Our first days in the Holy Lands were a blur, a fact which I will regret for the rest of my life. These were the lands where the gods and their children had walked aeons before the first mortal life sprang into being. I should have been singing awe-struck praise-songs, pouring libations out on the holy ground, burning sweet incense and begging the gods for their aid … and for their forgiveness for our trespass, just being here, to say nothing of what we had planned.
Instead, I stumbled along with my companions, dazed and delirious. I could not even stand unassisted. I retained just enough wits to provide some guidance on the evening of our arrival. I later learned that I slept through the entirety of the next day, waking just enough to be fed and watered. I had vague memories of a less than romantic proposal by Elana to Rennin, and of Khanaarre sleeping by my side, and of Elana and her knights standing guard over us.
My first clear memory is of waking, naked, on the unfamiliar bank of a stream. My feet were in the lukewarm waters, and a cool wet cloth had been laid across my eyes and brow. I could hear, faintly, a conversation in the distance. I was still weak and weary, but I was alive.
I took a few minutes to lay there and enjoy the fact, but I was ready to get up and return to the party by the time Khanaarre came to check on me. Finding me up, she went back to retrieve my bag so that I could dress myself.
“Thank you,” I said, pulling a short chiton from my wizard’s chest. My Georgi tunic was ruined, and it was too hot here for Georgi clothes, anyway. I even traded my knee-high boots for Vencari sandals.
My return to camp was welcomed more heartily than I had expected. Rennin gave me a deep, slow, nod. Orland clapped me on the back and Elana took both my hands in hers. Whatever their suspicions, however much they hated me for what I had done to Veralar Tann, it seemed that nearly killing myself to get them here had restored some semblance of trust and fellow-feeling.
We spent the rest of that second day resting, too. The magical flesh of the game and the waters in the Holy Land had done wonders to restore Rennin and Orland. Their cuts and bruises looked weeks healed, not days. Khanaarre looked tired, but not like a wizard who had bled herself nearly dry two days in a row. Now that I was fully conscious and able to eat and drink my fill, I was restored almost as quickly. Elana and Rennin did, as Khanaarre told me Orland had suggested, disappear into the woods to fuck. I surprised myself by wishing I’d had the strength to suggest to her that we do the same. I did feel up to it the following day, but by then it was past time to leave.
The forest of the Holy Land was comprised of massive trees with thick canopies, the likes of which I had never seen. The ground was thick with flowers and ferns and fungus and other things that seemed to thrive in the wet twilight, all in bright colors and some that literally glowed. Every rock that erupted from the dark earth was caked in moss and lichen, and many of the trees were, too. The sunlight that filtered through was directionless, and I was thankful that I had the compass to point us in the right direction, and that “east” here appeared to be “east” relative to the mortal world.
If we did not come to the charnel valley of Arcmedus’ journals after a few days, I would have to bring out my crystal ball, but I was doubly hesitant to do so after what had happened with Veralar. I had not yet inspected it for damage, and I was not certain that I had brought everything I would need to repair it if it had been exposed to too much light. And I harbored an irrational fear that someone else would barge in and be injured as I’d told them Veralar had.
“You never said what you wanted that skull for,” Rennin said that afternoon we resumed our travel. “It turned out to be as gold as the horns, in case you were curious.”
Skull? What skull? And then a vague memory surfaced.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had forgotten. I was half delirious. I didn’t have a specific plan, but it would be good for any number of things – a magnificent trophy not the least of them. How did you strip it?”
Rennin looked half disgusted and half amused.
“Giving orders while delirious is bad policy,” he said. “Khanaarre had a solvent that did the trick.”
Khanaarre had a solvent. Of course she did. Fucking Black Mask sickos.
“What would you use it for?” Khanaarre asked, the slightest note of irony in her voice. Was she turning things around on me? Trying to test me like I had her? The cheek!
But Elana and Rennin both turned their heads as they walked, waiting for me to answer. And Khanaarre was smiling, the little minx.
“It would be an excellent scrying focus,” I said. “Or a mount for any kind of magic mirror. It would also be an excellent spirit-vessel, either for a familiar or to power a construct.”
“Yes,” Khanaarre pressed. “But what would you do with it?”
