Elana sulked for a few hours, much as she had when Derrek had tried to reassure her that the Usurper’s rise had not been her father’s fault. I had tried to soothe her, then. This time I had no stomach for it. We had been in the wilderness for months. Hunting was plentiful, now, but our stores were gone, and it was too wet to even try to set more aside. We had been able to bottle more water, but we were quickly running out of tea and soap. None of us knew how much longer the journey home would be, or could even begin to guess how difficult.
Derrek and I were wizards, yes, but we were not her court advisors. We answered her questions as best as we could, but our role was to guide and protect, not to anticipate her questions and misunderstandings. Perhaps we should have said more, but the fact was that we knew nothing for certain. Derrek had read the collected poems of the great bard, but knew better than to trust them verbatim. I knew the ancient tales of my people, but they were just that – ancient tales – and not precise enough to provide strategic information. Nor did I know enough of the tales Elana’s people told of Tal Thannuu and his children to even guess what they expected, let alone to correct them; if Derrek knew more, he kept his peace.
As unreliable as my people’s stories might be, and as little as I cared to recount them to a human audience who would not quite grasp their significance, I could not help but dwell on them.
Like dragons, the sao`ashan lived for thousands of years. Every one of them was a sorceress or wonderworker, and mighty at that. Though no greater in physical stature than elves, they had commanded whole nations of giants. Legend said that they could snatch thoughts from your mind, your very soul from your body. In the tales, the greatest and most terrible of them were all served by warriors whose souls they’d eaten, and those warriors were made near-immortal, themselves, in the process.
The sao`ashan and their giant servants had found the ancientmost ancestors of the llamenan and the rrotran, two peoples migrating from what must have been some great famine or tragedy, and they immediately took us captive. We were set to work in their houses and their factories, as the giants worked their fields and filled the ranks of their armies. Our labor, alongside their giants, built their greatest cities, carving palaces from the living rock of whole mountains.
And yet, somehow, we had risen up against them. The llamenan and the rrotran, together. In those ancient days, we plotted and schemed, we threw off our chains, and we escaped. We fled their great cities and descended the Great Ice Wall to the mortal world.
As a child, I had been obsessively afraid of the sao`ashan. My mothers didn’t threaten me with them, like I heard some parents do while visiting cousins in `Aasmiir – the three-eyed take little girls who don’t do their chores; the soul-eaters lurk in the woods, looking for children who’ve wandered too far from home – but those horror-tales obsessed me. I could not imagine, as a child, that such terrible monsters would endure the indignity of defeat by mere mortals, that they could let the insult of our uprising and escape go unanswered. It seemed to my childish self that they must come for us any day, now.
My mothers, particularly Maosee, had tried to explain to me that we had escaped the Children of Tal Thannuu more than three thousand years ago. Generations and generations of elves. Twelve Queens, including our own Rrallashyl. That the sao`ashan had not pursued us past the Great Ice Wall when we had first left them, and they wouldn’t – perhaps couldn’t – pursue us, now. Still, three-eyed demons haunted my dreams. Childhood night-terrors subsided, eventually, but the morbid fear remained.
When I was older, I learned of Illustria, the first great human kingdom. And I learned that they traded with a kingdom of giants in the mountains, a secretive people who magically bound merchants to silence about what they saw and heard. And, like most of my people, I had immediately recalled our ancient captors and the giants who served them.
How true were those ancient tales that had so frightened me as a child? The horror stories that haunted my worst dreams even now? I did not know.
As we marched toward the Lightning Plains, I prayed that Dano`ar’s stories were true as told: that he had avoided the sao`ashan, or found all their cities empty and deserted. I prayed that we would do the same.
I would tell Elana my people’s tales, if she asked. But she would have to use her words.
Because unless we were very lucky, we would learn the truth of them, ourselves, soon enough.
===
Elana sulked, for a while, but she came around soon enough. She was young, even for a human, and she gave herself freer rein in our company and away from court, but she had been raised a political creature. She knew how far she could carry a grudge or indulge a temper before it began to undermine her goals. So, as night fell and as we settled into camp for the night, she turned to Orland Borgon and asked him for tales of their great-grandfathers and the fall of House Inimbri, which had held the Rorgoth Throne before Traianum.
Orland was the third of her five generals, and he had served her father in the same capacity. But he was also the son of a long line of diplomats, and he had been raised on political histories before he had turned his restless mind to military strategies.
