The Hidden City

  ‘What?’ He pushed aside a branch and slipped past it into the darkness of the forest.

  ‘I have to be real when I do this.’

  ‘What do you mean “real”? You’re real now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not exactly. Don’t ask questions, Sparhawk. Just find me a patch of open sky and don’t bother me for a while. I have to appeal for some help – if I can find them.’

  He pushed through the tangled brush, a cold knot in his stomach and his heart like a stone in his chest. The hideous dilemma they faced tore at him, seeming almost to rip him apart. Sephrenia was dying, but he must endanger Ehlana in order to save her life. It was only the force of Bhelliom’s will that kept him moving at all. His own will was paralyzed by the conflicting needs of the two he loved most in all the world. He pushed at the tangle surrounding him in a kind of hopeless frustration.

  Then he broke through the screen of brush into a small clearing carpeted by deep moss where a pool of water fed by a gurgling spring winked back at the stars strewn like bright grain across the velvet night. It was a quiet place, almost enchanted, but his eyes refused to accept its beauty. He stopped and set Aphrael down. Her small face was devoid of expression, and her eyes were blank, unseeing. Sparhawk waited tensely.

  ‘Well, finally!’ she said at last in an exasperated tone of voice. ‘It’s so hard to explain anything to them. They never stop babbling long enough to listen.’

  ‘Who’s this we’re talking about?’

  The Tamul Gods. Now I can see why Oscagne’s an atheist. I finally persuaded them to come here to do their playing. That should help to hide you and me from Cyrgon.’

  ‘Playing?’

  ‘They’re children, Sparhawk, babies who run and play and squeal and chase each other for months on end. Cyrgon absolutely hates them, so he won’t go anywhere near them. That should help. They’ll be here in a few minutes, and then we’ll be able to start. Turn your back, Father. I don’t like having people watch me change.’

  ‘I’ve seen you before – your reflection anyway.’

  ‘That part doesn’t bother me. The process of the changeover’s a little degrading, though. Just turn your back, Father. You wouldn’t understand.’

  He obediently turned and gazed up at the night sky. Several familiar constellations were either missing or in the wrong places.

  ‘All right, Father, you can turn around now.’ Her voice was richer and more vibrant.

  He turned. ‘Would you please put some clothes on?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it, Aphrael. Humor my quirks.’

  ‘This is so tedious.’ She reached out and took hold of a gauzy kind of veil she had spun out of nothing and wrapped herself in it. ‘Better?’ she asked.

  ‘Not much. Can we leave now?’

  ‘I’ll check.’ Her eyes went distant for a moment. ‘They’re coming,’ she reported. ‘They got side-tracked. It doesn’t take much to distract them. Now, listen very carefully. Try to stay calm when we do this. Just keep the fact firmly in mind that I’m not going to let you get hurt. You won’t fall.’

  ‘Fall? Fall from where? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’ll see. I’d do it differently, but we have to get to Dirgis in a hurry, and I don’t want Cyrgon to have time to locate me. We’ll take it in easy stages at first, so you’ll have time to get used to the idea.’ She turned her head slightly. ‘They’re here,’ she said. ‘We can start now.’

  Sparhawk cocked his head slightly. He seemed to hear the distant sound of childish laughter, though it might have been only the sound of an errant breeze rustling the leaves in the treetops.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ she instructed.

  He reached out and took her by the hand. It seemed very warm and somehow comforting.

  ‘Just look up at the sky, Sparhawk,’ the heartbreakingly beautiful young woman instructed.

  He raised his face and saw the upper edge of the moon come creeping pale and luminous up above the treetops.

  ‘You can look down now.’

  They were standing some ten feet above the rippled waters of the pool. Sparhawk’s muscles tensed.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ she said sharply. ‘Just relax. You’ll slow us down if I have to drag you through the air like a water-logged canoe.’

  He tried, but he didn’t have much success. He was certain that his eyes were lying to him, though. He could feel solidity under his feet. He stamped on it, and it was as firm as earth ought to be.

  ‘That’s just for now,’ the Goddess told him. ‘In a little while you won’t need it any more. I always have to put something solid down for Sephrenia –’ Her voice broke off with a strange little sob. ‘Please get control of yourself, Sparhawk,’ she pleaded. ‘We must hurry. Look at the sky again. We’re going a little higher.’

