In the morning, we all dug through our stores, searching for warmer clothes. Derrek and I, with our wizard’s chests, had the advantage. We all reclaimed our heavy, compact-style boots, and Derrek revealed a truly prodigious stash of heavy socks, which he distributed generously.
“I lost three toes to frostbite as a child,” he said. “I won’t lose another.”
Elana and Rennin winced in sympathy, as did I. I was embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t noticed – had he had them regrown by healer’s magic, or had my curiosity always been above his knees?
Orland chuckled.
“So there is more to you of Handar than just your face,” he said.
I winced at that, too, recalling Derrek’s tale of being mutilated and exiled as a child. If Derrek took offence, though, he gave no sign.
Between the five of us, with the surprise contribution of Derrek’s improbable wardrobe and what we had managed to salvage and patch of our battle-damaged traveling clothes, we were all able to don enough layers to face the increasing cold… at least for a while. We looked distinctly rag-tag, but what did that matter? Our dignity meant nothing in this place.
“I’ve lost track of the days,” said Rennin, “and the stars here are foreign to me, but autumn comes closer both with every day that passes and every mile we travel north, and winter will follow swiftly after. We may need to consider making a shelter for the winter.”
I shuddered at the notion, but he was right. The others nodded slowly.
“I fear you’re right,” said Elana. Then, to Derrek: “There will be more ruins, such as this?”
“According to Dano`ar,” he said.
“Let us reassess when we reach the next one.”
And so we set out. Part of me wanted to take an hour or two to explore the ruined city, but we had not come here to perform archaeology and, to be honest, I was mostly looking for an excuse not to step back out onto the Lightning Plains. I tried to remind myself that it had been more than three thousand years since the sao`ashan had held my people captive. They might have died out or moved on in that time. If they still lived, if they still lived here, they might have no living memory of elves. They might have given up the practice of slavery. I had no rational reason to be so afraid.
But afraid I was. So very, very afraid.
The first stretch of the Lightning Plains had been sharply distinct from the scrubland that had come before. As we travelled, though, the land proved less uniform than it had looked from the darkening path to the giant city. There were stretches of what looked like salt-plain. There were stretches of mud flat. There were stretches of sagebrush and juniper forest. Game consisted mostly of long and gamey jackrabbits, but we did sometimes spy more of the maned bulls in the distance, and we saw tracks and scat of the Dano`ar’s drakes and hunting cats, indicating that some middle-sized prey animals must be available somewhere.
We found Dano`ar’s road that afternoon. It cut through the desert, improbably clear and intact in spite of the desert sand and sagebrush that surrounded it. Like the ruin we had just left, the road was built to an inhuman scale: cobblestones the size of horses laid in rows wide enough for four carts to travel abreast. The whole of the road had probably been elevated, once. Some sections still rose head-high over the desert floor. Other sections had been swallowed by sand dunes, or had been wiped out by storm and lighting.
That night we camped in a wind shelter formed in the lee of an upraised section of ancient road. We made our cookfire from sagebrush, raised Derrek’s tent to share and conserve warmth, and kept watch in shifts. I took dawn shift, relieving Rennin and rebuilding the fire to make myself tea from our dwindling supply. I saw no signs of game or predators, but I spent much of the night avoiding strange and chitinous creatures with eight legs, two claws, and an upraised tail that looked like a stinger. They were no bigger than my palm, but they were unsettling to look at, and their stingers were bigger than any wasp I had ever seen. I was relieved when they scattered with the dawn.
I built up my fire and put on another kettle for tea, grateful that we had been able to freshen our water-stores in the scrubland and simultaneously hoping that we would find a well or spring again, soon. The kettle whistled, hopefully waking my companions, and I added tea to steep. I was just stringing my bow to go in search of something for breakfast when I heard a pained shout from inside the tent. A moment later, Rennin was limping out in just one boot, shaking the other to eject a half-crushed specimen of the creatures I had spent my shift avoiding.
“Fucker was sleeping in my boot,” he said, unnecessarily, kicking the corpse into the cook fire. It bubbled and smoked with a sickly-sweet odor, then burst.
