“Like the dust people?” Nicci asked.
Thistle nodded. “But not just people. Also spiders, centipedes—and lice, terrible monstrous lice.”
Nicci felt a twist inside of her. “I hate lice.”
“Lice drink life as well,” Bannon said. “No wonder the wizard likes them.”
“What killed your mother and father?” Nathan asked.
“Scorpions—big scorpions had infested the almond trees, and when my parents came to harvest the nuts, the scorpions fell upon them, stung them. When Uncle Marcus and two other villagers went to look for them days later, they found my parents’ bodies, their faces all swollen from the stings … but even though they were dead, the Lifedrinker made them into dust people too. My parents attacked Uncle Marcus.”
Her words tapered off, and Thistle didn’t need to continue the story of what the villagers must have done to get away. “After that, I stayed with my aunt and uncle. They said they would take care of me, that they would watch over me.” Her voice was bleak. “Now they’re gone. Verdun Springs is gone.” She swallowed hard. “My world is gone.”
“And you are with us, child,” said Nathan. “We’ll make the best of it.”
Bannon pushed ahead. “Yes, we will—if we ever get to Cliffwall.”
Looking up at Nicci for reassurance, the orphan girl nodded. “We’ll be there by tomorrow.”
* * *
The next morning Thistle led them along the floor of a canyon whose rocky bottom looked as if it had suffered flash floods during storms, but not for some time. The sky closed in as the canyon walls rose higher and drew together, looking sheer and impenetrable.
The wizard frowned, trying to gain his bearings as the shadows lengthened. “Are you certain this isn’t a dead end, child?”
“This is the way.” Thistle trotted ahead.
The canyon narrowed, and Nicci felt uneasy and vulnerable, realizing this would be a perfect place for an ambush.
“It closes up,” Bannon said. “Look ahead—it’s a dead end.”
“No,” the girl insisted. “Follow me.”
She led them up to where the rock walls formed the end of a box canyon, leaving only what looked like a narrow crack of two mismatched slickrock cliffs. Thistle turned to the travelers, then rotated sideways and shimmied into the crack.
She vanished.
Nicci stepped forward to see that the crack was a cleverly hidden passageway that led through a narrow elbow in the blind wall. After inching her way along through the claustrophobic passage, Nicci saw light ahead.
The girl squirmed out and stepped into a widening canyon. Nicci joined her, and Bannon and Nathan emerged behind them. Nicci caught her breath.
They all drank in the view of Cliffwall.
CHAPTER 40
Past the bottleneck of the closed-in stone passageway, the hidden network of canyons on the other side of the towering barricade wall was a whole world cut off from the rest of the landscape. Steep-walled finger canyons spread out like outstretched hands cutting through the high plateau. Nicci and her companions absorbed the view. This place was a hidden, locked-away network of secret, sheltered canyons.
The main canyon through the cracked plateau was broad and fertile, cut by the sinuous silver ribbon of a stream that collected drips from numerous overflowing springs. Sheep grazed on the lush green grasses, and fenced fields were bursting with tall stalks of wheat and corn. Vegetable gardens crowded with squash and beans had been laid out in confined ledge niches that pocked the cliffs. Orchards grew along the streamside, many of the trees in blossom. Wooden hutches held beehives that added a faint hum to the air. Hundreds of people worked the fields, tended the flocks, climbed the canyon walls on wooden ladders. It was a thriving, prosperous society.
All along the cliffs that enclosed the canyons, large overhangs and alcoves created natural sheltered caves in which buildings had been constructed, clay brick and adobe buildings. Some of the natural grottoes held only two or three dwellings, while larger overhangs held a veritable city of adobe towers connected with walkways.
The opposite side of the canyon held a singularly enormous cave grotto, a yawning alcove that held imposing stone buildings with blocky façades. The architecture had an air of ancient majesty. Nicci realized this must be the legendary wizards’ archive, only recently revealed.
