Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia) Read online

Reynard stood at the living room window and gazed out at the Black Cathedral’s four towers looming above the rooftops of downtown Colbon.

  He could dimly make out his reflection against the dark towers and the slate shingles of the roofs and the gray clouds that filled the sky; and his expression was pensive, his eyes dark.

  He was in a situation that he had never imagined he would be in, a situation that had seemed reasonable and even inevitable when he accepted it, but that now seemed absurd and terrible, a situation he vowed never to even consider again.

  Marriage.

  This was his fourth year of wedded life with the woman variously known as Kendria, Keilie Barrett, Tampipi Groz, Trixie Underhand, and a host of other names, but whom he always called Kay when they weren’t on a job. He wasn’t sure which, if any, was her given name. She insisted it was Kay, but she was a born trickster just like him, and he couldn’t be sure she was telling the truth. He had never had a problem with that. Names, like all words, were lies anyway.

  The marriage had made a sort of sense four years ago. With their similar talents and traits, they had seemed a perfect match, and it was all too easy to envision the two of them conning their way around Eridia, every Realm their plaything. He had assumed she would sustain his interest long enough that she would pass away before he grew bored.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Somehow he had forgotten how quickly he wearied of things—of seeing the same sights, hearing the same stories, fucking the same vaginas. Thrills waned. New thrills beckoned. His decision to wed was inscrutable to him now. He wondered if she had conned him in some subtle way. Or if he had conned himself.

  Getting out, alas, wasn’t so easy. Insanely stubborn Kay would never consent to a divorce, no matter how chilly and uncomfortable the relationship got, and trying to trick her—faking his death, for instance—ran the risk of rousing her wrath if it failed. She had a cruel, vengeful side worse than any he had ever seen. So far it had never been directed at him, but if he hurt her too badly…

  Well, sometimes he still had nightmares about what she did to that innkeeper in Cern. He had never imagined a screwdriver could be used like that.

  The most logical solution was to disappear, head to some obscure village on the South Sea and snooze on a beach for a century or so, until he was sure she was dead and the marriage existed only as a handful of documents crumbling away in a file cabinet no one ever opened anymore. When you were immortal, time was your friend if you knew how to use it.

  That, then, was his plan. Sometime soon in the dead of night he would slip out of their marital bed, then out of the house, then out of the city, and secretly make his way south, leaving no traces in his wake.

  But before he did that, he had one last task to perform here in Colbon: break into the Black Cathedral.

  “Introspection is unlike you,” Kay said behind him, giving him a start.

  He turned, catching a glimpse of his somber expression morphing into a willed smile as he did so. Kay stood in the entrance to the study, one arm propped against the doorframe. She wore a white shirt unbuttoned and untucked over a tight orange sleeveless shirt, plus a pair of black slacks. (She never wore dresses or skirts unless a job demanded it. He was surprised at how much this had come to bother him.) She had unpinned her long, crow-black hair, and it hung sexily tousled around her angular face. Her lips were bent in that arrogant smile he had once found so irresistible. Her blue eyes probed his face.

  “Just wondering if it’ll ever rain, or if those clouds’ll keep hanging there forever,” he said as he crossed the room toward her, passing the many luxurious furnishings bought with the fruit of their scams: the ebony and ivory chessboard table; the black leather sofa and armchair; the bearskin rug; the antique Embarathan wall mirror; the silver-filigree dwarven carousel clock on the marble mantle above the fireplace. All of it had grown so familiar he wanted to scream. “You done in there already?”

  “Yep,” she said. “I have well and truly mastered Mr. Artemis Henn’s signature down to the last pretentious curlicue. All we need now is to whip up a bill of lading, and we’re set.”

  He stopped in front of her and wrapped his arms around her waist. “Not only are you the best forger I’ve ever known, you’re probably the fastest, too.”

  “I know.”

