The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 326

His legs crumpled under him, and he sat hard on the lip, where the floor gave way. He was too dizzy and weak to negotiate the sloping side. There he sat while a low rolling scraping sound shifted around him, disorienting him, and he fought to stay sitting and not simply keel over.

After a long time he became aware that Pale-skin squatted beside him holding two objects in his hands: a loaf of clavas and a stone bowl filled to the brim with water. The smell of the water made his mouth hurt, and in fact his lips were so dry and cracked that the moisture stung them and they bled, the iron bite of his blood blending with the metallic taste of the water. He forced himself to drink less than he wanted, to eat only a corner, not to gorge, and afterward he was so tired that he curled up on stone and slept.

When he woke, he drank and ate again, and now he had the strength to stand, for it was apparent that the boulders—the skrolin—had moved while he slept, changing position to create a clear path for him down into the bowl.

The slope wasn’t so steep that he staggered, but it was still difficult to keep his balance. Pale-skin followed him, bearing more water and clavas, acquired from an unknown source. The skrolin moved only their heads as he passed, watching him, and that shifting rumbling sound followed him as he descended because they all of them fell in behind. He came to a round amphitheater cut into stone with a series of circular ledges and, in the middle, a shallow pit like the fighting ground for cocks or dogs.

Most of the skrolin gathered on the ledges, but Pale-skin led him down by stages to the pit where eleven skrolin waited. Each one wore an armband, but his was the only armband that gleamed, and when he got close to them, he saw that the armbands they wore were pitted and faded and scratched and even tarnished green with age, ancient objects whose potency had withered.

He sat down cross-legged in the center of the pit. All around, up into the ranks of the amphitheater and beyond that into the darkness which the glow of the armband could not penetrate, he felt them watching him, the force of many gazes, of interest and curiosity and of something more besides that had the scent of hope or longing.

“I am a messenger,” he said. “I swam through the poisoned tunnel to bring you a message from those who were lost when the earth trembled and drowned the tunnel through which they traveled. Some among them are still alive. Can you find them and help them to escape the trap they are in?”

His words brought silence. He listened. He heard his own breathing, nothing more. If they pulled air into lungs and let it out again, as did humankind, he could not hear it. They were as silent as the stone around them. They seemed more than half stone themselves.

Finally, when he thought there would be no reply, a rush of clicking and stamping and rubbing and tapping swept through the assembly. After a long while, the noise subsided. Pale-skin had retreated, and in its place one with a gold sheen and a dozen crystalline growths mottling its skin shuffled forward to confront him. It wore draped about its body a number of chimes and charms that rang softly. With a deft movement, at odds with its clumsy body, it stripped the armband off its own long limb and held it out for him to see.

“You wear a talisman,” it said. “But the talisman you wear lives. The talismans we wear are long dead.”

A sigh of grief shuddered through the assembly.

“Is it true that the shining city existed in the long-ago time? Is it true? Or is it only a story we tell.”

He nodded. “It is true. I saw it. I was there.”

“Tell us! Tell us!”

He told them what he remembered, which wasn’t much, only flashes of sights and sounds, a memory of a vast city glimpsed deep in the earth, of pillars clothed in jewels, of a marketplace that lapped a river, of caverns streaked with veins of gold and copper and wagons that moved without horse or oxen to pull them. But as he spoke, the words took on substance, as though he were weaving the city right there before them, as if their listening and his words were the hands and the clay out of which a pot could be formed.

He created the world they had lost, and they believed him, because they wanted to.

“But it is gone,” he said. “It was all gone. They destroyed it.”

Adica destroyed it.

The pain struck, doubling him over, because he could not see or hear with the lance of guilt and grief assaulting him. Adica had destroyed it, but she had died in a wall of blue fire and after that he recalled nothing. Only her, death, and the destruction of the world.

He fell forward onto the floor, body pressed against the stone, hands clenched and teeth gritted but the pain did not cease. Adica hadn’t meant to do so much damage, surely. She hadn’t meant to kill innocents in order to save her own, had she? Hadn’t it all been an accident, a misunderstanding?