On all sides of the frothing joining of the Suen and Adbattii rivers, the great city of Ulmanna sprawled across five hills that formed an approximate ring. Untidy warrens of streets stretched out like tangling spiderwebs from the river sides, presided over by the great ziggurat of Lugal to the south of the joining and the expansive palace complex to the east of it. Most of the wealthy parts of the city were upstream and surrounded by towering walls. Ulmanna had burst beyond its gates, many rougher hovels constructed of mud brick or just bundled reeds outside of the city wall, crammed into each other beside the flurry of activity that was the docks. Tens of thousands of people lived in Ulmanna and the surrounding river lands, every inch of ground given to human use. What was not the city was farms or orchards, watered by a canal system that rivaled Shadi’s, though it was only two-thirds the size of Ilati’s home.

“Ah, home! What do you think?” Kulziya said, letting his bronze-tipped spear lean against his shoulder. He chuckled at the wide-eyed stares from Shir Del and especially Roshanak. “Civilization at its finest!”

Roshanak blinked owlishly, squirming slightly on her horse’s back to get a better view. At her small height, there was only so much she could do. “The people, there are so many…”

“Like a busy anthill.” Shir Del turned to look at her daughter, tugging Roshanak’s braid gently. “Stay close to us and on Thriti’s back.”

Ilati took in a deep breath at the sight of Ulmanna, the first proper city she’d seen since Shadi’s destruction. It brought memories arcing up from the depths of her mind like wounding arrows. She turned her face away, looking back towards the road to the forest, but even that offered little comfort with the sheer volume of travelers flocking to Ulmanna. Youtab shifted beneath her as if the mare could sense her disquiet. She buried her fingers in her horse’s mane, trying to project a calm she didn’t feel in the slightest.

Kulziya glanced over at her and offered a slight smile. “Have no fear, wild one. To arrive at the beginning of the Festival of the River God is most auspicious.”

Menes frowned slightly. “A strange thing to say with a dying king and two princes poised for civil war.”

“He didn’t say it was most auspicious for them,” Eigou said cheerfully, nudging Ankhu forward. The trusty mule trudged along with the sorcerer on his back.

Shir Del snorted, features touched by a wry amusement. “Spoken like a true jackal, Eigou.”

He laughed and turned slightly to look back at them. “Come, let us make our way to the gates. There is no sense in dawdling. This jackal would like to eat his meal at a table.”

A gust of wind rose from the east, sweeping across the grass behind them with such a force it left even the river reeds bent like supplicants at the foot of a ziggurat. The others kept moving, but Ilati froze at a familiar smell: lightning on the wind, the dryness of the deserts, the hint of myrrh and bittersweet herbs. Youtab flicked her ears and let out a soft whinny as the others moved forward, pawing at the earth. Restlessness played in the mare’s muscles, flexing and rippling under her rider.

Darkness swallowed Ilati’s vision. She turned her eyes towards the sun, but saw only the bright ring of a corona: a total eclipse. The wretched copper taste of blood burst across her tongue as if she had just swallowed a draught of it. She couldn’t even call out, not with the sudden sense of scorpion legs climbing her back, nestling against her neck. Wails and groans filled the air, the weeping dirges of women and men alike.

They should quake at the very thought of their future. It will devour them like the desert sands swallow bones. You know that well.

Ilati felt a shudder run through her whole body at the dreadful weight in her goddess’s words. Before her, she saw a shadowy Ulmanna unraveling as if by the hand of an unsatisfied weaver. The rivers themselves coursed with fire instead of water, as if flowing straight from the pits of Ersetu, the land of the dead. K’adau’s laughter boomed across the countryside like the very rolling of thunder. In the east, a star brighter than all the others moved towards the zenith of the sky, burning red as blood.

There is more to your future than crushing a serpent, my poet. Your road ends where earth and heaven meet.

“Ilati!” Roshanak called, tinges of worry in her tone.

The image vanished in a blink, her eyes struggling to adjust to the warmth and light of the summer sun after the darkness. The others were moving already down the path towards Ulmanna, but Roshanak had stopped and turned on her horse’s back to face her. Ilati swept her hand across her brow, a cold sweat mingling with the dust on her face.

Shir Del stopped at her daughter’s cry and turned, brow creasing with concern. “Is something wrong?”

Ilati knew she needed to talk to her companions about what she had seen, but not with Kulziya and his men in earshot. The priestess whistled softly, urging her horse into forward motion. The others were still in motion towards Ulmanna, guided forward by Eigou’s eagerness. “I saw something,” she said in a low voice to the pair of Sut Resi. “Something that has not yet come to pass.”

“An omen?” Shir Del’s brow furrowed deeper.

Ilati nodded, reaching out to catch Shir Del’s leg to stop her from urging her horse towards the others. Roshanak pressed close on her other side to hear, clearly worried. “I saw a great misfortune,” she admitted quietly. “I do not think Ulmanna will escape Shadi’s fate. Even the sun itself went dark.”

“Nysra has great magic and dark gods. Perhaps he could make a thing such as this happen,” Shir Del said, flicking her fingers against her bowstring thoughtfully.

Roshanak gripped her small bow tightly, pressing her lips together into a firm line. Lapis lazuli eyes fixed on Ilati, her face suddenly smooth and expressionless, gaze penetrating and ancient. “It was not him.”

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Sometimes, it was easy to forget that Roshanak was second-souled, dead and living at once. In that moment, however, Ilati saw it with frightening clarity. Beneath the sunny disposition of the young girl was an unfathomable depth, a spirit lodged between worlds. The priestess swallowed hard.

