The Empire's Ruin, page 40
It was Pattick’s voice, finally, that broke her from her concentration.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” he murmured.
She looked up to see that the column had stopped. Pattick stood just at her side, a hand on his sword, gaping. “All that down below—it wasn’t even half of it.”
From the harbor, they’d seen only the ziggurat. The angle had been wrong to make out the other buildings on the plateau, the thousands of other buildings, all built of stone rather than wood, blocks upon blocks upon blocks of them. The scale shifted in her mind. This was the city. The ramshackle structures below were just some kind of slum, like so much driftwood tossed up at the base of the cliffs.
For a moment Jonon didn’t speak. He just glared at the place as though it had delivered him a personal affront. Only when the soldiers started to shift nervously did he turn to face them.
“If someone were going to attack us, they would have done it there.” He pointed back the way they had come. “On the ramp. That was the natural point of defense.”
This observation seemed to breathe some confidence back into the men. It was self-evidently true, for one thing. And the admiral was still the admiral—focused, stern, dismissive—despite the strangeness of the surroundings. A few nodded. Most loosened their grip on their swords and spears. One man elbowed his companion in the ribs.
“Scared of a bunch of empty houses?”
Gwenna didn’t share their confidence, and whatever relief she’d felt about reaching the top of the plateau vanished as they pressed deeper into the city.
There were no bodies. The streets were wide, empty, open to the sky. Though she scanned the windows and doors of the buildings they passed, there was no sign of ambush, no rustling of some hidden army massing for an attack. And yet she felt her hackles rising. Every time she glanced over her shoulder she expected to find eyes upon her. The wind keened through the streets, kicking up dust and tattered leaves, but in the moments that it dropped, she thought she heard scuttling, shuffling, as though something furtive were following. Beneath the smell of the soldiers—leather, and sweat, and oiled steel—beneath her own reek, she was almost certain she caught a whiff of something else, warm and feral.
She glanced over at Dhar.
“Do you hear anything?”
The Manjari captain closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “Only the wind.”
Gwenna looked up the column. Despite Jonon’s words, the animal wariness of the men had reasserted itself. They walked with drawn blades and half-leveled spears. Even the admiral had a hand on the hilt of his sword. Only Kiel seemed unconcerned by the strange city spread out around them. The historian moved with that strange gait of his, awkward but strong at the same time, studying the place with the kind of dry interest most people reserved for books.
Most of the construction proved more or less familiar—limestone blocks fitted and mortared, slate roofs, wooden doors hung on steel hinges, shutters over the windows to keep out the worst of the wind and weather. And yet the total effect was somehow strangely alienating, as though every angle had been knocked just a few degrees awry.
Then, at the end of a broad avenue, they reached the first square, the first pit, and the first statue.
Though Jonon had given no command, everyone stopped. It was hard to know where to look first. At the center of the square the ground simply … opened. It looked like a great well, thirty paces across, had been bored into the flagstones. At the center of that well, sunken down inside it, evidently hewn from the bedrock itself, stood some kind of stone structure, its flat roof coming just flush with the flags of the square where the soldiers stood. The lines of the building reminded Gwenna vaguely of something sacred, a shrine, a temple, but it had no windows or glass, no openings at all, save for what looked like a heavily fortified door deep at the bottom of the well. She stepped as close as she dared, peered over the edge into the darkness, but there was nothing else down there, just the temple, the flat open space ringing it on every side, and the sheer walls of the pit, all carved from the same stone.
Atop the temple, however, stood the statue.
It loomed over them, five paces high at least. Gwenna stared up at the thing, trying to make sense of the strangely jointed limbs, the impossibly limber spine, the eyes. Her first thought was that the sculptor had been a madman, someone who’d rendered his nightmares in stone.
Dhar, however, frowned, then stepped forward.
“Gabhya,” he said after a pause.
Jonon turned to him. “You have seen one of these before?”
The captain shook his head slowly. “But I have witnessed smaller specimens. This has the same … wrongness to it.”
That wrongness extended beyond all the limbs, all the eyes. There was something obscene about the figure, twisted, almost nauseating. For the second time, Gwenna had the horrible feeling that she was dreaming.
“Why is it up on a pedestal?” Pattick murmured.
The admiral glanced over at him, then nodded. “Why, indeed. Historian?”
Kiel gazed up at the sculpture, his eyes blank with the reflected sky. After a moment’s pause, he gestured across the gap to the roof of the temple and the statue’s base. “It has a name.”
Gwenna hadn’t noticed the letters carved into the circular plinth. If they were, in fact, letters. The script looked more like splattered blood—all slashes and accents—than text.
“Can you read that?” the admiral asked.
Kiel shook his head. “Not yet. I may be able to learn it if we find more samples.”
“Do you want to write it down?”
“There is no need,” the historian replied mildly.
No one seemed to want to get too close to the edge of the well. Gwenna didn’t blame them. A strange, cold … wrongness to which she couldn’t put a name wafted up out of the depths, as though the stone itself were rotting. Some of the soldiers eyed the pit warily. Other seemed more worried about the tight alleyways and empty buildings at their back; they turned in slow circles as though uncertain where to look. Several had looped around to the other side of the square.