Cliffwall was like a fortress in its huge, defensible alcove, stone-block structures five and ten stories high, massive square walls with defenses. A narrow, winding path chiseled into the cliff was augmented with knotted ropes and short ladders to grant access from the canyon floor to the yawning grotto above.
Once through the bottleneck into the canyon, Nathan tilted his head back and stared in awe, his mouth agape. “It reminds me of the Palace of the Prophets. Ah, I do miss the library there.”
Bannon displayed the same wide-eyed wonder Nicci had seen on his face when he was in the city of Tanimura. “Was the Palace of the Prophets really that big?” he asked.
Nathan chuckled. “Size is a relative thing, my boy. The cliffs and the overhang definitely make this look imposing, but the palace was at least ten times the size.”
“Ten times?” Bannon said. “Sweet Sea Mother, that can’t be possible!”
“No need for comparisons,” Nicci said. “Cliffwall is impressive enough, and it has the advantage of being intact. Perhaps we’ll find what we need to know about the Lifedrinker.”
In the bright daylight, some of the local people had spotted the visitors emerging through the hidden entrance to the canyon. Two boys working a vegetable plot halfway up a cliff whistled an alarm. The shrill sound echoed and ricocheted, amplified by the angled canyon walls. Others converged, responding to the alarm.
While Nicci might have preferred to reconnoiter the canyon structures to assess the Cliffwall defenses and any possible threat, Thistle shouted and waved at the people coming closer. “Hello! We are strangers from the outside. We need to look into your archive.”
More alarm whistles echoed from the alcove settlements, and in the towering fortress of the Cliffwall archive, dozens of people bustled to the windows and doors. Nicci couldn’t hold Thistle back as she boldly strode forward into the canyon, confident they would all be welcome here.
A group of Cliffwall dwellers hurried toward the four travelers. Thistle put her hands on the hips of her ragged dress and raised her voice. “We are here to defeat the Lifedrinker! I brought you a sorceress, a brave swordsman, and an old wizard.”
“I don’t appear that old,” Nathan said, salvaging his pride. “And I am a prophet as well as a wizard … although at present I am unable to use either of those faculties.” He tapped his head. “Still, the knowledge is here.”
“They are here to find out how to stop the Scar,” Thistle proclaimed.
Nathan looked up at the people drawing closer. “Hello! We understand you have an archive of knowledge? Ancient records that might prove useful in dealing with this terrible enemy that plagues the land?”
Nicci added in a harder voice, “Information that will give us the tools and weapons to defeat him? We need it.”
One middle-aged farmer wore a brown tunic flecked with grass ends and chaff from cutting wheat. “You would have to see Simon for that. He’s Cliffwall’s senior scholar-archivist.” He indicated the towering fortress alcove up the side of the cliff, where more than a dozen people were working their way in single file down the narrow pathway to come meet them.
“And Victoria. They need to see Victoria,” added a woman whose tight bun of pale hair was tied in a gray scarf. She had wide hips, stubby callused fingers, and biceps that were larger than Nathan’s and Bannon’s combined. “She’s the one who decides what knowledge the memmers preserve.”
The farmer brushed at the fragments of wheat, then placed a stalk between his teeth. “Now, now, it all depends on the type of information they need.”
“We haven’t seen strangers and outside scholars for years, not since the
Scar wiped out the valley,” said a red-faced shepherd who came puffing up, catching the end of the conversation.
“The scholars have needed new blood,” said the hefty woman. “No one here has found a way to stop the Lifedrinker. We need help.”
“Cliffwall was hidden behind a camouflage shroud for thousands of years,” said the redhead. “And even though the spell is gone, the spirits of our ancestors would torment us if we simply handed over that knowledge to any bedraggled visitor who asks! We are very careful about how many outside scholars we allow here.”
“We’re here to help,” Nicci said.
“And we’re not all that bedraggled,” Nathan said.
“I’m not a stranger,” Thistle insisted. “I watched you a year ago, and you never noticed. I’m the only survivor from Verdun Springs.”
