Markal explained, “Those fools in the bakery are helpless for a spell, but what I did won’t go unnoticed.”
Darik looked down at the old man’s left hand in alarm. The hand he’d used against the torturer had withered and blackened until it clenched into a claw. “But who are you? And with such magic, what have we to fear of watchmen?”
Markal let out a short laugh. “Not watchmen. Wights. So long as I kept the magic hidden we were safe, but now I’ve drawn them like vultures to a funeral tower.”
Wights! Darik’s stomach clenched in rediscovered fear. He followed the two men down the alley. Darik could, indeed, sense an aura drifting from Markal like steam from a fresh bun on a cold morning. The spent magic, he supposed, wafting out onto Balsalom’s night currents, advertising the old man’s wizardry as loud as any street vendor barking out his wares.
Darik’s estimation of the two men had turned completely askew. He’d taken Markal for a fool, Whelan a little more than that, but not much. At every junction or turn of the alley, Whelan deferred to Markal’s instructions. The tall former captain slid his barbarian sword into a scabbard over his left shoulder, but moved with the deadly grace of a cobra.
The wights first picked up their trail on the edge of the Slaves Quarter.
The Slaves Quarter was a festering sore on the west side of the city. Gathered in a single square mile, thousands of slaves packed its crammed tenements and built their hovels on its filthy alleys. Only the lowest slaves lived there: the mudders and stone-haulers for the roads and walls, the mine slaves, the unclean who disposed of the city’s human waste and its dead.
Rats, disease, and slave revolts bred in the quarter, and over the years, various guilds and viziers had tried to tear it down. But grand vizier Saldibar, with the decree of the khalifa, fought such measures. Destroy the quarter and the slaves would have to go somewhere else. Better to keep the problem in one location where it could be watched and controlled.
When they slipped past the Beggar Gate that led into the quarter, Darik noticed a curious thing. The crickets had fallen strangely silent. Even the lowest slave kept a cricket in a tiny stick basket just inside the threshold of his house. Indeed, he glanced through the slatted windows of a few hovels and saw the crickets in their cages, but sitting silently.
Darik turned to ask Whelan about this, but the tall man pointed a finger to his ears. “They’re warning us with their silence. Listen.”
Yes, Darik heard it. A rasping sound like dry, drifting leaves floated along the wind from the north. He felt something too, sniffing, searching for them.
They shrank against the mud wall of a low-slung slave house. Quiet murmurs drifted through an open window and the smell of a cook fire followed. The rasping noise paused at the dark head of the alley, then scurried further down the main street that passed through the quarter. Markal and Whelan let out deep sighs and Darik realize that he, too, had been holding his breath.
But just when Darik thought the danger past, the rasping came back to the alley. Blue light flickered and Darik saw his first wights. They merged together and dissolved, sometimes separate, sometimes moving in a solid blue flame of light. When they moved separately, they took the figures of slaves and beggars, noble ladies, and merchants. And their eyes! Both purposeful and completely insane in turns.
“Run!” Whelan cried. They turned and ran, with wights screaming in pursuit behind them.
The alley, narrow to begin with, choked to a bare gap between two buildings at the far end before opening onto the street beyond. Rubbish clogged its far end: heaps of rags, broken crates, the gnawed body of a cat. A bony dog yelped from the shadows when they approached, struggling to pull free some bit of filth it had been eating, then saw the wights and fled. The three slaves pushed through the garbage, kicking up a stench.
The wights caught them before they could get through. Darik turned to see one leaping at his throat with outstretched arms. He threw up his hands to protect himself and slipped in the filth. The wight fell on him, slicing its claws across his face. Darik kicked it away, but his blow felt like kicking through sand. The wight screamed and slashed at his unprotected belly. Other wights boiled down the alley to join the fight.
With a cry, Whelan threw himself between them, sword in hand. It glowed as bright as a fiercely burning torch. Under its blaze, the wight shrieked and scuttled backwards on its belly, but as it drew backwards, it pulled strength from the others who surged forward in a wave of blue spirits. Whelan stabbed his sword into the wights, who flowed around the blade like he’d thrust it into water. The wights pulled back at the attack, then crested to strike again.
