*
The Gold Leaf was dark, a sheet of undulating silver lapping at the side of the boat. Overhead the stars were just beginning to emerge, the last of the sun's rays still painting the western horizon in rising lines of gold that burnished the underside of the storm clouds lurking there. For now there was hardly any wind, the world still, at peace.
Across from him, his back to the sunset, the Wraethi’s hooded figure was still. Galairel risked much, he knew, coming out this early. From the hints and scraps he’d garnered in those rare moments the immortal became loquacious on the subject even ringlight was a trial of sorts, though it by no means offered the oblivion of the sun’s touch. Simply “excited the walls of his prison”, whatever that meant. “Requires greater conscious effort to remain centred,” was Kelsaro’s only slightly less opaque explanation.
He caught Rivan’s eye now, from the shadow’s of his hood, the sparks of starlight drifting in his gaze twinkling as he winked, crooking a lopsided smile. “You’re comfortable?”
The former Consort nodded, offering a smile of his own. “Yes, thank you.”
“Sea travel doesn’t bother you?”
“It does you?” Rivan asked, voice incredulous.
“It used to,” Galairel confirmed, dropping his chin in embarrassment. “When I was a young man. I was quite the joke amongst my fathers men; they used to say that the smell was enough to scare off the whales.”
Rivan laughed, before the implications of the comment left him stood at the brink of the precipice between them: in Galairel’s time the only ocean would’ve been beyond Ibaeran, to the south. The waters they now crossed would have been buried beneath several meters of pack ice.
Shaking off the chill wind of the millennia, he forced a smile back onto his face. “So where are we going, that required such secrecy?” He held up a hand as Galairel opened his mouth to speak. “I know we’re travelling to the place they gave your name to, what I want to know is where within the city.”
Lair grinned – a gesture that no longer sent shivers up Rivan’s spine. “You’ll see…” he glanced pointedly to Rivan’s right.
“You’re such a spoil sport,” said Lifaern, who’d volunteered to help watch the boat whilst they were ashore, and therefore by default drawn duty at the other oar.
“And of course you don’t have enough secrets to fill a mermaid’s cave,” Rivan retorted, though the effort of pulling the oar robbed it of some of the injured haughtier he’d been going for.
“Actually I’ve enough to bed a Drake. But we’ll not split hairs, shall we?”
“Let’s just concentrate on getting there, shall we?” the Wraethi suggested pointedly, peering up at the sky. “Farn assures me that storm is coming no where near us, but I’d rather not tempt fate.”
Grinning, the other two put their backs into it, pushing them on towards the looming darkness of the far shore.
They put in where the wall had come down, tumbled stones weathered over the intervening years so that the tortured edges were no longer quite so sharp. The surrounding forest had begun the slow process of reclamation in the intervening years, and the gap in the wall no longer resembled a breach in the fortifications, so much as a cleft in a cliff face, trailing foliage hanging down from the heights above. Rivan was eyeing the jutting edges of several overhangs when Galairel came up beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“The walls have stood like this for almost two centuries now; the dragon fire fused what was not torn down in place more permanently than any mortar. We’ll be perfectly safe, I assure you.”
Rivan nodded, glancing back to raise a hand to Lifaern in farewell before beginning to pick his way carefully up the landslide, through the breach.
Galairel’s walls had risen straight from the shoreline, its harbour internal, so the stones they climbed now were slick with spray, seaweed and moss, where winter storms had pummelled the shore. Fortunately, there had been little bad weather so far this spring, and anyway his companion had done this many times before, and was careful to point out the safest route up the makeshift causeway, leading them on into the gap.
The walls rose sheer and imposing to either side. By the light of the ring Rivan could make out the cave-like mouths of what must at one point have been passages marring the surface at various heights to either side. It was difficult to tell in the darkness whether they still led back along the wall's inner length for any distance. He knew from his history that it was made from local granite, sourced from the cliffs to the north east. The structure was an easy hundred yards across, and it was only as they approached the far side that the ground they crossed began to even out, settling round the level of the street beyond, though it still bore deep gouges here and there.
