year, century after century, assassinated by chance and unlucky fate?
He supposed it did not really matter. The simple, melancholy truth was that they were gone. He suddenly understood in his gut, as he had never really understood it before, what it was that Korhien had meant when he said every elf life was precious. There were so few of them left now that each death was another small defeat for the entire people, the putting out of another candle in a vast echoing chamber that would soon be dark and empty.
It was not exactly that the thought frightened him. It made him uneasy and sad. Briefly he considered abandoning his whole expedition and returning to the palace. Doing so would be to admit a defeat though, or at very least a failure of courage, so he pushed on up the hill, following the promptings of half-remembered memories from when he was very small, until at last he found it, or at least what he was fairly certain was it; the house where he had lived when he and Teclis had been very young children.
It sat high on the hill in a row of other houses just like it. In some of these lights still shone. They had not been entirely abandoned. Their old house stood tall and old and proud. It was older by far than the Emeraldsea Palace, built in ancient days when his father’s ancestors had looked down on the merchants literally beneath them. It was tall and narrow and five storeys high and each window facing outward on this side had a balcony. He could remember standing on one of these balconies as a child and looking down into the harbour. He had been too young and too small then to really understand anything that was going on around him. He felt much older than that now.
He walked to the door. It was chained. Someone had taken the trouble to lock the place up and it looked like someone visited every so often to see that it was maintained. He suspected it must be people in the employ of his mother’s relatives. They seemed like the sort who would be careful about property. He supposed that he could pry open the locks or the rings of the chain if he really wanted to but it seemed a bit like sacrilege. So he clambered up the front of the building and onto the first balcony.
Memories came flooding back. He had been here before when the barrier had been so high he had to stand on tiptoes to look over it and his father and his father’s friends had seemed like giants.
He knew there would be an even better view from above so he clambered up until he had reached the highest balcony and the ground was a dizzying drop beneath him. All of those hours spent clambering around in the rigging of the Eagle of Lothern proved their worth then. He was neither nervous nor afraid. He enjoyed the physical activity of the climb, almost as much as he enjoyed the view that was his reward.
He was very high above the city of Lothern now, and he could see all the way down into the harbour. The waves glittered silver in the moonlight. The thousands of ships looked like shadows. Their masts were like a forest floating on water.
Large patches of the city were lit up, a blaze of lights and life. Even larger parts were dead, all darkness and shadow and silence. It was as if a cancer was eating out the heart of Lothern. He was sure it had not been quite this bad when he was young, but it must have been. In the timescale of elves, a decade was an eye-blink. He had simply been young and unaware.
He saw the Foreigners’ Quarter was ablaze with light. Down there, naked flames burned and torch bearers walked through darkened alleys and thousands of people went about their business in the flickering shadows. It was fascinating and attractive and he knew that at some point he was going to have to visit it. But tonight he had other things on his mind.
He went to the shuttered windows. There were no chains on the outside, and there was a bar that was easily lifted by slipping the blade of his sword through the gap in the wood. The air inside smelled musty and stale but it still had the smell of the place he remembered – waxed floors,