Drawn Blades (13 page)

The Durkoth steered that slice of earth as quick as any sailing ship with fair seas and a following wind, and they never stopped moving. In one eight-day week they covered a distance I had expected to take us at least a month without my wounds slowing us down.

Rather appropriately it was late afternoon on the day named for the Sylvani when the Wall of the Sylvain finally hove into sight on the southern horizon—the first Sylvasday in the month of Opening. We were still a half mile short of the wall when our earthen barge slid to a halt in a small wood. The wall was barely visible through the trees.

There is nothing in the eleven kingdoms of the East quite like the wall. It is simultaneously a magical ward that defines the line between the human lands and the ancient empire of the First and one of the most densely populated cities in the world—a city a thousand miles long and forty feet wide.

A
stone snake five thousand miles long coils its way around the empire, a city riding on its back. Within is the oldest and mightiest civilization in the world, a dreaming land of decadence and corruption ruled over by ancient immortals fallen from grace. Beautiful and terrible they were in the power of their youth, and beautiful and terrible they remain, though they are ruined now and their strength broken—a decayed remnant of the world that was, bound forever within a wall built by the gods.”

That is how I first heard the Wall of the Sylvain described in my childhood by my mentor, Kelos Deathwalker. I remember the words exactly, both for the grandeur they evoked in my young mind and for the sadness with which he spoke them. I remember, too, the sigh and what followed after.

“That’s how the poet put it, lad, but it’s not quite true. The part about a city five thousand miles long, at least. It’s actually several cities and only one of ’em even a thousand miles. Great sections of the wall run through wastelands where no human can live, and the bulk of the wall’s inhabitants are human, just as the bulk of the empire’s are these days. The Sylvani simply don’t breed fast enough to keep up with us. It’s a poor life for a man—grubbing after the crumbs of the inhuman empire.”

“Still,” I said, “a thousand-mile city, that’s . . . I don’t even know. Please, tell me more.”

Kelos let out a gruff laugh. “A thousand miles long but only forty feet wide. The wall encloses the entire Sylvani Empire in a near-perfect half circle. It runs from the great eastern ocean around the Sylvain and back to the ocean, and it is made of two parts. The first is the wall proper. That’s the bit the gods made—the second part, the city, came later. I don’t know what the wall is made of or how they built it, but it’s exactly eight feet tall and eight feet wide. Hard as diamond, it is, and it looks more than a bit like some exotic gemstone.”

“How so?” I remember being utterly fascinated.

“It’s translucent. That means you can see a few inches into it, though if you lay a finger along the top corner and try to see it through the edge, you’ll be disappointed. It’s mostly green as fine jade, but calling it a stone snake is fair enough. It’s got other colors running through the stone in regular patterns like a snake’s skin—reds and golds mostly.”

“Do you think it might be a dragon? Frozen into stone by the Emperor of Heaven to keep the buried gods inside?” Even so young I had heard stories about the buried gods.

Kelos shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. The godwar was more . . . complex than the way your local priest probably told it. You’ll get more of the story here in the temple as you get older. For now, let’s just say the Emperor of Heaven’s powers don’t stretch as far as you might think they do, and that no dragon who ever lived was big enough for the task. Mostly, I think, it’s just one giant monster of a ward.”

“A ward against what?”

Kelos shrugged. “What remains of the power of the buried gods perhaps. Or maybe the magic of their children. It’s certainly true that no Sylvani lord can cast a spell this side of the wall. It contains and limits the power of the Others and prevents the buried gods from crossing into the lands of man, whatever its master purpose might be.”

I wasn’t sure if I liked his answers. My parents and the people around them had been pretty convinced about the power of the Emperor of Heaven. But I knew that I belonged to Namara now, and she had her own ways of doing things, so I nodded politely now and moved on to a different sort of question.

“Tell me about the city. Why is it only forty feet wide?”