  He felt nothing at all, no rush of air, no sinking in the pit of his stomach, but when he looked down again, the clearing and its enchanted pool had shrunk to a dot. The tiny lights of Beresa twinkled from minuscule windows, and the moon had laid a long, glowing path out across the Tamul Sea.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Her inflections were still Aphrael’s, but her voice, and most definitely her appearance, were totally different. Her face peculiarly combined Flute’s features with Danae’s, making her the adult who had somehow been both little girls. Sparhawk didn’t answer, but instead stood stamping one foot on the solid nothing under him.

  ‘I won’t be able to keep that there when we start,’ she warned. ‘We’ll be going too fast. Just hold onto my hand, but don’t get excited and break my fingers.’

  ‘Don’t do anything to surprise me, then. Are you going to sprout wings?’

  ‘What an absurd idea. I’m not a bird, Sparhawk. Wings would only get in my way. Just lean back and relax.’ She looked intently at him. ‘You’re really handling this well. Sephrenia’s usually in hysterics at this point. Would you be more at ease if you sat down?’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Never mind. Maybe we’d better stand. Take a couple of deep breaths, and let’s get started.’

  He found that looking up helped. When he was looking at the stars and the newly risen moon, he could not see the awful emptiness under him.

  There was no sense of movement, no whistle of the wind in his ears, no flapping of his cloak. He stood holding Aphrael’s hand and looking intently at the moon as it receded ponderously southward.

  Then there was a pale luminosity coming up from beneath.

  ‘Oh, bother,’ the Goddess said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ His voice was a little shrill.

  ‘Clouds.’

  He looked down and saw a fairy-tale world under them. Tumbled white cloud, glowing in the moonlight, stretched out as if forever. Mountains of airy mist swelled up from a folded, insubstantial plain, and pillars and castles of curded cloud stood sentinel-like between. Sparhawk’s mind filled with wonder as the soft, moonlit cloudscape flowed smoothly back below them. ‘Beautiful,’ he murmured.

  ‘Maybe, but I can’t see the ground.’

  ‘I think I prefer it that way.’

  ‘I need reference points, Sparhawk. I can’t see where I am, so I can’t tell where I’m going. Bhelliom can find a place with nothing but a name to work with, but I can’t. I need landmarks, and I can’t see them with all these clouds in the way.’

  ‘Why don’t you use the stars?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what sailors do when they’re out at sea. The stars don’t move, so the sailors pick out a certain star or constellation and steer toward it.’

  There was a long silence while the swiftly receding rush of cloud beneath them slowed and finally stopped. ‘Sometimes you’re so clever that I can’t stand you, sparhawk,’ the Goddess holding his hand said tartly.

  ‘Do you mean you’ve never even thought of it?’ he asked her incredulously.

  ‘I don’t fly at night very often.’ Her tone was defensive. ‘We’re going down. I have to
find a landmark.’

  They sank downward, the clouds rushing up to meet them, and then they were immersed in a dense, clinging mist. ‘They’re made out of fog, aren’t they? Clouds, I mean.’ Sparhawk was surprised.

  ‘What did you think they were?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it before. It just seems strange for some reason.’

  They broke out of the underside of the cloud – clouds no longer bathed in moonglow, now hanging close over their heads like a dirty ceiling that closed off the light. The earth beneath them was enveloped in almost total darkness. They drifted along, standing in air and veering this way and that, peering down and searching for something recognizable.

  ‘Over there.’ Sparhawk pointed. ‘It must be a fair-sized town. There’s quite a lot of light.’

  They moved in that direction, drawn toward the light like mindless insects. There was a sense of unreality as Sparhawk looked down. The town lying beneath them seemed tiny. It huddled like a child’s toy on the edge of a large body of water. Sparhawk scratched at his cheek, trying to remember the details of his map. ‘It’s probably Sopal,’ he said. ‘That lake almost has to be the Sea of Arjun.’ He stopped, his mind suddenly reeling. ‘That’s over three hundred leagues from where we started, Aphrael!’ he exclaimed. ‘Almost a thousand miles!’

  ‘Yes – if that town really is Sopal.’

