Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [Ed.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2016-12-30T11:00:00+00:00

2

Aleya fled along the snowy road, through the brush that now sprouted between its stones. Gusts rattled the treetops. In her mind lingered the image of the sorcerer untouched by the wind. As solid as he had seemed—far solider than his guards—he must be dead too, or something like it.

Dead and commander of the dead: She had, long ago, read about such things. A sorcerer could sustain his existence for centuries on this side of the Gate of the world, so long as he had souls to feed on. Her lord might have gathered to him all who had died during the siege and downfall of his city.

Aleya shivered: She had escaped not from a tomb but a larder.

Luckily, he did not seem to be able to pass the city gate. She wished she could remember the last hours of the city, when their enemies must have breached its walls and overrun the streets. Among the enemy had been mages who feared her lord’s ambitions, and priests and priestesses from many temples. They had defeated him, obviously, but with all the dead he had gathered up, perhaps their united strength had been sufficient only to confine him.

And now the armies of his enemies, too, seemed to have been swallowed by wilderness.

A city of the dead, through his power dreaming that it was still alive—she wondered if she herself had walked in that dream nightly for all the years since the city had fallen. How seductively real it had seemed for a moment, while the ruins and this snow-blanketed forest felt so utterly unreal—

Except that the forest persisted, mile after endless mile. The smell of cold bark and old leaves was stronger than the stink of the crypt that clung to her, and the ache in her legs was also undeniable. She could dance until dawn night after night, but never in her life had she walked so far on her own two feet.

Somewhere in the shadows, Aleya lost the footprints. She was too afraid to turn back, wanted only to put as much distance as she could between her and the haunted city, so she trudged onward. And at last the cliffs at the southern end of the valley reared up ahead.

The bridge leading south out of the valley lay in tumbled blocks in the depths of the gorge. And winter had not yet frozen the river, so she could not cross on the ice.

Aleya stood there wearily for a long moment. A lesser road did wind up the steep wall of the valley to the eastern border of her lord’s domain. She had ridden it long ago, in springtime when apple orchards had carpeted the road with petals.

The peasant who had made the footprints might know another way out of the valley. But she did not.

She found a trace of the road where she remembered it, along a stream that here joined the river. It climbed steeply through a deeper, darker forest that had swallowed all trace of the orchards.

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