I examined the wound. It looked irritated, but wasn’t bleeding badly. I applied a drawing salve, in case some portion of the stinger was embedded, then left him in Elana’s care to hunt breakfast. By the time I returned – victorious, today, bearing a small boar that I had already field stripped – his foot was beginning to swell.
“It looks bad,” Elana said, understandably concerned.
“Can you walk,” I asked him.
“Not without a crutch,” he said, his voice as neutral as he could keep it. Suddenly our wind shelter felt very much more exposed.
“There’s another ruin on the horizon,” I said. “Do you think you can make it?”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
I opened my wizard’s chest and pulled out my drug kit. I grimaced. I wished he hadn’t destroyed the creature that had stung him. Was it the sort of venom that could be fought off with stimulants, or the kind that would kill him when it reached his heart or brain? I thought of the laboratory equipment I’d left in my tower and suddenly wished I’d made some effort to assemble a portable alchemy kit from it.
“Derrek,” I called his name and summoned him with a gesture.
He came and huddled close.
“Did you see the thing that stung him?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Do you know anything about venoms or poisons?”
“Very little,” he said.
I grunted. It was all on me, then.
“I’m going to give him a depressant, now, because it doubles as a painkiller. If he starts to faint, we’ll give him a stimulant then and hope it doesn’t do more harm than good.”
He nodded.
I added a dose of tincture of poppy to Rennin’s tea. Derrek recruited Orland to help lower his tent and cannibalize the long poles into a makeshift crutch. Elana took charge of cooking the boar.
Rennin was already shaky by the time we were ready to go, and it was an incredible effort to get him back to the road. He walked as upright as he could, but the effort clearly cost him more than we had guessed, probably more than he could afford. Elana clung to his side, supporting him as much as he would allow.
We ate as we walked. When I had first seen the ruins while hunting, I had been certain that we would make them by nightfall. Rennin’s injury slowed us enough that I quickly came to fear that would not be possible. I meticulously kept my eyes on our goal, not wanting to worry or shame Rennin by looking back.
Our luck quickly took a further turn for the worse. We had only been on the road for a couple hours when a shift in the wind brought the scent of a hunting cat. I raised my hand. The party came to a complete and silent stop behind me. The wind shifted again and the scent was gone, but months on the road and this moment of fear combined to make my senses as acute as any elven hunter.
“We’re being stalked,” I said, and resumed walking. “Stay alert.”
We knew little of the hunting cats. Just that – if these that Dano`ar had seen were the same we had encountered in the river valley – they were massive and determined. The first one we had seen had stalked us for days. There was every reason to believe that this one would do the same. And, worn down by our travels and Rennin’s injury, we had every reason to believe that this one would see an opportunity where that one had not.
The need for greater vigilance slowed us further. Hour by hour, though the ruined towers grew ever nearer, it became more and more clear that we would not reach shelter before nightfall. And we had cannibalized our best shelter to make Rennin’s crutches.
We got our first glimpses of the hunting cat around noon: its massive triangular head, its elongated six-limbed body, its heavy lashing tail. It was darker and more dappled in coloring than the one we’d seen before, but clearly of the same kind. It knew that we had seen it, but seemed to sense that we could not flee any faster than we already were. It would strike in its own time. And that might well be the end of our quest.
I did my best to keep my mood to myself, but I don’t know that I succeeded. Or, perhaps more charitably to all of us: we all grew more frightened and frustrated as Rennin weakened and the shadows lengthened and the sense of danger drew ever nearer.
“Leave me,” Rennin said, stumbling as we helped him navigate the sands around a particularly steep break in the road. His voice was weak, his whole body shaking with the effort of remaining upright.
“No,” we all said simply, in near perfect unison.
The windward side of the road was a massive, shifting dune that threatened to turn our ankles and throw us down into the chasm – probably once bridged – that split the road like an axe wound. The leeward side was a dropoff so steep that shadows swallowed the bottom.
We paused to breathe when we regained the road. The shadows were dark and long, mirroring the stripes of storm clouds that had come to dominate the sky. The sun would be set within the hour. The potential shelter of the ruined city loomed in the distance, tauntingly near but unreachable.
“One more hour,” Rennin said. “I can go for one more hour.”
