leaped down the steps and hurried inside. I paused, looked up at the failing sun, at the moon—green and white—where it made its slow procession across the heavens. There was something in the pattern of canals upon its face that seemed familiar to me, recalling perhaps the green moon of Emesh that I had known for many years. Shading my eyes, I fancied I could see the black of night through the gauzy, faded pink of day.
“You can’t stay there!” Rag hissed, reemerging from below, “If they catch us now, so near the door . . . ”
“You haven’t told me where we’re going,” I said. None of it seemed real.
“I did!” Rag said. “We’re going to see the Judicator. He’s this way.”
“But you haven’t told me why.”
“I did!” Rag said again. “You’re to be tested.”
Pulled by the tension of the moment, I gained the top of the stairs, started down. “But tested how? For what purpose? What of my own time? My own people?”
The boy seemed to think long and hard upon his answer. Ultimately he shook his head. “I wish I knew, sir. That’s why I’m taking you to the Judicator. Please.” He hung his head. “Please, we’ve come so far.”
Saltus was on the stair behind me, a strangely threatening figure, for all his diminutive size. I might not be able to overpower him, but I could outrun him if it came to that—our experience on the stairs had made that plain. Yet where would I go? Everything I knew was dust, was atoms.
There was nowhere to go but forward.
Down.
“All right,” I said. “All right.”
Rag brightened at once, caught my wrist. “This way!” he said, and pulled me down into the tunnel. So old was that city, and so built upon, that one could see the strata where the builders piled new upon old. I saw then that what I had taken for a hill was really all a great tower, and rather than climb it, we had penetrated to its uttermost heart. When we had gone deep enough, Rag released my hand and ran on ahead, past pipes and open doorways to a place where the path ran straight.
There was light ahead—the faint light of the last sun.
I followed him out into it, and froze.
We had pierced the hill itself and emerged on the far side, upon a lip and shelf of native rock that overlooked the Last City of Kings. Funerary markers dominated the path to either side, tall and tilted, topped with cruciforms and inscribed with characters alien to me.
Before us lay a building I had been to before, a place I had been to in dream.
Always it had seemed immeasurably vast to me, but here it seemed humbler and more intimate. Personal, in its way. The temple’s great bronze doors were shut, and above them a round window of stained glass gleamed between twin towers, belfries whose carillons had long ago fallen silent. One tower had lost its top entire, and from where we approached I could see a hole in the tiled roof of the nave.
Rag reached the steps first, rushing past Saltus and myself, apparently eager to complete his rough errand. His robes flapped behind him like wings, and he had to snatch their hem as he mounted the cracked marble steps, taking them two at a time.
Almost I prayed I would awaken then, and find myself aspirating on the floor of my bath in my prison in the Arx Caelestis, my blood on Selene’s hands. But I did not. A cool breeze gripped the hem of my robe as I reached the top of that stair, and the sparse flakes of winter’s first snow danced beneath that blood-milk sky.
Rag pounded on the door, pounded again, and as we waited, he turned and pointed away over the city, away toward the sun. “You can see the Wall from here!” he exclaimed, “Just like I said!”
Following his finger, I turned—putting the temple doors at my right hand, and looked out to find a blackness on the horizon, its top nearly kissing the bottom of that bleary, red eye they called a sun. I would have thought it a range of mountains, were it not so perfectly regular. It was like looking at Akterumu from the shrine of Miudanar’s skull, its harsh geometry shimmering like a mirage in the desert heat.
The city ran all the way to its base, a rolling carpet of black stone.
“And there’s Castle Ward, straight ahead!” Rag pointed.
Another hill, like the one atop which we stood but far, far greater, rose in the middle distance, crowned with black towers and a great black dome. The whole hill had been castellated, rising tier upon tier in what seemed a mighty spiral, a profusion of buttressed walls and towers, of stained-glass windows, and of great statues—man shaped—that seemed to hold up the very buildings.
I had seen such a thing before, in the visions Ushara had showed me of the Empire we might rule together as Emperor and consort-queen.
I remember confusion at something the boy had said before, and oriented myself toward the sun to ask the boy my question when the doors swung inward. Turning at once to face this Judicator I had been brought to see, I halted—all questions driven from my mind.
