Within an hour, as they worked their way through a wadi strewn with black, sharp-edged boulders, Mar's progress became erratic, as if he were a staggering drunk.
Eishtren moved up beside him and reached out to catch his arm. "Do you need assistance, my lord king?"
Furious, Mar shrugged off the officer's hand, struggled determinedly another armlength, then toppled forward as the last vestige of the magic in his brigandine slipped from his control. He caught himself with hand and stump, saving his face from smashing into the hard packed gray grit, and lay still for a frustrated moment, breathing heavily. Finally, his anger spent, he rolled over and sat up. The others watched him, stoically in the case of the Gaaelfharenii and the quaestor, and wide-eyed in the case of Aelwyrd.
"My magic is done," he admitted, both to them and to himself. "This is as far as we go."
"No, my lord king," Wilhm contradicted with firm conviction. "I will carry you."
"That wouldn't solve the problem, Wilhm. I can't bring up any more water. What we have wouldn't take us very far at all."
Wilhm raised an arm like the branch of a great oak and pointed. "We don't have to go very far, my lord king. The mountain is there."
Startled, Mar wiggled around to look.
Just as Wilhm had said, a single, white prominence reared up on the otherwise flat horizon.
THIRTY-EIGHT
17th Year of the Phaelle’n Ascension, 205th Day of Glorious Work
Year One, Day Seventy-Five of the New Age of Magic
(Seventhday, Waning, 1st Wintermoon, 1644 After the Founding of the Empire)
Mhevyr
Whorlyr tweaked the flux modulation that activated his far talking disk. "Commence bombardment."
"Message received. Bombardment commencing."
He banked his Shrike to the north, so that he would overfly the fortified harbor and slowed his forward speed to a crawl. At an altitude of two thousand armlengths, he was well above the apogee of the cylinders from the Holy Trio's catapults. He could have monitored the battle, his first under his new rank of Director of Forces, on the command deck of the Duty, but the Shrike provided him the ability to watch the conflict unfold with his own eyes in real time. Moreover, he could adjust his position as needed to inspect any difficulties that might arise.
The first cylinders from the three warships impacted directly on the main harbor fortress, situated on a central island, blasting through its five armlength thick outer walls and raising clouds of dust and debris.
"Relay to Work. Advance target fifty armlengths to the east."
"Message received."
He watched with satisfaction as a segment of the bombardment moved to center on the fortresses' main bastion. Within seconds it had been reduced to a heap of fractured stone and in less than a minute more, the entire fortress had been leveled and all of its defenders, presumably, destroyed with it.
"Redirect targeting of all warships to the palace. Five salvos only."
"Message received. Five salvos."
Mhevyr's palace was half the size of the grand edifice at Mhajhkaei, but of more recent construction, with slender decorative towers and iron fences instead of walls. As a defensive work, it was next to useless and spies had informed him that it indeed housed no armsmen. Therefore, as a military target it had no value. However, he had ordered it destroyed completely to eradicate any political or symbolic value that might accrue to it in the minds of the Mhevyrii.
Having intimately observed the conquest of and the subsequent ignominious withdrawal from The Greatest City in All the World, but having lacked both the military status and the personal access to the senior hierarchy necessary to comment on his conclusions, he had resolved, now that he was in command, that he would not repeat the errors that had been made at Mhajhkaei.
Here at Mhevyr, all potential focal points of resistance, human and otherwise, would be immediately eliminated. All physical manifestations of the former order would be laid waste, including all government buildings, custom houses, arsenals, and barracks. All religious influences -- all temples, shrines, images, icons, priests, and acolytes of false gods -- would be annihilated. Efficiently and methodically, he would utterly subjugate this city and reduce its inhabitants to eager and obedient servants of the Brotherhood.
After the pinpoint bombardment finished, he overflew the area to verify that nothing higher than a manheight remained standing.
"Stand down catapults," he ordered into his far talking disk.
"Message received. Stand down catapults."
"Covey Commander Raehl, begin strafing runs on population exiting the city."
