Ravelin slid down the ladder and landed on the balls of his feet. He took the lantern from Modlin and strode ahead, the darkness slowly melting back before him.
The floodways were a series of vaulted arcades connected by storm drains so broad that two carts could have pulled alongside each other with ease. Not that anyone wanted to, of course. Tirce could barely breathe through her mouth past the thick layers of shawl she’d wrapped around her face, but the stench perforated it all in an almost spiritual assault upon the senses. Whenever she made the mistake of inhaling too deeply, coloured spots swam in her vision and she felt herself drawing closer to the gates of the afterlife.
“Do you all smell that?” Ravelin asked.
“If you are referring to the abounding fecal fragrance,” Kyber quipped, “Rest assured that it has not escaped our notice.”
Ravelin smiled.
“The smell’s a good sign. Means the filth has dammed up and the current is weak. If the air is fresher and the water runs swift and clear, don’t go any further, but come right back to me.”
“Isn’t fresh air a good thing?” Tirce said.
“Not here it isn’t.”
“Why’s that?” Neisha piped up.
“Flash floods,” Ravelin said quickly, “The free-flowing channels fill up right quick when it rains. I reckon there are more pleasant rivers to drown in than this one, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I suppose,” Neisha replied in a tiny voice.
“Just stick to your folk like tar, girl,” Ravelin’s tone softened, “All will be well.”
Tirce scowled. His explanation had made little sense. If anything, a dammed stream would overflow its banks. What was he playing at? Ravelin had already betrayed two previous accomplices, or so she had gathered from her eavesdropping. As if that weren’t enough, now he was lying through his teeth to the very people he was supposedly shepherding to safety.
She fingered the pommel of her sickle-moon blade, eyes measuring the distance between them. In a single motion she could draw it and lay open the side of his neck. But she knew nothing of the world beyond the curtain wall and its perils. How would she navigate the Wasting with him dead? No—it would be better to let him live out his usefulness before disposing of him.
At the very least he seemed to know his way around the floodways. Where others slipped and skidded on the ooze, he walked surefooted and chose each turn without hesitation. The eight fugitives followed after him, casting frightened looks at every archway and mouldering column whose lichen-scarred surfaces formed a canvas upon which the imagination traced a thousand leering, demoniacal faces.
“Have you made many trips to the Pale Woods?” Kyber asked after hours of silent trudging.
“A few,” said Ravelin.
“What’s it like over there?”
“Candy and spice and everything nice. Why else would our rates be so high?”
“It was an honest question. You needn’t mock me,” Kyber pouted, “Besides, if it really was that wonderful, you’d be over there yourself instead of wading through this…putrescence.”
“You’re sharper than you look,” Ravelin admitted, making a mental note to use the word putrescence in the future, “And for that you get my honest answer: I don’t know. I just lead my charges to the edge of the woods then head straight back to Lufthaven.”
“Aren’t you curious about what things are like on the other side?”
Ravelin shook his head.
“Here we have Stahlka and the gentle dentists at the Ministry of Inquiries. Over there, primitives sing to the trees and make sacrifices to the Wicker Man and the Mad Gods of twilight past. It’s all the same to me.”
“Those ‘sacrifices’ gave themselves voluntarily,” Tirce interrupted, ticked off by his flippant tone. She wasn’t about to stand idly by while some lowlife with boots full of shit-water insulted her heritage.
“Did they, now?”
“To renew the naturals cycles of creation and destruction that sustain this world, the cycle which the Ephalim have ruined forever.”
“Meanwhile our brave lads sign up en masse for the Civil Militia,” Ravelin brought his clenched fist up in a sharp salute, a mocking reference to a famous recruitment poster, “Never mind if they die like flies in the trenches, so long as they “Hold Back the Night!”, eh? But listen, I don’t talk politics. I only want what I’m owed, and to live to see what tomorrow brings.”
“How very enlightened of you,” Tirce sneered, “And here I took your for some common criminal.”
“Melikes the sound of his scheme, meself,” said Modlin, “Any advice for an old boy who wants to keep his skin in one piece?”
“Never run if you can hide,” Ravelin replied after giving it some thought, “Odds are whatever is coming after you will outpace you in the end. Second, never fight if you can run. Lastly, if a thing talks when by all rights it shouldn’t, then by the love of all that’s holy, don’t ever reply. You stand to lose more than just your life out in the Wasting, never forget.”
