The great avenue rose slightly near the base of the cliff, as though reaching upward toward the carved city and its tower in the cliff wall. Drakis could see that the road extended directly into the cliff, where it continued into the darkness. But the causeway that had once lifted the great road had crumbled and in so doing had opened a great gap of rubble at the base of the sheer walls.
“Look!” Urulani said as she pointed toward the base of the cliff. “Just to the left there.”
Drakis squinted into the brightening daylight.
The cliff-city was isolated but not inaccessible.
There was a stairway carved into the cliff face.
“Who do you suppose is living in there now?” Ethis asked.
“Whoever is in there,” Drakis answered, “cannot possibly be worse than whoever is out here. Let’s go.”
The valley was wider than they had anticipated; crossing it took most of the day. The sun had already lowered toward the horizon and was beyond the towering mesa, casting the face of the cliff and its carved city in afternoon shadow. The ruins at the base of the cliff were more extensive and difficult to pass through, the debris from the fallen walls choking the ancient streets and making their footing uncertain.
If any of them entertained thoughts of stopping, however, the shadows that moved with them, flitting from dark place to dark place in the ruins quickly changed their minds.
At last, the Lyric led them to the stair carved from the cliff itself. Clouds were gathering in the afternoon sky.
“I would not have believed it possible,” Drakis said.
“Yes, it is magnificent,” Ethis answered, gazing up the cliff face at the delicate relief carvings towering nearly a hundred feet over them.
“I meant I would not have believed it possible for the air to become any wetter,” Drakis answered, laboriously climbing the stairs. Sweat was pouring off his face. “How did anyone ever live here?”
“You need to drink more water,” Ethis said, eyeing the human critically.
“Just what I need,” Drakis said with a tired laugh. “More water.”
“You might be surprised,” Ethis answered, “just how much water you’re going to need in this climate.”
The stair doubled back on itself as it climbed the cliff face, presenting a landing at each turn. Drakis was having trouble keeping up with the Lyric, who continued her climb ahead of them on the stairs, while the warrior pulled the dwarf’s litter along behind him and urged Mala along before him. She had grown listless and sullen through the day, choosing not to speak. Her auburn hair was flattened by the humid air around her face and was stained dark with sweat.
Drakis glanced down over the side of the seemingly endless staircase to the valley far below. The distance gave him pause, and for a moment he thought dizziness might overcome him. It was a sheer drop down into the ruins nearly three hundred feet beneath them. From this height he could make out the old pattern of streets and alleyways that had once made up the civilization that had nestled against this mountain but which was defined now only by the crumbling foundations and, Drakis guessed, not even that after a few more short decades.
At last the stairs ended in a wide landing on the first concourse.
“Never before to my eyes,” Urulani breathed in awestruck wonder.
The wide concourse led to delicately carved walls of buildings—each one from the same stone but unique in expression and design—a patchwork of individuality in art that rose a hundred feet above them. The entire structure was a melding of the natural cavern and the opulent architecture of its former inhabitants. A colonnade of pillars ran across the face of the cavern opening, supporting a second concourse overhead. Two of the pillars were broken and had toppled onto the wide concourse but those that remained were exquisite in the carvings of human faces mixed with those of dragonlike features. Each face was different from the next as were the animal depictions, some of which were strange and unknown to Drakis’ eye.
Drakis turned back to gaze at the ornate wall of building carvings. Doorways and windows in the structures were largely unobstructed— the wood that once fitted their doorframes or windowpanes having rotted away and vanished, leaving only faint marks in the stone to show that woodworking had been here at all.
“This will do well for us,” Ethis said to Drakis, nodding with approval as he gestured with two of his four hands. “I’ll search some of these ruins to make sure they’re cleared of any troublesome inhabitants and find us a defensible position. Then we can concern ourselves with food and water.”
“Very well,” Drakis answered. “Urulani?”
Urulani stood staring at the base of one of the pillars, transfixed by the many faces, each with different aspects and expressions, that seemed to be staring back at her with their stone eyes.
“Urulani?” Drakis asked again.
The raider captain shook herself. “Yes! What is it?”
“We need to set a watch,” Drakis said, walking over to her.
“Watch?”
“Yes,” Drakis insisted. “Someone to watch the stairs to make sure that no one follows us here and another to . . . is there something wrong?”
“No!” Urulani said at once as her eyes suddenly focused on Drakis. “I’ll take the first watch. Set the dwarf over here while I keep an eye on those stairs.”
“Will someone get me off of this horrible contraption!” Jugar howled. “Bad enough that I should be dragged through the forest like a fireplace log, but to be tied to this . . . this thing! It is too much of an indignity to be borne by man or dwarf!”
“Relax, Jugar,” Drakis said, wiping his brow as he knelt to undo the straps securing the dwarf to the litter. “You’re not going anywhere for a while without considerable help on our part, so you might as well get used to being polite.”
“Polite, is it?” Jugar sniffed. “Dragged into the wilderness of a forsaken land because some Ephindrian jelly-man had to shut the door on our only way back home! Having a dragon’s head fall on me and who nearly ate me after he was dead! Considering the events of the day, I believe I have been the very epitome of polite!”