“Never heard of it,” said the shepherd.
“That’s because you’ve been locked in these canyons forever,” Thistle said. “The rest of the world has gone on while you stayed hidden here. Everything is dying, and you don’t even know it.”
Nicci put a hand on the girl’s shoulder to calm her. “We have come here to help. If I have the right information, maybe I can find a way to stop your enemy.”
“And bring back the green valley,” Thistle insisted. “They can do it.”
They all turned as the group of robed scholars hurried toward them from the towering fortress archive. The people began to talk at once. “Simon, these people came from the outside.”
“This girl led them. She says she’s from a place called Verdun Springs.”
“One is a sorceress and the other is a wizard.”
“And a prophet.”
“Victoria, look, that one’s a sorceress!”
“They want to study our information, look into our archives…”
“We’ve needed some fresh scholars.”
Nicci tried to sort the overlapping chatter as a man stepped forward, obviously in charge. “I am Simon, the senior scholar-archivist of Cliffwall. I supervise the cataloging of the knowledge preserved here by the wisdom of the ancients.”
Nathan raised his eyebrows. “Senior scholar-archivist? You seem rather young for the job.”
Simon appeared to be in his mid-thirties, with thick brown hair that stuck out in unruly spikes, since he apparently didn’t have the inclination to care for it. His chin and cheeks were covered with a wispy corn silk of beard. “I’m old enough to do my job. And I started young, brought here twenty years ago as a prodigy from one of the valley towns.”
“The camouflage shroud broke down only fifty years ago,” said a matronly woman who took her place next to him—Victoria, Nicci presumed. She was in her sixties, with gray-brown hair tied back into a braid that she wound in a coil around her head. Her face was smooth, showing only the beginnings of crow’s-feet around her eyes, and her rounded cheeks were flushed a healthy pink. Her warm voice sounded to Nicci like the voice of a kindly grandmother from a children’s tale, but with a hard edge.
“We’ve been the guardians of Cliffwall since the old wizard wars, but we have only recently opened the archives to outsiders again. Simon’s scholars have completed barely half of the cataloging work. But my memmers can perhaps explain what you need to know, directly from our memories—once you convince us of your need.”
CHAPTER 41
Simon, Victoria, and the other intense scholars led the visitors to the fortress archive up the sheer cliff. As they toiled up the narrow path that zigzagged along the rock wall, Nicci could see the size of the towering buildings constructed inside the cave alcove, and she grew more impressed with the ancient library. The great stone façades of the Cliffwall buildings towered higher than she had at first guessed.
“This is imposing,” she said, trying to imagine how such a mammoth city could have been built in such an isolated place. “Maybe the Palace of the Prophets was only five times larger.”
Thistle scampered ahead up the precarious path, never missing a step or a handhold. Impatient, she stopped partway and turned. “Come on, Nicci. Don’t you want to see the library?”
As Nathan climbed the rock face, he admired the huge buildings, the tower faces, the windows and arches, and the imposing primary doors, twice as high as a man. “Look at the massive stone blocks in those walls. The only way such a fortress could have been erected—especially in this isolated canyon—is through magic.”
“Powerful magic,” Nicci agreed. “In a time before so much magic was purged from the Old World.”
The wizard paused on the steep cliff path, resting a hand against the smooth rock at his left. He nodded. “Indeed, it must have been quite an undertaking.”
After clambering to the overhang of the great alcove, Thistle waited for them in front of the imposing stone buildings. “Sweet Sea Mother,” Bannon whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The matronly Victoria looked at him, a troubled expression crossing her apple-cheeked face. “Your Sea Mother had nothing to do with it, young man. She is far away and did not aid in the effort. This was accomplished through human labor, and it cost the lives and energy of many gifted wizards.”
