The cavalry unmasked. Shedding the black cloaks and hoods of our escape from the lanterns, Methan soldiers now strode about the camp in knee-length coats of coarse burlap which spared room for ruddy jerkins of hide at the chest. They had no metal armour; the only metal that they carried being the steel of their scimitar swords. Heads were wrapped in the same burlap; tightly coiling layers that covered ears, necks and foreheads, protecting almost everything except for their faces from the sun. By the look of it all, my own small headcloth wasn’t going to help much.
Because of the head-coverings it was hard to tell at a glance how many here were women. There was Marszal Savhar, whose “field officer” rank placed her in charge of the Eighth Battalion. She seemed to be on close terms with the High Commander. Just below her, I gathered, was the other woman I’d seen last night, Keda – the Artabh, senior “company-grade” officer. She was the one who oversaw the Mounted Scimitars division, I guessed, passing down orders from High Command and leading them in battle. She wasn’t here with us just yet, having been given special instructions to join us only after six days of the mission. In her place were two junior officers, or telmadhi, of the cavalry. Both men. But there were more women in the ranks. It had seemed strange to me at first, since Sarah’s stories had always been clear that soldiers in Naemia were all men. After last night’s secret meeting, however, Rusper had told me that the strangeness was really Antissa’s for not ever enlisting women, while the regiments of other caliphies always had.
Now I watched Marszal Savhar jog up a slope of the basin to six waiting mounted soldiers. As she passed them orders from the ground, I tried to figure out which of them were women. Only two I could be sure of – by height and build, breadth of the shoulders – even though Savhar herself was hardly lacking bulk and breadth and brawn.
So those were the scouts, I realised, as they veered and rode away from camp, hooves kicking dust. How far would they ride, had Plamen said?
The sun got hotter and meaner and counting cavalry-women didn’t work as a distraction for long. Issachar, the eldest servant of the group and official quartermaster of supplies, gave me a flask within the hour but snatched it back after I’d had only three gulps of water. I glared at him as footsteps crunched behind me. ‘Thirsty?’
When I turned around, it was one of the telmadhi standing there, hands on his hips as he looked me up and down with eyebrows skewed. You could tell the telmadhi from the others by the lacquered black cording that was twisted through their head-wraps. It also ringed around the tops of their boots and coiled their scabbards. But this man looked too young to be an officer—even a junior one—at least as far as I could tell when he dropped his mouthguard to smile. Judging by the tufts that poked out from the fringes of his burlap, his hair looked black. As black as mine. His eyes a warm and rusty copper.
‘Out here, you’ll need to learn how to control that thirst of yours or it’ll drive you crazy,’ he said to me. The smile was wry, disarming. ‘Three swigs in the morning, five at noon, three again with dusk. Those are the rules when you’re in the desert and no Vedan is above them. No Elmine either.’
Even as uncomfortable as I was in the heat, I found myself a little lost in his coppery eyes, almost forgetting about the water. There was something in his voice too, and that smile, that reminded me of someone else. He even had that easy, always-knows-best way about him and I wondered if I’d have guessed he was a soldier out of garb.
Now his attention turned to Issachar: ‘I trust all three casks were at capacity when you took them to the officers’ quarters? Hope no one needs reminding that to hoard more than a skin at any time is an offence to High Command. Same applies to us soldiers.’
Issachar nodded dutifully. ‘Yes, telmadekh.’
‘Good man.’ Smiling again, and giving me another tiny glance, he walked away.
My heart sank. It was like the warehouse again! I’d just quaffed the whole morning’s quota and it had barely wet my lips! Not a mistake I’d make again. ‘Which one is he?’ I asked Issachar, who avoided my eyes.
‘Hm? That’s Telmadh Eflan,’ he grunted.
