Citadels of the Lost (4 page)

“Look!” Urulani said as she pointed toward the base of the cliff. “Just to the left there.”

Drakis squinted into the brightening daylight.

The cliff-city was isolated but not inaccessible.

There was a stairway carved into the cliff face.

“Who do you suppose is living in there now?” Ethis asked.

“Whoever is in there,” Drakis answered, “cannot possibly be worse than whoever is out
here
. Let's go.”

The valley was wider than they had anticipated; crossing it took most of the day. The sun had already lowered toward the horizon and was beyond the towering mesa, casting the face of the cliff and its carved city in afternoon shadow. The ruins at the base of the cliff were more extensive and difficult to pass through, the debris from the fallen walls choking the ancient streets and making their footing uncertain.

If any of them entertained thoughts of stopping, however, the shadows that moved with them, flitting from dark place to dark place in the ruins quickly changed their minds.

At last, the Lyric led them to the stair carved from the cliff itself. Clouds were gathering in the afternoon sky.

“I would not have believed it possible,” Drakis said.

“Yes, it is magnificent,” Ethis answered, gazing up the cliff face at the delicate relief carvings towering nearly a hundred feet over them.

“I meant I would not have believed it possible for the air to become any wetter,” Drakis answered, laboriously climbing the stairs. Sweat was pouring off his face. “How did anyone ever live here?”

“You need to drink more water,” Ethis said, eyeing the human critically.

“Just what I need,” Drakis said with a tired laugh. “More water.”

“You might be surprised,” Ethis answered, “just how much water you're going to need in this climate.”

The stair doubled back on itself as it climbed the cliff face, presenting a landing at each turn. Drakis was having trouble keeping up with the Lyric, who continued her climb ahead of them on the stairs, while the warrior pulled the dwarf's litter along behind him and urged Mala along before him. She had grown listless and sullen through the day, choosing not to speak. Her auburn hair was flattened by the humid air around her face and was stained dark with sweat.

Drakis glanced down over the side of the seemingly endless staircase to the valley far below. The distance gave him pause, and for a moment he thought dizziness might overcome him. It was a sheer drop down into the ruins nearly three hundred feet beneath them. From this height he could make out the old pattern of streets and alleyways that had once made up the civilization that had nestled against this mountain but which was defined now only by the crumbling foundations and, Drakis guessed, not even that after a few more short decades.

At last the stairs ended in a wide landing on the first concourse.

“Never before to my eyes,” Urulani breathed in awestruck wonder.

The wide concourse led to delicately carved walls of buildings—each one from the same stone but unique in expression and design—a patchwork of individuality in art that rose a hundred feet above them. The entire structure was a melding of the natural cavern and the opulent architecture of its former inhabitants. A colonnade of pillars ran across the face of the cavern opening, supporting a second concourse overhead. Two of the pillars were broken and had toppled onto the wide concourse but those that remained were exquisite in the carvings of human faces mixed with those of dragonlike features. Each face was different from the next as were the animal depictions, some of which were strange and unknown to Drakis' eye.

Drakis turned back to gaze at the ornate wall of building carvings. Doorways and windows in the structures were largely unobstructed— the wood that once fitted their doorframes or windowpanes having rotted away and vanished, leaving only faint marks in the stone to show that woodworking had been here at all.

“This will do well for us,” Ethis said to Drakis, nodding with approval as he gestured with two of his four hands. “I'll search some of these ruins to make sure they're cleared of any troublesome inhabitants and find us a defensible position. Then we can concern ourselves with food and water.”

“Very well,” Drakis answered. “Urulani?”

Urulani stood staring at the base of one of the pillars, transfixed by the many faces, each with different aspects and expressions, that seemed to be staring back at her with their stone eyes.

“Urulani?” Drakis asked again.

The raider captain shook herself. “Yes! What is it?”

“We need to set a watch,” Drakis said, walking over to her.

“Watch?”

“Yes,” Drakis insisted. “Someone to watch the stairs to make sure that no one follows us here and another to . . . is there something wrong?”

“No!” Urulani said at once as her eyes suddenly focused on Drakis. “I'll take the first watch. Set the dwarf over here while I keep an eye on those stairs.”

“Will someone get me off of this horrible contraption!” Jugar howled. “Bad enough that I should be dragged through the forest like a fireplace log, but to be tied to this . . . this
thing
! It is too much of an indignity to be borne by man or dwarf!”

“Relax, Jugar,” Drakis said, wiping his brow as he knelt to undo the straps securing the dwarf to the litter. “You're not going anywhere for a while without considerable help on our part, so you might as well get used to being polite.”

“Polite, is it?” Jugar sniffed. “Dragged into the wilderness of a forsaken land because some Ephindrian jelly-man had to shut the door on our only way back home! Having a dragon's head fall on me and who nearly
ate
me
after
he was dead! Considering the events of the day, I believe I have been the very epitome of polite!”

Drakis chuckled to himself, then shook his head. “Well, perhaps you might extend your famous patience a bit longer and help us. We can hardly know where we're going until we're sure of where we are now.”

“Well, it's written right in front of you!” the dwarf groused.

“What is he talking about?” Urulani asked.

“Those columns,” the dwarf yelled, pointing with his broad, right hand. “Those aren't just pretty carvings, you know! It's the ancient script, used from before the Shadow Wars in the time of the Age of Mists. That was after Drakis Aerweaver—the first Drakis, mind you—fought the dragon Kopsis south of the God's Wall Mountains and created the Desolation of the Sand Sea. That was nearly two thousand years before . . .”

Drakis held up his hand to stop the dwarf's mouth.