I knew the broad strokes of the tale, too. The Black Mask was not an exceptionally political order, but my master had had a more than passing personal interest in history. I could not immediately recall, and Orland didn’t say, how Inimbri had come to hold the throne, but by the time they were overthrown they were already counted among Decadent Emperors: hosting elaborate drunken and drug-fueled feasts accompanied by troupes of dancers and gymnasts performing shows that crossed the line from urbane sensuality into explicit sexuality. They maintained the state cults with staid civic piety, giving the Court of the Sun precisely its legal and traditional due, but had publicly reveled in collecting initiations from the smaller, more exotic, mystery cults, adding many of their more fervid holidays to the civic calendar. The small cults and the richest Houses had enjoyed the revelry, but the mainline solar cults and the smaller houses had despaired at the public indecency and public expense, and the taxes that went to financing them.
Orland told the tale of how priests of the Triumvirate and the judges of the Court of the Sun had come to the House Traianum, suggesting that the time had come for a new dynasty. Official lore claimed that Gilgardos Traianus had been reluctant, begging for a sign. But Orland believed – and Derrek and I both agreed – that it had been Gilgardos who had approached the Sun Court, if not the Triumvirate, and asked for their blessing in the first place before putting long-laid plans into action.
House Traianum began their civil war with a whisper campaign. They accused the emperor Ovidius Inimbri of falling under the sway of a cult of the Leviathan, only narrowly avoiding accusing the small cults en mass of serving the Enemy of All. Accustomed to more lascivious accusations from the conservative factions of the empire, Ovidius was slow to respond. In the end, Gilgardos Traianus had won through a combination of superior charisma and military prowess.
The first of the now-infamous Traianum Reforms had been to remove the most licentious festivals that the Inimbris had added to the state calendar. The second had been to ban all intoxicants but wine and beer from state functions, and to limit their export to the Compact. Then they had lowered taxes and tariffs – the promise of which had bought them most of their allies, both in Vencar and the Compact at large.
The next day, conversations continued in similar vein. Elana, Rennin, and Orland told stories from the days of the height of the empire. Rennin recounted great battles between the Vencari Imperial Army and the infamous battle-bards of Namora – a subject he might have not have chosen, were Veralar still in our company. Orland declaimed passages from the Valdaria, an epic poem which valorized the days of the Plague of Revenants, and the ways that the Vencari Houses had protected themselves and their people from the rising dead and eldritch abominations before the coming of the Prophet of Torh. Elana bragged about the accomplishments of her ancestors: the trade reforms with the Compact, the acquisition and introduction of horses from Shendryl, the great trade alliance with Naal that made crossing the Sacred Desert possible. Some of it, I had heard of. Some of it, I had not. A few times, I looked over my shoulder to see Derrek composing his face into careful neutrality. Even so, all our moods were improved.
The torrential rains continued each morning for the first three days. On the fourth day we were granted a reprieve, and on the fifth day the rain was shorter and lighter. Every day after that grew dryer and cooler and longer. We were clearly entering a new climate band.
The land grew dryer as well as the air, and rockier. It also began to slope upward. The underbrush grew thinner with each mile we hiked. On the eighth day, the massive trees that had surrounded us since we first crossed over into the Holy Land began to diminish. We saw patches of sky with increasing regularity.
Game grew slightly less plentiful, but the additional time it took Rennin and I to hunt was more than balanced out by the time we reclaimed with the receding rains. The dryer ground was no less treacherous to hike than the mud had been, but the luxury of dry shoes and the reduction in blisters were blessings beyond words.
We had not quite made it out of the jungle when we came upon the first of Dano`ar’s ruined cities. The trees had thinned, and we were getting regular views of the sky, but the earth was still wet black loam and choked with flowering ferns and vines, and strange animals cried and howled in the distance. We didn’t recognize it for what it was, at first: all we saw was a strangely regular hill, vine-covered and thrusting up into a surprisingly large hole in the canopy. It was when Rennin and I went to climb it in hopes of seeing over the trees that we felt the stone solidity of it beneath the vines and realized what we had found. What we had taken for rock formations and hillocks around a large central hill were, in fact, the remains of a city built around a step pyramid.
Rennin and I continued our climb to the top, aided by the knowledge of where to look for the stairs. They were still a vine-choked hazard, but that was an easier and safer path than attempting to climb the great steps of the pyramid, each of which was taller than any of us. At the summit we could still not see much over the trees, but we could see the tips of mountains in the distance, north by northwest, and the shadow of clouds on the distant horizon.
Looking down we could see the rough layout of what the city had once been. At the foot of the pyramid was a wide clear space, almost entirely reclaimed by the jungle. Just beyond that were low, solid buildings that looked relatively intact. Beyond that lay the rubble of what looked to have been larger, taller buildings.
“Who do you think built this?” Rennin asked.