“Sir!” Chent called suddenly. He was gesturing out toward the temple, to something on the roof occluded by the statue. “There’s a … some kind of door.”
More like a trapdoor, Gwenna saw when she’d joined the others, broad and heavy, banded with steel, set flush into the flat stone.
“How do you get to the ’Kent-kissing thing?” Lurie muttered.
“There.” Cho Lu pointed to the side of the square. A long wooden plank hung against the wall of one of the buildings. Metal brackets had been set into its ends, at right angles to the plank itself.
Cho Lu gestured to the brackets, then to two holes drilled into the stone at the lip of the well.
“These fit into those. It’s a bridge.”
“A drawbridge,” Jonon corrected him. He studied the building at the center of the pit. “For some kind of prison.”
“Strange place for a prison,” Pattick said, “out here for everyone to see.”
The admiral shook his head. “The seeing would have been the point. Whatever happened down there”—he pointed into the shadowy depths—“it was meant to be observed.”
Whatever the place had been, it wasn’t the only one.
They worked their way deeper into the city, navigating by the top of the ziggurat, which loomed over even the tallest buildings. In some places the roads ran straight, in others they bent unpredictably, almost pointlessly, as though the builders had shied away from some obstacle that had long since eroded. Deep ravines scored the plateau—streams running along the bottom—and in places they were forced to cross stone bridges that looked too slender to support their own weight. The city was marvelously intact, but the layout of the place felt … shattered, carved up, as though it were actually a score of different cities forced uneasily together.
A few hundred paces farther along, they reached another square, another pit, another sunken prison or temple or whatever it was, another statue looming over the flat roof. This one reminded Gwenna vaguely of a bear. If bears had eight limbs and walked upright.
“It’s like they worshipped these things,” Cho Lu said, shaking his head.
A few of the legionaries shot wary glances at Dhar.
“The Manjari,” he said quietly, “have never worshipped monsters. The statues in our cities are of generals, patriots, lawmakers.”
“That thing,” Jonon said, leaning hard on the second word, “does not look like a giver of laws.”
The soldiers had grown openly agitated, checking over their shoulders every other breath, overgripping their swords, tapping at the triggers of their flatbows. Gwenna closed her eyes, tried to listen. The patter she’d heard had vanished, but she could still smell something out there. It was tricky to decipher the scent, but she could make out dirt, blood, hair.… For half a heartbeat she thought she heard panting. Then the wind kicked up and it was gone.
Jonon turned to face his men, putting his back to the pit, as though indifferent to whatever might lie in wait there.
“We have come to a new land, and so, of course, there are new creatures. A traveler from afar who arrived in Annur, or the foothills of the Romsdals, say, would be amazed by the sight of a moose, a porcupine, even something as simple and natural as a beaver. These creatures”—he raised a finger toward the statue—“these … gabhya—if they are real at all—will seem strange to us. This is a reason for vigilance, not fear. The world is brimming with beasts, but one thing links them all—if you put a sword in them, they bleed, and when they bleed enough, they die. Remember that you were brought on this expedition, all of you, because you are skilled at putting swords into things.”
As speeches went, it wasn’t bad. It raised a cheer from the men. Cho Lu nodded, as though the comparison between an eight-legged bear and a beaver were reassuring. Gwenna could smell the wariness on him all the same, the wariness on all of them.
They passed three more wells and statues before they reached the city’s inner wall—some enormous ant thing, maybe a bat, and a tree. That last was almost comforting until Gwenna realized there were thousands of mouths where the leaves should have been.
She shifted toward Kiel. “It affects the plants, too?”
The historian nodded. “All living things.”
“So the sickness is here?” Gwenna glanced over her shoulder once again. “In this city?”
“No. As I said, you would feel it.”
“You said a lot of things. One of them was that no one lived down here.”
“I said I was not aware of any human habitation this far south.”
It felt like an extremely thin hair to split, but Gwenna let it go. “What does it feel like?”
“Good,” Kiel replied. He narrowed his brows. “Too good.”
Gwenna tried to imagine feeling too good. She failed.
The world still felt painfully bright, shockingly cold. The fear still prowled inside her, black-eyed and sharp-beaked, tugging at the sinew of her chest. And yet, a strange thing about that fear—though it was no less intense than what had attacked her inside the brig, it felt easier to bear out here, in this strange city, where they were almost certainly being stalked by … something. At least there was a reason to be afraid. At least the jagged pieces of her own emotion fit, for once, with actual danger in the actual world. She was a lot more likely to die, of course, maybe ripped apart by some nameless monster, but she wasn’t quite as insane. Somehow, it felt like a reasonable trade-off.
As she tried to sort through her emotions, Cho Lu came trotting back to the column, his face grave.
“There’s a wall, sir.”
Jonon nodded. “Makes sense. A central fortification around the ziggurat.”
