“Call me Quin.”
He rose and shouldered his pack. Then he stomped out the fire, kicking dirt over it with his feet. Not that it mattered; there wasn’t anything nearby to burn. The wastelands of Malikar were a sterile rockscape. There wasn’t a trace of detritus in the soil. Even the riverbeds were far more sand than clay.
Naia pushed herself to her feet, grateful that the wind had died down. The hardpan that stretched before her was crystalline-calm. The clouds moved across the sky with far less urgency. Their shadows striped the desert below in ever-alternating patterns of black and gray. The expanse before them wavered, surreal.
“Well, we’re almost there, at least,” Quin said as he trekked off.
Naia followed a short distance after him. It wasn’t long before they came to the end of the lava flow and skirted a tumbled array of sharp rocks before turning northward. A flat plain stretched ahead of them, broken by strange geometric patterns. Naia stopped, staring at the view, her mind groping to find an explanation for the unnatural terrain.
“What is it?” she asked.
Quinlan Reis turned back to her, swiping a sleeve across his brow. “What’s left of Skara. An ancient city that was destroyed in the Desecration.”
Naia’s eyes scanned the ground ahead of them, at last recognizing the geometric shapes for crumbled walls and jagged ruins. There was not much left, really, only the footprints of what must have been a vast metropolis. The ruins stretched across the flat expanse to the distant foothills ahead. Not too far away, the remains of an ancient statue stuck out of the dark soil of the desert. It had once been a marble sculpture of a rearing horse, now forlorn and obsolete. Half the horse’s head had crumbled away.
“How did an entire city perish?” Naia wondered out loud, feeling disturbed by the amount of death that must have occurred here. Her eyes scanned the ruins, her mind estimating casualties.
The demon beside her nodded at the large, conical peak leaking lava and belching great plumes of smoke. “The side of the mountain blew out. This entire region was consumed by mud and hot ash.”
Naia shook her head, envisioning all the dead that had been left unattended. Left to rot, covered in debris. The image was sickening.
“How awful,” she whispered. “I can’t imagine what their deaths must have been like.”
“Quick. They broiled where they stood.”
Naia shot a glance at him, shocked by his indifference. The expression on the man’s face was unreadable. She took a step away from him, suddenly uncomfortable.
“Why are we here?” she asked.
Quinlan Reis gestured to the rubble spread before them. “Because the people of Malikar have all turned away from the old gods. You won’t find a temple of Death intact anywhere in the Black Lands. Except here.”
Naia looked at the patterned terrain and then back at her companion. She frowned, not understanding what he was talking about. “How? This isn’t even a ruin. Everything’s been leveled down to the bare foundations.”
Quin offered the same, sardonic grin he liked to wear so much. “Why don’t you look again, darling.” With that, he turned and walked away, over to a large, flat slab of stone poking out of the black wasteland. He jumped onto it and walked across to the exact center of the slab. There, he found an opening. With his foot, he scooted a wedge of sand over the edge, watching as it rained down into the space below.
Naia hadn’t the faintest idea what the man was trying to demonstrate. Then it occurred to her. She sprinted toward him.
“Are you saying this is a roof?”
Quinlan Reis smiled. “So it would appear.”
Immediately, the entire ruin took on entirely different dimensions. Once again, Naia’s eyes wandered over the symmetrical patterns of the rubble. Only, this time, she didn’t see bare foundations. She saw rooftops. Ancient Skara lay yet before them, intact, but submerged beneath the ground.
Her mind reeled in wonder. The possibilities…
“So the entire city lies beneath us?” she gasped as she scrambled up next to him on the stone rooftop.
The darkmage flashed her a grin. “By all accounts.”
Naia turned slowly, her eyes tracing the lines of the buried city. “But how do we know which of these rooftops is the Temple of Death? There are far too many to just start digging down and looking into all of them.”
Quinlan crouched, snatching off his hat and holding it over his knees. He looked up at her, his face suddenly weary. “As it happens, I lived in Skara for a time. I once knew my way around the city quite well.”