“No!” Markal cried behind them. “At its head. Its head.”
Darik saw what Markal meant. Wights rose and crested: a mass of limbs and heads and eyes. But behind the individual wights, he saw something else, as if his eyes had become slightly unfocused. Collectively, the wights formed a horned serpent with coils of blue light, and a head with a tongue that darted out and tasted the air. The head reared back to strike. Darik fell back next to Markal, the burning pain across his face fading with the fear of the moment.
Whelan’s sword glowed in anticipation of battle. “By the Hand!” he shouted. “May the Harvester take you all.” He swung his sword.
The sword itself cried with a loud scream as it bit deep into the serpent’s head. The two lights met in a flash and a terrific sound rent the air, as if the oak doors at the Great Gates leading into the city had been torn from their hinges. Flame burst from the head and the snake dissolved into a flurry of wights. Fire burst onto the buildings on either side of the alley; the dry, thin walls burned like kindling. The other wights fled the way they’d come.
The three stood panting before Markal turned to look at Darik’s wounds. His face stung with a cold wound, but Markal said, “If you survive the blow, the cut of the undead will fade in a day or two at most. Come on.”
“Just a minute,” Darik protested, still breathing heavily.
“We haven’t killed them,” Markal said, “only frightened them off until they find another captain. As for the ones struck down by Whelan’s sword, they’ll return to their dark master. Only the Harvester can gather the cursed spirits who hunt us. Come.” More insistent this time.
Darik shook his head to clear it from the events he had yet to sort through. He followed the two men out the narrow side of the alley, leaving a burning street. Bells in the distance announced that someone had spotted the flames from their watch tower.
“But who is chasing us? What do they care for a few runaway slaves?”
Markal smiled. He held up the blackened claw that had been his left hand. The skin shed in long tatters, like a leper’s. “If you haven’t guessed, Whelan and I are no slaves. The master of the Dark Citadel wishes to speak with us.”
“Cragyn,” Darik whispered. “Is he here? In Balsalom?”
“Quiet boy,” Whelan said sharply. “Don’t speak that name.” He resheathed his sword.
“No,” Markal answered. “He’s not here. But his agents have arrived. I thought that Kallia still resisted the wizard. Perhaps I’ve overestimated the khalifa—may she live forever.”
“I hope you are wrong old man,” Whelan said, a note of what?—Admiration?—touching his words. “She is a good queen.”
Markal showed them their salvation a few minutes later, the escape from the city that would mask the lingering scent of the wizard’s magic. Darik turned up his nose in disgust. Markal meant them to escape through the sewage aqueduct.
Designed by an engineer from Veyre, the aqueduct diverted water from the Nye river, carried it under the city walls, through the palace and the great houses and back under the wall on the west side. By this time, only the sewage flowed down the river’s channel in the dry season; Balsalom and the irrigated fields on the other three sides of the city drained it dry.
The sewage pipe served only the rich, of course. Everyone else gathered their waste into night soil b
ins which putrefied at every street corner until slaves carried it into the desert. In the Slaves Quarter, however, it was left in heaps with all of the other filth until the spring rains washed everything away. Either that, or a fire like the one raging at their backs burned it.
Early in the year, heavy rains had swollen the River Nye, bursting dikes and overflowing the sewage aqueduct, sending a foul current running down Balsalom’s main roads. When the rains washed out the Slaves Quarter, it joined the overflowed aqueduct to fill the market square with two feet of filth. To prevent a recurrence, the grand vizier ordered the engineers guild to tear up and widen the narrowest part of the aqueduct, west of the quarter.
Markal led them to a gaping trench, twenty feet deep and four or five wide. Stacks of fired bricks lined the trench, together with heaps of excavated dirt. Whelan lit his oil lamp and held it into the trench so they could have a look. An oily brown current flowed at the bottom.
“No time to hesitate,” Markal urged. “Quick, get down there.”