As the evil sun kept climbing, I started doubting I’d survive. Unlike behind the fortress walls, out here the only shade was in our tent where I could neither breathe nor sit for long before the other servants found me and told me off for shirking jobs. To them I really was another servant of their number. The Elmine one. But soon enough there were fewer jobs for us to do. Another hour into the morning, I helped Kobi set out the torch-staves in a circle round the camp. There were two dozen of the staves, which allowed for spaces of about three yards between them. But once we’d finished, Marszal Savhar told us to widen the circle at the north of the camp so as to line the high ground of the basin at one edge. The ground was hard, even at the lip: not soil or gypsum in this area but a kind of stony, dirty gravel, hard to break even with the sharp point of the stave.
It was still leagues on leagues in all directions before any dunes began to rise, though when I looked into the distance I thought, just maybe, I could see where the earth began to turn a cleaner, whiter gold. I couldn’t see any Antissa, as Plamen told me I would, but then the glare was so harsh I couldn’t look for very long.
I envied Kobi. Few boys I’d seen in Antissa were so brown—almost black—and I suspected that the fortress hadn’t been his home long either. So much darker than the soldiers of the cavalry, he couldn’t be Methan or Laudassan. He must have come from deeper south, the so-called ergish caliphies. Zeidha, Ospégath and Shad. Inland life was harder there, I’d been told, under constant heat. Rusper had said that the ergish Vedans lived in ways much closer to those of the country’s earliest clans than what had grown up in Antissa. Well, for one thing, they had no pipes to draw up water from underground. Kobi didn’t mind the heat, it seemed, or if he did, it didn’t show. Going about our tasks he was friendly but, like the others, wary of me. I was the Elmine, after all.
Noon took years to come. As I sat on a rock halfway up the basin and waited for it to bring my next drink, I listened to the strop of sharpening scimitars mingled with the snorting of horses and flow of talk. Sweat had soaked my shirt through while my back and shins and feet all felt like they were frying in oil.
Desperate for some distraction, I peeled back the sleeve of my swathes and looked at the torque on my arm. That lion’s face on the tarnished lid looked back at me.
I pulled its lever.
The Sight, in an instant, blasted me with so much ungraspable space that I nearly lost my balance and fell forward off the rock. Nausea and dizziness came quickly so I rammed the lever in, slid off the torque and stowed it away inside my sling-bag.
Then I unholstered the fusil from my belt and turned it over. This was one of the smallest in Rusper’s range of weapons. The metals that made up the main body were either warm or searing hot, soon slicked with sweat. I started running through the checks but soon it got too hot to hold. So I holstered it again. Then I opened up the three capsules of schot, if just to count my ammunition. A round of six stones was in each, lined up like spherical soldiers. Eighteen shots. Eighteen chances. Was that enough? Would it need to be?
A thorny lizard ogled me from another rock along the slope, impossibly happy being baked alive. It cocked its head to eye me better, as if confused by my discomfort, then flicked its tail and disappeared.
Water was all I could think about.
By early afternoon, the camp was quiet. Plamen came out of the command tent to put his sword across the grist-wheel, restring his crossbow, buff his boots. The worst heat was over now, small comfort though it was when I could still hardly stand it. Always there, impossible to ignore, draining me dry.
The scouts returned to camp. ‘Nothing for miles,’ I heard one tell Savhar as he dismounted. Two took their report to High Command while the others saw to resting the horses.
The sky purpled and then, slowly, the air cooled. Issachar and another servant called Kadesh built up a fire of logs and coals near the middle of the camp. I couldn’t bring myself to help; too wrung-out and exhausted by all the blistering hours I’d crawled through just to get here. So instead I walked the torch perimeter, staring out through the gathering dark. And hoped for strength for what was coming.
Below, the fire was soon lit and Kobi took it, torch to torch, along the circle we had made. As he approached me he said: ‘You’ve not before travelled in the desert?’
I shook my head, ‘No,’ but his question had been kind, maybe a little worried for me. ‘Well, not like this. Just the one time, when we came to the city . . . from Elman.’
He offered a thin smile, then lowered his flame towards the unlit torch between us. Sulphur snapped and crackled, bringing it to life. ‘I see you suffer,’ he said, ‘and try to hide from the sun.’
‘I’m not used to it.’
Another smile. ‘Not like in Elman?’
