City of Dragons

She turned back to the broad avenue that led straight up from the river toward the distant mountains. The wind was at her back, and her eyes squinted against the falling rain. She looked from side to side as she walked, pausing at each divergence of the road. There was so much here to explore and catalog and record. She reached the top of a gentle hill and after a moment of consideration turned right.

Along this wide street the buildings were grander by far than the humble homes and small stores she had been visiting closer to the waterfront. The black stone that made up so much of these buildings shone with the wet of the rain and glittered where threads of silver ran through it. Many of the lintels and columns of the structures were decorated. Here were pillars carved with twining vines and animals peering from behind them. There, an entry was shielded with stone that had been artfully carved into the shape of a trellis and vine.

On the next structure, there was a portico under which she took refuge from the increasing violence of the downpour. The columns were carved in the shape of acrobats supporting one another, feet on shoulders and then hands upholding the ceiling. Tall doors of silvery and splintering wood barred her from entering. She pushed gently at one, wondering if some ancient latch still held it closed. Her hand sank through the disintegrating wood. Startled, she pulled her hand back and then stooped to peer through the fist-sized hole. She could see an antechamber and then another set of doors. She took hold of the door handle and tugged on it, only to have it pull partially free. Appalled at the damage she was doing, she let go, only to have the heavy brass knob tear free and fall at her feet with a clang. Oh, well done, Alise, she scolded herself sourly.

And then, with the wind and rain howling past, she stooped down to pull handful after handful of wood away until she had an opening big enough to wriggle through. On the other side, she stood up and looked all around. She could no longer hear the patter of the rain, and the wind was hushed and distant. Light fell in soft-edged rectangles on the floor from the high windows. A carpet disintegrated under her feet as she walked into the middle of the room. She looked up: the ceiling was painted with a swarm of dragons. Some carried beribboned baskets in their claws, and in the baskets and dangling from them were brightly garbed figures.

A second set of tall wooden doors beckoned her. She crossed the room to them and found them much better preserved than the exterior doors. She clasped a gleaming brass handle and turned it, pushing against the door. It swung almost easily, with only a tiny squeal of disuse.

The revealed chamber had a sloping floor that descended gently to a grand stage in the center of a theater. It was an island surrounded by a space of empty floor, then by tiered benches and finally chairs bearing the dusty ghosts of cushions. When she lifted her eyes, she saw that curtained boxes looked grandly down on the stage. Light came from an overhead dome of thick glass. Decades of dust dimmed the light that shone in from the overcast day. It could not disperse the lurking shadows that stood frozen at the outermost edges of the room. The waiting figures, half glimpsed, seemed to have frozen at her sudden intrusion.

Alise took a careful breath and lifted her hand to wipe raindrops from her lashes. She knew they would vanish. It was a trick of the black stone, she was coming to understand. Sometimes it whispered, sometimes it sang loudly, and sometimes, when she came around a corner quickly or happened to brush her hand against a wall, she would have a glimpse of people and horses and carts, of all the life that the city still remembered. She rubbed her eyes thoroughly, dropped her hands, and looked around again.

They still stared at her from the shadows, every head turned toward her. The bright motley they wore proclaimed their profession: they were tumblers and acrobats, rope-climbers and jugglers, performers such as she might have seen in a troupe at a Summer Fest or performing solo for tossed coins at the edge of the Great Market in Bingtown. They were impossibly still, and even after she had fully realized that they were statues, she still ventured a wavering “Hello?”

Her voice carried through the hall and bounced back to her. On the far side of the room, the curtains that draped a theater box suddenly gave way and fell with a whoosh to the floor in a cascade of thread, fluff, and dust. She jumped, startled, and then stood, clutching her own hands and watching the myriad motes of dust stir and dance in the thin sunlight. “Just statues,” she insisted aloud. “That’s all.”

She forced herself to turn and walk the aisle that circled the seating to reach the first of the figures.

She had thought that up close they would be less unsettling. They weren’t. Each was exquisitely carved and painted. A juggler clad in blue and green had paused, two balls cupped in one hand and three in another, his head cocked quizzically, his copper-green eyes squinting in the beginning of a smile. Two steps beyond him, a tumbler had halted, one hand held out to his partner, chin tucked in to his chest as he stared curiously out at the empty seats. His partner was dressed in yellow-and-white stripes to match his motley, and her hair was an untidy tumble of black curls. Her lips were curved in a mischievous smile. Beyond the couple, a stilt walker had dismounted from his sticks and leaned them against his shoulder to regard the empty hall. He wore a bird-beak mask, and an elegant headdress mimicked a bird’s topknot of feathers.