Rulers of the Darkness

He didn't see the ley-line caravan leave the forest; by then he was asleep, his chin on his chest. When he woke again, the mountains were near. And then the caravan traveled over mountains and through mountain valleys for the next couple of days. Much of the terrain reminded Istvan achingly of his own home valley; many of the villages, with their walls and their fortresslike, steep-roofed houses of gray stone, could have been Kunhegyes, where he'd grown up. But Kunhegyes lay far from any ley line.

Some of the men from the mountains of eastern Gyongyos had never seen the plains that led down to the Bothnian Ocean. The only flat ground they'd ever known was that of the great woods of western Unkerlant, and they exclaimed in wonder to see farmland stretching from one horizon to the other.

Kun looked at Istvan over the tops of his spectacles. "I thought you'd be oohing and ahhing with the rest of the back-country lads," he remarked.

"Then you're not as smart as you like to think you are," Istvan retorted. "Didn't I come this way before, when they threw me onto a ship and sent me to Obuda?"

Kun thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Aye, of course you did, and I'm a natural-born idiot. I must be."

Down in the flatlands, towns got bigger and closer together. Istvan had all he could do not to marvel at the sight of so many buildings all in the same place, and at the sight of tall towers climbing toward the stars. "How do so many clans live together in one place without feuds tearing them to pieces?" he asked Kun. "You're a city man, so you ought to know."

"What you have to understand is, a lot of people move to the cities from out of the countryside," the former mage's apprentice answered. "Some of them are younger sons and the like- men who won't get a fair share from their family plots. And others are the men who want to find out if they can get rich. The odds are slim in town, stars above know that's so, but it'll never, ever happen on a farm."

"I suppose you're going somewhere with this, but I'm not following you, not yet," Istvan said.

"Bear with me," Kun told him. "In your valley, your clan's been living next to its neighbors for hundreds of years. Everybody remembers who did what to whom, and why, since the stars first shone. Some of the clan quarrels are that old, too. Am I right, or am I wrong?"

"Oh, you're right, of course," Istvan said. "That's how things are."

"Ha!" Kun pounced. "But it's not how things are in the cities, or not so much. If you move away from most of the people in your clan, you move away from most of the old squabbles, too. You get to know a man for what he is himself, not for whether his grandfather's great-uncle stole three hens from your cousin's great-grandma. Do you see what I'm saying?"

"What it sounds like is the army, except without the discipline in the army," Istvan said. "Here, I do what I do because the officers tell me to, and you do what you do because I tell you to, and the troopers do what they do because you tell them to. Back in my valley, my place in the clan tells me what to do. I always know what's expected, if you understand what I'm saying." He waited for Kun to nod, then went on, "But if you're living in the city away from your clan, how do you know what to do or how to act? Who tells you?"

"I tell myself," Kun answered. "That's what cities are all about: making your own choices, I mean. They're changing the face of Gyongyos, too."

Istvan disapproved of change on general principles. In that, he reckoned himself a typical Gyongyosian. His eyes slid over to Kun, who smiled as if knowing what he was thinking. As far as Istvan was concerned, Kun was no typical Gyongyosian- and a good thing, too, he thought. What Kun might be thinking of him never entered his mind.

They slid through Gyorvar the next morning, heading down to the docks. All the chief rivers watering the Gyongyosian plain came together at Gyorvar and went down as one to the not far distant sea. Istvan didn't think about that. He craned his neck to get a glimpse of Ekrekek Arpad's palace. Before his first trip through the capital, he'd imagined it as a tower taller than any mountains, a tower from which the Ekrekek could reach out and touch the sacred stars if he so desired. It was nothing of the sort, being pavilions of gleaming marble scattered across parkland, but lovely nonetheless. He'd remembered that.

And then, after Istvan got his glimpse, the ley-line caravan stopped at the docks, which were anything but lovely. He'd remembered that, too. The battered transports waiting to take his comrades and him across the sea were even more unlovely than the ones he remembered from his last trip through Gyorvar. He didn't know what that meant. Nothing good, probably.

***