I bit my lip. Because waiting was fine. It was fine, but what if we missed our opportunity because we waited? Or what if this was a false trail and we wasted time backtracking to it only because we thought something was here that we could have eliminated by quickly checking it out?
Gundt seemed to feel the same way.
“You two stay here. If I don’t come back in a turn of the hour, go on to the inn without me and wait for the others.”
Judicus licked his lips like he was thinking about reminding Gundt that he was the one in charge of our coterie – again – but Gundt gave a very subtle nod to me. They were still worried about me. Which was crazy!
“It’s a plan,” Judicus said. “But if you see a ruined city – best that you don’t go in. It’s haunted by things no mortal should see – or so the texts say.”
“I’ll be back quickly.” Gundt left his pack with us and disappeared into the woods.
“It’s okay,” Judicus said when Gundt was gone. “Probably just hunters or other travelers. Or something.”
I frowned. Why would travelers stay in the forest when a town with a real inn was so close?
Every sound in the forest made my skin crawl. It felt like there were Stryxex everywhere waiting to pounce.
To my relief, Judicus took out the map and opened it up to show me.
“Look, here’s Rafinnette. Here’s where that crazy island was with the altar on it,” he pointed as he spoke. “I think this little dot is meant to be the town ahead. If we travel further inland, the road swoops to the south and toward Bricatorre. See?”
I pointed to the small marking close to the dot he thought was a town.
“I don’t know what that mark means, either,” he admitted. “It looks like it’s right where we are standing, but that’s maps for you. They play with distances. It could still be miles away or even on the other side of the road. I think it could be a sign for Ciuade, though. If it is – well, no one should put that on a map unless they are trying to avoid it. At least there’s a warning. The maker of these maps uses this wavy line as a way of saying ‘don’t go there’ but he uses that for old quarries as well as places rumored to be haunted or rapids in rivers. To him, it just means generalized danger. See how he places the wave symbol under whatever this one is?”
I peered at the sign. It looked almost like a snake to me.
“I need more detailed maps,” Judicus said with a sigh. “These ones cover the whole country, which is nice, but I’d like to really narrow in on the details, you know? It’s hard to make proper decisions about travel if you don’t know whether you’re avoiding a deadly mine shaft that drops into nothing or just a rumor about a mysterious woman who collects mushrooms.” He laughed nervously. “Or the legendary city from which all rope workers originally came.”
I huffed a laugh and caught him grinning with me. And for just a moment I thought about how I now had more friends than I’d ever had before. How they cared about me. How I had a place with them. It made me feel so warm, so full of belonging and appreciation – like nothing in the world could ever touch me.
Judicus took my hand again, almost on impulse and he was smiling when he said, “Sersha. I’ve been thinking ...”
And then I heard a scream.
And I knew that scream.
“Mally,” Judicus whispered, suddenly paler than normal.
We were both back on our feet before the scream ended.
Chapter Fifteen
We took one look at each other and Judicus turned to follow, but I snatched his hand.
“Gundt will need our help,” he hissed. “Even if it’s Ciuade, we can’t leave Mally if that’s her in there.”
But that wasn’t why I had grabbed him. I squeezed his hand trying to make him understand.
He shook his head as he realized. “No, I’m not taking your energy. We don’t know what’s happening and you haven’t slept since yesterday. You’re too tired. Maybe ... maybe it’s nothing.”
But we both knew it wasn’t nothing. I drew my belt knife just in case and Judicus drew his sword. The dark circles under his eyes combined with the blade gleaming in the dawn light made him look like a rakish villain.
“I just hope it isn’t Ciuade,” he muttered. “The legends of that place are gruesome.”
I followed him wordlessly – of course.
The track went uphill, and we had to bend half double to follow it, but when we reached the top, we had a clear view of the other side.
Judicus pressed himself backward against a tree the moment we reached the top. He tugged me against him to keep me from trying to push past. I followed his finger as he pointed.
“Look, it is a ruin,” he whispered. “Merciful heavens, don’t let it be the city.”
And it was certainly ruins. Though what had been ruined was hard to tell. The trees had grown up and had grown mature so that they towered not just around the ruins, but through them, until rubble looked like natural hills and half-walls looked like more fallen trees.
Half of a face lay stuck into the ground ahead of us, half its nose and one of its ears buried in the dirt and pine needles. A tree grew around it, curving with the form of the head so that it wrapped around the brow, nearly disguising the crown that had been carved into the stone. The tree was thicker than my waist and Judicus’s waist put together. How long ago had this place been destroyed?
“When rope work was discovered – those who touched the threads didn’t know how to do it safely,” Judicus whispered. “There were ...accidents.”
One single stone eye looked right at us from the ruined statue’s head. It was polished so that it shone and reflected and showed me myself huddled against Judicus, my eyes wide and long brown hair in disarray. The way Judicus had me tucked against him made him look protective. I was so taken aback that it took me a moment to realize what else the eye showed – Gundt a few trees away, looking down from a low branch, lips pressed together and shaking his head as he looked right at me.