I shook my head and met his eyes; in the firelight, didn’t think he suspected. Just a friendly question. The flame brightened his sable face.
‘Don’t have it be your enemy,’ he said. ‘Your swathes are good, Antissan weave, they’ll shield you well. Eat, drink and rest as we do and the desert sun won’t harm you. You’ll see.’
‘I’ll try,’ I nodded.
He looked skyward — ‘Not like the night’ — then nuzzled his chin into his mouthguard and moved away along the torch-line with the flame.
Half a dozen men and women of the cavalry took up the first stretch of the night-watch and I was called down to help with the breaking out of rations. They were modest travelling foods and nothing needed to be cooked: dates, yeheb nuts, lavak flatbread and a tough, dry, salty fish they called “khapent.” Well, that was something at least. At a time when there was almost none available anywhere in the capital, and not even the viziers of the Sanhedrin could get their hands on any—the common soldiery could still dine on cured fish. Well, hardtack fish.
When the water came to me, I savoured my three mouthfuls like honey.
Spirits were high. While soldiers ate around the blaze, soon joined by the Marszal and two telmadhi, Kadesh, Kobi and I ran food to the night-watch, then joined the other servants at our fire. It was smaller than the main fire and we weren’t allowed logs, just coal, but it was big enough to take some of the sharpness from the cold now creeping into the air. The desert’s other demon. There was only a little conversation, the others seeming to prefer eating in silence. But now I saw there were two women among us. A mother and daughter, from Laudassa I overheard. Their names were Aznath and Rakhel. But for whatever ergish reason, they only spoke to Issachar.
At no time during the meal did the High Commander appear. But now his presence could be felt, even if only by passing shadows across the glow of his canvas. The cavalry tended to their horses and then turned in for their rest. By now freezing, I crawled into our tent after the other servants, and we chose our places side-by-side. Our breath and closeness were only just enough for warmth, and I felt sorry for Kobi before long. With his back so near the flaps, held closed by two wide-spaced knots, he shivered. It made me shiver as well and kept me awake into the night.
But so did the other sounds that rose from the silence; a racket of echoing caterwauls and gibbers on the plains. They were out there, beyond the basin, ranging through the dark. Nearer and louder, further again. Soon it was all I could hear.
----------------------------------------
Most of me was numb when I woke up. The cold had got into the tent and spread all the way through, stealing most of the warmth from our bodies and breath. I didn’t feel as if I’d slept even a bit, and Kobi had to shake me several times before I willed myself to move. Or try, at least.
Outside the flaps, by the dying light of the central fire and glare of perimeter torches, I saw that half the camp had already been taken down, the Methan soldiers moving about the site with all the bustle of a North District street. The sky was dark.
My joints all stiff, it wasn’t easy to get my swathes back on again, which made the other hands impatient: they needed help with reloading. Yet when I helped they got annoyed, saying that I packed things in bad order and wasted space on the carts. So instead I helped Kadesh to feed the stocky carthorses once hitched, holding a bucket of mixed feed and rock-salt under steaming, snaffling snouts. All but nodding off on my feet.
There’d been a dream. Almost like a smell I couldn’t place, it hung off twigs of sleepy thoughts and I couldn’t be exactly sure if I’d dreamt it just this night or the one before. Nor could I hold onto its pictures. Green eyes, many pairs. A white face . . . formless, staring . . . Words too; a chanting.
A golden wheel that turned . . .
‘Hey . . . hey! Next horse.’
Embers were crushed. Along the edge of the basin I teamed with Kobi, one-by-one uprooting torch-staves from the ground and extinguishing them in the broken gravel of their holes. I was slow – numb fingers clumsy – and only got five of the twenty-four; Rakhel stepping in with some annoyance. Half-asleep, I hadn’t noticed all the tents were down and packed, and that the cavalry was moving to the edge, leading their horses. Some of the horses started screaming and bucking from their masters. Hisses and high-pitched yowls came from the darkness.
That woke me up—I dropped my armful of torches as Rakhel leapt back behind me. Some of the soldiers near the edge drew swords and held them at the ready, but they were soon sheathed again.