Darik grimaced when the sewage washed over his boots and soaked his robe halfway to his knee. They passed out of the open trench and into the aqueduct itself where the top of the tunnel shrank low enough that Whelan’s head brushed the bricks when he stood straight. The air filled with the stench of human waste so thick Darik thought he would choke.
The floor was slick and the tunnel dark with only Whelan’s small olive oil lamp to lead them, so Darik had to run his hand along the brick side for balance. A film clung to his hand when it touched the wall and his groping hand scared up pale, blind creatures that lived on the filth, skittering away when he touched them. His tongue and throat thickened with the stench.
After about twenty minutes he asked, “How far do you think we’ve gone? Is it much further?”
“Much further,” Markal said. “Keep going.”
Darik sighed. No sense complaining, when the alternative above ground was so much worse. He walked in silence for a few minutes before venturing another comment. “So once we’re outside the city, what then? Are we safe? Until the mountains, I mean?”
Whelan grunted.
Markal let out a low chuckle. “I think what Whelan means, is ‘No, it’s going to get much worse.’”
That was the answer Darik had been afraid of. “How long are they going to follow us? All the way to the mountains?”
“Likely further,” Whelan said. “Hard to say.”
Markal said, “We’ve stirred up a nest of bees. It appears that the dark wizard has already infiltrated the city. And here we flee without knowing how he draws such power.” He turned back to Darik. “He’ll discover soon enough who and what we are and try to stop us before we reach Arvada.”
Darik grew annoyed with the direction of the conversation. The depth of his ignorance stunned him. “You lied to me, didn’t you, Whelan? Everything from Sanctuary up to that staged scene in the market that you said Markal knew nothing about. And bringing my sister along. You made me leave her.”
Whelan just grunted again and moved up to inspect a new pipe leading into the aqueduct, before waving the other two ahead.
Markal said, “Yes, he lied, against his wishes, but not against mine. You couldn’t know too much if you were captured and tortured. Far better you think us runaway slaves than spies. Yes, spies. Finding the strengths and weaknesses of Balsalom.”
“But whatever for?” Darik asked, shocked at this new bit of news. Even though he left the city as a criminal, he still felt loyalty to the city of his birth, a city he’d never left more than five miles beyond its gates. “We are peaceful, and the trade over the mountains enriches us both.”
“War is coming, my young friend,” the wizard said. “Will Balsalom and the Western Khalifates stand against Cragyn or with him? We had to find out. It isn’t the khalifa we worried about, but others.”
“And me? Why take me with you?”
Markal shrugged. “Because I’m an old fool. Last week Graiyan sold you to a caravan leaving tomorrow for Veyre. Once there … “ He shrugged. “The dark wizard’s men would work you to death mining iron for the war. To the man’s credit, I don’t think Graiyan knows what has been happening to slaves sold to Veyre. He just wanted you out of the way of his new daughter. Which turned out to be a valid concern.”
Darik nodded. Inside, he wasn’t sure if this were a new lie or the truth. “You expected me to leave my sister?”
Whelan turned around, showing his first interest in the conversation. “Graiyan and Elethra love the child and she loves them. Will she really be better with you, kin, or no? Your path travels through pain, and hardship. Her way, should Balsalom be spared war, will be much kinder.”
Yes, it made sense. But he wouldn’t have left Kaya had he any choice in the matter. He wasn’t convinced that she would be better off with the baker and his wife. No, he wouldn’t give up on his sister so easily. He fell silent and the two older men left him to his thoughts.
They trudged through the gloom and stench for some time before emerging where the aqueduct dumped into the desert. This time of year, dawn came early, and a dim glow already showed on the horizon. Darik blinked against the light and tried to breathe deeper, but the air still stank where they stood. Sewage poured into the sand, spreading into a nasty quagmire for a hundred yards before it formed a sluggish current that flowed away from the city. Sickly plants grew around the edge of the pool, and a cloud of flies worried the surface.