  “And so humble.” He leaned in and kissed that smirking mouth, his own mouth twisted into a cocky lustful smile despite his secretly wishing he were anywhere else, with anyone else. At least he wouldn’t have to maintain this charade much longer. The details of his journey south had been ironed out long ago, and he had had the necessary funds set aside for over a month, the money having been garnered from several solo scams he neglected to mention to Kay. All he needed to do now was figure out how to infiltrate the Black Cathedral. Once that was done, he was gone. Sure, he could just go now and wait a couple centuries before tackling the Cathedral. Seeing as how the building had been sitting there inviolate for thousands of years, the odds of someone else solving its mystery in the next two hundred were slim. But slim wasn’t none. He refused to wait. He wanted the achievement all for himself.

  “So,” Kay said, “I was thinking: Since the weather’s so bleak, maybe we could stay in this afternoon, snuggle in front of a fire, cuddle a while, fuck each other’s brains out.”

  He nuzzled her earlobe. “Sounds good.” Despite his weariness with her, with this life, his cock began to swell.

  “Oh, good,” she said, drawing back a little to look him in the face. “I’m glad. I thought maybe you’d prefer to slip out for a few hours and not tell me about it, the way you always do when I’m at work.”

  His heart jumped and ice filled his veins, but thanks to millennia of experience he managed to keep any trace of alarm from his face, offering only a baffled frown to the calm, keen gaze she was fixing on him in search of any telltale flicker of guilt.

  Damn it. She knew. How much she knew, he wasn’t sure. At the very least she knew he had been going out while she was at work at the East Belephon Shipping warehouse, where she had taken a secretarial position as part of their current scam. And she also knew he had been lying about it, answering her casual after-work questions about his day with bland tales of naps, or fencing practice, or reading the latest government legislation in search of amusingly exploitable loopholes. But did she know he actually spent most of his time taking long walks near the Cathedral, watching, analyzing, thinking? Worse, did she know the whys and wherefores behind it all?

  Her calm face told him nothing. Despite her relative youth, she was almost as good at veiling her thoughts and feelings as he was. She once told him that as a teenager she had spent countless hours in front of a mirror mastering control of her facial muscles till she could adopt any expression at will. She had then worn that cool, cocky smile of hers until it became habitual, her default expression.

  Maintaining his puzzled frown, he shook his head. “I’m not really sure what it is you’re getting at.”

  “You’re not fucking someone else, are you?” she asked, her calm, collected manner never wavering.

  “Of course not,” he said, letting his relief that she hadn’t learned the truth manifest as a burst of laughter. He was pleased to see a flash of surprise in her eyes before she slammed her mask back into place. He appreciated her dilemma: He seemed to be telling the truth, but given his masterfully tricksterish ways, how could she know for sure? And if he wasn’t fucking someone else, what was he doing when he headed out on those afternoon excursions he always lied about?

  They regarded each other in silence a moment as they weighed conversational gambits like chess masters running through potential sequences of moves.

  Kay found a move first. Her smile widened while her eyes narrowed, and she opened her mouth to say something he could tell she expected to be decisive and devastating.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “I’ll get it,” Reynard said, glad for the distraction. It was likely
nothing important—a solicitor or a wrong address—but it gave him a chance to figure out what to tell Kay.

  He opened the door, and there stood Solace, a polite smile draining away beneath her wide, stunned eyes.

  “Reynard?”

  “Solace?”

  “Friend of yours?” Kay said, gliding into place beside Reynard, her arms crossed, one sleek black eyebrow arched, a deceptively friendly smile on her face.

  “Yeah,” Reynard said. “Old, old friend. Haven’t seen her in years.”

  Kay’s smile wavered briefly. No doubt she was wondering if the comment meant Solace was an immortal like Reynard. He had told Kay about his immortality shortly before their marriage—immortals were more widely accepted these days, and in many quarters Elders were virtually worshipped—and although on the whole she seemed comfortable with it, she sometimes showed signs of insecurity and envy, as if being mortal were something she longed to overcome the way she strove to overcome every other trait she saw as a failing. Thus, the notion that this beautiful woman might share with Reynard that remarkable gift which she—Kay—would never possess or fully understand had to be like a splinter deep in her soul. Immortality was an arena she simply couldn’t compete in. Not that she would let it stop her from trying, of course.

  “Well, any friend of my husband’s is a friend of mine,” Kay said with a warm, congenial smile. Reynard knew she had phrased it that way just in case Solace didn’t already know Reynard was married.