The boy called Rag stood within, black haired and dressed in dirty robes that might once have been white. But Rag stood also beside me, to the left of the doors. I looked at them both, thinking at first they must be twins, but the stains on their ugly garments were the same. There was a brown smudge on the left shoulder, a spot of damp from his fall in the alley when I had leaped to knock him clear of the approaching colossus.
I turned to face the boy in the door, mouth half-open. I took a step forward, for a moment banishing the boy outside from the periphery of my vision. When I turned to look, he was gone.
“Welcome, Hadrian, son of None,” said the child within the door. His voice was not Rag’s voice, high and cold and scared. Rather two voices issued from those cracked lips, one deep and grave, the other high and musical.
I drew back, hand instinctively going for the sword that was not there. “Saltus?”
But Saltus was gone, had vanished, too—and I have never seen it again.
Rag gestured for me to enter. In that strange, dual voice, he said, “I have been waiting for you, for such a long time.”
“You’re the Judicator,” I said.
If he answered, I hardly heard him, for I knew the space within, had seen it before what seemed a thousand thousand times, in visions and in dreams. Those warped, time-beaten doors opened upon a vast and echoing hall, a long, broad hall facing east; a place of worship whose carven benches lay in ruin to either side of the aisle. Bloody sunlight fell through the hole in the ceiling, and with it the rare snowflake tumbled past high windows of stained glass, images that showed scenes of men and angels. Men with red cloaks and red crowns. A white bird descending. Angels.
Great statues stood in niches along the outer walls, past the columns that lined the nave, shapes huge and hideous, shapes not unlike those I had seen in the outer hall of the Dhar-Iagon. A thing like a human brain studded with eyes, many handed, crawling. A coiled serpent with countless feathered wings. A lioness with the bald face of a woman. A goat-headed man with a staff. A bat-winged man with a face like some many-legged sea monster. The greatest of these were perverse caryatids supporting the vaulted roof whose cracked and falling frescoes showed the heavens filled with angels, apparently untouched by the devils below.
Looking up at them, I staggered, caught myself on the corner of one of the pews. A great cable of braided metal snaked across the floor. It was but one of many, of a numberless tangle that coated the floor of that great temple, running from narthex to chancel.
In its place, there was a rocking cradle set upon a pedestal where all those cables converged. Before it knelt a figure in tarnished white, a hunched figure kneeling with his back to me.
It was the temple, the cathedral of the Quiet, the place that I had seen in my visions. It was sacred and profane at once—had been profaned, I sensed, and guessed that the monstrous statues had been put there by some later builder. Still, I sank to my knees in shock and reverence.
“Rise,” came that dual voice from the doors behind.
I looked back, and again found the boy called Rag was gone. The great doors were shut.
“Rag?”
Kures zir ol.
Here I am.
The voice issued from on high, filling the space of that great temple as water fills a glass.
A holy terror filled me, recognizing the qualities of that voice, of those dual voices blending into one. Staggering to my feet, I drew back a step, retreating toward the narthex and the outer doors. It had been a trick, all of it, though I little understood how it had been done.
I am dead, I told myself. I am dying, dreaming. This is all one final vision.
Am branuran oah i ge.
It is not a dream.
The kneeling figure stood, and I saw that it was no man, but the boy Rag once more, only he wore a mantle over the stained and grubby robes. As I stood there, paralyzed, utterly transfixed, he moved toward me, seeming to glide over the space between us, as though the distance were itself contracting. He seemed to grow larger as he approached, just as Ushara had done in the pantheon of Phanamhara, until—though he appeared to be only a boy—he was taller even than myself. He spread his hands, and a light streamed from them, and from all of him. I threw a hand across my face to shield my eyes, and turned my head away.
My heart hammered in my ears, and my mind drained of all thought save one certain thing.
He was one of the Watchers.
Ganae ge noan caphid.
Don’t be frightened.
Said that twinned, ethereal voice. A hand—a human hand, warm and five fingered—came to rest upon my shoulders; and a voice—a human voice, a voice like the voice of the boy I’d met in the Well—said, “I am the Judicator, Ragama.”