There was a heavy weight of sadness in his voice. Someone he’d known had lived here, Naia surmised. Someone he’d cared for deeply. She almost felt empathy for the man. Then she remembered who he was. And what he was.
“So you know where the temple is?”
He nodded. “The Temple of Death in Skara was one of the great wonders of the ancient world. I could never forget it. No matter how much I’d like to.” He bowed his head, looking a bit deflated. “It was in the civic center across from the palace. It shouldn’t be hard to find.”
With that, he rose and set his hat on his head. He walked to the edge of the slab and jumped down. Turning back, he offered out his hand. Naia accepted it, exploring the lines of Quinlan’s face with her eyes.
She let him lead her up what must have been a broad avenue, now a wide road paved in ash and bordered by stone walls. A low rumble echoed in the distance, like the earth groaning under its own weight. She had no idea whether the sound came from thunder or the guts of the volcano. She glanced sideways at Quinlan. The darkmage didn’t seem to notice or to care. He was walking with his gaze focused on the street ahead. He wore a melancholy expression, not seeming the least bit interested in the wonders buried beneath their feet.
“Who lived here?” Naia asked, attempting to draw him out in conversation.
He shot an irritated glance her way. Then he scowled. “It doesn’t matter. She’s dead.” But his expression softened, and at last he relented. “There was a girl. We were both apprenticed to the same master who brought us here for study. The geology of the region is … unparalleled. And so was the metallurgy. We studied together and became quite close. But she ended up marrying someone else.”
“What was her name?” Naia asked.
“Amani.” The way he said it proved he loved her.
Naia bowed her head in commiseration. She could feel the pang of his grief. “I’m sorry. It always hurts when the person you love loves someone else more.”
Quinlan Reis stopped walking. He turned around, anger and hurt infecting his eyes. Naia stopped too, wondering what she’d said that could have been so wrong.
“This is a completely different situation,” he growled, making a futile sweep in the air with his hand. “It’s not like you and Meiran; Darien didn’t have to choose between the two of you. Amani didn’t choose to be the wife of my brother—he chose her. And neither she nor I had any gods-damned say in the matter. There wasn’t anything we could do.”
Naia just looked at him. His words stung like a spear-thrust, hitting her in the heart.
“What are you saying?” she said, her voice quavering. “Did Darien choose Meiran over me?”
Quin looked flabbergasted. For a moment he just stared at her. Then he spread his hands broadly and shook his head. “What do you mean, choose? There was no choice to be made! He never even mentioned you.”
Naia froze. She stood there looking at him stupidly, her mouth hanging slack. The hurt clenched her throat, heated her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” the darkmage said. “That was rude.”
“No.” Naia blinked the tears from her eyes. “Don’t apologize. I needed to hear that.” She tried to swallow the feelings back down where they came from. It hurt. Gods, it hurt. But she had other things to think about. Darien was the least of her problems. Apparently, he wasn’t even her problem anymore.
“Quinlan,” she began, but he cut her off.
“I told you. Call me Quin.”
She nodded, swiping at the stubborn tears that refused to go away. “Quin. I’m sorry about what happened between you and Amani. You’re right; it is an entirely different situation. You and your lover were torn apart. Darien and I… No. What am I saying? There never was a ‘Darien and I.’ I was just a fool.”
She turned and took a step away—
—and tripped as a gaping hole loomed right in front of her feet.
Naia cried out, pinwheeling her arms and arching her back away from it. For an eternity, she teetered there on the edge. Then the hole reached up and sucked her in. She was falling.
A hand caught her cloak, jerking her back. Naia fell on her rear in the dirt and scrambled away from the edge.
Quin leaned forward, squinting as he peered into the dark opening in the ground. He knelt and picked up a rock that was lying half-buried in the sand. He held the rock over the shaft and dropped it in. There was a long delay before Naia heard the sound of the rock hitting stone. Quin straightened, adjusting his hat.