I glanced over at him. The look on his face was an interesting blend of curiosity, wonder, and fear.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Likely the same people who built the pyramid beneath the gate.”
When we made it back down to the ground, it was clear that the others had also realized where we were and been struck by curiosity. They had cleared the vines from one of the squat structures at the foot of the pyramid, exposing an open door well on one wall and a relief carving on the other. Elana and Orland were exploring the interior. Derrek was examining the carvings.
I joined Derrek while Rennin stuck his head through the opening. The structure was built to a mortal scale – the door large enough for any of us to enter but the ceiling low enough that the tallest among us could reach it with little effort – but built of massive stone blocks. More interestingly, no two masonry stones were the same size, but they were all cut with such precision that no mortar was needed to join them. Each was cut with a single figure. Some appeared to represent buildings or scenery, but most were anthropoid, contorted so that they fit within the confines of the tidy rectangular geometry of the masonry.
“Any thoughts?” I asked him.
He grunted noncommittally. I waited.
“Nothing I’d care to share without a beer to blame,” he said after a while.
I chuckled, and told him what I’d said to Rennin.
“That seems likely,” he said. “But who maintains that site? Why did they abandon this one? And when? It would take hundreds of years for something to topple and overgrow like this in the Compact. But look at this weathering – or the lack of it! This might have been abandoned mere decades ago.”
I nodded.
“Or perhaps the vine cover sheltered it from the rains,” I said. “Which only further complicates the question.”
He nodded back.
“Whoever they are,” he said, “I don’t think that they are the same people who built the tombs. Or, if they are, there was enough time between the two that their visual style has completely changed.”
“I concur,” I said.
It was early afternoon, and we could have made a few more miles before sunset, but we all agreed that were unlikely to find another camp site as good as this. So Derrek and I explored the ruins while Rennin and Orland made camp. We found countless more carvings, none of them bearing any iconography that either of us recognized. If I were to guess, I’d have said that the small buildings surrounding the central pyramid were priests’ quarters and storage for ritual supplies, either scavenged when the site was abandoned or long ago lost to the elements. Derrek thought that the larger buildings in the next ring looked like the crushed remains of homes and storefronts. I could not argue: though I had seen some of the great cities of the Compact, I knew that the elven architecture with which I was most familiar bore no resemblance to human or dwarven cities, and I had seen relatively few of those to compare these to.
When the sun began to set, we laid out our bedrolls in the surprisingly cool, dry, and bug-free shelter of the building we had freed from the vines. The space was small and solid enough that Derrek and I were able to place wards that could protect us from any intrusion and there was no need to keep watch. Nonetheless, the knights took up positions to either side of the doorway. Elana took the corner nearest Rennin, leaving Derrek and I to share the final corner.
As true night fell, we were glad of the shelter and the wards. The cries of a hunting cat split the night, accompanied by the death-scream of a deer. The sounds of the jungle were still alien, even after the weeks we had spent here, and grew more so the further north we traveled. That made sense, I supposed: the further we moved from the Veil, the further we were from not just the gate but from the very mortal world from which we’d come.
I was glad of the warmth of Derrek lying beside me, and of the nearness of our other companions in the shelter, as well. There had been so much tension for so long, I had begun to fear that the quest would tear us all apart. In these last few days, though, we had begun to feel like a team, again.
I still had my suspicions about Derrek, of course, and knew that Elana and her knights did, as well. I had, on restless nights, come up with a handful of scenarios – each less plausible than the last – that might explain how he had come this far and still intended to betray us. That he wanted the sword for himself but feared he would be unable to return to the mortal world without our aid remained the most likely but still strained credulity. That this was an absurdly and unnecessarily elaborate ruse to deliver us to the Usurper, his former lover, came in a close second. Both theories suffered from the decade that he had waited for us to come to him when he could have sought out the prince on his own at any time. It had occurred to me that perhaps he was a better diviner than he let on and was acting on his own to fulfil or deter whatever prophesy Lynqxaemass had seen in the stars. If astral timing were involved, either of the first two theories suddenly became more plausible.
I didn’t want to believe that he was the traitor Lynqxaemass had believed one of us to be. I struggled with the idea that any of us was a traitor: we had each loved the prince for as long as we had known her. But, if she had not been lying to torment us, he was by far the most likely.
As I began to drift toward sleep, my thoughts turned – as they did more and more often – to Rrii`aa. I pictured her face in my mind, remembered the sound of her laughter and the bright mischief in her eyes. I would not wait for Elana’s victory, I decided. As soon as I returned to Liddarn, I would ask her to marry me, and to look for a husband together. Would she accept or refuse me immediately? Would she insist on a long engagement, or on consulting a matchmaker? I did not know, precisely, the stars under which she had been born; a matchmaker might look at our birthcharts and declare us incompatible.
