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 wizard 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?”
Markal nodded grimly. “The dark wizard. I thought he’d reach for the easternmost of the Western Khalifates first, to test his strength. But if Balsalom falls so easily, the others will come down too.” They watched in silence as the army approached with the rising sun.
“And what from here, do you think?” Whelan asked after a few minutes. “Does he come after us straight away?”
Markal said, “I suspect he’ll march west and take the passes immediately, yes. Take the Way and you take the world, as they say.”
The army drew nearer and Darik could see more. Hundreds of banners snapped in the wind, leading columns of men. A troop of mammoths stomped into place against the south side, and the columns spread apart to let them by. Winged shapes, too large to be birds, shadowed the sun, soaring back and forth over the city. Men on horseback formed phalanxes around the flanks. The army snaked as far as the eye could see.
A small vanguard on horseback left the army to approach the gates. From its apex, a trumpet sounded a challenge, clear in meaning. Let us in or be crushed. The army shouted in a single voice and banged sword hilts against shields in a fearful clamor. When they stopped, a few mammoths still trumpeted, before falling silent with the others.
“Look!” Whelan said, pointing to the north side of the city. Someone raised a huge white flag above the tower that overlooked the Great Gates, emblazoned with the golden dragon of the Saffa. The khalifa’s own flag. “She’s going to resist.” Other banners raised atop minarets throughout the city.
Darik’s heart lifted at the sight, then turned cold when he remembered his sister. Kaya would have to brave the coming battle. He should have gone back for her while the others lay stunned from Markal’s magic.
Markal nodded, but he, too, seemed to take little pleasure from this discovery. “She has no chance. The dark wizard has caught her completely unprepared. And if he brings the Hammer, he can tear down the very walls of the city.”
Whelan’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. “Kallia will not go easily, though. Of that, I’m sure.”
Markal said, “Perhaps she’ll gain us a few weeks then. More if she musters allies. If only there were more time, we might bring help. Come, we must hurry.”
Markal and Darik hurried down the hill, but Whelan lingered a moment longer, watching. Darik heard him mumble to himself, “Goodbye, my queen, I will build a chime to your memory when I reach Eriscoba. May the Harvester rest your soul.”
Chapter Four
Toth’s View overlooked the Great Gates on the north side of the city. The tower wasn’t built by T
oth at all, but by a khalif named Ordvan Ter, remembered for little in Balsalom where he was born two hundred years earlier, but revered in the city a few miles to the east that bore his name. Toth’s View jutted higher than all save the merchants minaret, which stood taller by virtue of starting atop a rise at the heart of the city.
The city stretched below, a vast array of crowded buildings topped by towers, bazaars, and rounded cupolas. The Grand Bazaar sat a half mile to the west, and today it was crowded with thousands of people trying to buy whatever foodstuffs they could before the enemy arrived.
Toth’s View also commanded a view across a long sweep of the Tothian Way as the road described a perfect line across the plain. This was how Ordvan Ter’s tower came to its present name. It gave the khalifa a good view of Cragyn’s army as it stretched along the Way for miles. She watched with growing dread.
All morning, farmers and refugees from burned villages poured through the north and east gates, and they clogged the streets with people, carts, and animals. As the city woke, others crowded the streets to find out what was happening. Some objected to the masses of outsiders, and fights broke out.
She wanted to run down to the street and grab them one by one. Stop it! she would shout. We’re at war. He’ll kill us all!
Pasha Boroah had urged her to turn away any refugees not bearing food. She’d balked at leaving them to Cragyn’s army. Balsalom itself was a city of survivors seeking refuge from the Tothian Wars, together with Selphan and freed slaves from Veyre. She wouldn’t change that now.
Through this crush, Balsalomian soldiers struggled into position behind the gates. Archers crouched along the city walls, ready to rise and fire over the battlements should the enemy attack. But the scene presented her a view of chaos and little more. She hoped her pashas had better control over their armies than it appeared. Kallia worried that too many years of peace left them soft.
Beside her, two men waited to hoist aloft the dragon flag when the enemy drew near the gates. The grand vizier stood on Kallia’s other side, squinting onto the plain. He dictated what he saw to a pair of scribes, who scribbled his observations onto parchment. Impossible to count the number of foot soldiers and horsemen, but Kallia guessed their earlier estimate to be accurate. But they’d been wrong about everything else.
The army stopped a hundred yards from the gates, gathering into ranks and Kallia got her best view yet of the enemy.
Perhaps fifty mammoth trumpeted at the vanguard of the wizard’s army, tusks ringed in iron, ridden by northern soldiers. Several giants milled throughout the group, some more than twice the height of a man. One draped a pole over his shoulder onto which he’d impaled several bodies. Scouts or farmers murdered in their fields, she guessed. The horses shied away from both mammoth and giant, and whinnied in terror whenever the dragon wasps landed or departed from their midst. Kallia’s own men did the same when the wasps swooped low over the walls, dragon kin on their back screaming and shaking spears.
A dragon wasp was not a true dragon. The last dragon died in the Tothian Wars, although farmers still turned up the odd bone in their fields, turned hard as stone by time. A wasp looked more like a flying snake with short, clawed feet and a neck that darted back and forth as it flew.
An oily cloud gathered about a mile behind the army, flickering with lightening. What kind of magic could harness the weather itself?