They moved away from the river of sewage until they reached the shade of a jasmine tree that grew up against the city walls. Darik was glad for the strong scent of its flowers. Darik wanted to sink to the ground, but Markal urged them on until they stood a hundred yards away from the city. The wizard stared around the edge of the city walls with a concerned look on his face. Darik saw nothing.
“Wights?” Whelan asked. He reached a hand over his shoulder to rest on the hilt of his sword.
Markal shook his head. When he spoke, he sounded puzzled. “No. Something else. There’s a buzzing in the air. Perhaps—” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “No, not yet, I don’t think.”
Whelan snuffed the lamp and pushed it into the pouch at his belt. He pulled out a water flask, which the other two gratefully accepted. They took a moment to rub sand on their bodies, to scrub away some of the filth. Markal’s left hand had begun to heal, dead flesh dripping away to reveal new pink skin beneath. He grimaced when it touched the sand. They turned to go.
Ahead, the Tombs of the Kings. For generations, the khalifates built towers of silence to honor their dead. The living wrapped the dead in white shrouds and raised them onto platforms where they’d be picked over by birds, flesh feeding the world that gave them all life. But hundreds of years ago, according to Darik’s tutor, men buried their dead kings in tombs in the desert. Until mad King Toth denied the grave and the Harvester, rising from his tomb and terrorizing the people who dared appoint another king after his death. Darik had no idea if Nathalus told the truth or just repeated old myths, but this was only the second time he’d ever seen the tombs and he stared in amazement as they drew closer. The other time he’d stood atop the west walls with father at midday, squinting against the shimmering sand. Not the same at all.
No two tombs looked the same. Far to the south were pyramids that framed the sky, others immense slabs of marble with stairs that led into parts better left unseen. There were mastabas and sepulchres, white stone towers, and long temples that ran in a straight line for five hundred yards. Some lay choked with desert scrub and twisting, evil-looking vines, while others stood bare and free as if they’d stood unencumbered for a thousand years. Perhaps they had. They passed a grotesque statue thirty feet high of a man with three eyes and a belt of carved human skulls. Darik touched his index finger to his thumb to ward evil and tried not to look at the statue.
“I don’t like this place,” he said.
“No?” Markal asked. “Well neither do the Veyrians. Be thankful. If a Veyrian wiza
rd sent those wights, he won’t follow us into the tombs.”
That was true enough, Darik thought. Veyrians feared the dead and the Harvester who gathered them, perhaps because of King Toth after the war. His wight had haunted the streets of Veyre, snatching children from their beds at night to feed his power until the Harvester and his hounds had hunted him to the ends of Mithyl.
They followed an old stone road, covered with a thin drift of sand, up between two mausoleums and toward a tomb at the top of a rise. Over the years, part of the square tomb had collapsed, and sand crept up against the side. For a worried moment, Darik thought the old man expected them to go inside, but then he saw that Markal only wanted the view from the top of the hill.
The sun rose in the east, turning the rocky sand into millions of glittering diamonds. The hill stretched no higher than the city walls, so they could see little of Balsalom but a few gleaming white minarets pointing at the sky and the rounded tops of cupolas. Smoke hung in a pall overhead, but from the thin trickle drifting from the city, Darik guessed they’d taken control of the fire the three had lit in the Slaves Quarter. He was glad for that.
“Look!” Markal said, pointing to the north edge of the city, where the Tothian Way skirted the Great Gates, or rather, where Balsalom had been built against the road, which predated the city. An older city had once stood on this site, but Toth had reduced it to rubble in the wars.
A cloud of dust floated on the desert. Some windstorm, perhaps? Darik frowned. The air sat quietly enough where they stood.
Whelan let out a low whistle. “We’re mistaken, aren’t we?”
“What is it?” Darik asked. “What are you talking about?”
Markal ignored Darik, turning to Whelan again. “I thought we had until spring. Now, we have to hurry. We’ll pick up horses at Montcrag, if the castle can spare them. We have to warn the Citadel, gather the Brotherhood and the Order.”
Darik shook his head in exasperation. “What are you talking about? What’s happening?” But even as he asked, he caught a glimpse of black and silver flashing off the morning sun. “An army?”
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