Jungle gave way to fen which, in turn, gave way to lush grassland that faded into rocky scrubland. The sky faded from lurid and clear cerulean summer blue to a darker steely blue grey streaked with storm clouds. The mountains in the distance grew larger without ever appearing to grow closer.
Game was scarce in the fen, and the water unfit to drink for the first time in the Holy Lands. We were fortunate that our waterskins were full, and the amphorae packed in our wizard’s chests, and that we had grown accustomed to hunger. The birds and rodents we found were too small to be hunted by bow. There were massive water lizards, each as big around as Orland and twice as long, but we were uncertain if they were fit to eat – and even less certain that they were safe to hunt, after we saw a pair of them duel, moving with astounding speed and ferocious strength. It took us two days to cross that fetid swamp, dodging the giant lizards and venomous snakes and getting caught in the mud.
The grassland was better hiking and better hunting. Snakes were still a concern, but the few we saw were already retreating from our party’s crashing progress through the high stalks. Even Rennin couldn’t move quietly, and I was left to hunt and forage on my own. I caught us a handful of large rabbits, that first day, and after the swamp it felt like a feast… until we came to the edge of the plain, when we encountered not just one, but a whole herd of beasts that looked vaguely like bulls with lions’ manes. We each put three arrows in the nearest of them, but that had no effect save to drive them to run. We were forced to pursue, and I only brought the creature down by magic.
That was a feast! But one we were barely able to enjoy. We stopped then to make a fire – carefully, amidst the grass – and ate our fill with relish. But even before night fell, we could hear the calls and cries of scavengers circling us, weighing the risks of an unknown adversary against the bounty we had brought. We cooked as much as we thought we could eat the next day, then fled into the grass, conceding our kill to the uncounted competition.
Two days later, we crossed into the scrubland. At last, the mountainous horizon appeared to be growing nearer, and at the very edges of our vision we could see the pillars of stone that Dano`ar had described. Once again, game became scarce. We spent more time each day scavenging for food than we did travelling northward. It was pure luck that we discovered that some of the most common plant life – a squat swollen flowering thing, covered in sharp but nontoxic spines – was not just edible but delicious. It was a struggle to clean so that it could be eaten without stabbing ourselves, but it was more than worth the effort, and we collected as many as we could carry in the hopes that they would keep in case of leaner times ahead.
It was three more days of travel before we finally came to the end of the scrubland and to the edge of the Lightning Plains proper. This transition was more abrupt than some of the others: there was, in fact, a line where the scrub rapidly diminished and where columnar stone formations of various sizes suddenly appeared, growing taller and taller with each northward mile. In the middle distance, maybe a day away, maybe closer, rose a city wall marked with broken towers. Dark patches of storm cloud chased each other across the sky, flickering with lighting, and thunder crashed ominously in the distance.
The weather changed almost as soon as we crossed that line. The wind rose and the temperature dropped almost painfully. We had to stop immediately to dig out heavier cloaks. It was only the thought of building a fire out of the wind that got us to that first ruin, closer to full dark than we usually liked to travel.
We could see the towers and walls from far enough away that the sheer size of the city didn’t shock us, at first. It was only when we had found our way inside those cyclopean walls that the true scale of it became apparent. Every building block was at least the size of a person. Even half-fallen, most of the buildings were taller than Orland and Derrek stacked on top of one another. Some were two or three times that size. Doorways rose twelve or fifteen feet into the air. Ceilings – in those few buildings where any interior floors survived – were even taller. We could see that while some of the buildings were plain, even austere, others had once been ornately decorated. In our haste and the poor light, though, we had little chance to examine the artwork.
The temperature dropped precipitously with the setting sun, and night had long fallen by the time we found a building small and intact enough for Derrek and I to shroud in protective wards. We did so immediately, then promptly lit a fire by magic as well.
“This is not the most efficient use of my blood,” said Derrek, “but neither is freezing to death.”
I doubted that dying was likely a literal risk – it was hard to say how cold it really was, not just how much colder than what we had become accustomed to for the months we had been here – but I neither argued nor complained.
We huddled close that night. I found myself delightfully warm pressed in between Derrek and Elana, on the far side of whom lay Rennin then Orland. For some reason, I thought of that long-ago night in the Namoran inn, laying on the wooden floor by the fire, pressed between Elana and Veralar. Grief over her loss welled up in me, strong and fresh, and in that moment I hated Derrek for what he had done to her, accident or no.
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