‘Wildcats,’ one of the women still on watch reported loudly. As I gathered my torches with Rakhel, I wondered what kind of wildcats she meant. She’d sounded confident at least. Probably leopards, they prowled at night. Now with the watch I marked the black cross-cords of one of the telmadhi. Not Eflan, the other one. ‘They’ll scatter quickly when we move,’ I heard him say.
It was the last we heard of them.
But I was still exhausted. Not even the jolts and lurches of the cart over the uneven ground kept me alert, and for a while I simply slept in my seat with my chin bobbing. A hand nudged me awake as first light filtered through the dawn, to give me my morning sips from the waterskin.
‘How far have we come?’ I asked.
Kadesh grunted something back, which sounded more-or-less like ‘Not far.’
Soon the sun lanced lemon rays over the heads of the cavalry’s column. I could see our formation now. Plamen and Savhar rode right in front, behind them Telmadh Shafra and the first group of riders. After that came the supply-carts; I was riding in the third. Behind us rode Telmadh Eflan with the rest of the detachment, six by five. Another two riders ranged around and ahead. At a pace, I guessed, the line must stretch about a hundred yards.
Whenever that pace slackened, riders would talk amongst themselves, although the accents of Methar made conversations hard to follow. I’d got so used to the Antissans who made up most of the Royal Guild. But I understood Telmadh Eflan easily; by his speech, I supposed he must have spent a good few years in the city. He was young—no more than thirty, I reckoned—and had a handsome, roguish face with skin the colour of dunes, thick hair that wasn’t black after all but russet-brown. A rascal’s eyes. He talked a lot, laughing often, and I liked him. The way he taunted his own riders with mocking gibes made me laugh too and helped distract me from the heat.
At midmorning we stopped to water the horses and take food. The land was changing; rolling around us like a frozen brown sea. That gravel and gypsum of Antissa’s central plains were gone, but the ground was hard still; dry and cracked and streaked with bedrock reefs that surfaced through like bones. Beyond, either side of our column, were golden dunes of the ergs. White copses of scrub dotted some of their slopes but I didn’t see much life. Just the buzzards and, maybe once in the distance, a few gazelle.
Miles fell behind us, eventually pushing hills of rocky crag against the horizon. We turned north. Again, so quickly, the heat became almost too much for me to bear. My swathe-hood’s shade wasn’t enough, but it was all I had. It could have been noon or sometime after, I couldn’t focus on tracking time, when I peered out from under it.
Ahead of the column, a wide plain swept to the northwest for many leagues between the hills – a passage – the earth across it pale and bare with darker smudges like charcoal shading. At its edges the hills leaned back, though one among them leaned forward; its ridge of high cliffs and flat tiers bared to the sun like giant steps. The cliffs that faced us across the plain loomed some two hundred feet at least, and at their summit I could see the reddish tinge of man-made walls.
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‘This lot’s gonna be needing as much clerical water as they dunk their heads in, marszalekh!’ came Eflan’s shout from behind our cart. I didn’t hear anything shouted back from the Marszal but there was laughter from both blocks of the cavalry, maybe some retort from the other telmadh, and I smiled too. This was Calvallagh.
A flash of gold caught my eye just before I lowered my face out of the sun. Even under the shade of my hand my eyes were streaming in the glare, but I could still make it out at the very end of the ridge. Alone, away from the temple, on top of a wind-whittled spike of rock, like a beacon: a gold pagoda. From here it looked like a birdcage.
We crossed the breadth of the northwest passage; halfway across passing a mound of rocky precipice almost as tall as the cliffs, as if a great piece of them had calved off and drifted out into the open by itself. It looked like a great tree stump.
A dyked shelf of rock then curved from the foot of the cliffs, widening into a crude road as it climbed. Its track was steep, rough with surfaced bedrock, and the cavalry had to lead their horses, pushing them hard against the slope, while the wheels of the carts snagged and spun against broken earth. I dismounted and helped the other servants offload whatever heavy items could be carried. On top of the cruelty of the heat, this turned the climb into a punishment; my body soon soaked and burning up inside my swathes. But I’d not have wanted to make this stretch attached to wheels: just a short glance back, once we’d made it above the middle tier, was all I needed to be sure of that.