“It’s something about the way the gods built the wall. For exactly sixteen feet on either side of the wall the ground is almost as hard as granite and flat—perfect for building. Beyond that, the ground looks normal but isn’t really for a good hundred yards. If you try to dig, the hole fills in behind your shovel. If you hammer a post in, the ground spits it back out. If you put a tent up, it falls over. They call it the Fallows.”

“That’s amazing!” I remember clapping my hands together with delight at a world so strange.

“The wall is a strange place. I’ve heard that back when it was new, people tried to dig under the Fallows, to run tunnels into the Sylvani Empire, but those filled in, too. The only thing that freely crosses under the line of the wall is water. A half dozen major rivers and any number of streams flow beneath the wall, and there are places where it provides the only bridge.”

“So, you can pass the wall in a boat?”

Kelos shook his head. “No. The wall-stone extends right down to skim the surface no matter the level of the water, and a boat simply won’t fit. For that matter, I once saw a man try to swim underneath it on a dare. He went down, and never came up again, though fish pass through easily enough.

“You can’t build atop the wall either, though it’s easy enough to walk across it. That eight-foot stretch of stone stays perfectly clean and clear all year round. Neither snow, nor dirt, nor any of the works of man will stay atop it for any length of time. You can walk or run on it, but if you stand still for any length of time you’ll find yourself slowly sliding toward the nearest edge. The people who live in the city of Wall use it as their only street, and every building has two main doors, one on each floor. The lower opens into the Fallows. The upper onto the wall.”

Memory is a funny thing. I hadn’t thought of that moment in years, but seeing the city there along the wall, it suddenly pressed in on me in a way that felt more real than the present did. It hurt me to remember those days, when I was young and free of all the cares and betrayals the years would later pile on my shoulders. It hurt to remember how much I had loved the man who had acted as my father in the service of Namara, Kelos Deathwalker.

He was my mentor, my friend, and my goddess’s greatest traitor. For years I had thought him dead, fallen with so many others in the destruction of the temple. Now that I knew better, I wished that I did not, that I had never learned of his betrayals. And yet, I couldn’t help but wonder where he was now, and whether he was well or ill. He was as responsible as anyone alive for the destruction of my way of life, but somewhere down deep in my soul where the child Aral yet lived, I loved him still.

“Aral?” Faran touched my shoulder. “Are you in there?”

I shook myself free of memory and realized that our Durkoth guide had not come to the surface when we stopped moving. “I am now. Where’s Thuroq?”

Faran pointed at the place the stairs used to be. “Gone. At least, as far as I can tell. After we stopped, I went forward to speak with him. The stairs closed in my face.” She jerked her chin over her shoulder. “The little wall’s gone, too, and the stand of bamboo. Even the dirt’s changed. It matches the local stuff now. The only thing they left us is the stump where the horses are tied.”

“Huh. I would have liked to have a final word with him, but I guess that’s moot.” I sighed. “Come on, we should get the packs on the horses. We have a wall to cross.”

The Durkoth had chosen their stopping place well in terms of staying out of sight, leaving us in a scrubby patch of woodland far from any Magelander roads or farms. We had passed some fifty miles east of Gat—one of the five great university cities that governed the Magelands—and traveled more or less due south from that point on.

The major wall crossing points were almost all to our east, nearer the coast and the Ruvan Delta. The one exception was a couple of hundred miles north and west at the point where the river Uln went under the wall below Tavan, providing a natural transshipment point.

People crossed everywhere, of course, and the city along the wall extended all the way from the mountains to the sea here in the north, but the population thinned out a bit in places like this. Here you might go fifty feet between buildings, and they rarely stood taller than the two stories needed to provide easy access to the top of the wall. A thicker cluster of buildings stood a bit to the west of us, which likely meant a crossing house, so we pointed our horses that way and started moving.

The trees ended at the edge of the Fallows in a line as sharp as a sword’s cut. There were a few scrubby bushes here and there in the open strip before the wall, but mostly the plants hugged the ground. And nothing in the Fallows grew higher than the eight-foot line of the wall’s top. A sort of low grass was the dominant growth, striped yellow and brown like a Kvanas’ slink. The one horse who tried a bite didn’t take a second, though the sheep grazing in small flocks seemed to like it well enough.

