House War - The Hidden City Part 31

She walked in silence for another long moment, taking the steps as if they were magic-and illusion, at that-and could disappear at any second, dropping her sudden weight. But she stopped once or twice to touch them; to feel their cold surface against her palms. To judge for herself the truth of his words.

"How far down does this go?"

"I don't know. You can count the steps if you like; they're not much more than a foot in height, possibly less. This is a gentle incline."

She counted for a while, and gave up. Counting was something done on a slate, with numbers; counting these was like losing the experience, or rather, like flattening it, like making it something it wasn't.

The rope was a slack thing between them. "Rath?"

"Yes?"

"How is it that no one discovered the maze before you?"

"I don't honestly know."

"I mean, there must be other people who've come into bas.e.m.e.nts or chutes before."

"Possibly. But when people fall into something, their usual concern is to get out."

It felt wrong, to Jewel. The wrong answer. She was uneasy here, and couldn't say why. But she didn't mention it precisely because she couldn't, and Rath would ask. The feeling was strong, and it made her neck p.r.i.c.kle; goose b.u.mps, she thought.

The last step opened up onto a flat causeway that was visibly cracked in many places. It was gray, in the magelight. She thought it would be gray in any light. But it felt safe to her, and she relaxed; it was good to have her feet on solid ground. Even if that ground was so far beneath the ground she was used to, bodies didn't make it this deep.

The thought disturbed her in a different way. "Are people buried here?" She asked him. "I mean, in the ground, not in cenotaphs?" She forced herself not to add, you know, the ones you rob.

His face in magelight, he turned, lifting a pale brow. "You ask the oddest questions," he said at last. "But I think there must be bodies buried here. You've seen some remains, and this was a city. All cities have their dead."

"Do all cities demand them?" she asked. The words left her lips as if they were foreign, and he looked at her oddly. She realized she'd asked the question in Torra.

Was surprised when Rath answered her anyway, although he answered in Weston. So Rath understood Torra, even if he had never chosen to speak it.

"All cities," he said softly. "But I think especially this one. Do you know your bardic lays?"

She shook her head. "We didn't see too many bards."

"Most bards wouldn't know the lays of which I speak," he replied. "And I speak mostly to myself; it's a habit. It's seldom that I have company here that is not my own." Her hand was still in his, and he tightened his grip; it was meant to rea.s.sure. Or she thought it was.

They walked across the stone together, and it opened up into a darkness that was utterly unlike Averalaan at night. Here, the magelight was dwarfed, as it had been the one other time she'd followed him. She saw a building ahead of them, and stopped.

Her mouth was a half-open O of surprise.

"Yes," he told her quietly. "This is a part of the undercity that you did not see the first time you visited. Do you know what that is?"

She shook her head.

Before it, steps that were the length of a city block beckoned, and above those, recessed on a flat that held square pedestals, were four statues. Some were headless, or missing limbs; some were hewn, as if by stone sword, at waist, leaving only legs, some portion of torso, nothing to identify them. Funny, how faces mattered. But they seemed sentinels of a bygone age, and they stood between what had once been doors. The frames themselves were arched and came to a point three times Jewel's meager height. Maybe four. She looked up; they seemed tiered, these doorways, and if wood had once graced them, nothing did now; they opened up into blackness, as if they had always been open arches.

"Into this place," he said softly, "I do not travel."

And as she edged toward the stairs, she felt it: a subtle p.r.i.c.kle of skin, a sharp unease. "Me either," she whispered, leaning into his back, almost unaware of the motion until she felt him stiffen. She pulled away.

Rath did not say another word, but led her past it, the magestone now cupped slightly in his palm. The city was dead; empty-but he s.h.i.+elded his light as if he himself did not believe those words.

But it was here, and only here, that that was true.

"The city," he told her softly, "was not uniformly buried; there are buildings that might have been palaces, and what remains of those are crypts. There are others that might have been bathhouses-at least judging by the placement of the fountains. Homes of the powerful. Come," he told her, and she followed. Not, given that he held her hand, that she had much choice.