Out of respect – and perhaps desperation – we took him at his word. He threw one arm over Elana’s shoulder, adjusted his crutch under the other, and we moved forward.
That was the moment the hunting cat chose to strike.
It emerged from a fold in the ground that we had mistaken for a mere shadow, leaping at the limping pair of Rennin-and-Elana, who had fallen to the back of our line. Derrek and I had no time to act. Orland, who must have seen it a moment before the rest of us, did.
Having no time to draw his sword or shield from his back, he leapt bodily at the beast, spinning mid-air to hit it with a resounding crash of hammered steel against heavy flesh and bone.
Man and beast both fell to the ground, stunned by the impact.
Beast recovered faster.
It surged, rolling on top of Orland. Its claws scrabbled against Orland’s shield. Its jaws bit for his head, as though he were a turtle.
I dug my wizard’s claw into my hand, uttered the word of power, and flung a bolt of force, but missed in my panic. Derrek spoke that terrible word and hurled a beam of golden light, as he had with the hostage takers in So’renner. The beam struck the creature’s head with a sickly smell of burning flesh and it collapsed atop of Orland.
Both lay terribly still.
“Orland?” Elena called. Rennin was collapsing in her arms and it was all she could do to keep them both upright. “Orland, are you alright?”
My guts clenched.
Together, Derrek and I went to check. The daylight was dimming fast enough that we had to conjure our own lights to see by. We quickly wished that we hadn’t.
Orland lay beneath the beast, his head clenched in its jaws. Derrek’s golden light had burned clean through the creature’s skull, cauterizing as it went so that the wound was still smoking. The spreading pool of blood that obscured Orland’s face could only be his own.
Our faces clearly lit by magelight, Elana and Rennin didn’t need us to say it. Unable to bear the weight of both Rennin and her grief, Elana’s legs gave way and she and Rennin fell together to the ground. She screamed in rage and fury, then collapsed into loud, ugly sobs.
I looked to Derrek, uncertain what to say or do next, and saw the grief fade from his face. What replaced it wasn’t any emotion I could recognize. It was a mask as impenetrable as the one made of iron I’d seen him wear to the banquet. I turned to where he was looking and had a guess of what he might have felt.
There, at the edge of the pool of light we had conjured, stood three creatures that towered over us all. The smallest of them was as much bigger than Derrek and poor Orland as they were bigger than Elana and Rennin, the other two were that much bigger, again, than their companion. Two largest were dark brown with shaggy hair and polished steel breastplates. The third was pale, smaller and thinner than the others, wore a chain shirt under a white tabard, and bore only a single eye in the center of her brow. The matched pair bore swords and spears. The cyclops carried a halberd.
Our stunned silence caught even Elana’s attention. She, too, turned to see what had brought us to a stop. She gasped.
They carried their weapons at the ready, but they did not brandish them. They spoke to us in a language I had never heard before. Our stunned silence may have been answer enough. The cyclops spoke again, this time in a dialect of celestial that I could understand, if only barely, offering a guarded greeting and a demand to identify ourselves.
They were giants. Giants like those who had served the sao`ashan. These, at least, still lived. Did the sao`ashan still live? Did these soldiers serve them? My blood ran cold with fear. I could not force words past my throat, let alone my lips.
I looked briefly back to Derrek. He was already moving forward. When he met my eyes the unreadable expression gave way to what I thought might be regret and resignation. As he passed me, I heard him whisper, “I’m sorry.”
He pulled that beautiful and alien clip from his hair and held it aloft so the silver caught the light. Then he spoke to them in the language that they had first greeted us in, which none of us had heard before.
Elana and I exchanged looks of horror and confusion as Derrek spoke with the giants. I was still too scared and shocked to speak. I could only imagine that Elana felt the same.
Finally, Derrek turned to face us, his expression carefully neutral.
“They will escort us to safety,” he said. “They have offered to carry those of us who cannot walk.”
Once more I looked to Elana. I was grateful beyond words that it was not my responsibility to make this decision.
“How,” Elana choked on the word. “How do you know their language?”
“I was taught by the priestesses who raised me,” he said.