I had only passed the wall twice before, neither time for a mission—the goddess had rarely interfered in Other matters—but I knew to look for a crossing house, and we soon found one. It was the widest building in the little neighborhood, easily identified by the ramp that started on ground level on our left, wrapping up and around the back of the building as it climbed to the level of the wall. At one of the busier crossing points it might have had an iron gate across the base, but here there was only a wooden bar that could be easily lifted out of the way.

As we approached the base of the ramp, I called out, “Hello, the house!”

There was a bell as well, but I didn’t need it, as a plump matron stuck her head out of a second-story window before we’d quite brought the horses to a stop.

“What’s your rate for three horses and two riders, no trade goods?” I asked.

She looked us up and down, quite obviously gauging how much the market would bear by the cut of our clothes and the quality of our horses. “Five silver kalends.”

“That’s extortionist,” Faran growled in a low voice.

I agreed with her, though I didn’t much care. We had the funds, and I’d have cheerfully tossed her the coins without any argument if that wouldn’t have burned us deep into the woman’s memory. Everyone haggles.

“You’re right,” I said loudly to Faran. “Let’s move on to a house that’s in the business of border crossings instead of highway robbery.” I tugged on the reins, turning my horse’s head away from the gate.

“Three kalends,” the woman called, “and you won’t find cheaper in a hundred miles.”

“Two.” I didn’t turn back, but I didn’t ride away either.

“Three, and I’ll throw in a dinner you can eat in the saddle. . . .”

We eventually settled on two kalends and three fivers—the kalend is shaped like a five-spoked wheel and can be broken along the lines of the spokes—and no dinner. I wanted to find us an inn a bit farther west along the wall since we’d crossed well to the east of where Siri was expecting us. We’d get our dinner there. I tossed the woman the coins once we had our bargain and she reached out and pulled a rope that lifted the bar aside. We rode up the ramp, around the corner, and out onto the wall.

As I crossed the line, I felt a sort of tugging on my harness as though phantom hands had briefly grasped at the sheaths on my back, and I thought I heard the faintest echo of a metallic chime. But both things passed in an instant, and, when I asked Faran if she’d caught the noise or felt anything, she just shook her head.

We paused atop the wall for a several long beats to look at the endless line of the thing stretching away both east and west. There was something utterly inhuman about the perfection of that view. It rolled up and down with the terrain, but without any of the lumps or bumps such a wall would have had if it were made by the hands of man. The surface was as smooth as a pool of clear water in the heart of a windless day, unmarked by any line or blemish. Sure, it varied in color and pattern like a snake’s skin, but it did so with a geometric exactitude that you could have used to place the knots on the world’s most accurate measuring cord.

Within a few minutes, the horses started to stamp. Nothing that touches the top of the wall stays there. Though the magic sliding the horses along toward the edge was slow and subtle, they could clearly sense the movement. At some level, the wall didn’t want them there, and they were in ferocious agreement. So, long before I was tired of the view, we finished crossing the wall and rode down the other side of the ramp into the Sylvain.

Eight feet. It was a distance I could have easily traveled in a single jump, and yet it took us into an entirely different world. To start with, the Fallows grass on the Sylvani side was of a lusher variety, deep green shading into blue, and the horses liked that just fine. But that was the least of the changes. We let the horses graze for a little while as we tried to adjust to the shift.

Shifts, really, since
everything
was different to some degree or another, including the weather. It was noticeably cooler despite how far south we’d come, which should have made the reverse true. Clearer and sunnier, too. Most of all, things felt . . . richer. Everything was more itself, or maybe more like you imagined it ought to be. The trees in the distance were greener and stronger and more treelike. The sky was bluer, the clouds puffier; even the wind tasted more like wind should. The earth itself felt more solid and real.

You could feel the change in the ground coming up through the horses, like water rising in a fountain. It was there in the way they planted their hooves and moved their bodies, in the set of the saddle and the hang of the stirrups. The whole thing ought to have felt marvelous.