“What do you mean?” Shir Del asked, apparently unfazed by the strangeness of it. Then again, she was Roshanak’s mother and a dream-walker herself. She was probably accustomed to such things.

The girl faltered for a moment, that intensity suddenly fading from her visage. She blinked a few times and then rubbed at her eyes with one hand. “We should warn them.”

“Would they listen?” Ilati said, stomach knotted with nerves still. “We are strangers and said to be wild folk at that.”

Shir Del shrugged at that, looking back towards the others. “To Eigou, perhaps. If what Captain Kulziya says is true, he is a seer of great renown in Ulmanna. If their chieftain truly wishes his counsel on this dream of a star rising in the east, surely he would listen.”

Ilati touched the scar that twisted the corner of her mouth. Her father had never held much fondness for his brother-king in Ulmanna, still chafing in some ways from the revolt that had broken the Kullan power in the west. Amar-Sin had kept most of his thoughts on such matters away from his only daughter, reserving them for the education of his sons, and she had never really been curious enough to ask. Since her first menstrual blood, temple duties had dominated her attention, and before that, the task of learning to read and write at her mother’s behest.

If even a fraction of what little had made it to her from scribes and acolytes was true, however, she doubted Tudhaliya would hear anything he did not wish to. The uncertainty worried at her mind like a hound with a bone as she followed Shir Del and Roshanak to the others, their horses closing the open ground quickly. Eigou’s mule plodded along at his own speed, keeping pace with the guardsmen they traveled with. The great forest was no place for chariots, so Kulziya and his men had traveled on their own two feet.

“...hopefully your countrymen will be wise enough not to crowd my granddaughter’s horse,” Eigou said as they approached the gate, thronging with people. Drumming and flutes were audible from beyond the gate, the whole city humming with the festival’s excitement.

“Does she ride a horse or a lion, Eigou?” Kulziya said with a laugh, glancing backwards towards Youtab. The mare flicked her ears and snorted as she slowed, turning her head to gaze at the man with a baleful eye.

The one-eyed sorcerer shook his head at that. “In my experience, lions are far more demure.”

“Even a wild horse can be broken.”

Ilati thumbed an arrow’s fletching, tightening her grip on her bow as she glared down at Kulziya. Her temper was more fearsome with thoughts of Nadar and Shadi’s destruction clinging to her, as well as the unsettling vision. “You will sprout feathers enough to fly if you try,” she said fiercely. While she was nervous around armed strangers, there was absolutely no way she was letting him lay a finger on Youtab. The mare could protect herself, something evident both against the men of Nadar and a demon, but Ilati was not about to abandon her companion’s defense.

“Are your arrows as sharp as your tongue?” Kulziya said with amusement, something challenging in the undercurrents of his speech.

The priestess knew she was being baited for the amusement of the man and his troop. She felt her temper cool into something hard and sharp under their eyes. Weakness here was not an option, not if it would travel to Commander Sarhad’s ears and reveal her. When she spoke, it was with an imperiousness befitting a queen. “If you wish a dog that performs tricks for the laughter of a crowd, gaze into the waters.”

Kulziya laughed. “For what? A fish?”

Shir Del grinned with a certain relish, clearly catching Ilati’s meaning. “Captain, I think she means your reflection.”

The guard captain narrowed his eyes at that. “You insult the nephew of your host, the great king? You are foolish.”

The Sut Resi woman wasn’t above twisting the knife. “Yet not so foolish as to need words explained.”

Eigou’s good eye gazed up towards heaven for a moment as if he was searching for some divine stroke of patience. “I think it would be rather unwise for everyone involved to start a feud. That is enough. Captain, if you would kindly cease provoking her, I am certain my granddaughter will extend to you the same courtesy.” He gave Shir Del a stern look that the Sut Resi woman seemed absolutely impervious to. “And you, Shir Del, should know better than to needle.”

“When have I ever started something I could not finish, Eigou?” the warrior woman shot back even as Ilati relaxed slightly out of her tense posture.

“Eigou has the right of it,” Ilati said, though she knew she had been part of that quarrel when perhaps letting it go would have been better. “We are not here to make enemies with King Tudhaliya or his people. You will have your fight with another in the future.” She knew better than to directly reference Sarhad or the Nadaren. That enmity would stay buried until it was too late for Nysra’s hounds, if she had any luck at all.

“The manners of the wild folk are as unkempt as they are,” Kulziya said with a shake of his head.

Menes, who had been watching quietly with his hand lingering near his bronze sickle-sword, studied the guard captain. “I find, noble one, that they repay all things in kind.”

“Perhaps that is so,” Kulziya acknowledged more carefully, turning to face the warrior. If he noted Menes’s hand position, he said nothing of it. “I am surprised that a man of Magan is so comfortable around immodest women.”

The charioteer shrugged. “I consider myself a warrior first, and I respect those who acquit themselves well in battle.”

“Tell me of this battle, then,” Kulziya said to Menes as he resumed their progress through the gate. “I am most eager to hear of it.”

Eigou let the others lead the way, moving his faithful mule to one side of Ilati’s horse. Shir Del took up the opposite side, intending to keep people from jostling Youtab’s flanks. They all knew that of the Sut Resi horses, Ilati’s mare was the most likely to lash out. “I expected you would have a harder time shedding such manners,” the old man said.

Ilati loosened up a little, relaxing more completely despite the press of the crowds and the din of the celebration ahead. She moved her fingers away from the quiver at her belt. “You were the one who told me I must leave them as a serpent sheds its skin.”

“I suppose I am not used to people listening so intently,” Eigou said with a shrug, offering her a wry smile. “Let us hope it will be enough, especially once we reach the palace.”