A short way shy of the summit, there was a well. A water-well! I stared at it in wonder as it passed by on our right, sitting there so temptingly among the yellow rocks, half of me trying to figure out how the clerics could have possibly dug a borehole through this ridge, the other despising the company for not stopping right there to draw water and drink. My throat felt like parchment, didn’t theirs? That first clean mouthful, its taste and coolness . . . my headcloth wet on boiling skin . . . It was barely five yards away—and all I needed was a splash.
Kobi must have been watching me, because when I made up my mind to do it and moved to dash out from the group, he caught my arm. ‘It’s not our water,’ he said simply. And he was right; it wasn’t mine. The noontime quota was just paces away, I supposed, and I knew I shouldn’t let the thirst make me all crazy like Eflan warned.
The shelf-track levelled. Some of the soldiers remounted. Calvallagh, somehow, had looked bigger from the plain. What came into view as we crested the top tier of the ridge was hardly more than a cluster of dusty domicile-dwellings, ringed with long-forsaken columns, broken arches and plinths, and one miserable half-circle of bricks at the approach: just three feet high and knocked down in most places, barely a wall. All the sandstone in the place was a ruddy orange colour as though the sun had burned its skin. Only one of the buildings had a full roof of tiles intact, all the others part or wholly caved in and canvassed over. Bushes grew wild at the feet of freestanding columns and a single wind-beaten palm drooped over one of the arches as if it had fainted. Blocks of old masonry and cracked, toppled amphorae lay in the scrub. Whatever this place had been once, it clearly wasn’t anymore.
Mounted again, the High Commander rode beyond the line of tumbled bricks. A few gaunt sheep ran from his horse, crying like deserted children.
The human inhabitants I could see were nothing at all like the Methan clerics who had come to Antissa. There had never been a question that those men, in their long muslin thobes and square hats, could be anything but priests. Even to a child who knew so little of the desert outland. The men I now saw among the broken walls, nervously picking at their rags as if they had nothing else to do, were more like peasants. Cassocks hung off them in scraps, their beards were wild and none wore hats. Within just moments of our arrival, they had all been drawn out to watch us, and I counted less than ten.
Plamen’s boots met the ground. He took a short swig from a skin and wiped his mouth. Then hailed a cleric. The one he hailed, who had been staring like the others, turned away. Then hurried off towards the nearest colonnade as if he’d suddenly remembered an urgent task. Savhar, still on horseback, shouted: ‘Priest!’
The shout didn’t stop the cleric and, at the command in her voice, others started dispersing through the ruins. The second Telmadh broke away from from the frontal group, spurring his horse to a canter impressively fast. Hearing hoofbeats, the cleric threw a glance over his shoulder and, clearly scared, started to run – only to be cut off by the horse. Shrouded in a circle of dust, he fell to his knees and wrung his hands before the Telmadh.
Plamen strode out through the dust-track, Savhar down off her horse and close behind him. I made my way towards the front of the column and watched the three officers surround the sorry kneeling figure. Choppy shreds of talking drifted back to us; I couldn’t follow. Looking back at the watching cavalry, I glanced at a few of their faces and thought some looked ill-at-ease. Many frowned, a few exchanged unhappy mutters. I pitied the cleric. Whatever they were asking of him, all it seemed he could offer were frightened nods and frantic shakes of his head. Could he speak?
The three returned. ‘What news?’ said Eflan to the Marszal, watching the wretch trip and scamper out of sight.
Plamen answered: ‘But for eight festering old men, this temple has stood uninhabited for a month, perhaps longer. The rest of its clerics have forsaken Calvallagh for the communities to the south. The Archimandrite’s temples in Methar.’
‘Why?’ I asked, feeling bold.
Of course he didn’t look at me. In front of his officers, what was I but a beetle at his boots?
But he did answer: ‘Fear.’