“Careful.” He offered Naia a hand. “That would have been quite a drop.”
Still shaking, Naia allowed the darkmage to pull her to her feet. She leaned over the hole as far as she dared, trembling fingers grasping Quin’s hand. Down below, she could see only blackness.
“It’s probably the interior of a building.” Quin leaned in close to dust her off. His palms moved briskly over her shoulders and down her back. “You nearly fell through the roof. Which isn’t the most practical of all entrances.”
Naia was too shaken to appreciate his humor.
“Here.” Quin patted her arm in reassurance. “Just hang onto me and watch your step.”
He guided her wide of the cavity. Naia glanced behind, distrusting it, worried that it might collapse and widen toward them. Her suspicion extended to the entire street, not trusting any of it. Any step she took could end in disaster. They could break through the fragile crust of a rooftop and fall to their deaths without warning.
She let Quin guide her down an ash-paved boulevard lined with the tops of block walls. The rooftops of ruins peeked out of the ground to either side, some taller than others. Some of the jutting masonry looked like it had been used recently to shelter travelers. There were no people about, though. No one lived in Skara. No one alive, at any rate.
They walked past fragmented ruins to the center of the sprawling maze. There, they came to what appeared to be a lake of gray powder. It was encircled by enormous slabs of stone thrust out of the ground at odd angles. Quin drew up in the center of the flat circle, turning slowly as his eyes scanned the wedge-shaped marble that surrounded them. With a grunt and a nod, he started toward a broad slab that sloped upward out of the dust.
He paused with one foot lifted on the rooftop where it rose from the sand. “This is it.”
Naia looked up at the enormous structure that slanted away from them, hundreds of feet long and just as wide. It appeared seamless, as if formed from one singular chunk of marble. Which implied that it was wrought by magic. She had never seen anything of the like since leaving Aerysius.
“How do we get in?” she asked, despairing. The temple doors had to be several stories below the level of the roof; it would be impossible to dig through that amount of dirt.
Quin shrugged his pack off, setting it down on the ground. Then, squatting beside it, he proceeded to rummage through the contents. At last he produced a palm-sized copper cube with strange markings on every facet. He hefted it in his hand, appearing to study the object critically. Then he glanced sideways up at her, nodding in the direction of the ruins across the street.
“Go wait for me on the other side of that wall. Oh, and you might want to cover your head.”
Naia frowned at him, wondering what the strange object could be. Something dangerous, if he wanted her that far away from it.
“What is it?”
The darkmage grinned. “Something extremely useful, under the circumstances.”
Naia considered the innocent-looking cube and shrugged. If Quin thought something that small could move that much dirt, she wouldn’t argue. But she was still curious; was it an artifact? Or something more sinister?
She turned and walked across the street, taking refuge on the other side of the block wall. Squatting, she gazed down at the silken dirt beneath her feet. Naia ran her fingers through it, making parallel furrows in the dust. The sand was light and soft, like fine powder. It shimmered with miniscule crystals, like twinkling stars in a matte-black sky. She lifted her hands and noticed the tiny minerals clinging to the fibers of her gloves. She rotated her hands, watching them glisten.
“Get down!”
Naia covered her head as Quin’s body slammed into the ground beside her. Then a resonant THOOMB! sent a plume of dust straight up into the air, raining down on their heads like pelting hail. The clatter of pebbles bouncing off stone went on for several seconds before finally letting up.
Naia dropped her hands from her head and gaped at Quin, who gaped back at her. He took a peek over the top of the wall.
“Shall we go assess the damage?”
Naia could only nod as she stood up, finger-combing the dust out of her hair. The street was no longer smooth, but littered with chunks of marble and scattered debris. A crater had appeared next to the sprawling slab that was the roof of the Temple of Death. The hole was significantly deeper than Naia had imagined it would be. Quin’s little cube had done a lot more damage than she’d anticipated.