Well, what did he expect? We’d heard screams! Of course, we were going to come and join him here.
Judicus took a trembling step forward and Gundt tried to hiss for him to stop. But the rope worker’s eyes were huge as he dropped my hand and stumbled toward the statue, hands up, palms open.
“It’s Liandra Keerana Fleris. The first rope worker. She who found the threads that weave all things together.”
He was staring in awe at the statue.
I tried to grab his arm, but he was too quick, hurrying now to where the head was so he could run his hands over it.
“Merciful heavens, it’s a Lens. No one talks about that, Sersha. It’s a Lens!”
I looked back at Gundt, trying to show him with my expression that this was not the plan. His own expression was equally distressed as he slid down from his perch and snuck across the ground toward where Judicus was admiring the head.
It seemed there was a crumbling wall behind the head and a pair of feet sticking out from the foliage – stone feet, of course, belonging to the half-head of this Lens.
Gundt signaled to me and we crept around the head, watching. If we couldn’t stop Judicus, we could at least make sure this place wasn’t going to swallow him up.
I kept hearing Mally’s cry in my head again and again and I couldn’t help the urgency that filled me now, willing me to act – to somehow save her from distress. It leaked into my actions, making me quick and jerky and it leaked into my thoughts, the distress making them slow and muddled. She was in there somewhere – in this place that Judicus had feared. And what was happening to her to make her scream like that?
There was no one on the other side of the head. Just the crumbling wall and a massive doorway with the door shut. It was a gorgeous masterpiece all by itself – tarnished silver hammered over wood. Someone had taken the time to carve an entire garden’s worth of flowers over the door in intricate detail – some of them no larger than my pinkie finger. It was wide enough for three carts to go throug
h at once and just as tall. But over the masterpiece someone else had gouged letters into the metal, hammering them in with chisel and a heavy hand.
“None shall pass lest the curse fall.”
I looked at Gundt and his lined face was troubled.
“I guess if the door is barred, we should go over the wall,” Judicus said from behind me.
I turned to him, eyes wide, and he shrugged.
“What? That was Mally screaming. We’re not just going to leave her in there because of a vague warning, are we?”
But I wondered if maybe we should.
Chapter Sixteen
I didn’t like the way the shadows moved within the ruins. They moved like they were alive, but when I looked directly at them, I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
We climbed over the crumbled wall.
“Stay behind me, Sersha,” Gundt said, keeping his sword high.
But as we passed between broken buildings that must have once been homes, huge conifer trees growing up and through what remained of them, we saw no people at all. Nothing but those strange shadows that tried to slide away from your eyes.
Another long, wailing scream made the hair on my neck stand up and I eased my weight onto my toes, ready to run, but not sure if I should be running towards or running away from it. Judicus slipped forward, past Gundt’s outstretched hand, hurrying soundlessly across the pine needle-covered street. We hurried to follow as he ran around a building and then spun right back and threw himself against a crumbling wall, spread flat against it.
His eyes were wide.
Gundt tried to push me to join him before creeping around the building himself, but I refused to go. If there was something to be seen, I was going to see it.
I crept up just behind him and my mouth fell open as I looked.
We stood on the edge of a crater. It was as if a wide portion of the ground – a rough circle about the size of most main city squares – had been cut out like a round of pie dough and then smashed into the earth. Rough carved earth and stone formed sheer cliffs all the way around it, grown over now with creepers and tiny striving plants except for the far side from us where the ground had torn a little less neatly and had left a rough, rocky path down to the lowered circle.
There was a small building with a domed roof inside made of stone – a temple if I had to guess. A tree grew right through the dome, leaving spiderwebbed cracks all around. It was a mighty redwood and from where I leaned over the edge, I could see the tops of its noble branches and the nest of eagles nearly at the top of the tree.
These ruins had been here a very long time.
It would have been beautiful and maybe even peaceful – a place to sit and contemplate life and the brevity of human accomplishment beside the lengthy scroll of years – if it hadn’t been for the screaming.
This time when Mally screamed, my eyes found her right away.
Just outside the temple, someone had built a round altar and the top of the altar was a wheel surrounded by bladed weapons pointed inward on tall columns. It could spin so that the blades whirled around whatever, or whoever, was in the center– as it was doing now.
I didn’t know what it had been there for originally, and I wondered if the people below knew, but what it was doing now was spinning around Mally who was chained in place so that she was nicked by one of the blades every time because avoiding one only put you in the path of the next. I thought the cuts were shallow, but even that many shallow cuts could be too much. Her blood sprayed out, splattering the watchers, the altar, and the stones all around.
How horrific.
But wasn’t she their good luck charm? Wasn’t she meant to save them all? Or at least give them power, which to the evil among us seems like the same thing?
Gundt growled between his teeth, shot to his feet, and began to jog around the lip of the cliff.
It was a bad idea. His sudden movement kicked up the eagle from his nest, who shrieked as he launched into the sky. And just as I feared it would, it also drew the eyes of every one of Mally’s captors.
