“They’re gone,” she said over her shoulder.
Paithan had difficulty keeping up with her. “That’s what the last group said when they left. You know what happened to them.”
“No, I don’t,” Aleatha retorted, walking quickly through the empty streets. Paithan caught up. “Yes, you do. You heard the screams. We all heard them.”
“A trick!” Aleatha tossed her head. “A trick to deceive us, trick us into staying in here. The others are probably out there feasting on... on all sorts of wonderful things and laughing at us...” Despite herself, her voice quavered. “Cook said there was a ship out there. She and her children found it and they flew away from this dreadful place...”
Paithan opened his mouth to argue, shut it again. Aleatha knew the truth. She knew well enough what had really happened that terrible night. She and Roland, Paithan and Rega and Drugar, the dwarf, had stood on the steps, watching anxiously as Cook and the others left the safety of the citadel and entered the distant jungle. It was the emptiness and the loneliness that drove them to risk leaving the safety of the citadel’s walls. That and the constant quarreling, the arguing over dwindling food supplies. Dislike and distrust had strengthened into fear and abhorrence.
None of them had seen or heard signs of the tytans—the terrifying giants who roamed Pryan—for a long, long time. They all assumed—everyone except Paithan—that the creatures had left, roamed off. Paithan knew that the tytans were still there, knew because he’d been reading a book he’d found in a dusty old library in the citadel.
The book was handwritten in elven—a rather old-fashioned and outdated elven—and was illustrated with lots of pictures, one reason Paithan had chosen it. Other books in the library were written in elven, but they had more writing than pictures. He snored just looking at them.
Some type of godlike beings who called themselves “Sartan” were the ones who had—so they claimed—brought the elves and humans and dwarves to this world.
“Heretical nonsense,” his sister Gallic would have termed it. The world of Pryan—world of fire—was one of four worlds, purportedly. Paithan didn’t believe that part, having found a diagram of the supposed “universe”—four balls hanging suspended in midair, as if some juggler had tossed them up and then walked off and left them.
“What kind of fools do they take us for?” he wondered. A green and lush tropical world whose suns, located in the heart of the hollow planet, shone constantly, Pryan was—according to the book—intended to provide light and food to the other three worlds.
As for the light, Paithan readily conceded that he had more light than he knew what to do with. Food was a different matter. Admittedly the jungle was full of food, if he wanted to fight the tytans for it. And how was he supposed to send it to these other worlds anyway?
“Throw it at them, I guess,” said Paithan, considerably tickled at the thought of flinging pua fruit into the universe. Really, these Sartan must think they were all idiots to believe a tale like this!
These Sartan had built this citadel. And, according to them, they had built a whole lot more citadels. Paithan found this idea intriguing. He could almost believe it. He’d seen their lights shining in the sky. According to the book, the Sartan had brought the elves, humans, and dwarves to live with them in the citadels.
Paithan believed that, too, mainly because he could see evidence with his own eyes of the fact that others like himself had once inhabited this city. There were buildings built the way elves liked them, with lots of gewgaws and curlicues and useless columns and arched windows. And there were buildings meant to house humans—solid and dull and square. And there were even tunnels down below, made for dwarves. Paithan knew because Drugar had taken him down there once, right after they had first entered the city, when the five of them had still been speaking to each other.
The citadel was very beautiful and practical, and the person who had written this book appeared to be baffled by the fact that it hadn’t worked. Wars had started. The elves, humans, and dwarves (the writer called them “mensch”) had refused to live in peace, had begun to fight each other.
Paithan, however, understood perfectly. There were only two elves, two humans, and one dwarf living in the city now, and these five couldn’t get along. He could imagine what it must have been like back then—whenever “then” was. The mensch (Paithan came to hate that word) populations had grown at an alarming rate. Unable to control the ever expanding numbers, the Sartan (may Orn shrivel their ears and any other part that seemed suitable) had created fearsome beings they called tytans, which were apparently supposed to act as nursemaids to the mensch and also work in the citadels.
The light beaming from the citadel’s Star Chambers was so bright that any ordinary mortal who looked on it would be blinded, and so the tytans were created without eyes. To compensate for the handicap (and to control them better), the Sartan had provided the tytans with strong telepathic skills; the tytans could communicate by thought alone. The Sartan had also given the tytans very limited intelligence (such strong and powerful beings would be a threat if they were too smart) and had also endowed them with their rune-magic or something like that.
Paithan wasn’t much on reading; he had tended to skim over the boring parts. The plan had worked, apparently. The tytans roamed the streets, and the elves, humans, and dwarves were too intimidated by the monsters’ presence to fight. All well and good. But what had happened after that? Why did the mensch leave the cities and venture into the jungle? How did the tytans get loose? And where were these Sartan now and what did they intend to do about this mess?
Paithan didn’t have the answers, because at that point the book ended. The elf was miffed. He’d gotten interested in the story in spite of himself and wanted to know how it turned out. But the book didn’t tell him. It looked as if it had intended to, since there were more pages bound into it, but these pages were blank.
He’d read enough, however, to know that the tytans had been created in the citadels, and so it seemed more than likely that they should be drawn to the citadels. Especially since the tytans kept asking everyone they met (before they bashed their brains out) questions such as “Where is the citadel?” Once the tytans found the citadel, they wouldn’t be likely to leave it. That’s what he’d told the others.
“I’m staying right here, inside these walls. The tytans are still out there, hiding in the jungle, waiting for us. Mark my words,” he’d said. And he’d been right. Horribly right. He would sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, thinking he heard the screams of the dying out in the jungle, beyond the walls.
Paithan had refused to go with Cook and the others. And because he refused to go, Rega—Roland’s sister and Paithan’s lover—had refused to go. And because Rega had refused to go, Roland had decided to stay. Or perhaps it was because Aleatha—Paithan’s sister—had refused to go that Roland had decided to stay. He said it was because of Rega, but his eyes kept darting to Aleatha as he spoke. No one was certain quite why Aleatha stayed, except that she was fond of her brother and it would have taken a great deal of effort to leave. As for Drugar, the dwarf, he stayed because he was given to know that he wasn’t welcome to join the party that was leaving. Not that he was particularly welcome among those who stayed behind, but they would never say as much to him aloud, since he was the one who had saved them all from being devoured by the dragon.[27] The dwarf did what he wanted anyway and kept his own counsel about it, rarely talking to any of them. But apparently Drugar agreed with Paithan, because the dour dwarf had shown no desire to leave the citadel, and when the screaming began he had simply stroked his beard and nodded his head, as if he’d been expecting it. Paithan thought about all this and sighed and put his arm around his sister’s shoulders.