  Which Solace didn’t, of course. Her eyebrows flew up in amazement. “Oh! That’s—I had no idea! Congratulations to both of you.”

  “Thank you,” Kay said. Then to Reynard: “Well, don’t just stand there; invite her in.”

  “Oh, um, yeah, come on in,” Reynard said, backing up and opening the door wide.

  Solace stepped in, took a quick glance around the room, then fixed a smile on Reynard. “Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting to find you on my route.”

  “Route?”

  “I’m here for the Census.” She tilted up the clipboard in her hands to reveal an orange-and-green “Colbon Census” logo on the back.

  “Ah.” Reynard nodded. The Greater Colbon Census was all the news lately. It was the first census in the area’s history, and the way the government and various civic organizations had hyped it up, you’d think it was the answer to all the world’s problems. Reynard had been eagerly awaiting the census taker’s visit, planning to answer every one of his or her questions with outrageous lies. Now, though, that didn’t seem so feasible. Not with someone he actually knew. Especially not another immortal.

  “Please, sit,” Kay said to Solace, directing her to the black leather chair.

  “Thanks.” Solace sat down, smoothing out the seat of her long blue dress with one swift sweep of her hand as she did so. She took another, longer look around the room while Reynard and Kay seated themselves on the couch. “Nice place you have here.”

  “Thanks,” Reynard said. “I had no idea you lived in Colbon. How long have you been here?”

  “Six years now. I like Colbon. It’s pleasant.” She glanced at Kay. “What about you two?”

  “We’ve only been here about nine months,” Reynard said. “Before that we lived in Cern.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “The usual merchant business. There were some opportunities here I thought were too good to pass up.”

  “Ah.”

  Reynard sensed Kay shift a little beside him, a shift no doubt due to sudden relaxation. If Solace didn’t know Reynard’s true profession, then the two of them couldn’t be all that close, which surely came as a huge relief to Kay.

  “What have you been up to lately?” Reynard asked Solace. “Aside from the Census, I mean.”

  “Honestly, there isn’t anything else right now. I’d been doing some minor work for the regional government, mainly clerical stuff, and I was getting pretty sick of it. Then I heard about the Census, which sounded a lot more interesting, so I decided to switch over to that. It really is a full-time job. Going into it, I don’t think any of us grasped the magnitude of what we were getting ourselves into. There are far more people living in this area than anyone thought. Did you know there’s a weird offshoot group of the Pith living in a system of caves deep in Erstwood? Apparently they hunt and forage for all their food, and they’ve even set up a small-scale mining operation to get the metal to make their swords and armor. Nobody had any idea they were there. It’s incredible what we’re finding out.”

  “What’ll you do when the Census is over? I mean, this can’t be a very permanent job…”

  “It’s longer-lasting than you probably think. Not only will it take us several more months to finish the basic data collection, but then we’ll have the task of collating and analyzing all that data. We’ll be working on this stuff another couple of years, at least.”

  “Wow.”

  “So where do you two know each other from?” Kay asked.

  “Oh, we met a long, long time ago in a little place called New Portland,” Reynard said. “Way up to the northeast, near the Wilds. Not all that far from Mickelberg, actually, where you and I spent a certain quiet, rainy evening on our way to the coast.” He smiled lovingly and patted Kay’s knee.

  Not one word of which told Kay what the question had really been intended to ascertain: namely whether or not Solace was an immortal. Kay didn’t dare ask anything too direct, since exposing Reynard as an Elder to the wrong person could end up garnering the couple far more attention than a pair of con artists were comfortable with. Likewise, Solace couldn’t be sure Kay knew about her husband’s immortality, and hence would avoid saying anything that might blow his cover. Reynard was curious to see how long he could keep the two women tiptoeing around the subject of Elderhood before the truth emerged (if it ever did).

  Kay, of course, couldn’t help but notice the evasiveness of his response.

  “Of course I remember,” she said, bestowing upon him a smile which, though warm and loving on the surface, harbored in its depths an entire winter’s-worth of frost.

  Solace cleared her throat and took a pencil from a holster at the top of her clipboard.

  “We’d better get down to business,” she said. “I mean, I don’t want to be brusque, but I have a certain number of streets I need to cover today, so I can’t really linger in one place for too long, much as I’d like otherwise.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Reynard said.

