The Knave of Souls - Fantasy - Sequel to The Jack of Souls

Chapter 39

A FAILED TRYST

*

Harric glanced down each intersection they passed, hoping to notice movement or to hear sounds of Brolli or the Kwendi he'd glimpsed from the room. Seeing no sign of life in any of them, he hurried on, the limbs of the trellises flashing by above him as if he passed through some highly ordered orchard. When he'd crossed a total of eight intersections, the corridor opened abruptly onto a tiled square as wide as a stone's throw and open to the night sky.

A high and continuous trellis blanketed the entire square like the scaffolding for some broad and invisible building. Like the trellis in Brolli's map room, wooden platforms adorned various levels of the trellis, though here they supported no cloth partitions or pavilions. The trellis spilled over the edges of the square to climb the drum-shaped buildings just as ivy climbs trees.

A smile lifted one side of Harric's mouth. "They climb everywhere."

"Not here they don't," Fink hissed. "Place is dead. Let's get out of here."

"Calm down. If it's dead it can't hurt you."

But Fink was right. None of the usual signs of inhabitation presented themselves. The chimneys were cold. The windows were shuttered or dark. The only sound or motion in the square was the splash and echo of a lonely central fountain and a steady sigh of wind through the trellis.

"What a shame," Fink said. "No Kwendi here. Guess we have to go back to that big room and wait for him to open the Gate home."

"Nice try."

Harric began circling around the right side of the square. "This way. They might have gone through to the other side. And look," he said, squinting through the essence fog of the trellis. "There aren't any buildings on the far side of the square. Looks like it opens onto a valley or something. Maybe we'll get a look at where we are."

Harric peered closely at the buildings as they passed them. If there were Kwendi in them, they weren't using any fires. But that wasn't surprising, since they saw well in darkness. It was also possible they left their homes in the day to work elsewhere in fields or...whatever they had.

Unlike drum towers in Arkendia, which rarely had windows bigger than an arrow slip, Kwendi drums supported numerous balconies, platforms, generous windows and elevated doorways. Surely through one of these he should glimpse a Kwendi too old for the fields or a mother with children. Yet the place seemed cold and empty. Unlived in.

An uneasy feeling coiled in Harric's gut.

An inspiration to open a door and look inside one died quickly. None of the houses near him had front doors. In fact, they didn't appear to have ground-level doors at all. Scanning the nearest building, he found the front door: three fathoms above where an Arkendian front door would be hung an elaborate porch around a heavy door. He exhaled a puff of exasperation. He was not going to climb a three-fathom trellis to a door that might be locked.

"This place is a graveyard," Fink hissed. "If they were here, we'd see their soul strands. I'm telling you this place is a ghost town."

Harric said nothing. His own soul strands rose like a bonfire of spiritual light into the glorious Web of the Unseen. Where were the Kwendi's strands? Even if all Kwendi strands went to some terrestrial source, would they be visible on the ground? Hurrying to the open end of the square, he hoped a more expansive view of the area would reveal some sign of Brolli or at least some Kwendi he could follow to a more populated area.

When he stepped past the last building, he found himself looking out over a small valley shaped like a steep bowl no wider across than an easy bow shot. Dozens and dozens of Kwendi buildings ringed the inside of the bowl from bottom to top. And all of them stood as cold and empty and soulless as the ones in the square.