‘Yet the Rath have made no advance upon the temple or the ridge,’ Savhar said, hands on hips. She looked to Eflan, who hadn’t spoken with the cleric. ‘Priest says they’ve been seen, but as yet none have come anywhere near the cliffsides.’
So the man had said something.
Plamen’s eyes floated over the company’s emptying saddles and out into the glare of the plain. ‘Even to those who hold the high ground untouched,’ he said, ‘a restless force is unnerving. And if fear has reached Calvallagh, then that force may be moving. We were right to come here.’
We took our midday water.
At the centre of the grounds was a shallow theatre, ringed around with more freestanding columns. We set up camp there, erecting the torch-staves in the arches. Plamen, meanwhile, took up residence of the building with the roof. The heat eased off a little bit. Soldiers and servants sat resting on the tiers of the theatre, and in the shade where they could find it. The clerics didn’t come near us, choosing instead to keep their distance and hide away inside their homes.
Why had some gone and some stayed? Rusper had told me that the clerics cleaved to their sites out of a reverence for the ancient Builders of Antissa and their belief that the monuments in the desert were due protection. Everything else had been built by disciples after that, like this old broken-down temple. And since I knew that the Builders weren’t the gods of the Vedish, I couldn’t help but wonder: did these strange hermits pray to someone or something? Was it the gryphon?
Soon I wandered away from the rest of the company, past the small lookout party already posted at the north edge of the ruins, and from there onto the ridge beyond the farthest colonnade. Short puffs of warm wind raced to meet me from the plain; one threw sharp grit into my eye and I must have looked like an idiot to the soldiers on the outskirts as I staggered on, trying to rub it out. But there was also tiredness in my stagger, so I made sure to keep my steps well away from the drop.
The cliffs ran west. From their craggy lip the precipice swept into a natural scarp of rocky ground, then flattened out to meet the gypsum of the northwest passage. Towards the prow-like farthest point, the flat of the ridge began to narrow. Boulders converged and blocked my path. Slowly, carefully—the bandaged slit along my leg now hurting more after the hike we’d made on foot—I climbed my way from rock to rock, between, around the steeper ones, and crested the boulder at the top.
A wide-winged bird flapped off the dome.
It was the strangest feeling; like a feather-tickle of memory. I knew full well I’d never seen it in my life, the monument, and yet I felt somehow I had.
How could I though? None of the Builders’ monuments were anywhere inside the city.
Down the other side of the boulders the narrowed ridge dipped a short way before it thinned into a wall: a slender wall maybe some hundred feet in length, seeming – from here – to jut out from the precipice into the plain like a long arm. The arm-wall sloped up at the end, there twisting itself into the spike of crude, wind-whittled stone the thing was built on.
I made my way onto the arm, a little nervous of the openness ahead, but then I saw its inside wall wasn’t sheer. Most of the way it inclined gently, so if I fell I wouldn’t plummet.
Small, simple, beautiful. But not golden, as I’d first thought across the plain. The dome, so perfectly round, was of some richer, browner metal that shone a golden colour in the sun, and the eight thin pillars that spread its weight looked much the same. Scaling up the sandstone spike wasn’t too hard, to my surprise. Even with the soreness in my leg, I reached the base of the pagoda without a slip. The open dais of its foundation was made of stone, dark grey like slate, maybe some fifteen feet across and ringed around with narrow steps. I clambered up, mounted the steps and slowly reached out with my hand to touch the closest gleaming pillar.
Expecting heat, I almost jerked it back on instinct. But the metal wasn’t even warm. As I looked the pillar up and down, I thought back to Meck’s Blister Test and wondered if I knew this metal from his catalogue. The design of the pillars wasn’t normal either. Standing at weird outward angles, they had no capitals or bases, and ran straight into the floor of the dais. The floor’s stone circle itself displayed an intricate veinwork of fine ruts across the surface, that wove in from the outer edge.
A hairy face in the corner of my eye made me jump. Under the spike, one of the clerics was standing there on the arm-wall, staring up at me in silence as I examined the pagoda. I froze and stared back for an awkward moment. He must have followed me here.