  “Okay…” Solace scanned the topmost sheet of paper on her clipboard. “First of all, the address is Number Two, Francis Street, correct?”

  “That’s right,” Kay said.

  Solace nodded and made a small notation with her pencil. “Two residents only?”

  “That’s right,” Kay said.

  Another nod. Another notation. “Full names?”

  “Reynard Kitson,” Reynard said. “No middle name.”

  Solace penciled this in, then looked at Kay. “And you?”

  “Kay Liana Kitson.”

  “Oh, Liana’s such a lovely name.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Now then, the part everyone hates: your ages.” With a reassuring smile, she held up a hand, palm out. “Please be honest; no one’s passing judgment here.”

  “I’m thirty-one,” Reynard said.

  He had been a little afraid she would react in a way that made it obvious she knew he was lying: raising her eyebrows in disbelief, for instance, or glancing at Kay to check her response. But Solace merely nodded once again and wrote down his answer. He should have known that anyone thirty-five hundred years old—even an utter Pollyanna—would have long since gotten dissembling down to an art finer than a pinpoint. For all Kay’s wiliness and mirror-gazing, she was an absolute tyro in comparison.

  “You?” Solace said, glancing up at Kay.

  “Thirty-four,” Kay said.

  Solace wrote it down.

  The rest of the questions passed without
incident or, to Reynard, interest. Species, gender, marital status, length of residency in Colbon, occupation, blah, blah, blah.

  “That’s that,” Solace said as she reholstered her pencil. “Fast and painless.” She unclipped the topmost paper and reinserted it at the bottom of the stack.

  “I expected more for some reason,” Reynard said.

  Solace smiled. “Most people say that.” She stood up. “Well, like I said, I have a lot more territory to cover before the end of the day, so alas, I must go.”

  Reynard and Kay saw her to the door.

  “It was delightful and certainly unexpected to run across you like this,” Solace told Reynard. “And it was a pleasure to meet you,” she said to Kay.

  “Likewise.”

  “Since we’re both living in Colbon,” Reynard said, “we’ll have to keep in touch.”

  “Yes!” Kay exclaimed as if she found this a wonderful idea. “Perhaps we could have you over for dinner sometime.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Solace said, “but I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble…”

  “No trouble at all,” Kay said. “Are you free Sunday evening?”

  “Um…not this Sunday, no. Maybe the following Sunday?”

  “Splendid,” she said. “We’ll plan on dinner around six. If there’s any trouble with that just send us a wire.” She laughed blithely. “You have our address, after all.”

  “Thank you,” Solace said. “I look forward to it.” She started to turn to leave.

  “Just out of curiosity, who’s next on your route?” Reynard said, grabbing hold of the top of Solace’s clipboard and tilting it toward him so he could read the topmost sheet. “Number 6?” He looked over his shoulder at Kay. “That’s old man Festal, isn’t it?”

  “I think so, yeah,” Kay said. She was eyeing Reynard’s face closely, no doubt wondering the reason behind his sudden interest in Solace’s route.

  “Watch out for his dog,” he told Solace, all seriousness now as he let go of the clipboard. “It’s bitten people before.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Thanks for the warning.” She opened the door and backed out into the hall. “Well, thanks for everything, and I guess I’ll see you two the Sunday after next.”

  “We look forward to it,” Kay said. “Bye.”

  The door closed. Kay and Reynard looked at each other.

  “She’s nice,” Kay said.

  “Isn’t she sweet?”

  Kay headed back toward the couch.

  “So, is she an Elder?” she asked in a bland, conversational tone. “I couldn’t tell for sure.”

  “She—oh!” He stooped and pretended to pick up Solace’s pencil, which he had been hiding up his sleeve ever since he palmed it when he took a peek at her clipboard. “She dropped her pencil.”

  Kay froze, her back to him, then looked at him over her shoulder, her face unusually still.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Her pencil. I’d better hurry and get it back to her.”

  “I’m sure she has extras.”

  He already had the door open. “Well, just in case she doesn’t.” He frowned at her, as though puzzled by her chilliness. “She is an old friend, after all. Geez.” He shut the door on Kay’s rising left eyebrow.