Drakis chuckled to himself, then shook his head. “Well, perhaps you might extend your famous patience a bit longer and help us. We can hardly know where we’re going until we’re sure of where we are now.”
“Well, it’s written right in front of you!” the dwarf groused.
“What is he talking about?” Urulani asked.
“Those columns,” the dwarf yelled, pointing with his broad, right hand. “Those aren’t just pretty carvings, you know! It’s the ancient script, used from before the Shadow Wars in the time of the Age of Mists. That was after Drakis Aerweaver—the first Drakis, mind you—fought the dragon Kopsis south of the God’s Wall Mountains and created the Desolation of the Sand Sea. That was nearly two thousand years before . . .”
Drakis held up his hand to stop the dwarf’s mouth.
“Just tell us what it says,” Drakis demanded.
“Reduced to reading for the illiterate, eh? Fine!” Jugar flushed red but held his temper. He turned toward the pillar and pointed again. “This says, ‘Hekrian, Seer of our Goddess Quabet, bids all seekers . . .’ or, maybe that’s sojourners ‘. . . welcome to the peace and beauty of Pythar—City of Unification.’ Then there’s some religious nonsense about ‘seeking the higher way,’ and finding ‘peace in the one.’ I like the way it finishes, however. Right here it reads, ‘Behold the eternal might and glory of Armethia, where man and dragon rule as one in their terrible might and justice.’
“Witness my polite compliance.” Jugar gestured around him as he gazed on the ruins, “as I behold the eternal might and glory of humanity and the dragons that protected them so well.”
“I am looking, dwarf,” whispered Urulani, her gaze following the ornate column upward and then out over the ruins of the city now so much more evident below them. “I had never supposed that we were once so great a people.”
“Once, perhaps,” Jugar replied. “But no more.”
“But we could be again,” Urulani said with sudden conviction as she turned toward Drakis. “The prophecies! I had not believed . . . had not dared to believe that they could have been true. Yet here I stand in the land of legend, my hand touching the lost glories of our past and looking at the man who could make all of those things once lost come to be once more!”
Drakis groaned, shaking his head. “Not you, too?”
“You could be this man, Drakis,” Urulani said, stepping toward him with conviction. “I do not know of any gods but I do see what is around me. The legends told of this place, and here it is. Those same legends spoke of a man named ‘Drakis,’ and here you stand!”
“Here I stand?” Drakis said in astonishment. “I stand here because our choices were to either retreat through a fold portal or die. How can you, of all people, believe what this dwarf has been selling?”
“How can I not believe it?” Urulani said, her voice rising with her temper. “All the signs of the legend being fulfilled . . .”
“Make any prophecy vague enough and it’s bound to be fulfilled in someone’s eyes,” Drakis countered.
“But that same prophecy is found everywhere in the southern lands,” Urulani said fervently, conviction growing in her as she spoke. “From farthest Exylia to the Straits of Erebus, from the shores of the Lyrac Ocean in eastern Ephindria to the rocky coasts of Mestophia on the Charos Ocean, the story is told of the coming of Drakis and the rise of a new day of freedom, peace, and justice.”
“Everyone wants to make me into this marvelous godlike hero who will come riding out of legend and save them. But no matter how hard they try—no matter how hard they believe, Urulani—I’m still just me. I’m just a slave who happened to be named Drakis and got mistaken for someone important.”
“No,” Urulani shook her head. “I was there. The Iblisi came for you—slaughtered entire villages to find you—they came because you are that Drakis, and above all they fear you.”
“No, Urulani,” Drakis said quietly. “They came after me because they made a mistake. Now that we are so far from them, I don’t think any of them cares what happens to us or even knows we’re gone.”
CHAPTER 4
Proper Orders
RHONAS CHAS WAS THE ETERNAL CITY of the Rhonas elves and the very life’s-heart of the Rhonas Empire . . .
. . . And Sjei-Shurian of the Order of the Modalis was determined to make sure it stayed that way.
He stood before an awning-covered stand in the Paz Rhambutai—the Plaza of Sweetness—in the eastern section of the Old City and surveyed the ordered patterns of various colored fruits with an indifferent eye. Sjei was an elf of such common features as to defy description. His head was elongated as was common with his race but not so elegantly formed as might call attention to it. His nose was hooked but not so sharply as might be thought attractive to his kind. His eyes were black, but the shape of his drooping eyelids shuttered them and made them unremarkable. The tips of his pointed ears dropped slightly, and his mouth was small, hiding the worn tips of his pointed teeth. He was neither fat nor thin . . . tall nor short for his kind. His single distinguishing mark was a scar that cut through his right eyebrow, yet even this noble mark was so small as to be barely noticeable unless one were looking for it. His robes denoted that he was of the Order of Vash but the commendations, ribbons, and medals it sported were absent any of the more spectacular awards. Those he eschewed in favor of the more common types that dealt largely with mundane achievements. In all, Sjei had the most remarkably unremarkable appearance imaginable in an elf of one of the military orders; someone who would easily be mistaken for one who had never drawn a weapon in all his years of service.