  ‘It has to be. The Sea of Arjun’s the only large body of water on this part of the continent, and Sopal’s on the east side of it. Arjun’s on the south side, and Tiana’s on the west.’ He stared at her incredulously. ‘A thousand miles! And we only left Beresa a half an hour ago! Just how fast are we going?’

  ‘What difference does it make? We got here. That’s all that matters.’ The young woman holding his hand looked speculatively down at the miniature town on the lake-shore. ‘Dirgis is off to the west a little way, so we won’t want to go straight north.’ She shifted them around in mid-air until they were facing in a slightly northwesterly direction. ‘That should be fairly close. Don’t move your head, Sparhawk. Keep looking in that direction. We’ll go back up, and you pick out a star.’

  They rose swiftly through the clouds, and Sparhawk saw the familiar constellation of the wolf lying above the misty horizon ahead. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘The five stars clustered in the shape of a dog’s head.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like any dog I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You have to use your imagination. How is it you’ve never thought of steering by the stars before?’

  She shrugged. ‘Probably because I can see farther than you can. You see the sky as a surface – a kind of overturned bowl with the stars painted on it all at the same distance from you. That’s why you can see that cluster of stars as a dog’s head. I can’t, because I can see the difference in distances. Keep an eye on your dog, Sparhawk. Let me know if we start to drift off-course.’

  The moon-bathed cloud beneath them began to flow smoothly back again, and they flew on in silence for a while. This isn’t so bad,’ Sparhawk said. ‘At least not when you get used to it.’

  ‘It’s better than walking,’ the gauze-clad Goddess replied.

  ‘It made my hair stand on end right at first, though.’

  ‘Sephrenia’s never gotten past that stage. She starts gibbering in panic as soon as her feet come up off the ground.’

  Sparhawk remembered something. ‘Wait a minute,’ he objected. ‘When we killed Ghwerig and stole the Bhelliom, you came floating up out of that chasm in his cave, and she walked out across the air to meet you. She wasn’t gibbering in panic then.’

  ‘No. It was probably the bravest thing she’s ever done. I was so proud of her that I almost burst.’

  ‘Was she conscious at all? When you found her, I mean?’

  ‘Off and on. She was able to tell us who’d attacked her. I managed to slow her heartbeat and take away the pain. She’s very calm now.’ Aphrael’s voice quavered. ‘She expects to die, Sparhawk. She can feel the wound in her heart, and she knows what that means. She was giving Xanetia a last message for Vanion when I left.’ The young Goddess choked back a sob. ‘Can we talk about something else?’

  ‘Of course.’ Sparhawk’s eyes flickered away from the constellation in the night sky. ‘There are mountains sticking up out of the clouds just ahead.’

  ‘We’re almost there, then. Dirgis is in the big basin lying beyond that first ridge.’

  Their rapid flight began to slow. They passed over the snowy peaks of the southern-most expanse of the mountains of Atan, peaks that rose out of the clouds like frozen islands, and found that there was only thin cloud-cover over the basin lying beyond.

  They descended, drifting down like dandelion puffs toward the forest-covered hills and valleys of the basin, a landscape sharply etched in the moonlight that leeched out all color. There was another cluster of lights some distance to the left – ruddy torches in narrow streets and golden candlelight in little windows. ‘That’s Dirgis,’ Aphrael said. ‘We’ll set down outside of town. I should probably change back before we go on in.’

  ‘Either that or put on some more clothes.’

  That really bothers you, doesn’t it, Sparhawk? Am I ugly or something?’

  ‘No. Quite the opposite – and that bothers me all the more. I can’t think while you’re standing around naked, Aphrael.’

  ‘Im not really a woman, Sparhawk – not in the sense that seems to bother you so much, anyway. Can’t you think of me as a mare – or a doe?’

  ‘No, I can’t. Just do whatever you have to do, Aphrael. I don’t really think we need to talk about how I think of you.’

  ‘Are you blushing, Sparhawk?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am. Now can we drop it?’

  ‘That’s really rather sweet, you know.’

  ‘Will you stop?’

  They came down in a secluded little glen about a half-mile from the outskirts of Dirgis, and Sparhawk turned his back while the Child Goddess once again assumed the more familiar form of the Styric waif they all knew as Flute. ‘Better?’ she asked when he turned around.