“Barter,” I admitted. “I prefer a quartz sphere for scrying, and hand-cast or -carved sculptures for spirit vessels. But between the beauty and rarity of the thing, I could trade it to nearly any wizard for nearly anything, and make a good bargain with most any spirit, especially if they had a shrine upon which to mount it.”
“You really want for nothing,” said Elana.
I shrugged.
“All I lack in life,” I said, “Is a safe place to perform my experiments, and a community with which to enjoy the results.”
Khanaarre looked at me for a long moment, and I felt seen through like I had not in decades. It made my skin pebble despite the humid heat, and my blood run cold.
“That’s why you left the Usurper,” she said. Her tone was a question, but there was no doubt in her eyes. “He sought knowledge as a means to power, where you sought power as a path to knowledge.”
I stumbled in my tracks and tears welled in my eyes. If I had ever had the courage to tell Aemillian why I could not stay to share the Throne with him, those were the words I would have used. It would not have been the whole truth – my secrets could not endure the scrutiny of life as the Emperor’s Consort, and I would not suffer any child I bore to be heir to any throne, let alone that one – but it was more than enough. And yet I loved him, still.
I knew that my body had already given me away, but my dignity insisted that I dissemble.
“That is the best guess anyone has ever made,” I conceded. “But the dispute between he and I, as ever, remains our own.”
I don’t think that any of them were fooled. As much as that hurt my pride, it served my agenda. In that moment I desperately missed Sara Kemm. She had always known that my tale of a Vencari wife was a sop to the pride of those who wished me to marry into their families. She had also understood, instinctively, that the story covered a hurt that I did not wish to share.
As we travelled eastward, we began the slow descent into what we hoped would be the great valley for which we were searching. The trees grew smaller and thinner, and the terrain grew slowly rockier, with sloping hills rising to either side of us. There were stretches where that made walking easier: broad paths of weathered granite as wide as Vencari roads. There were also stretches where there was no level ground to be seen, and we were desperately glad that we had not brought horses.
We got our first views of the sky: lurid blue, marked by stars so bright that they could be seen even in daylight, their constellations unfamiliar. When we crossed into more open ground, the Starry Serpent Ün dominated the eastern horizon, so vast that it seemed closer than the very sun and moon.
The sight of it brought me to tears, and I was unable to speak that first hour we beheld it. Elana and Rennin made gestures to ward off evil, of course, but they were weak, reflexive, stunted by natural awe. Khanaarre and Orland, I think, were almost as moved as I was
Game and forage were plentiful. The beasts of the woods had never seen or smelled humans or elves, and knew no fear. The leaves and barks and berries and mushrooms we found were hearty and nutritious – though careful dowsing revealed a handful to be poison, and careful taste-testing proved a few of them to be vividly hallucinogenic. Knowing from Arcmedus’ journals that we were going to a place “where nothing grew or lived”, we did our best to live off what we could hunt and gather, and to smoke and salt-cure enough of what we found to meaningfully extend our dwindling drygoods.
It also grew wetter. We’d enjoyed three full days of dry weather, but the soaked stones of the step pyramid should have served as a warning. On the fourth day we got the first of what turned out to be near-daily morning rains. It was pure luck that we were in a rocky patch, and had climbed up a cliff to camp.
We woke to a warm drizzle. By the time we were done with breakfast, we were forced to erect a tent to escape the torrential fall of hot and heavy rain. By the time we’d wrestled mine (being the largest, to accommodate my scrying setup) up, the path we were following had become a river.
Rennin stared at that rushing current.
“If we had we camped in one of the flat places,” he murmured, “we and our gear would all have been washed away.”
Soon, we were as stunned by the rain’s quick departure as by its coming. The river dried up little more than an hour after the rain stopped. The sky cleared to vivid blue even faster.
We took that warning to heart, and made camp as far upland as we could each day, and erecting my tent in the evening in anticipation of the morning rains.
On the sixth day, we encountered our first monster.