He had mentioned those priestesses once or twice before. I had assumed they were the isolated keepers of some obscure mountain temple, just north of Handar. Perhaps some relic of Illustrian culture, given his obsession with and success at discovering the secret of their lost power. Or a snake cult, given the winged serpent tattooed on his chest. Now, I had a sudden fear that the temple was much, much further north than I had imagined.
Elana looked down at Rennin, then over to where Orland’s corpse lay.
“Do we have any choice,” she asked.
“We could fight,” he said, composed but not cold. “Khanaarre and I would probably prevail against these scouts. But I do not think we would survive much further into the plains, themselves.”
“Will we be … prisoners?”
“Suppliants,” he said. “Foreigners who crossed into forbidden territory uninvited, yes, but also strangers found weary and injured in the wilderness.”
Elana paused. Then she nodded.
Derrek turned and nodded to the giants. The two larger, darker ones came forward. Up close, I could see that one was a man and one was a woman. The woman took Rennin from Elana with every gentleness, lifting him as easily as Orland might once have lifted a small child. The man pried the dead cat’s jaws from poor Orland’s skull and lifted him with, if less tenderness, no less ease or respect.
The cyclops gestured for us to follow. We did. The two other giants brought up the rear.
The giants did not speak to us as we walked. Nor did we speak to each other. We were exhausted and broken-hearted, and prisoners in a very practical sense, even if Derrek had said otherwise. Elana’s thoughts, I imagined, were on her dead friend and dying lover. I was struggling to think of any question I might ask to which I truly wanted the answer.
Our captors did not press us to a forced march, but neither did they let us dally. Night fell around us, dark and cold, as we approached the ruin. The distance had really not been that great. We would have made it easily, if not for Rennin’s injury. Orland might even still be alive.
At last we came within sight of the gate, and it suddenly became very clear that this city was not ruined or abandoned. What had looked like broken walls from a distance were, rather, strangely irregular: never less than fifty feet high, sometimes rising to half again that height, but everywhere perfectly maintained and crenelated. Details were vague in the darkness, but I could see the great towers that rose from the corners where sections of wall met, sometimes a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet tall, and greater towers still rose from the city within the walls.
We were brought to the front gate, where great bronze doors reflected our dim mage-lights back to us. The doors, twice as tall as the taller of our giant companions, were decorated with the images of still greater, taller giants. When the doors opened in those mighty walls, spilling bright blue-white magelight onto the road, another trio of guards stepped out to meet us. These did brandish their weapons, until our captors gave the proper signs. Then things got even stranger: the cyclops leading our party stepped aside so that Derrek could step forward and once again present his hair pin. The gate guard stepped back in surprise, then bowed, and we were quickly ushered through the gate. We were not searched or disarmed.
The wide courtyard immediately inside the walls was lit by magelights. Further down the road, I could see they used lamps or torches, instead. The courtyard was marked by a fountain in the middle and surrounded by massive stone buildings. Some were plain stone slabs. Some boasted pennants or tapestries hanging from windows, or to either side of the door. Others were ornately decorated with caryatids holding up porches and balconies in front of walls marked by elaborate bas relief carvings. Everywhere there were giants, some with two eyes, some with only one, most in armor and the rest in what I could only describe as livery.
We were led to a moderately decorated building, taller than any stone building I had ever seen, with a deep covered porch lined by fluted columns. To either side of the door, the wall was carved with the highly stylized image of some enormous plant, and repeating geometries ran the length of the foundation. Derrek followed without protest. We, in turn, followed him.
Elana was almost inside when she realized that the giants carrying Rennin and Orland were continuing without us.
“No, wait!” she cried. “Where are they taking them?”
Derrek started, then shook his head.
“Rennin is being taken to a healer,” he said. “Orland is being taken to the temple of Torh. I’m sorry. I should have said sooner.”
His eyes and his voice were distant, hollow. When he looked at us, he did not seem to see us.
“And where are we being taken?” Elana demanded.
Derrek squinted at the building in front of us. Then he spoke to one of the guards. They answered politely, but gestured to the door firmly.
“To be made comfortable until morning,” he said, “when we will be given an audience with the archons of the city.”
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