“Baelmont and his cohorts, clearing the worst of the rubble for the advance,” Galairel explained sombrely, noticing the direction of Rivan’s gaze.
Pausing, he reached out to run fingers across one such gash in the wall at his side, tracing the line of the wound; he could fit his whole hand in one, bury it to the wrist. It ran with its three fellows for several metres before abruptly loosing depth.
“Come on.”
Shivering, he nodded. Followed the Wraethi out into the street beyond.
It was like stepping into a dream.
One of the moments that had remained with Rivan from the first year of his travels, before he’d crossed the sea to Taiiruz, had been during his brief sojourn in Incarnate. He’d hated the capital almost on sight, largely thanks to the slightly aloof impersonal attitude of the city’s inhabitants. But it did hold two places with which he’d fallen in love with.
The first was the city’s water gardens, which he’d visited at sunset as they were lighting the many coloured paper lanterns strung throughout the boughs of the swamp willows and white lepers.
The second was the Chapel of Saint Colleen.
As a young boy church had been a chore, to be endured in polite silence so as not to embarrass his parents in front of their peers. Stepping into the building’s austere nave, he’d suddenly been struck with a profound sense of awe, a humbling that brought tears to his eyes as he walked the nave’s length towards the effigy, with its bare legs and torn dress, the eyes bound about with a scrap of bloody cloth.
He’d brought his silver feather that evening, from a market seller down at the dockside bazaar.
As the years past, it was that air of quiet contemplation that had stayed with him, that sense not of reverence necessarily, for if Colleen had been clear about one thing in her writings it was that reverence should be reserved only for the bright other that bound all together. No, it was more a feeling of appreciation, of respect.
As if in valuing, you yourself were valued.
A sense of belonging.
As he stood at the edge of the square, staring about at the low slung elegance of the buildings around him, with their incredible yet concise detail, it was this sense of belonging he felt stirring once again.
The situation was further compounded by the strange luminescence worked into the stone work; whole sections of wall in soaring arcs made from a stone that gave off a soft luminescence reminiscent of the Wraethi’s skin by ringlight.
Crossing to the nearest, a two storey house whose front had been staved in during the assault, he traced the line of pale stone, where it shot through the darker granite that matched the slabs of the wall, fingers following the line of smoke-like knot-work, where it ascended to partially blot a night sky. To the right of the building’s empty door lintel, the knot-work clouds thinned into strips. Stars and a circlet with crescent inset – the moon, he realised – were rendered in high relief on the black background.
“Not all of us were gifted artists, but for those that were, the results could be exquisite.”
Rivan nodded, turning to offer a half melancholy smile. “How did you discourage the bad ones from spreading their graffiti everywhere?”
Galairel’s eyes sparkled. “With
the greatest of diplomacy.”
“Come on…”
But the Wraethi was linking an arm through his, leading him away from the ruined nightscape. “Another time, Rii. Tonight is for a different story.”
“One you’re being very coy about.”
“As is an older man’s prerogative.” Night sky gaze on him for a second, before Lair looked away.
Rivan found himself studying that line of jaw as the Wraethi turned to lead them on, now familiar feelings stirring in the pit of his stomach.
Together they crossed the overgrown garden that centred the square, heading down one of the broad avenue’s that radiated away from it towards the heart of the city. Galairel glanced at him, a smile twitching at the corner of his lips. “Come now; you are seeing what few have had the chance to lay eyes on, from your generation. Take the chance, you may not get it again.”
The avenue processed in a gentle curve through the city, seemed to cut at random through the surrounding districts in a way that made little sense from their vantage.
“It’s an old planning concept,” Galairel explained, when Rivan pointed it out. “Usurped here, from its original purpose, for the sake of art.” Rivan looked at him blankly. “The radial avenues curl in to the centre like the spiral arms of a galaxy…” he made a motion with his hands, twisting the blades of his palms in towards an imaginary point “…with a series of concentric, circular