I could not hear their words, but I could see their fingers point at him. And that’s when I saw the second thing – a group of soldiers in uniforms that I did not recognize were standing with a picket of horses on the far side of the cliff.
They saw Gundt, too. And they didn’t waste time calling or pointing. Five of them broke off from the rest, charging toward him.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and then Judicus was whispering in my ear.
“Crawl back from the edge before they see us, too.”
It was a good plan. It should have saved us from notice.
But as we turned to sneak away, a second group of people slid from the buildings around us, faces wrapped in black.
I hadn’t been wrong. The shadows were moving – they’d been filled with people.
Raiders.
Here.
Miles to the south of where we’d seen them last but still just as deadly.
Chapter Seventeen
One of them spoke in his own language and Judicus replied back. I forgot how educated he was sometimes – it made me feel doubly voiceless.
“You’ll come with us,” the raider said in my language, his words rough as his men surrounded us.
Judicus swallowed and I saw the little flickers of his eyes as he assessed the men surrounding us, assessed the cliff behind us, and noted Gundt, and the sound of ringing steel as the Flame Rider fought back against the soldiers further along the rim of the cliff.
Slowly, Judicus raised his hands.
“That’s right. Horacen will speak with you,” the raider said. And I was glad I couldn’t see his expression because his words sounded leering and cruel.
“I get the feeling it’s not talking he wants to do,” Judicus said as we walked with their spears against the small of our backs.
“He doesn’t speak much, no,” the raider agreed.
“I bet he likes cutting people up,” Judicus added casually.
“It is one of his finer skills,” the raider said.
Sweat broke out across my brow. What was Judicus thinking? Was he trying to make light of this? We’d massively failed. And it was morning. There was no hope of a phoenix saving us.
He probably should have fought these raiders with his rope work while he could so we could escape.
But his eyes kept flicking down the cliff to where Mally was crying out every few minutes and I knew the truth. He wouldn’t abandon her to save his own skin – not when she was in that much trouble. Not even when he didn’t like her much.
There was a sadness in his eyes, and I wondered if he felt as indebted to Aunt Danna as I did – if he felt like he owed her after she nursed him through the forest. Or maybe, as usual, he was just that noble. The real kind of noble, not the kind that you were born into that meant money and privilege. The kind that made you do the right thing when no one would expect it of you.
I’d lived for years behind the bar and in the kitchen of the Hog’s Head Inn. And I’d dreamed of seeing the world, of becoming more. And here I was, surrounded by raiders, having not just seen more of the world than anyone in my village ever saw, having not just seen it from above as only a privileged few ever would, but seeing things that no one even thought were real. Seeing legends come to life and magical ruins and strange peoples.
And in all of that, I’d learned something – something I was holding onto even as these barbaric raiders pushed me along with the razor-sharp tips of their spears. I had learned that a kind heart and a determination to do what’s right is more valuable than magic. It was more precious and rare than strange artifacts or creatures made of nothing but shadow and magic.
He was right not to flee again. We couldn’t flee forever. We couldn’t chase forever. And maybe we hadn’t picked this spot or this confrontation, but it felt – somehow – as if it were inevitable that we’d take our stand in this abandoned, cursed place.
They led us all the way around to
where the earth sloped down into the basin. I couldn’t help but notice how they nodded to the soldiers they encountered as if they were all friends and not supposedly the armies of the men who lived here and the armies of invaders. If Mally’s screams and all Lady Lightland’s previous actions hadn’t been enough, that would have told me that something very suspicious was happening here.
Rough steps had been carved into the ragged edge where the top earth met the bottom of the basin. We were pushed into single file and then forced down the steps.
Judicus glanced back at me constantly, checking to make sure I was safe, until he was cuffed by the raider in front of him.
“Eyes forward.”
My eyes were not forward, I was watching the basin below, noting every detail as it slowly grew larger before our eyes.
Everything was built or had grown to a massive scale from those towering redwoods to the columned and domed temple and the large arches surrounding a stone courtyard in front of it where the wheel of blades had been carefully placed.
If this was where ropework had originated, then I wasn’t surprised that people feared it. This was not a happy place. Not a good place. Not at all.
I picked out Lady Lightland first. Her two Stryxex riders flanked her. But what made me very nervous was that she looked uncomfortable – maybe even a little wide-eyed – and so did her riders. I’d watched her slit my aunt’s throat with barely a flinch, watched her raise an army of stone creatures, watched her order my death. And now she was looking nervous?
I bit my own lip and kept looking.
There was a clump of raiders to her left, watching Mally spin with arms folded over their chests. I recognized Horacen immediately. He had a wolf head stitched on the chest of his black clothing and he stood exactly as I remembered. Seeing him here with Lady Lightland was certainly no surprise.
But seeing the Grand Hadri’s soldiers in a careful square formation on her right? That was a shock. Even though I’d seen the men and pickets above on the rim, I hadn’t stopped to think about why they were here. What could bring soldiers of this land who were meant to defend it and these enemy raiders to the same place without bloodshed?
Phoenix Heart: Episode 5: Grand Hadri Page 6