We had come across a herd of enormous goats, easily twice the size of their mortal-world kindred. Khanaarre and Rennin had hunted a pair of them, and were field dressing them, when a gargantuan six-legged cat descended from upland, snarling and hissing. Khanaarre and Rennin were just barely within sight of Elana, Orland, and I. The fact that I could see that the beast had six legs was a testament to just how unearthly huge it was. I drew my knife, preparing to intervene, but Khanaarre was faster: she had not, it seemed, taken off her wizard’s claw to dress the goat, and pierced her palm simply by making a fist. I could not hear the words she uttered, but the rock-colored cat-creature staggered as if it had been punched by a fist the size of its own head, skidding down the rocks toward them. It did get its legs back under it, but Rennin had reclaimed his bow, by then, and it only took an arrow to the shoulder to convince the beast that this kill was not its to scavenge.
“Did you see that thing?” bragged Rennin upon their return.
“It was magnificent,” crowed Khanaarre.
“We did,” said Elana.
“It was certainly something,” said Orland.
As with the rain, we proceeded more cautiously after that. Khanaarre and Rennin kept their bows out and strung whenever it wasn’t raining, and we kept a watch rotation as we had not since we had left Vencar. I, however, was grateful to be worried about weather and wildlife, rather than bandits and soldiers.
The six-legged rock-colored cat-thing stalked us for two days, but did not dare approach again while the sun was up, or strike in the light of the fire. Elana and Rennin could not sneak away into the wilderness, anymore, but they did stop pretending that they hadn’t. They sat shoulder to shoulder around our cook fires, and no longer bothered erecting separate tents when we didn’t all just sleep in mine. I have to admit that I was a little jealous: it had been a very long time since I had been that young and in love. I thought of Sara, and Aemillian, and of Chi Inaa, who I had loved before I even came to the Compact. And, to my great surprise and slight frustration, I caught myself watching Khanaarre out of the corner of my eye. It had just been one night, however nice, and there was no version of this quest that I could foresee where we had a future together. I wasn’t even supposed to like these people.
We did not need to notice when the rock cat stopped stalking us. Like an oversized housecat, it posed on top of a large rock to watch us go, then turned its back to march the opposite direction when it knew we’d seen it. At first we thought it had simply gotten bored, or that the trees had grown too thin for its liking – which was, perhaps, true in a sense – but we soon saw signs that we had entered the territory of a much larger predator.
We didn’t know how to interpret what we were looking at, at first: a massive pile of bones, including the skulls of at least two different beasts, spilling out of what looked like a broken shell of fur, all bleached grey and reeking of bile. It was Khanaarre who figured it out.
“An owl pellet,” she said, all the blood draining from her face. “An owl pellet the size of a pony.”
Rennin and Orland looked at her like she was mad. Elana looked as scared as Khanaarre.
“That would mean an owl the size of a house,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Perhaps we should move quickly and carefully and quietly.”
We spent the next two days crouching between rocks, our eyes ever skyward. We saw the beast only once, on the afternoon of the day after we found the pellet: a silhouette against the clouds, vaguely raptor-shaped, eerily silent, and diving – thankfully – for other prey.
The rain continued relentlessly, four mornings out of five. It got to where almost everything we owned was sopping wet. I had already traded out my boots for sandals. The rest of the party was forced to do the same. The only way to keep our foodstores dry was to hide them in Khanaarre’s and my wizard’s chests, and it became impossible to lay up more, as we had those first few days.
And then, one day, there were no more trees. Only dry shrubs clung to the rocky earth, despite the plentiful rain, and the wheeling stars overhead, twice as bright at night as even they were by day, and the Starry Serpent in the east. The descent became steeper and steeper. The white granite darkened to grey and then to black. Then, abruptly, the land dropped away. A great chasm opened up before us, cut either by tectonic action or the endless flowing of water or, perhaps, the literal hands of the gods.
“Sun have mercy,” Elana swore softly, looking out over the valley.
I decided not to point out that this was the work of the Sun, and his sons, in one of their great battles with the children and minions of the Leviathan.
“Arcmedus’ journals say that he travelled the south rim,” I said instead. “It was there that Xadaer and the other sons of Horaath were interred, so that their spirits could watch over the place where they and their soldiers had fallen.”
