The City Read Online Free PDF Page B

were made of rich woods, and the wall hanging was heavily embroidered with fierce beasts and strange flowers. In the bottom corner a gulon stared balefully out at him.
    ‘We are still in the sewers here, in the Halls,’ he said, ‘but you do not come and go through the tunnels. So there must be an exit to fresh air?’
    She shook her head. ‘This is called the Hall of Watchers,’ she volunteered. ‘Centuries ago, perhaps hundreds of centuries, it was part of a great palace. Then the palace fell, or there was an invasion or an earthquake, I don’t remember, and the ancient palace disappeared under a new one. And then another. There are many layers of old cities, most of them destroyed. But some buildings remain intact, like this, deep in the ground. We are very far below the present City.’
    ‘That is the first of my questions you have answered.’
    ‘I am not here to answer your questions.’
    ‘Why
are
you here?’
    He caught her eye and they both smiled.
    ‘We are both too old for such prevarications,’ she told him. She sighed again and shrugged the greatcoat off her shoulders. It was a silver crescent moon glimmering on her breast. ‘I can do nothing more to you than the world has already done.’
    They were silent for a while, then she offered, ‘You ask about my friend Indaro. She was at the First Battle of Araz.’
    Vile memories danced in his mind. ‘So were thousands of others,’ he replied. ‘Tens of thousands.’ Including me, he could have told her.
    ‘Just a child really, gently raised.’ She looked at him. ‘Many people believe women should not be fighting this war.’
    ‘I am not one of them,’ he told her, not entirely truthfully. ‘The City would have been lost long since without its women warriors.’
    She shook her head sadly. ‘The men guard our City’s past,’ she quoted. ‘The women guard our future.’
    It was a familiar argument. ‘If the City is lost then no amount of children and babies will help us,’ he retorted.
    ‘The City
is
lost. It was lost long since.’
    ‘Not while our armies defend it still.’
    In his heart he knew the City was reaching a vital crossway. The enemy cities were subjugated, their armies conquered, fortresses taken, yet still they fought on. The City was besieged, albeit from a distance. And it was casting its women into the war machine in a last desperate throw to win the war, at the risk of future population catastrophe.
    ‘The City is great,’ he said stoutly, although he knew it was not true. His words echoed emptily in the stone chamber.
    ‘The City is dying, Bartellus. How can you spend a single day down in the Halls with the other Dwellers and see lives lived in absolute wretchedness, then claim that the City is great?’ Her tone was calm, her face grave.
    ‘The City is
all
its people, including the Dwellers,’ he argued. ‘How can
you
spend time with them, if indeed you do, lady, and not see their strength, their toughness, the uncompromising spirit that has helped the City survive centuries of war?’
    ‘I cannot believe,’ Archange said, ‘that you are using the Dwellers as an argument for the City’s greatness. No great city, by definition, should have people living in its
sewers
. Any city should be judged, at least in part, on how it looks after its poor, its frail, its dispossessed.’
    As so often in the past, he found he was arguing something he did not entirely believe. They were circling around a subject which was never spoken aloud by the wary. Yet in this hidden place he could bring himself to say the words. ‘The Immortal is pursuing this war. It will end only if the emperor wills it.’
    She eyed him gravely. ‘People who have told him that have been cruelly punished.’ She took a sip of water, then said, ‘We are talking about two different things. If the City is great it is due to the courage and resilience of its people. But the war has brought it to the brink of ruin. As you say, it is the emperor who is