Black rain had trickled over the city, ashes and tears. Dead birds also came down. It was a season of fallings, birds and rain and tiles, and strength. The wave, too, had slipped away. It took with it, back to the ocean, many of the treasures of the city. In return, the wave had sprinkled the land with marine keepsakes. Fish were in the trees. Weeds wrapped the uprights of doors and embraced the legs of arches. But Saardsinmey was no longer a city, a built place. It had become a geography, a place of escarpments and jagged standing stones.
Very occasionally there was the oddest, least conscionable, event. Something living might be seen moving through the city, or heard calling out there. These happenings were infrequent.
Beautiful and pristine, her masts precise, long flanks tidy with oar-ports shut, her prow pointed by a gilded Vardish lion that blazed in the strange light, the ship lay at anchor on the roof of the Zarduk temple, almost forty-five feet in the air.
Below, aside from the massive outer walls, and their girdling pillars the width of ten men around, little of the temple remained. But it was, nevertheless, a marker in a desert, for beneath its stair, strewn with freakish debris, nothing else had stood in a radius of thirty streets.
“The hand of Corrah,” said Chacor. “Or some god they offended.”
He stared in disbelief and dismay at a dead sea-thing, a dark blue bladder with its eyes sunken in, and half the size of a man’s body. It was automatic to measure that, for a man lay beside it, a Zakorian priest of the temple. The wave had broken his arms and squashed out his face with his soul, even as it battered the sea-beast against the pillar.
Chacor was full of horror, and abject depression.
A man darted from the temple. He was wet and filthy and carried a sack. He came at the dead priest like a rat and tried to pull a golden wristlet from him. Chacor struck the looter flat, drawing his dagger as he did so. The Alisaarian looked at Chacor, at the dagger, clearly muddled. “Something to you, was he? That won’t help him now. Go on then. You have it.” Chacor sprang toward the looter, ready to knife him. The looter, sack held tight, sprinted away, between the hills of patchwork dripping masonry, from which bodies hung, and skeins of hair like weed and weed like hair. . . . How had he survived, that Alisaarian? Corrah knew. Some quirk of destiny, like Chacor’s own.
The sea had smitten the tomb of Panduv like a colossal hand, not a fist, a woman’s blow, open-palmed.
All light died. That was the augury. One expected to be next.
Rung face down, bruised by those damnable carvings of a dancer’s vanity, Chacor heard rather than saw the walls giving way. The water poured through and filled his mouth. He thought, formlessly, that this was a disgusting way to die.
He came to himself, soaked and cold, puking up the sea, and then to realize someone was helping him, one of the soldiers. Happiness that another man was alive with him made Chacor cry. The soldier had the kindness to pretend that this was only the sickness affecting his eyes. In Alisaar it was beneath a man to weep. In Corhl, as in Zakoris, it earned a boy over six years a flogging.
The soldiers, they had all survived, had got out of the tomb by use of the door mechanism. Three of the Shalians had been killed. The rest had taken their bodies away, down to the temple, if anything was left of it. Everyone else stood on the slope of an alien land, mud and muck, minced bushes, branches piled as if for a bonfire, and various rubble. In parts, a tomb jutted from the unrecognizable vista. Houses of death, they had weathered death better than fifty thousand houses of the living.
The light was appropriately hell-light, now scarlet, now sporadically phased by black clouds and dirty syrupy rain that had a foul odor. It occluded most things, and wholly masked the view of the city, a blessing, perhaps.
The soldiers meant to go down into Saardsinmey—they still named it that, the havoc below: Report to barracks. They did not seem to question it would be there. On the other hand, the Guardian’s palace and adjacent buildings had been erected with much care and cash. It was impossible to detect anything from up here. Except look. That was the Zarduk temple, by Rom’s teeth, drifting in and out of the murk, and something glinting on the roof—a beacon maybe—
“Where’s the Lydian?” said Chacor abruptly.
Some of the men had already gone off to the Shalian fane, to see if they could find any of their mounts alive. They were coming back now, mountless, with grim faces. Chacor had thought the Swordsman might be with them.
“One court and one wall standing,” said the first soldier to reach the captain. “Our Rom trod on their goddess good and proper. They’re making a pyre for their mates, trying to find something dry enough to bum. I said, row out to the fire-mountain. I shouldn’t have said it. But Rom’s bleeding guts, there must be thousands dead down there—”
“You can see a bit, from their wall,” said another. “It’s a shambles.”
“The Lydian,” said Chacor.
“What? Oh, to the stadium, could be. He’s long gone.”
Presently the soldiers got themselves into pedantic military order, and marched off, sliding and out of step in the slime. They would be wanted in the city. They had welded themselves to this idea.
But Chacor had no inspiration at all. He decided eventually to start after the Swordsman, or at least in that direction. He did not know why, or ponder why, any more then he knew or pondered why he kept glancing back, through the red-black rain, at the hill and the tomb where the white woman still lay, her bed awash with trapped salt water.
He could not find the stadium. He could not find anything. Enormous stacks of stone and plaster went up, some with caves in them. In the caves were chairs and colonnades, barbers’ shops, bread-ovens, gleaming mirrors, dead bodies. Sometimes a tree or pillar had been carried up and pushed through a wall. Sometimes the trees and pillars had stayed put. He saw dogs and hiddrax, and once a horse, hanging by their necks from boughs or high cornices, as if in a knacker’s yard. He saw too many such things.
Once he heard, or thought he did, a woman shouting and calling. He tried to reach her but could not shift the mounds of marble, the great fallen arch with its headless statues. And finally anyway, he could not hear her any more.
When he gave up on the stadium, and so on the Lydian, he got to the Zarduk temple and observed religiously the grace of the stranded, crewless ship. For the first time it had occurred to Ghacor some god had done all this, and that it would be clever to be gone. The looter, once he had vanished, became unreal. No one else seemed living. A couple of times Chacor was misled—a woman, her hair fluttering in a gust of cindery breeze, the glimpse of light on an ornament . . .
Then suddenly, he found Five Mile Street.
It was easy, in a way, for the sea had cut through it as through a canyon, mostly unimpeded, and so left its wide long shape, the margins only spoiled by debris, pools of water, and fantastic flotsam.
Chacor walked then, looking exactly before him, and climbed up and over where he had to. When he heard things he took no notice. Twice, there were hoofs. They echoed, striking every new hollow, whipping back from a hundred sounding boards, until a phalanx of riders raced through the sky. But there was no point in attending to it. Something seemed to be burning down ahead, near where the docks had been. Probably it was some fire that the wave had not quenched, or a weird reflection of the volcano, which was now itself barely visible through smoke and umbra. Even so, a few ships might have remained, coasting the wave, as had the vessel on the temple, these with their crews living.
A man moved out from the wreckage on to Five Mile Street, about a hundred yards away. Chacor, fooled too often, would not look. When the man waited, Chacor kept on, although, recollecting the other meeting with the looter, he drew his knife.