But this was his place. There were streets, although it was odd to see streets with a ceiling, no matter how high, odder yet to see them and feel so strongly the absence of the magelights that were scattered so precisely throughout the city, no matter which holding they occupied.

"Where are we going?"

"I believe," he told her gently, "that it was once the home of either artists or the maker-born."

He turned corners, and she tried to mark them, to hold the direction of the turning in memory. To Rath, memory was important; possibly the most important of the attributes that she lacked. Here, just the two of them again, she wanted his approval.

As much as she had ever wanted her Oma's, perhaps because at least with Oma, she was guaranteed a sharp affection. Rath guaranteed nothing.

It was damp, here; the rains must have a way of seeping through dirt, through the closed sky. "The tunnels," he told her, "are extensive. It's only in a few places, such as these, that they open up into the remnants of the old city."

"What city was it?" she asked softly.

He said nothing for a long moment. At last, he said, "I do not know the name. I will not ask it; the Order of Knowledge might have some answer, or perhaps the bards-but to gain their insight, I would have to give too much away. Remember this."

She nodded, even though he couldn't see it.

He paused at last in front of a building that was so tall its upper floors vanished in darkness. She wondered if they were still there, or if they had been crushed when whatever cataclysm that had swallowed this place had occurred.

Otherwise, it was a structure that almost dwarfed the street; if it had had grounds, the way the fancy manors did, someone had built roads across it. The front of it, the facade as Rath called it, was flat, and seemed to be almost seamless stone; what seams there were were like fault lines, cracks that looked like webbing or roots as they traveled down the length of wall.

There was a large door. Easily the largest door that Jewel had ever seen-except, of course, for the absence of door itself. Stone was molded and formed, and ran from ground upward, ending in an arch that, unlike the peaked architraves of the other building, was also composed of a series of smaller stones. In the center of that arch, one of these stones was larger than the rest, and a symbol was engraved upon it; it glinted in the magelight.

"Is it gold?" she asked him softly.

"Gold," he said with a shrug, as if gold were of no consequence, "or magic. From this vantage, it's impossible to tell, and I've never tried to climb the facade. Not everything that seems solid is." He paused and turned toward her. "From here," he said quietly, "take nothing. I have items that we can sell."

"Is there anything to take?"

"Much," he replied, "but not without effort, and the sale of it would be costly in ways you cannot imagine." He hesitated, and then shook his head. "I take," he said quietly, "things which might possibly have been pa.s.sed from father to son for generations; things that the poorest of the people in the holdings might conceivably own, in ignorance of their value. Or things, like the stone, which might be found at the entrance ways to the maze itself.

"The maze has many uses, and if it were to be discovered, one of them, at least, would be gone."

She waited.

"I travel, here. I can pa.s.s unseen by those it is better to avoid. I can move from the thirty-second to the heart of the Common and back, should I desire to do so with no witnesses at all."

She didn't ask him when that might happen. It was wisest not to know. But he surprised her. "I will teach you what I can, Jay. And you will find that the ease of pa.s.sage is not without its use. This is today's lesson, and I have neglected your tutelage almost shamefully of late; I have been much occupied. Are you ready?"

She nodded.

"Then come. Enter the stone garden."

And he led her through the open door-if indeed it was that-and into the darkness beyond.

Chapter Ten.

THE STONE GARDEN, he called it, and if Jewel had wondered why-and she had-the wonder s.h.i.+fted, becoming something else entirely. She had heard of rock gardens before, and they made no sense-how did one grow rocks? And why would one bother? You couldn't eat rock, after all, and it wasn't particularly pretty.

But this rock?

She reached out to touch a trailing vine. Felt the hard, smooth flat of a leaf beneath her fingers as dust came away in her hands. The trellis upon which these vines grew was rock as well, but rock with grain, as if it were a testament to wood, to things that lived and died.

She saw leaves, and bowing stems, things without color, and she almost heard the wind through them; felt a hint of a sunlight that would never again reach this place.