"Message received. Beginning strafing runs now."
THIRTY-NINE
They came across the road first, by the simple expedient of wandering across it. Initially, it was intermittent, broken by wide, age-old gullies or swallowed by hillocks, but eventually it emerged above the surrounding terrain on a raised bed of cemented gravel and clay to become an unbroken ribbon that roughly paralleled the line of the river vents. Formed of some seamless olive stone, the road surface was ten paces wide, an armlength thick, and cool to the touch despite the heat of the sun. It showed considerable abrasion from windborne sand, but no ruts, cracks, or spalls and was smoother than any modern built road that Mar had ever seen. Stretching out before them with extended straight-aways and long, incremental curves, it was clear that its engineers had possessed superior skill, having ingeniously laid it to fit the landscape so that no stretch had a perceptible grade.
"It goes in the right direction," Aelwyrd said, shifting slowly from one tired foot to the other and back again. Burdened with Eishtren's spare arrows and his own portion of their food and supplies, the boy had nonetheless maintained the stiff regulated pace set by the Quaestor.
Lord Hhrahld pointed at the irregularly domed silhouette of Wilhm's mountain, now reaching far up into the sky and covering a large portion of the horizon. "More than that, lad. It goes where we are going."
"It will allow us to manage a faster pace," Eishtren contributed. In Mar's place, he led the march, but had in no way sought to exercise primacy.
Since he apparently had nothing to say, Wilhm remained silent.
Perched on Wilhm's shoulder and feeling in comparison to the Gaaelfharenii more like a small child than a man, Mar waved his stump expansively. "By all means."
They came upon the bridge after perhaps another league. It was a marvel, a weathered but unbroken single span a thousand armlengths long that leapt gracefully over a deep, dry riverbed that looked like it had not seen water since the beginning of the world. The wadi came from the northeast and faded away to the south, loosing itself in a rock strewn erg.
"Perhaps they diverted this river underground and that is what feeds the Blue Ice?" Eishtren said as they stood at the center, looking over the unguarded edge down into the parched depths.
"My guess would be no," Lord Hhrahld replied. He pointed out toward the stratified walls of the wadi. "You can see where the old banks were. The volume of water that flowed under here was more than comes out at the main mouth of the delta of the Ice River. The flow of the artificial channel is barely a tenth of that. This river just went away. If it had dried up slowly, there would be more terracing. It vanished in a season or less."
After another moment of looking into the long dead river, they moved on, and when they were nearly across, Wilhm spoke, apparently a delayed response to Lord Hhrahld's last words.
"Doom fell on them."
"No doubt," Lord Hhrahld agreed. "But what sort?"
He walked to the right, almost shoulder to shoulder with Wilhm, so that Mar could have reached out to touch him if he so desired. Wilhm had a long, smooth gate and being carried on his shoulder was not unlike riding on a very large horse moving at a walk. Eishtren and Aelwyrd proceeded a couple of paces ahead, and the two Gaaelfharenii retarded their steps so that that their much more lengthy strides would not overrun the quaestor and the recruit.
For once, Wilhm, without turning his head, surprised Mar by answering immediately. "Magic war."
"Your dreams tell you that?" Mar asked.
"No, the mountain does."
Mar blinked. "You can hear the mountain?"
"Yes, my lord king."
"Right now?"
"Yes."
Mar thought a moment. "Lord Hhrahld, is there any chance that you hear the mountain?"
"I? Why, no." The white-haired pirate paused and appeared to be listening. "Well, then again, perhaps I do. Wilhm, what is it that you hear?"
"It is a ... song."
"Ah? Does is go something like this?" Lord Hhrahld hummed a discordant series of sounds that was not exactly a tune.
"Yes."
"Then I hear it as well. Or, more accurately, feel it in the marrow of my bones. There is no actual sound, I think. The code means nothing to me, however."
Mar listened with his ears and his magical sense, but could detect nothing. "Eishtren? Aelwyrd?"
Eishtren swung his head about briefly to reveal a placid expression and to say, "No, my lord king."