Three cloud castles gathered overhead, vast windmills churning against the wind to keep them from drifting along with the air currents. She’d heard many ideas of who lived in these castles in the sky, but whoever they were, the affairs of mortals apparently interested them. What did they think would happen today? Perhaps they already knew; maybe they’d gathered to see Balsalom sacked, its people led away in chains. They wouldn’t involve themselves unless the dragon wasps flew too close to their castles.
Where is Omar? she wondered. She feared he would sit out the battle, or worse still, side with Cragyn. And what of the armies of Starnar, Havorn and Saltopolis, ten thousand strong? If Havorn’s Pasha followed plans, he would come up behind Cragyn’s army and take the hill a mile to the north, wedging the wizard’s forces in the valley between the hill and Balsalom. But Pasha Jas Web was a fickle man, prone to changes in mood. He might change plans when he saw the force of the enemy and try to reach the city walls instead.
The powerful army of Darnad, Balsalom’s only real rival in the west, remained on the sidelines for now. The khalif of Darnad wished to marry Kallia to one of his sons and unite the two khalifates, but she had resisted for several years, knowing that as soon as she married she’d lose influence with the other families vying for her hand.
“We found out who tried to burn the city,” Saldibar said, breaking her from her thoughts.
Someone had set fire to the Slaves Quarter last night. The entire Quarter might have burned to the ground had not the Eighth Phalanx been marching less than a mile away. As it was, the fire burned a swath two hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long. A pall still hung over the city.
“Have you caught them?” she asked, spirits lifting at the news.
“Not yet, but we will. They posed as three slaves, but when a master torturer came to question them, one cast magic that killed the man and wounded several others. They fled the city, headed west, we believe.”
She couldn’t say she was sorry for the torturer. Of all the guilds, the corrections guild was the worst. She never used them to punish her own prisoners, but many used them to enforce guild law. The power to kill a master torturer meant a powerful wizard indeed.
“Spies,” she said. “But west? They’re not going to the dark wizard. Why?”
Saldibar shrugged. “Undoubtedly they’ve already passed their secrets. Or perhaps they’re from the Free Kingdoms and are fleeing home.”
She immediately discounted this theory. “Setting fire to the city is the act of an enemy. King Daniel is an honorable man.” She considered. “In any event, they must be stopped. Killed, if necessary.”
“I have already ordered it so, my queen.” He hesitated. “I was wrong about Cragyn’s armies.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you wish my resignation?” He fingered the amulet around his neck, symbol of his office. The opal pendant had been in his family for three generations.
“Of course not. But we made a careless mistake. You should have sent more spies at once rather than immediately distrust the ones who’d given their lives.”
He bowed his head. “Yes, my queen.”
“Look!” one of the scribes shouted.
A small detachment of men rode forth from Cragyn’s army. Six horse strong, they wore black, flowing robes girded with iron-bound leather armor. They came to the gates and stopped. One man waved an olive branch overhead while the others threw shields and scimitars to the ground, then unbuckled their armor and cast it down as well.
“They seek a parley,” Saldibar said.
“Whatever for? We’ve already said we won’t surrender.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps a final offer now that we’ve seen their army.”
“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “Or perhaps Cragyn has discovered the army marching to their rear and wishes to negotiate safe passage west.”
“Unlikely. The army is pitching camp. I can see engineers assembling siege weapons. But it wouldn’t hurt to stall for time, let us get our armies organized, see if we can contact Omar or Pasha Jas Web.”
Saldibar hurried down the tower to consult with the pashas. A few minutes later, the Great Gates drew open just wide enough to let in Cragyn’s men, then closed. Balsalomian soldiers dragged the men from their horses, searching them for weapons, then led them away under guard.
Kallia counted the stone stairs as she descended. Two hundred and fifteen. Ordvan Ter had built a stair for each year since Balsalom’s founding. It had been another hundred and ninety seven since the man’s death. The city was built by survivors of the Tothian Wars: merchants, farmers, sol
diers who cast down their weapons and swore they would never fight again. The very word Balsalom meant “peace” in the old tongue.
Before the wars, there had been another city on this site, the Tombs of the King attested to that, but few remembered its name. Syrmarria, her tutor had told her. Capital of Aristonia, which had become the Desolation of Toth. Of its people little trace remained. Is this how it would end for Balsalom?
Kallia took no chances. She brought the six men into the middle of the throne room, surrounded by twenty armed guards. Half a dozen wizards and the three remaining master torturers stood next to her or mingled amidst the guards as she took her seat on the throne, in case one or more of the visitors were wizards. Kallia lifted her scepter and took a closer look at the six men. They looked like ordinary soldiers, stripped of weapons and armor, but the scepter told her otherwise.
Once, during her great grandfather’s reign, a star storm fell, turning the sky as bright as day for three straight nights. On the third evening, a burning fireball blazed across the heavens, striking the ground with a thunderous boom some distance outside the city. The khalif sent his men to retrieve the star stone, a blackened chunk of rock and iron. One of his wizards forged the Scepter of Balsalom from the stone, and since then, the khalifs and khalifas of Balsalom held a gift of discernment that had saved them from many spies and assassins.
The first four men were pashas of the dark wizard, but the last two hid behind a magical disguise that concealed their true nature. The first of these two she didn’t recognize, a wizard of some kind, but the other...her brother.
“Omar,” she said, angry. “You betrayed me.”
At once the disguises swept away. The magic fled, either from the scepter’s power or because the wizard no longer wished to maintain the disguise for the others. Angry murmurs circulated through Kallia’s men and some drew swords.
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