Any elf on the streets of Rhonas—as happened commonly every day—would forget his face within three steps of passing and never give him another thought.
And yet, next to the Emperor, he knew himself to be the most powerful elf in the entire Imperial City—and by logical inference, in the entire world beyond. Sjei-Shurian was the Ghenetar Omris over the Order of Vash. This post as the “general of unity” over one of the three warrior orders of the Empire would have been enough to have secured his place of power within the treacherous and ever shifting landscape of Rhonas Imperial politics but he was also Master of House Shurian. He was, in addition, a member of the most elite of all elven Orders, the Modalis.
The Modalis was, so far as its public face was concerned, a largely philanthropic organization with impressive public holdings north of the Old Keep of the Iblisi and well situated inside Tsujen’s Wall east of the Mnera Gate. Nearly everyone in the city knew that there was far more to it than that, but it was a pleasant fiction that all the Rhonas elves found advantageous to maintain as the truth even without the encouragement of the Iblisi. The true center of the Modalis lay in the rather unpretentious and otherwise unmarked building just behind Sjei on the eastern side of the Paz Rhambutai northeast of “The Ministries” and situated nearly equidistant from every other Order, Forum, Guild, and Ministry that struggled for dominance in the Imperial City. It was known simply as “Majority House” which was something of an irony considering the elite and exclusive nature of its occasional occupants.
Sjei, after considerable deliberation, picked out an apple from the cart and paid the groveling Fifth Estate market vendor with carefully and precisely measured coins. He then turned, holding the apple gingerly in his left hand as he looked across the square to the building occupying his thoughts.
He smiled slightly, baring a minimum of his teeth. He felt a kinship with Majority House. It, too, was unassuming in the extreme if one might be forgiven for describing mediocrity in imperative terms. The subatria was narrow and high, appearing to be almost hidden behind flanks of vertical shops and market stalls in the plaza. That those shops were either owned or controlled by the Modalis was an open secret, and the height of the walls and location of the shops were a part of a carefully orchestrated design for its defense and safekeeping. The avatria floating above it was small and unassuming, dwarfed in comparison to the monumental extravagances of the surrounding houses, each of which vied for supremacy of ostentation. That was also to Sjei’s liking: the idea of hiding in plain sight appealed to him.
Sjei lifted the apple and sank his teeth into its crisp flesh, pulling it away with a satisfying snapping sound. The plaza was filled with elves moving in the labyrinthine spaces between the stalls of the market. A cross section of the Empire was well represented there: First Estate Imperators anxious to get through the crowds and on with their business in The Ministries; Second Estate masters and mistresses of the Aether simply taking from rather than bargaining with the Fourth Estate vendors who were dependent upon their magic to maintain the yield of their client Fifth Estate farms; Third Estate noblewomen on their shopping expeditions with their slaves and guardians in tow . . . all these moved through the plaza with their eyes casting about or staring at their feet. Not one of them gave so much as a casual glance upward toward the unassuming building that held their fate within its common-looking walls.
Sjei tore another large bite from the apple, his grin allowing some of the juice to run down the side of his chin. He was more than a member of the Modalis; he was the Sinechai, the Quartermaster whose charge was to conduct the meetings of the Modalis. Some had more rank and some had more seniority in the House Forum, but he alone controlled the agenda of those meetings, steering the discussion in the direction he felt necessary. It was a power that required finesse and a subtle touch. It also was a power that was best used sparingly, tactically, and emphatically.
Today, he knew, was a day when all his skills would be required. Playing the Modalis council members was a dangerous game with stakes deadly high, swift, and permanent. Still, one didn’t begin with the Modalis unless one was sure all his pieces were in place and that all the dice were covered.
Besides, he loved a good game.
“Kyori
-Xiuchi,” Sjei said with quiet dignity. “You have summoned this assembly. It is for you to state your cause.”
In truth, Sjei had exerted considerable effort in influencing Kyori into calling this gathering. He could only hope the doddering old patriarch of the Occuran would actually remember the reason he had been given for summoning everyone to the Modalis forum.
Smoke from the incense braziers drifted through the large room. To Sjei, the smell was cloying, but it seemed to please Liau Nyenjei, the Minister of Thought, who was very much enamored with such recent fads. The walls were partially hidden behind layers of shadow and smoke. Only a single shaft of light from the open circle in the apex of the domed ceiling illuminated the center of the room. The elven figures sat in their appointed chairs facing toward one another just within the shadows around the bright center of the floor—as they each did in their dealings as the Modalis.
Kyori stood very slowly.
Play your part, you old fool, Sjei thought.
“A most troubling report has reached the Occuran regarding the Western Provinces,” Kyori began. “It seems that there has been a disruption of the Aether Wells across most of the province. Several Houses fell completely, their magic failing and their Impress slaves released from the bondage of the House Altars.”
A low murmur rumbled through the forum space from the other Modalis masters.
“As control and trade of the Aether is the lifeblood of our Order, this constitutes a threat to the Modalis as well as the Empire at large—making our interests allied with the Imperial Will. I therefore forward the discussion and resolution of this matter before the assembled . . .”
Citadels of the Lost Page 3