The valley ran west to east, a mind-bogglingly deep cleft in the earth. The only place in the Compact where I had seen anything like it had been in Namor, when I had first come to the lands of my own kind. The Naam river cut through the Namoran highlands, leaving a gash even wider than the river itself as it meandered east to west through the sandstone desert. This was twice as wide, and possibly twice as deep. Looking down the face of the cliff, I judged it passable, but only barely, and only if we had the proper gear. We did not, and I was glad that we had no need.
Nothing lived or grew here, even along the rim. The earth beneath our feet, so vibrantly alive just a mile back, felt dead. The wind that blew in our faces tasted of death and despair. What, from a distance, sometimes looked like foliage always proved to be swords and spears, often embedded in piles of naked bones. Some of those skeletal remains were human sized, but just as many were gigantic, half again to twice my height. Still others were smaller than a dwarf. Some had the skulls of animals, or the remains of wings, or of a second or third pair of arms. A few even had the hindquarters of a beast. All had clearly died of violence. Some, across impossibly vast oceans of time, still stood upright against one another, locked in battle even in death.
The skeletons, here, were more plentiful than the trees had been when we first crossed into the Holy Lands. The ground was hard and parched, indicating that no rain had fallen on the blackened granite in quite some time.
Finding places to set up our encampment was easy. Sleeping was another matter. Torrential morning rains were replaced by a wind that rose each night when the sun set, howling and wailing in the darkness and making the canvas of our tents shake and snap. There were voices on the wind, too: screaming, crying, chattering. Incomprehensible and maddening. We quickly came to miss the rain.
We came upon the first mausoleum on our second day along the rim. It was made of black granite, built to a giant scale, and covered in bas relief carvings depicting the many victories of the four-armed, wolf-headed occupant, whom the Heavenscript above the door named Vangol, son of Nodor, son of Althaeruh.
We came across two more mausoleums the next day, one larger than the first, the other smaller. These, to my shock and horror, had been leveled and looted. What if the Tomb of Xadaer had suffered the same fate? All of this would have been for nothing.
The ashen expressions my companions wore as we passed those two piles of rubble told me that their thoughts were along the same line.
“It has been a very long time,” said Khanaarre, as we set up camp for the night. “We cannot be the first grave robbers to come to the Holy Lands in search of objects of power.”
We all nodded.
“No,” said Rennin. “It was foolish to think that.”
“The looting of those crypts is not a promise that our target has met the same fate,” said Orland.
“All of your diviners confirmed that this path was our best chance,” I pointed out to the prince. I knew that to be true. I knew what my own divinations had said for the last decade and a half. But enough had gone against plan over the last months, culminating in my confrontation with Veralar, that my faith in my own vision was shaken.
We spent the next day wracked with worry. The next mausoleum we passed, near noon, was as whole as the first we had seen. Irrationally, this was reassuring, but we could not shake our fear entirely. And then, as the sun was setting on our third day walking the rim of the great valley, we came to the Tomb of Xadaer. All our worry proved to be for naught.
The mausoleum was as wide as my home and forge back in So’renner, and twice as tall. It stood alone, closer to the cliff edge than any other tomb we had yet seen. Like all the others we had seen so far, this tomb was built of black granite. The exterior was covered in bas relief carvings, divided into panels by faux columns that suck out from the walls. The images depicted a winged man with handsome but inhuman features. In some panels, he was depicted in a knee-length skirt or loincloth and held a scepter of rule. In others he wielded an ornately hilted khopesh and dressed in a breastplate and armored kilt that looked, to my eye, more Rasyri than Vencari, but in truth was neither.
Rennin reached for the door once we had made our first lap of the building, though we had not yet eaten dinner or set up our camp.
“Stop,” Khanaarre said harshly. “The door is locked and trapped.”
To his credit, Rennin stopped and took two steps back.
“How can you tell?” I asked, idly curious. I’d no doubt that she was correct, but I could not see any specific signs.
She glanced at me, perhaps trying to measure my tone. I hadn’t intended disrespect, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t achieved it.
“The same way you knew when we approached the Eastern Veil,” she said. “It’s my area of expertise.”
I nodded and made a subtle gesture toward the door. She shook her head. Then looked to the prince.
“With your permission, Elana,” she said, “I would like to wait till morning so that I can come at it fresh.”
Elana nodded.
“I defer to your wisdom,” she said.
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