The Black Raven - Katharine Kerr [28]
Many-towered cities rose in her nights, where she wandered with a lantern in hand while she searched for something she’d lost, though she could put no name to it. At other times she walked in the city during a summer’s day and marvelled at the strange buildings and the people she saw among them. In the center of this city rose a hill, circled at intervals by five stone walls. At the top, inside the highest wall, stood a fortress of some kind. In her dreams all she could see were squat towers clustering behind the stone. Sometimes she knew that she had to get into that fortress; in other dreams, she needed to escape it—though paradoxically, she never dreamt of being inside it.
When she woke of a morning, she would lie in bed and marvel at how clearly she saw the dream city. Even though its central hill reminded her of Citadel, the rest of it—the buildings, the people’s clothing—looked nothing like Cerr Cawnen, the only city she’d ever seen. By brooding over the dream images this way she reinforced them, so that the city took a permanent form. Whenever she went back, the same houses and shops would occupy the same locations; the same hill would loom over the familiar streets.
Finally, Niffa turned bold. When in her dream she came to its gate, she walked through. All around the city lay meadows where the grass grew as high as her waist, but narrow paths ran through them. She followed one a little ways down the road, stopping often to look back at the towered hill to keep within its sight, but she woke before she’d gone far. Over the next few nights she would walk a little way through these meadows, then rush back to the city before it could disappear. She had learned, just lately, that things you loved could disappear without warning.
Eventually, as she walked through the grass she saw far off to one side something gleaming like fire in the green, but no smoke rose. She left the road and struggled through the grass under a sky growing dim with twilight. Off to her right a huge purple moon trembled on the horizon as night deepened. When she looked back, the city walls still rose nearby, with here and there a point of lantern light upon them. The sight gave her the courage to keep going toward the fire-gleam, a strange red glow like a beacon in the grass.
Two huge five-pointed stars, each taller than a man and twined of stranded red-and-gold light, hung in the air just above a stretch of beaten-down grass. Between them the earth opened into the mouth of a tunnel sloping down into some unseeable darkness. On the other side of the stars someone was standing in the grass—a woman, judging from her long ash-blonde hair, but she wore tight leather trousers and a tunic rather than dresses.
“Here!” the woman called out. “You’re not Raena.”
“And I do thank every god in my heart for that,” Niffa called back. “Who be you?”
The woman walked around the stars and stood looking her over with her hands on her hips. Niffa had never seen anyone so beautiful, or so she thought at first glance. She had silver-blonde hair with silver eyes that matched it. Her features were even and perfect-but her ears! They were long and strangely furled like a new fern in spring.
“My name is Dallandra,” the woman said at last. “And I made these wards to keep Raena away from a thing she seeks. Who are you?”
“Niffa be my name.”
“Jahdo’s sister!”
“And is it that you know our Jahdo?” In her joy Niffa forgot her fear. “Fares he well? Oh please, do tell me.”
“Well and safe, truly, and you’ll be seeing him in the spring.”
The joy rose like a wave of pure water. All at once Niffa lay awake, tucked into her blankets with a ferret asleep on her chest and grey dawn flooding the window.
“Tek—tek,