The hours went past. The sky became ashen with dusk and then grew entirely dark. Sometimes isolated villages came into view below, little sprinklings of lights, thin white rivulets of smoke curling upward. Otherwise he could no longer see anything down there. For all he knew they had already by this time passed above the Hallimalla, the great southward-flowing river that cut the continent in half. They might have gone right over the ancestral cocoon, even. But all was blackness below. Nortekku fell into a doze, and dreamed that he was wandering through a fabulous city, a place of gigantic shining towers and gleaming bridges that looped through the air without apparent means of support. In his dream he understood it to be Vengiboneeza, the one city of the Great World that had survived the Long Winter almost intact, and in which the Koshmar tribe of People, Thalarne’s ancestors, had dwelled for a few years after the Time of Going Forth. Dreaming about Vengiboneeza was nothing new for Nortekku; every architect speculated about Vengiboneeza, trying to reconstruct in his imagination how it must have looked. The descriptions left of it by those who had seen it while it still existed led one to think that its buildings were unparalleled for beauty and brilliance of design, crystalline cloud-piercing towers, arrayed on grand boulevards. But nothing remained of the place now. The Hjjks had occupied it after the People had moved on south to found Yissou and Dawinno, two centuries back, and in the war that soon followed between the Hjjks and the People the great Koshmar warrior Thu-Kimnibol had pounded those priceless ruins into oblivion, using potent Great World weapons that his brother, the famed wise man Hresh, had obtained for him by excavating ancient sites. Those two, Thu-Kimnibol and Hresh, were directly ancestral to Thalarne, Nortekku knew. He wondered whether her passion for archaeology was in some way a means of atoning for the destruction of great Vengiboneeza that her famous ancestors had brought about.
The airwagon made another stop, and another. Another meal was served. Nortekku slept again, and when he awakened the morning sunlight was in the sky and the wagon was landing once more.
Another brief stop, he thought. We will go on and on, for days, for weeks, for months, until this machine finally brings us to Bornigrayal. If ever it does.
But no: this place was Bornigrayal, even now, here, actually, truly, journey’s end. Rumpled and blinking, he joined the line of passengers leaving the wagon, descended the staircase that took him to the runway, shaded his eyes against the sudden flinty brightness of the day. This was the northernmost of the Five Cities of the Eastern Coast, and it was cold here, very cold, colder even than in Yissou. The Bornigrayal sky-harbor was situated practically at the shore of what must surely be the Eastern Ocean. A ferocious brutal wind, knife-sharp, came roaring in off the dull gray surface of that immeasurable body of water. The chill was like a bit of the Long Winter, long after its time, obstinately lingering here in these high latitudes. That wind cut right through Nortekku’s dense covering of fur and struck at the skin beneath, so that he began to shiver. None of the other debarking passengers seemed to be affected by the cold, not just the Hjjks, who were impervious to cold, but the various People too. Yissouans, naturally, were accustomed to hard winters, and so also must be the passengers who had boarded in mid-flight. But Nortekku had grown up in golden Dawinno of the balmy breezes, where true winter never came, where the only distinction between one season and another was that during the winter months the days were shorter and there was occasionally a little rain. For love of Thalarne he had subjected himself to a winter in Yissou, and now, it seemed, still for love of Thalarne, he was going to have to endure even worse weather than that.
Carriages were waiting to take the arriving passengers to the Bornigrayal proper, which could be seen against the western horizon as a distant row of white flat-topped towers glinting in the hard morning light. On the eve of his departure Nortekku had mentioned to Prince Vuldimin that the merchant Khardakhor had advised him to seek out the Dawinnan ambassador, Samnibolon, upon his arrival, and Vuldimin had at once given him a letter of introduction. The ambassador was, he said, an old friend of his. It was amazing how everybody of any importance in the two city-states of the Western Coast turned out to be an old friend of Vuldimin’s, if not an actual kinsman. But it should hardly be surprising that close ties of kinship would unite most of the highborn of both cities, since their ancestors had all come out of just two cocoons, the Koshmar one and the Beng, and Koshmars and Bengs had intermarried steadily since the union of the two tribes in the early days of the Going Forth.
“I should warn you,” Prince Vuldimin had said, “in case you’re not already aware of it, that Prince Samnibolon is connected by marriage to the family of the Princess Silina. Quite probably he doesn’t know a thing about your unfortunate little interaction with them. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to mention it, if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” said Nortekku. “Not to him, not to anyone, not ever.”
Prince Samnibolon was a small-framed man, gray-furred, whose office in the embassy quarter of the city was as elegantly appointed as any prince’s chamber should be, with painted scrolls on the wall and glass cases that contained the sort of small Great World artifacts that so many highborns were fond of collecting. The ambassador sat at a circular desk fashioned of strips of rare woods, raised on a gleaming bronze dais. Nortekku knew him to be a member of the House of Hresh, Dawinno’s dominant family, who held most of the highest posts in Dawinno’s government. He was reputed to be a suave and subtle man, a diplomat of diplomats. Through the Hresh connection he was related in some way to Thalarne.
The ambassador skimmed quickly through Nortekku’s letter of introduction and said, “Building a new palace for Vuldimin, are you? He does have a taste for comfort and luxury, that man!” Then, with a knowing smile: “But if I had to live in a ghastly place like Yissou, I suppose that I would too.—You’ve been up north for quite some time, then?”
“Most of this past year. I bring you greetings from your friend the merchant Khardakhor, who is currently in Yissou. It was at his suggestion that I came to you.”
Samnibolon delicately raised one eyebrow in a brief show of surprise. He would know, certainly, about the bitter commercial rivalry between Khardakhor and the elder Nortekku. But he said nothing of that now, merely murmuring a word or two about hearty old rough-hewn Khardakhor and moving smoothly on to ask what it was that had brought Nortekku to Bornigrayal. To which Nortekku responded that he had come to have a small role in an archaeological project under the direction of Thalarne Koshmar of Yissou’s Institute of Scientific Study. She was currently here in Bornigrayal on a matter of family business, he said; and, since certain unexpected problems now had arisen regarding their project, he needed to locate her and apprise her of the new developments. It was a story that he had carefully rehearsed all morning and he delivered it unfalteringly.
“Ah, Thalarne!” the ambassador said. “One of the great ornaments of the Yissouan branch of my family, so everyone says.”
“You know her, do you?”
“Alas, no. I haven’t had the pleasure. But I’ve heard many good things of her: said to be a most attractive woman—most! And brilliant and learned as well. As no doubt I hardly need to tell you.” Samnibolon pointed out that as a citizen of Yissou she was outside his official sphere of responsibility, and therefore she would not have had any reason to contact him since her arrival. So he could not confirm that she was actually in Bornigrayal at this very time, but if Nortekku wished him to make inquiries about her at the Yissouan Embassy, he definitely would. Nortekku did so wish. He gave the ambassador the address of the hostelry where he had found lodgings, and, after a few pleasant minutes of exchanging gossip about certain high figures of Dawinno who were known to them both—Nortekku noticed that throughout the interview Samnibolon had made no mention of Nortekku the elder; he must be aware of their estrangement—he took his leave.