‘Hello,’ I said eventually. Softly; it was so quiet here anyway.
‘Feet,’ the man said.
On cue I looked at mine—sandals! Understanding, I sat on the top step of the dais and pulled them off. Then held them up so he could see.
He nodded seriously, twice. And seemed to wait.
So, taking a moment to aim right—I didn’t want to lose another pair, not now, not in the desert—I tossed them out from the pagoda. They fell and made their flapping landing: one right in front of him, between two rocks, the other skating a short way down the inside slope. Would he take them?
But he only nodded one more time, turned around and walked away. As I watched him climb and work his way around the boulders, I hoped I hadn’t offended him. But my feet had been swelling in those sandals, and the touch of slate was cool.
Now I stepped between the pillars and across the inbound grooves. There they were. Slowly—respectfully I hoped—I moved around them, the Builders’ Stones, trying to observe them from all sides. Each stone that made up the construct was unique in size and in shape, but all were deep, dull, leaden grey—more a pale black. Their shapes were formed by such precise, razor-sharp planes and corners that they simply couldn’t be natural. They’d have been cut, though cut by what I couldn’t even start to guess. Assembled into some kind of design, they seemed to balance at impossible angles. They must be fused somehow, or else expertly sculpted out of a much bigger block of stone, or they simply couldn’t have stood here for five hundred years.
What kind of stone was it anyway?
Glancing between the pillars to check for other watching clerics, I pressed my palm against a surface of the stone. Again, surprised. Where the gleaming pillar had been cool instead of boiling in the sun, this stone was cold. Almost too cold, even for standing in the shade!
I drew my hand back. Stepped away, to take them in.
There wasn’t much more to take in, I realised soon. I’d already been told that the ancient ciphers and runes, long since copied and interpreted by the clerics, had worn away. But, in a triangular divot on the ridge-facing side, I thought I found one: just a short line of scratches. The grooves were shallow and smoothed thin, but it was possible that they’d once resembled symbols like the ones on Meck’s Transcripts and the Xiqopix.
After another few moments of dumbly staring at the lines, I circled back and sat down on the lowest slab, back to the tallest. More bizarre protrusions curled inward either side of my head like the black, warped wings of a madman’s armchair. It actually worked as a kind of seat. Probably forbidden, I supposed, but the cleric had gone and didn’t seem to be coming back. What could I possibly do to them, anyway? The whole structure was solid and obviously couldn’t be toppled if it had stood here for so long. How could the Rath do them any harm even if they did come to this place?
Gazing out across the plain, I took a deep breath and let it out. Felt hot, exhausted, confused. And disappointed.
So this was it. The legacy of the Builders of Antissa—apart from Antissa itself—was a stack of grey blocks in a shiny cage. Why? According to Rusper, not even the clerics could answer that. Why put them here in the first place if their meaning was a secret? And what were they for if there wasn’t a special meaning? Masters of engineering was how their makers were remembered, not sculptors.
And yet the way they were arranged here on the dais was so precise, so deliberate that surely . . .
Surely.
Exhaustion washed over my body. My mind wandered as I stared between the pillars. The heat was making me drowsy just like Plamen had predicted.
But that wasn’t all he was right about. Methan cavalry or not, sooner or later this mission would become about me and only me. I had to face it—had to try.
I drew my sleeve and pulled the lever.
The Sight discarded my body and hurled my awareness into space. I grabbed back just enough focus to see the sandstone of the spike slip away behind me before I tumbled.
No choices. No control. Just the space, slicing through me like sunlight through the thinnest paper. Whirling and spinning, my mind released hold of everything else. All except for one thing.
It was out there: ‘. . . little spark.’
Crags loomed ahead, but Calvallagh and its monument were already far behind.
I was out in the wide plain, and above it. Raised high.
Below was rock, the tree-stump mound. I felt its shape and knew its boundaries, cracks and fissures . . . and secrets. The secrets tugged at my senses. Helpless against the pull, I bled into secrets like fluid.
They weren’t just fissures but wide hollows in the rock . . . winding crevices . . . broad caves . . .
