Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [75]
They were all dead now, the Horsekin conquerors, wiped out by their very victory. After the city had fallen, and its few surviving defenders been tortured to death, the Kin had thrown the corpses of friend and foe alike into the harbor to rot. They settled down in Rinbaladelan to live in a city for the first time in their lives, crowded into the ruins of their conquest with broken sewers and not the faintest idea of the need for same. They’d never seen a ship before, either, and harbors were a mystery to them—except for fishing in. The sea had given them a fine crop that next year, with the suppurating dead to feed it.
It had been an interesting little plague, all in all. Evandar smiled as he remembered the dying of the Hordes, the Meradan, as the elves had termed their enemies. The women and children died first, crawling on hands and knees while their swollen bellies poisoned them. Later, Evandar walked among the dying warriors and taunted them as they lay puking and sweating in their stolen jewels. The survivors of the first plague fled north to infect the Horsekin living in the ruins of Bravelmelim, who had died in turn, and its survivors fled again until a chain of death wound round the brief Horsekin empire and strangled it.
By then, Rinbaladelan, the first thing on earth that Evandar had ever loved, lay long past help or repair—or so he’d always thought, until some seven hundred years later, when he met Dallandra, the second earthly thing he’d come to love. She’d spoken of the crafting of fine things that lasted beyond the moment of their imagining; she’d turned his eyes to the lands of men and dwarves, where master craftsmen still understood the smelting of metals and the quarrying of stone. Dallandra had given him ideas, grand ideas full of vast imaginings, and he’d begun to scheme out ways to realize these ideas, not in his own shifting empire of images, but upon the solid earth and in the world of Time. After all, if souls could die and be reborn, why shouldn’t a city do the same?
Evandar needed more than craftsmen, of course, to make his city live—he needed citizens to settle Rinbaladelan and do the work of the rebuilding. Most of the descendants of the elven people now lived out on the high plains of the Westlands as nomadic horseherders, remembering their former splendor but sharing none of it. A dying race, worn out with loss and danger, soon they would be gone, a memory blown on the winds of Time, unless somehow and against all odds he could revitalize their race and bring them souls willing to be born among them. For three hundred years now, he’d been braiding a complex net of schemes to do just that.
“And then the bitch nearly goes and spoils everything,” he said aloud to the ruins. “That charming harridan, that hag of great strength, she who was once my wife, Alshandra.”
At her name he spat onto the sand. The siege of Cengarn was only the beginning of her troublemaking. She’d promised her followers new conquests as their reward and turned their greedy eyes to Deverry and the rich lands of men. Where was he going to get the artisans and settlers he needed, if the stupid shrew plunged the whole country into war? And what would happen to that third thing he’d come to love, Rhodry Maelwaedd?
Evandar disliked acting directly upon the earth. He preferred to give a charmed gift here, utter an oracle there, pretend to be a god to the Gel da’Thae, a Guardian to the elves, a mysterious dweomermaster to men and dwarves so that he could say cryptic things and set obscure riddles—in short, to play only the most subtle melodies upon the harp of Wyrd. Yet, if he refused to act, if Cengarn fell, what then would happen