“Just tell us what it says,” Drakis demanded.

“Reduced to reading for the illiterate, eh? Fine!” Jugar flushed red but held his temper. He turned toward the pillar and pointed again. “This says, ‘Hekrian, Seer of our Goddess Quabet, bids all seekers . . .' or, maybe that's sojourners ‘. . . welcome to the peace and beauty of Pythar—City of Unification.' Then there's some religious nonsense about ‘seeking the higher way,' and finding ‘peace in the one.' I like the way it finishes, however. Right here it reads, ‘Behold the eternal might and glory of Armethia, where man and dragon rule as one in their terrible might and justice.'

“Witness my polite compliance.” Jugar gestured around him as he gazed on the ruins, “as I behold the eternal might and glory of humanity and the dragons that protected them so well.”

“I am looking, dwarf,” whispered Urulani, her gaze following the ornate column upward and then out over the ruins of the city now so much more evident below them. “I had never supposed that we were once so great a people.”

“Once, perhaps,” Jugar replied. “But no more.”

“But we could be again,” Urulani said with sudden conviction as she turned toward Drakis. “The prophecies! I had not believed . . . had not
dared
to believe that they could have been true. Yet here I stand in the land of legend, my hand touching the lost glories of our past and looking at the man who could make all of those things once lost come to be once more!”

Drakis groaned, shaking his head. “Not you, too?”

“You could be this man, Drakis,” Urulani said, stepping toward him with conviction. “I do not know of any gods but I do see what is around me. The legends told of this place, and here it is. Those same legends spoke of a man named ‘Drakis,' and here you stand!”

“Here I stand?” Drakis said in astonishment. “I stand here because our choices were to either retreat through a fold portal or die. How can you, of all people, believe what this dwarf has been selling?”

“How can I not believe it?” Urulani said, her voice rising with her temper. “All the signs of the legend being fulfilled . . .”

“Make any prophecy vague enough and it's bound to be fulfilled in someone's eyes,” Drakis countered.

“But that same prophecy is found everywhere in the southern lands,” Urulani said fervently, conviction growing in her as she spoke. “From farthest Exylia to the Straits of Erebus, from the shores of the Lyrac Ocean in eastern Ephindria to the rocky coasts of Mestophia on the Charos Ocean, the story is told of the coming of Drakis and the rise of a new day of freedom, peace, and justice.”

“Everyone wants to make me into this marvelous godlike hero who will come riding out of legend and save them. But no matter how hard they try—no matter how hard they believe, Urulani—I'm still just
me
. I'm just a slave who happened to be named Drakis and got mistaken for someone important.”

“No,” Urulani shook her head. “I was there. The Iblisi came for you—slaughtered entire villages to find you—they came because you
are
that Drakis, and above all they fear you.”

“No, Urulani,” Drakis said quietly. “They came after me because they made a mistake. Now that we are so far from them, I don't think any of them cares what happens to us or even knows we're gone.”

R
HONAS CHAS WAS THE ETERNAL CITY of the Rhonas elves and the very life's-heart of the Rhonas Empire . . .

. . . And Sjei-Shurian of the Order of the Modalis was determined to make sure it stayed that way.

He stood before an awning-covered stand in the
Paz Rhambutai
—the Plaza of Sweetness—in the eastern section of the Old City and surveyed the ordered patterns of various colored fruits with an indifferent eye. Sjei was an elf of such common features as to defy description. His head was elongated as was common with his race but not so elegantly formed as might call attention to it. His nose was hooked but not so sharply as might be thought attractive to his kind. His eyes were black, but the shape of his drooping eyelids shuttered them and made them unremarkable. The tips of his pointed ears dropped slightly, and his mouth was small, hiding the worn tips of his pointed teeth. He was neither fat nor thin . . . tall nor short for his kind. His single distinguishing mark was a scar that cut through his right eyebrow, yet even this noble mark was so small as to be barely noticeable unless one were looking for it. His robes denoted that he was of the Order of Vash but the commendations, ribbons, and medals it sported were absent any of the more spectacular awards. Those he eschewed in favor of the more common types that dealt largely with mundane achievements. In all, Sjei had the most remarkably unremarkable appearance imaginable in an elf of one of the military orders; someone who would easily be mistaken for one who had never drawn a weapon in all his years of service.

Any elf on the streets of Rhonas—as happened commonly every day—would forget his face within three steps of passing and never give him another thought.

And yet, next to the Emperor, he knew himself to be the most powerful elf in the entire Imperial City—and by logical inference, in the entire world beyond. Sjei-Shurian was the
Ghenetar Omris
over the Order of Vash. This post as the “general of unity” over one of the three warrior orders of the Empire would have been enough to have secured his place of power within the treacherous and ever shifting landscape of Rhonas Imperial politics but he was also Master of House Shurian. He was, in addition, a member of the most elite of all elven Orders, the Modalis.

The Modalis was, so far as its public face was concerned, a largely philanthropic organization with impressive public holdings north of the Old Keep of the Iblisi and well situated inside Tsujen's Wall east of the Mnera Gate. Nearly everyone in the city knew that there was far more to it than that, but it was a pleasant fiction that all the Rhonas elves found advantageous to maintain as the truth even without the encouragement of the Iblisi. The true center of the Modalis lay in the rather unpretentious and otherwise unmarked building just behind Sjei on the eastern side of the
Paz Rhambutai
northeast of “The Ministries” and situated nearly equidistant from every other Order, Forum, Guild, and Ministry that struggled for dominance in the Imperial City. It was known simply as “Majority House” which was something of an irony considering the elite and exclusive nature of its occasional occupants.