Simon turned to look at the buildings with clear reverence. “The most powerful wizards in the world came here in secret back at the time of the ancient wizard wars. It took them years to construct and hide this place, under the greatest cloak of secrecy, but their gamble paid off. Emperor Sulachan and his purging armies never discovered the wealth of knowledge those wizards placed here. The camouflage shroud remained in place for centuries, hiding Cliffwall completely from any prying eyes. Only the villagers here in the canyons even remembered it existed.”
“Until fifty years ago,” Victoria said, with obvious pride in her voice. “And now the preserved knowledge is available to all again.”
Nicci turned to look across the canyon as afternoon shadows closed in. Some of the shepherds slept in tents near their flocks in the canyon-floor pastures. In the numerous alcoves studding the opposite cliffs, she saw other dwellings lit by cook fires and lamps, but the imposing Cliffwall complex shone brighter as the gifted scholars used magic to illuminate the library archive.
“And we are studying, and practicing, as quickly as we can.” Simon sounded enthusiastic.
The farthest structure at the right side of the alcove caught Nicci’s eye. A large tower was damaged, melted as if the stone had become candle wax. The slickrock overhang had folded in, reminding her of a drooping eyelid. The windows were sealed over like an ice sculpture that had thawed, slumped, then frozen in a fresh cold snap.
Before Nicci could ask about the damage, though, scholars opened the towering doors and Simon led them through the main stone gate into the front tower. “This is only the outer fortress, but there’s much more to Cliffwall than what you see here. An entire complex of tunnels runs through the heart of the plateau all the way to the cliffs on the other side.”
Inside the main library building, the ceilings were high and vaulted, the thick walls made of quarried stone. Their footsteps echoed along the blue-tiled floor of the entry portico, and bright lights glowed from perpetual lamps evenly spaced along the walls, burning with magic. The stone halls were lined with wooden shelves crowded with mismatched volumes, an odd assortment of leather spines or rolled scrolls, even hardened clay tablets with indented symbols that Nicci didn’t recognize.
Nathan hungrily ran his gaze along the shelves. “I can’t wait to start reading.”
Simon chuckled. “These? Just minor overflow volumes that scholars took out because they looked interesting. The main vaults of knowledge are deeper inside the mesa—and much more extensive. All manner of knowledge is preserved here.”
Three lovely young acolytes came up to join Victoria, sweet-faced and eager, none of them older than twenty. The matronly woman nodded at them with a gentle smile. “Thank you for joining us, my dears. We can use your help and attention.” She introduced them to the visitors. “These are m
y most dedicated acolytes Audrey, Laurel, and Sage.”
The three women wore white shifts, sashed tight around their waists with a fabric belt, and each girl was strikingly beautiful in her own way. Audrey had high cheekbones, full lips, and rich, dark hair, almost a blue-black. Laurel had strawberry-blond hair that hung loose, except for a decorative braid on the side; her eyes were green, her lips were thin, and her white teeth glinted in a ready smile. Sage’s deep reddish-brown hair was thick and shining, and her breasts were the most generous of the three.
Nicci and Nathan gave them a polite acknowledgment, but Bannon made a deep bow, his face flushed with embarrassment when the girls fawned over him, paying more attention to the young man than to the others.
Victoria clucked at them. “These strangers must be tired and hungry, so let us eat while we hear more of their story. Go, prepare extra plates. Everyone will be gathering for the midday meal.” The older woman smiled. “We have roast antelope and fresh corn, along with honeyed fruits and pine nuts for dessert.”
Nicci was startled to realize how hungy she was. “That would be appreciated.”
The wizard grinned. “And far better than munching on roasted lizards.” When Thistle shot him an annoyed glare, he raised a conciliatory hand. “Not that we didn’t appreciate the food, child. I just meant I was up for a bit of variety.”
The dining hall held long plank tables covered with flaxen cloths. Men and women of all ages had gathered for the midday meal. Some were engaged in low conversation, exchanging new revelations they had found in forgotten scrolls. Many seemed too preoccupied even to notice the strangers; they wolfed down their meat and vegetables, then went back to their books without waiting for dessert.
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