But it was still just a crater; nothing more. The explosion hadn’t managed to even crack the temple’s exterior.
Quin fidgeted, chewing his lip in obvious frustration. He raked a sleeve across his brow. Then he made a vague gesture back the way they had come.
“One more time,” he said. “And this time, get down!”
Naia didn’t need to be told twice. As Quin jumped inside the crater with another cube in his hand, she ran back across the street and took up position behind the eroded wall. Only, this time, she lay with her body flush up against the stone, on her stomach in the dirt. She closed her eyes tight, knowing what was coming.
There was the sound of running footsteps. Then another THOOMB!—even louder this time. She heard Quin’s body landing somewhere behind her, followed by the clattering noise of raining pebbles. Eventually, the torrent tapered off. For a moment, the ruined city was as silent as the dead it contained.
Naia rolled over and found Quin on his back, staring up at the sky. His face was covered in dust, blood dribbling from a cut over one eye. He blinked, and the air over him seemed to ripple. The blood and grime immediately disappeared. He rolled over and sprang to his feet.
“Are you all right?” Naia gasped.
“I’m dead.” The darkmage shrugged as he bent over to dust his pants off. “So I suppose that makes me, by definition, not quite all right. Let’s just say that I’m about as right as I’m ever going to get.”
Naia folded her arms, glowering at his failed attempt at sarcasm although small part of her appreciated it. The world they walked through was dark enough.
“Well, now.” He turned and strode back across the street. “Let’s see if that made a dent.”
Naia followed, noticing that the crater was now twice as wide as it had been before. Quin jumped down into the newly formed pit. Naia paused, looking down. The cavity was much deeper than it looked. And this time, the explosion had ripped a gash in the temple wall, scoring a larger hole out of what must have been a window.
Quin grinned up at her, beckoning her to join him.
Naia slid down the crumbling slope, catching his hand to steady herself. She paused to dump the pebbles out of her shoes, then straightened to examine the wall. Quin dropped to a crouch, running his hand over the marble façade of the temple. A bright glowing orb erupted beside her face. Naia flinched away from it before realizing that it was just a globe of magelight. She caught herself on Quin’s shoul
der, almost knocking him over.
“A bit jumpy, aren’t we?”
“The word you’re looking for is fearful,” Naia corrected him. “And yes, I am. Mostly of you.”
The darkmage cracked a grin. “Excellent. Then you won’t try arguing with my next idea.”
She stared at him then stared at the gaping hole. Her eyes widened slowly, and she started shaking her head.
“No.”
“Yes.”
13
Perfectly Damaged
Darien extended his arms out to his sides, holding the position awkwardly as Sayeed buttoned the sleeves of the black tunic they’d had tailored to fit him. The garment was unlike anything he’d ever felt before, stiff and heavily embroidered. Looped buttons ran from the high collar all the way down to the hem. Sayeed finished with his sleeves then strapped the Omeyan warbelt around his waist. Over the belt he wrapped a golden sash, through which he hung a long, curved dagger in a tasseled scabbard.
Sayeed retrieved a matching sword, bowing low as he held it up, presenting the blade. He bared a few inches of steel, exposing a single edge with three deep grooves. The hilt was wrapped in bronze wire and set with semiprecious stones that matched the stones on the scabbard. It was a handsome weapon that looked ornamental. But it bore the scars of battle. This blade had seen war.
“This is the sword carried by Khoresh Kateem in the battle of Harmudi,” Sayeed stated, sliding the elegant scimitar fully back before slipping it through the sash at Darien’s waist.
He arranged a scarf over Darien’s shoulders, saying, “First will be the ceremony. Afterward, there is the reception. It is then that the warlords of the Khazahar will declare their support for you.”
Darien nodded, tugging at his collar, which was buttoned up so high he could scarcely breathe. He could feel his throat fighting against it every time he tried to swallow.
The Zakai officer drew away, considering his appearance gravely. He issued a stiff nod of satisfaction. “Have I answered all your questions?”
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