They reached a section where the flow was so congested that it spilled out into the walkways as a deep mire that squelched up to their knees. The path ahead of them had been sealed off by a lowered sluice gate, the filth packed into a solid mass in gaps between the bars. Ravelin yanked on a nearby lever and the sluice gate rose with the groan and rattle of reluctant counterweights.
Tirce held up the lantern and saw its rays diverging down three separate passages branching left, right and center.
Ravelin paused and his face took on a puzzled look.
“Something wrong?” Tirce asked.
“The markings have changed,” the chancer murmured.
“What markings?” she prodded. Ravelin up went to the archways at the entrance of each of the three passages and squinted at their keystones. Tirce did the same and made out some faint petroglyphs carved into each of the keystones depicting strange spirals arranged around a cluster of green dots and circles. There was something disturbingly familiar about their appearance, but before she could work out what that was, Tirce’s vison blurred once more. And this time it wasn’t because of the smell—an unexpected migraine was tickling the lining of her eyeballs with needles. Blinking away tears, she lowered her gaze and found that the discomfort vanished immediately. It was as if the crude images hurt to even look upon.
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“There’s only one safe path from here, and the stone above it has always been left blank,” Ravelin explained. Tirce noticed that he too was rubbing at his eyes.
“But they’re all marked,” she said, pointing out the obvious.
“Which suggests our path is no longer safe,” he said patronizingly.
“Safe from what, exactly?”
“We’ve been over this,” Ravelin growled, clearly uncomfortable, “Flash floods. Now wait here. And do nothing! I’ll double back and see if we took a wrong turn.”
He stalked impatiently back the way they had come, leaving his charges for the second time that day. Yleine threw up her hands in disgust, saying:
“Wonderful! So our guide has gone and forgotten his own route.”
“Papa, is it true? Are we lost?” Neisha tugged at Kyber’s sleeve.
“He’s only being careful,” Kyber said, a worried crack in his voice hampering his attempt at cheerfulness, “These floodways are a perfect maze. They’ve never been mapped out in their entirety, not since the founding of Lufthaven.”
“Why would anyone want a map of a smelly old sewer anyway?” Neisha said dubiously.
“Oh, but it wasn’t always a smelly sewer,” her father, eagerly launching into an educational spiel that was of interest only to himself:
“Eons ago, when the oceans vomited forth the peaks of our native continent, another city emerged on the banks of the Idelas where we now stand…”
It was an old wives’ tale, often repeated. A legend that the Ephalim had concocted to lend credence to their supposed celestial origins, and by extension, their divine mandate to rule.
Tirce’s attention drifted away from the babbling clerk and she found herself staring down the length of the central passage, the light from her lantern fading by degrees until the inky wall of blackness denied it completely.
Something flickered just beyond the edge of her vision. A vague sense of unease wormed its way up from the pit of her stomach. Tirce called upon the gift in her blood and widened her irises till they gleaned through the shadows like those of a cat. She discerned the distant shape and abruptly relaxed; it was just another set of dots and swirls identical to the one on the keystone.
Water gurgled as it coursed past her, swift as a babbling woodland brook. It almost sounded like the murmur of many voices, low and musical. Strange how the mind conceived its own illusions like that.
“… and notice how the walls around us are perfectly smooth, without the slightest joints visible between the blocks?” Kyber continued, “That’s because there aren’t any blocks. The denizens of the Nameless City carved these passages out of solid granite, boring tunnels of such superlative symmetry as to put our own modern works to shame. Commanding vast powers beyond our understanding, they dug a series of mighty canals and dams to tame the fury of the tides. For the Idelas was no mere river then, but a raging sea that wrapped round the peninsula and carved out the valleys of the Heartland. They shaped the land itself to suit their mysterious purposes—”
“Come again?” Tirce muttered. The voices were faint but unmistakable. A little closer and perhaps she would make out their words. Without even realizing it Tirce found her feet wandering towards the source of the medley of voices.