  ‘Much.’ He picked her up and started toward town, his long legs stretching out in a rapid stride. He concentrated on that. It seemed to help him avoid thinking.

  They went directly into town, made one turn off the main street, and came to a large, two-story building. ‘This is it,’ Aphrael said. ‘We’ll just go in and up the stairs. I’ll make the innkeeper look the other way.’

  Sparhawk pushed open the door, crossed the common-room on the main floor and went up the stairs.

  They found Xanetia all aglow and cradling Sephrenia in her arms. The two women were on a narrow bed in a small room with roughly squared-off log walls. It was one of those snug, comfortable rooms such as one finds in mountain inns the world over. It had a porcelain stove, a couple of chairs, and a nightstand beside each bed. A pair of candles cast a golden light on the pair on the bed. The front of Sephrenia’s robe was covered with blood, and her face was deathly pale, tinged slightly with that fatal grey. Sparhawk looked at her, and his mind suddenly filled with flames. ‘I will cause hurt to Zalasta for this,’ he growled in Trollish.

  Aphrael gave him a startled look. Then she also spoke in the guttural language of the Trolls. ‘Your thought is good, Anakha,’ she agreed fiercely. ‘Cause much hurt to him.’ The rending sound of the Trollish word for “hurt” seemed very satisfying to both of them. ‘His heart still belongs to me, though,’ she added. ‘Has there been any change?’ she asked Xanetia, lapsing into Tamul.

  ‘None, Divine One,’ Xanetia replied in a voice near to exhaustion. I am lending our dear sister of mine own strength to sustain her, but I am nearly spent. Soon both she and I will die.’

  ‘Nay, gentle Xanetia,’ Aphrael said. I will not lose you. Fear not, however. Anakha hath come with Bhelliom to restore ye both.’

  ‘But that must not be,’ Xanetia protested. ‘To do so would put the life of Anakha’s Quee
n in peril. Better that thy sister and I both perish than that.’

  ‘Don’t be noble, Xanetia,’ Aphrael told her tartly. ‘It makes my hair hurt. Talk to Bhelliom, Sparhawk. Find out how we’re supposed to do this.’

  ‘Blue Rose,’ Sparhawk said, touching his fingers to the bulge under his smock.

  ‘I hear thee, Anakha.’ The voice in Sparhawk’s mind was a whisper.

  ‘We have come unto the place where Sephrenia lies stricken.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What must we now do? I implore thee, Blue Rose, do not increase the peril of my mate.’

  ‘Thine admonition is unseemly, Anakha. It doth bespeak a lack of trust. Let us proceed. Surrender thy will to me. It is through thy lips that I must speak with Anarae Xanetia.’

  A strange, detached lassitude came over Sparhawk, and he felt himself somehow separating, his awareness sliding away from his body.

  ‘Attend to me, Xanetia.’ It was Sparhawk’s altered voice, but he had no consciousness of having spoken.

  ‘Most closely, World-Maker,’ the Anarae replied in her exhausted voice.

  ‘Let the Child Goddess assume the burden of supporting her sister. I have need of thy hands.’

  Aphrael slipped onto the bed and took Sephrenia from Xanetia’s arms and held her in a tender embrace.

  ‘Take forth the box, Anakha,’ Bhelliom instructed, ‘and surrender it up unto Xanetia.’

  Sparhawk’s movements were jerky as he pulled the golden box out from under his tunic and lifted the thong upon which it was suspended up over his head.

  ‘Gather about thee that serenity which the curse of Edaemus hath bestowed upon thee, Xanetia,’ Bhelliom instructed, ‘and enfold the box – and mine essence – in thy hands, letting thy peace infuse that which thou dost hold.’

  Xanetia nodded and extended her glowing hands to take the box from Sparhawk’s grasp.

  ‘Very good. Now, take the Child Goddess in thine arms. Embrace her and deliver me up unto her.’

  Xanetia clasped both Aphrael and Sephrenia in her arms.

  ‘Excellent. Thy mind is quick, Xanetia. This is even better. Aphrael, open thou the box and draw me forth.’ Bhelliom paused. ‘No tricks,’ it admonished her with uncharacteristic colloquialism. ‘Seek not to ensnare me with thy wiles and thy soft touch.’