The huge plain pulled me back out.
Caught in spiral updraughts, the voice was still calling to me, blown up on thermals full of airborne sand and dust. I knew each speck and mote of it.
The ghost was down there . . . far below, standing in the plain. Wind seemed to pull at his white form, nagging his wispy essence and muddling my awareness of how much of him was there and how much wasn’t. And then a dust-devil spun him away into a haze. I was spun too, blown from the mound.
Other voices were out there but none of their words were clear to me. They seemed to chant into the wind. I’d heard that chant somewhere before . . .
I soared. Above me now, through clouds, the sun became a golden wheel. The wheel was turning, glowing brighter, doubling, growing. Now two wheels and then a set of three, or four, or more. Turning and glowing. Turning, glowing.
Now the Sight was like a storm from all around me, everywhere. There was too much to be aware of and the wind was almost . . . ‘Florian!’
I grappled for some sense of my body. The torque!
Far away my hand remembered how to move, clutched the lever and forced it home.
The Sight was gone. I grasped and pawed my arms and chest, feeling like the players on the stage had just shoved me back into the pit where I belonged. My hair was flapping wildly over my headcloth; the wind was strong and very real. I’d slept. How long had I been sleeping? If it was anything to go by, the sky had turned a sickly brown.
‘Florian!’
Real voices were calling, the bluster ripping at the sound.
Sand and dust sprayed the pagoda, flying between the pillars in clouds and skating, hissing, across the slate. Shielding my eyes from it, I looked into the plain.
A giant wall of murky brown spanned the passage some miles away. Higher than these cliffs, it was moving towards us. Fast. That wasn’t what I’d thought Rusper meant when he’d mentioned dust-storms.
‘Desert take you, boy! Florian!’
Leaping from the Stones, I skidded across the dais, between the pillars, down the steps and back onto the spike. This time, scaling down, I nearly lost my footing twice. Then halfway across the arm-wall, scoring feet over the rocks, I remembered my sandals and—cursing—turned and ran back for them. Grabbed the first, side-scrambled down the inner slope for the second, then up again. Fast but clumsy, I snagged my swathes on hooking twigs of a clinging bush, tripped and skinned my leg on a rock, from the knee right down through my bandage. As it scored into the still raw claw-wound underneath the dressing, I yelled out pain, freed my caught swathes, hauled myself back up from the slope and grabbed my shin. As I squeezed the reddening bandage, I knew I’d torn the stitches out!
I looked. The dust-wall was a monster. Surging forward, it ate the desert as it swelled up from below, devouring sand and dust and gypsum, soaring, churning, tumbling closer.
No time to look. No time to think about my leg. I didn’t put my sandals on, just launched and ran. Somehow even in my panic I remembered the way the cleric had gone—a different route around the boulders that was faster.
On the ridge, I saw two figures waving wildly from the edge of the temple grounds. Issachar and one of the cavalry. The bluster broke up the sound of their shouting but I didn’t need it. Ignoring the pain in my leg, I sprinted out across the flat while the dust-cloud swelled up on my right. Close now, it would easily overreach the edge, yet it had grown so thick and fast that when it hit the precipice—
Calvallagh dimmed, wind beating tents and thrashing bushes. ‘Move!’ someone yelled. I heard the blast of the wave as it enclosed the arm-wall behind me. On my right, the cloud rose, blossoming towards me like a gigantic brown flower. It met the scarp and cliff-wall and rolled up as I reached the outer colonnade. It was Telmadh Eflan who caught me with a curse and clapped my arm inside his fist.
The gloom swept over our heads as we charged down along the columns.
‘Cover your mouth!’ he roared.
Thickening fast, dust whipped my legs, dug into my bleeding wound, stung my eyelids, smacked my cheeks. I tore my headcloth from my head and tried to cover as much of my skin as I could but it made no difference. I flung my head down.
Eflan shook me off his arm and threw me hard against a column. Either side, what looked like large areas of Vorth gushed past me in the gale. The dirty dust-cloud became a storm. I squeezed my body into ball and pinned my head under my arms. Brown turned to black.