The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

relaxed as they entered this district; she let go her tight hold on his lead-rope, and let him have his head again. The shape of this area was determined by the river that ran through it; there was scarcely a bit of bank that did not have a mill wheel on it to make use of the swiftly-flowing current. The buildings here were old—and Nightingale suspected that few of the people traveling beside her had any idea how very old they were. The mill wheels and millraces were recent additions to buildings that had been standing beside this river since before the Cataclysm.
    The buildings were not pretty; they were simple, brute boxes with square window-holes where there might once have been glass. Now they were covered with whatever might let in light and exclude weather; glass in some places, oiled paper or sheets of parchment in others, but mostly sheets of white opaque stuff the Deliambrens used for packing crates and padding. The base color of these dull boxes was an equally dull grey; where in the past people had tried to apply paint, either to cover the entire building or as crude advertisements, the paint remained only in patches, as if the buildings had some kind of scabrous disease. But the irony was that these places were solid still; they had stood for centuries and likely would stand for centuries more. Nightingale had been inside the Deliambren Fortress-City; she had seen buildings like these being erected. One actually poured the walls, using wood to make the molds to give the walls their form, as if they were huge ceramics. Once the grey stuff set, it was stronger than granite and less likely to age due to weathering.
    So the irony, lost to those beside the Gypsy, was that these buildings which seemed relatively new were actually much, much older than the tenements that had been falling down.
    The road crossed the river on a bridge that also dated back to the Cataclysm; Nightingale privately doubted that anyone could bridge the Lyon River in these days—except, perhaps, Deliambrens. It was a narrow and fierce stream, with a current so swift and deep that “to swim the Lyon” was a common euphemism for suicide.
    For a moment, there was relief from the heat; the waters of the Lyon were as cold as they were swift, and a second river flowed above it—a river of fresh, cool air. Nightingale moved as slowly on the bridge as she could, stretching out her moment of relief.
    On the other side, the manufactories gave way again to housing, but fortunately for Nightingale’s peace of mind, the people here lived in better conditions than those near the slaughterhouses.
    There were more of those pre-Cataclysm buildings, in fact, given over to living quarters rather than manufactories. These had more windows, and from the look of things, the ceilings were not as high, granting more levels in the same amount of space. In between these older buildings, newer ones rose, not quite as dilapidated as the tenements on the other side of the river, but by no means in excellent repair. These newer buildings huddled around the old as if for support, as if without those grey bulwarks they could not stand against wind and weather.
    Nightingale tried to imagine what this area might have looked like before the wooden tenements were built, but had to give up. She just could not picture it in her mind. Why would people have put so much open space between the buildings, then build the buildings so very tall? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to lay everything out flat, the way a small village was built? That way everyone could have his own separate dwelling, and one would not be forced to hear one’s neighbors through walls that were never thick enough for privacy . . .
    Ask anyone who has ever spent the night in an inn with newlyweds in the next room.
    Well, there was no telling what the ancestors had been thinking; their world was as alien to the Twenty Kingdoms now as that of any of the nonhumans. Nightingale certainly was not going to try