Cho Lu shook his head. A chill crept up Gwenna’s spine.
“This wall, sir. It’s backward.”
They rounded one last corner, and Gwenna was able to see for herself. The structure looked normal enough at the base: massive blocks of mortared limestone curving away in both directions, obviously strong enough to withstand all but the most protracted assault. As Jonon said, a wall deep inside a city wasn’t all that bizarre—plenty of cities had old fortifications crumbling away inside their neighborhoods, scarred reminders of invasions that had taken place decades or centuries earlier. This wall, however … Cho Lu was right. The walk at the top was completely open to attack from where Gwenna stood because the parapets had been built on the far side.
“This wasn’t built to keep people out,” she murmured. Wind keened through the empty streets. Her fingers itched all over again for her absent blades. “It was put here to keep something in.”
* * *
There was no gate.
Instead, after following the wall for maybe a third of its circuit, they found a stone staircase—wide enough that ten people could have climbed abreast, the treads shallow, steps long, the whole thing ceremonial rather than functional—ascending to its top. At the base of the stairs, as though they’d been frozen in the process of marching down and out into the large, open square, stood two columns of statues. More gabhya, although this time what drew Gwenna’s eye wasn’t the gaping mouths or too-many limbs or the wrongness of the twisted flesh rendered in stone, but the skulls at each statue’s base, human skulls, thousands and thousands of skulls.
She’d seen plenty of bones in her life, strewed around old battlefields mostly, some with gobbets of flesh and scraps of skin still clinging to them. These were nothing like those. They were neatly stacked in rings around each statue. All had been scrubbed clean, but the interiors were packed with dirt. Some kind of flowering vine spilled from the eyes, tumbling in graceful, leafy, verdant curls to the stones below.
Gwenna looked over at Kiel.
The historian still didn’t smell like anything, and yet there was something in his posture as he gazed on those piles, some faint shift she could neither identify nor describe. He’d seen skulls stacked up like that before, or—more likely—read about them somewhere. He recognized them, at any rate.
“Was this…” Pattick trailed off, staring at the skulls.
“Sacrifice,” Jonon replied grimly. “Human sacrifice. They could build, the people who made this place, but make no mistake about it—they were savages all the same.”
Gwenna expected the admiral to send a team of legionaries to scout the steps. Instead, after a last, derisive glance at the gabhya and the skulls heaped beneath them, he mounted the stairs himself, hand on the pommel of his undrawn sword, gaze fixed on the top of the wall. The soldiers watched for a few moments in mute amazement, then scrambled to follow him, their own weapons at the ready.
Kiel still hadn’t moved.
“You know what happened here,” Gwenna said quietly.
“People died.”
“But you know why they died. Who killed them.”
“On the contrary, I am as shocked by the existence of this city as anyone. Like you, I am struggling to … gain my footing.”
“You don’t look like a man who’s struggling.”
“I’ve found that people often do not look like what they are.” He held her gaze for a heartbeat or two. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Before she could reply, he turned to follow the others, hunching slightly as he climbed the steps, leaving Gwenna alone with the stone monsters and the dead.
For a mad moment, she considered running. Chent and Lurie had gone ahead with the others, distracted from their charge by the horrors of the place. She could bolt from the square in a matter of moments, lose herself in the city, get free of Jonon, and Kiel, and all of it.…
And then what? The Daybreak was the only way back. The Daybreak, or a trek through thousands of miles of Menkiddoc, straight through whatever sickness plagued the interior of the continent, through whatever poison had created the gabhya. Unless there was a boat. She’d seen nothing in the harbor, but Cho Lu had mentioned a shipyard. If she could find a small craft, something nearly finished, forgotten when the inhabitants fled, she might just manage to pilot it back to Annur.
Without charts? whispered a grim voice in the back of her head. Without supplies?
There’d been a time she would have strangled that voice and started running. Now, however, when she tried to imagine sailing away, the horror of spending months in a boat alone unfolded like the horizon. It wasn’t impossible, but it felt impossible.
Bhuma Dhar’s words came back to her: The stillness is difficult for you, and so you turn your training on yourself.
At least here, in this land of bones and gabhya, there might be something to distract her from herself. Something to fight. Something to loathe that wasn’t named Gwenna Sharpe.
She forced her body into motion. Moving hurt, but then, staying still hurt. It all fucking hurt. Slowly, like some beast tamed and brought to heel, she followed her captors up the wide steps.
At the top of the wall she stopped, transfixed by the sight that had brought everyone else up short. It was like the wells they’d encountered earlier—a great hole bored into the plateau—except larger, a hundred times larger, a thousand, a huge pit carved from the bedrock, and there, rising from its center, hewn from the same unbroken stone, the ziggurat. A stone walkway, held up by a dozen or so heavy arches, stabbed inward from the wall, spear-straight, stretching all the way to the first level of the stepped pyramid. It was wide enough that even a drunkard might stagger across without falling, but it had no wall or balustrade, nothing at all to block the view down into the wilderness below.