Rath let her hand go, and she wandered almost without thought; here, she found flowers, whole flower beds, each flower different; some budding, some blooming, and some at the end of blossom, petals almost falling from round centers. She found roses, but they were odd roses indeed: trees, trunks thick and knotty, branches, thorns still sharp, just above her head. Touching them, she exhaled; she blew dust in a cloud past her lips, left blood in its wake. None of these things were alive; they were all stone, although not the same kind of stone; some were smooth and some porous, and in the light of a day that would never come, she thought the subtle shades of gray would have hinted at color in a way that not even living flowers could.

"Makers," she whispered.

"I think it must be so," he replied, his voice muted and hushed. She turned to look at him then; found him close to her shoulder, where the light he carried might illuminate this hidden wonder. She had rarely seen Rath in any state of reverence, and perhaps reverence was the wrong word-but it was d.a.m.n close.

"Even the least of these," he told her quietly, "would be almost beyond price, could you pick them. But they would never grace this garden again; there is no life here, and no renewal. It is, and it is what it was meant to be: eternal. Only the living dies," he added softly.

There was a path, and he led her along it, but they walked slowly; they had to. She paused, often in shadow, and light came as he returned to her side, to see what had caught her eye, and what, her hand. She could not help but touch the plants that had been carved in stone. Could not believe that they had, in fact, been carved; she thought they must have been shaped, and grown, by the hand of an Artisan.

"Is it all like this?" she asked him as she rose for the fiftieth time.

"I cannot say. Much of it, yes. Understand, Jay, that this is a work that affects each witness in different ways; what you see and what I see are at once the same and utterly unlike. I have seen gardens that might surpa.s.s this one in color and form; that might be considered the more beautiful by those with an eye to appreciate it. I would be surprised if you've seen more than flower boxes."

She couldn't argue with him. It was true. But this stone garden made her long for a sight of the grounds beyond the gates in the richer holdings.

"Who lived here?" she asked.

"I told you-"

"I mean, were they good people?"

He froze, and the look he gave her, softened by magelight, was an odd one. "Good?" he said, as if it were a foreign word.

"Good as in not evil."

He reached out to touch a rose petal. "Does it matter?" he replied at last. "I think the men and women who lived in this place and created this garden were not concerned with good or evil; they were concerned with beauty, with truth rather than reality; they made something they hoped would last."

She said, "It matters."

"Why?"

And shrugged. "I don't know. I don't think I could do this-this garden, this work-if people were starving outside my doors. Or worse."

"Why? People will always be starving. If not directly outside your doors, then beyond them. People," he added, letting his hand fall away, "will always be dying. And if you stop your life's work because of them, what work will you ever do?"

She shrugged again. Thinking of Arann and Lefty. "I don't know. Could I make that my life's work?"

"To know?"

She shook her head. "To save them." She saw the stiffness in his shoulders, in the sudden straightening of his neck, and wondered what she said that was so wrong.

"It won't last," he told her, voice cold.

"Neither will I. My father didn't. My mother didn't. My Oma didn't. Does it matter if it lasts?"

"Can you ask that, while you stand here, in this garden?"

She was silent.

"Can you understand that you can spend the whole of your life fighting-both literally and figuratively-to achieve something as fragile as peace? That, having given your life to it, you will lose it, either before your death, or for certain, after it? What will your life have meant, then?"

"Rath-"

"No. I will not speak more on this." He was not speaking to her. She knew it. And wondered about whoever it was he was speaking to. Her Oma had told her that the past was like a whole other country, with different rules, and no way of changing anything. She saw that in him now. It was the first time she had ever seen it so clearly.

"It will mean," she said distinctly, "that I'll have tried."

"And failed," he said bitterly.

She bent, now, before a perfect stone blossom. Gray, dusty, webbed; she touched it, and the webs clung to her fingers, becoming part of her. "These were never alive," she told him.

"I'm aware of that," was his cool reply.

"But if the person who made them had never seen life, they would never exist all. They don't grow. They don't change. They can't change," she added, "anything."

"Beauty can change much."

"Depends," she said, rising as well. "Depends what you find beautiful." But even saying it, even defiant, she felt a pang as he led her away from the stone garden. Because it was beautiful, and in a way that life could never be: It was perfect.

"And maybe," she continued, although he was no longer speaking, "if people saw people try, they'd try, too. Maybe then we'd have something like the garden, but alive."