It took her almost an hour to cross the city, ever downward along the winding, dropping streets. Finally she came to the stone ruins that stood pale in the starlight, where once had risen a sanctuary of the old and happier civilization. Here, once, all travelers had been welcome. Now, few came, for the dark abhorred this place and had marked the ruins as forbidden. The un-men could not breach the magic of a sanctuary to enter it, but the folk of the city might have entered had not the dark laid a heavy spell to keep them away. Few folk would cross the spell’s sense of cold threat, even to save themselves from the dark’s mind-rotting evil. The resistance troops crossed, those few humans strong enough, determined enough to fight the dark’s powers. The power of the sanctuary helped them keep their minds free.
Animals could always cross the dark’s barrier. The speaking animals did not succumb to the wiles of the dark as did humans. They were in perfect tune with the powers of the sanctuary, taking of its strength and protection to help them battle the un-men. Un-men, undead, unliving, the names of the dark were several. Soul buzzards, Kiri thought, for they thirsted after the carrion of men’s souls.
Kiri’s skin prickled and something cold clutched at her heart as she slipped in among the broken, fallen walls. But the strength of the sanctuary was there, steadying her. She stood for a moment inside, to see that she wasn’t followed, before she moved in to where three large stones tilted up to shelter a black hole in the earth. Here she went down on hands and knees.
She slipped down into a hole that had once been part of a larger grotto. Now it was an animal cave, warm and strong-smelling. Here she would give her report about Prince Tebmund and his wonderful horses.
She had no idea what her meager information would finally add up to. She wondered if she wanted to know. Yet regardless of her own misgivings, she knew she must learn more than this. She must seek Prince Tebmund out, perhaps become useful to him in some way so he would talk to her. Kiri’s gift, the gift she and her father shared, told her Prince Tebmund was important—either as a friend or as a dangerous foe.
Chapter 5
The cave of the great cat was empty. Kiri huddled down inside the door to wait where she could see out across the ruin but remain hidden herself. She could see stars gleaming above the rooftops. She supposed Elmmira was hunting. She had much news for her, for besides the arrival of Prince Tebmund and his horses, there was more frightening information. The dark leaders from the north planned to attack Bukla and Edain very soon, using Dacia as their base. King Sardira would stay in the background as usual, furnishing the dark with troops, horses, food, and weapons forged in his mines. Always seeming neutral, he had recently made a state visit to Edain in the name of friendship. Soon he would destroy Edain.
It had taken Kiri nine long sessions lying on her stomach, pressed into a thin attic space above the king’s private chambers, to gather information about the attack. It came by bits and pieces as runners arrived by barge from the neighboring continents, to stand sweating and uneasy in the purple satin room. The king’s captains took their orders in his chambers, too, before the blazing fire, sipping mithnon from little amethyst goblets, their voices rising clearly up to Kiri’s hiding place.
Kiri sighed with satisfaction, knowing she could tell Elmmira exactly how many troops Quazelzeg expected King Sardira to furnish and how many barges to transport them and the horses across the inlet to Bukla and Edain. She knew where the weapons would be hidden and where grain and fodder had been stored. The most frightening news was that Quazelzeg himself would make his base for the attacks in Sardira’s palace. The thought of the dark overlord there in the palace all winter terrified her.
Some of the dark leaders were human men, turned irredeemably to evil. Quazelzeg was not. He was soulless, manlike in shape only, thriving on human degradation. She had watched him twice as she lay in the alcove above the king’s ceiling, sick with fear of him. His face had the waxy pallor of too-tight skin drawn over heavy bones. It was a face that never smiled or changed expression. His body was like some terrible machine—colorless and evil. The un-men were not native to Tirror, but had come long ago into this world through the Castle of Doors. They were lured here by a darkness that had spread through Tirror, slowly at first, calling to other evil to come to join it. Quazelzeg came, and the terrors of mind slavery began.
Quazelzeg came here to Dacia sometimes with his captains for the bloody stadium gaming and to take the favors of the city. His consorts, like Quazelzeg, were chill succubi sucking at the life of the city, drinking in human pain and lust and the suffering of tortured animals.
It was harder for the speaking animals. They had the ability to anticipate the future, like humans, and so they could also anticipate pain and death, whereas the mute animals could not. The speaking animals feared threats to their kin, to their young, and to their human friends.
It was the speaking animals, the great cats and the wolves, who, too often, were pitted against drug-frenzied human prisoners in the stadium games for the entertainment of Quazelzeg and his kind.
Alone in the cave, Kiri frightened herself so much thinking of the bloodless faces of the unliving that she crawled into Elmmira’s tangled bed of straw and refuse. She huddled there, shaken and desolate, wishing life could be different, wishing there were no dark invaders and that Papa was home. More than anything, she wished no human would cleave to the darkness, for if they would not, the dark leaders could never win.
She was half asleep when Elmmira came. She leaped up, her knife drawn, before she saw the shape of the great cat against the sky. Elmmira padded in looking smug, with a brace of rabbits dangling and a muffled murmur in greeting. She dropped the rabbits, purred, and rubbed against Kiri.
“You are tense and nervy, Kiri wren. You have been thinking troubled thoughts.”
Kiri sheathed her knife, put her arms around Elmmira’s silky neck, and pressed her cheek against the great cat’s muscled shoulder. Elmmira’s warmth was strengthening. Her whiskers scratched Kiri’s face, and her muzzle smelled of blood, from the rabbits. Elmmira’s rumbling purr shook them both.
“There was good hunting tonight, Kiri wren. Take two rabbits home to your Gram.”
“I will,” Kiri said gratefully. “We’ve had no meat in days.” The palace kitchen was freer with bread and beans and boiled vegetables than with the fresh meat that the cooks guarded closely. Sometimes Kiri hunted with a bow among the rubble of the city for rabbits or blackbirds, but so did many others, and game was scarce. The great cats were the only hunters who could generally be sure of a meal. They prowled the night-dark streets fading into shadow away from humankind and roamed the rocky coastal cliffs, denning there, taking seabirds. Elmmira’s own cave led by secret ways to the sea-cliff dens some quarter mile away, and so to the main part of the ancient sanctuary of Gardel-Cloor. The great cats hunted inland, too, taking wheat rats and hares from the gardens and farms. They lived on Dacia as shadows, moving at night unseen, avoiding with care the traps Sardira sometimes set for them.
Only Kiri and those trusted in the underground could find the cats when they stole away to Gardel-Cloor.
The sanctuary had once been busy with travelers, speaking animals and humans resting together in comfort and warmth. But that was in the old times, the times that could never be again, the times of the singing dragons. There were no singing dragons anymore. When Kiri thought of dragons, she felt as if a part of herself was missing. Yet she had never known dragons, and never would. The dragons were gone from Tirror.
The dragons had held, in their magic, the ultimate powers of the natural world, that world of creatures that knew no corruption. Now the only link between humans and those powers was the speaking animals. Kiri studied Elmmira’s gentle bloody paws. Elmmira did not kill for pleasure—no animal did. She killed only for food. There was no evil in the natural world; that was why the dark leaders hated the speaking creatures. Kiri snuggled close to Elmmira’s warm side and began to tell her of the invasion plans.