“Yes, you heard that right,” Kyber said, pleased to find his audience captivated. No one noticed as Tirce ventured up the central passage, drawn by a compulsion she could neither understand nor resist, “Mysterious is the only way to describe it. To this day we can only guess what they were trying to accomplish with their colossal effort. Our elfin benefactors encountered members of that race when they made landed on these shores millennia ago, but the records of that meeting are scarce. From the handful of surviving third-hand accounts, however, we catch glimpses of the fantastical. Temples erected in the name of unfathomable deities, their fixtures gilt all over in gold and silver, monolithic bases held suspended over the ground without any visible means of support. Waterfalls that flowed uphill, their unnatural course turning dynamos of copper and brass. And strangest of all were the people themselves: Umbertino the Unreliable rambles about their green skin, gilled faces, webbed toes and speech which resembled the warbling of bullfrogs. Complete poppycock, to be sure, though it makes for amusing reading.”
The petroglyph began drifting towards her, not scrawled on stone but in the very air and darkness. The sound swelled into a sonorous chanting in some language with a distressing lack of vowels:
“Phryglyth chggys khtrem! Rhlyed khthet nucthn!”
Thoughts burst unbidden into Tirce’s mind, a vision of awful grandeur stretching back across millennia. She stood at the giddy apex of a ziggurat of impossible proportions, its floating base thronged by squat, bow-legged humanoids with scintillating green skin. Their toadlike faces were turned towards the river where a sleek craft glided up the banks, its strange gossamer sails resplendent in the haze of the primeval sun. Though the humid air was untouched by the slightest breeze, the ship was somehow propelling itself without barge poles or oars.
It was clearly foreign to the Nameless City, eerily elegant where the Nameless City was uncomfortably angular. The toad-things chirped and warbled inquisitively as the sails caught and diffused the light in a kaleidoscope of colors.
There was activity on the deck and the sails angled against one another, focusing the captive light until it reached a blinding intensity. A hot wind caressed Tirce’s face, emanating from the craft. Cries of wonder quickly turned to shrieks of despair as a second sun bloomed on the river, churning the waters into hissing geysers of steam. Tirce tried to shield her eyes with her hands, the skin blistering off her palms.
A white beam of annihilation reached out to touch the crowd, leaving rows of charred corpses in its wake, flesh hardening into lumps of coal as they were immolated where they stood. From atop her high perch Tirce watched as the Nameless City died in blinding agony, smelled the stomach-turning sweetness of singed hair and melting fat, her mouth frozen in a wordless scream as the very air in her lungs caught fire.
“…and so our founding fathers decided to keep the smaller canals to carry out the city’s waste. They covered them up so that wagons wouldn’t keep falling in and paved roads directly atop them. These thoroughfares were plagued by odd tremors and collapses which claimed the occasional farmer’s cart. Decades ago the Ministry of Reclamation decided to make some much-needed repairs to shore up the structural defects (the archways we saw earlier resulted from this). There were also plans to include a series of sluice gates to manage the problem of sewage congestion. The work was discontinued after some stoneworkers went missing in a suspected cave in. Others went inexplicably mad, trapped in a catatonic state in which they could only babble about ‘devil fishmen from the singing seas’, or some such gibberish. The poor fellows probably just breathed in a pocket of gas and became delirious, but I digress—”
“Kyber!” Yleine warned.
“What? Oh,” Kyber saw Neisha clutching her mother’s skirt in a tight grip, pale with fright, “Oh. Right. That’s enough story time for one day, I think.”
“But where are they now?” Neisha broke in, her face gone white as a sheet, “You said our forefathers met the people of the Nameless City. Whatever happened to them?”
“They burned them,” Tirce answered coldly, “Burned them all. And they hate us for it.”
Everyone turned to see Tirce standing some yards away up the central passage, her back turned towards them. The petroglyph was visible to all now, floating towards them with an eerie menace.
Too late Tirce realized that the markings on the keystones were not mere symbolism, but an illustration of something dreadfully real which now reared up out of the shadows.
The pattern of dots became a clutch of bulbous eyes arranged in a maddening lack of symmetry, and the swirls came to life as writhing masses of tentacles which trailed into the current below, drinking deep from the foul nourishment therein. Though it walked hunched over on its knuckles like an ape it was so immense that its shoulders brushed the ceiling and coated the stone with a layer of slime from its warty skin.
“What in hell’s gaping mouth is that?” Modlin shouted.
Her mind still dazed by its unnatural stupor, Tirce could only watch as the beast surged towards her in all its awful immensity, webbed claws reaching out to maim and mangle.