Aelwyrd likewise flashed back a grin and a headshake.
Mar looked down at his bearer, the sharp angle making the Gaaelfharenii's strong nose and cheeks prominent. "Wilhm, what exactly does the song say?"
After three steps, Wilhm began to sing. He had a strong baritone voice, but the sounds that he made were not words, but something similar to the mimicked language that toddlers used before they actually learned to speak. He went on at length and gave no indication that he would stop.
"Wilhm," Mar interrupted, suppressing his unwarranted exasperation, "I meant to ask, what exactly does the song mean?"
"His words are not our words."
"Who?"
"The last one of them."
"Right. Translate them to our words, if you can."
Wilhm took up the song again for another stride, then broke off and droned in a voice that was not his own, "To those that come after. Greetings and felicitations. I trust that, having received this message, you have regained a sufficient level of knowledge -- we called it technology -- to understand those things which I shall presently relate."
Wilhm paused briefly.
"I cannot know how many centuries may have passed since I have stored this broadcast, but hopefully it has not been so many that you are not an altogether different sort of men than we were. Some of us believed that the time of mankind upon this world was done, inhumed by the destruction that we wrought, and that some other creature, perhaps our own sentient formulations, would rise to replace us. I, however, have always had faith that high magic civilization will emerge again, built by that most magnificent of beasts, mankind."
Another pause.
"It is my dearest hope that those things which I might teach you concerning us, those that went before, shall be of use to you and perhaps guide you away from those acts of hubris that brought us low."
"My own people, the Pyrai, were a great power on our world, first among nations and chief in many magical endeavors ..."
Without missing a step, Wilhm continued on, relating the words of a man who had lived before history. When he spoke of wonders, he used terms that had no meaning to spin tales of the fantastic and the impossible. When he spoke of places, he described lands that were now seas, mountains that might only be islands, and cities of which no evidence survived. When he spoke of people, he recited strange sounding names and improbable events that were not even myth. When he spoke of the wars that ended his civilization and doomed his city, he was forlorn, brief, and cryptic.
"This is only a small portion of my story. I have so very much more to tell and to explain. In stasis, I await you. If you should feel that you might gain benefit from my knowledge, then come to the shelter beneath my city. I am secured in location thirteen on the thirteenth under level. The primary ward will admit biologics. The key to my chamber is sldkf-sldkjfl-alksj-lkjsdlfj-alksjd-elwhj-lsiod--"
Mar interrupted Wilhm. "What's that?"
"It is what the song says."
"Yes, but those are just letters."
"It is what the song says."
"All right. Go on."
Picking up where he left off, the young Gaaelfharenii finished the letter groups, enunciating six more, for a total of thirteen. The number of letters in the groups varied, but the entire alphabet was not used, only a subset of thirteen letters. When finished, Wilhm paused for several moments and then began the message again. The unnamed originator had left his message to loop continuously, speaking to a world that could not hear him, apparently for all eternity.
Mar let Wilhm go through the entire message again and then stopped him. "Thank you, Wilhm. I don't need to hear it a third time."
"There is something sad in that," Eishtren said without inflection. "It can only be heard by the Gaaelfharenii, and only then when they are this close. Had we not come, and Wilhm with us to interpret, then the last words of that ancient survivor may have gone unheard forever."
Aelwyrd drifted back to walk just to Wilhm's left and looked up at Mar with a bright expression. "Are we going to let him out, my lord king?"
"The man who left the message? I have no idea what type of magic stasis is, but I don't think it would keep him alive for millennia."
"The king is right, lad," Lord Hhrahld rumbled. "Likely that fellow perished before your hundred times great-grandfathers were born."
"But what if he lives?" Aelwyrd insisted with the persistence of the young.
"That's not why we've come," Mar told the boy firmly. "We'll find Oyraebos' second text and leave the dead safely in their tombs."
Disappointed but accepting, the recruit returned to his place by the quaestor.
Beyond the bridge, the city began.
At first, only scatters of crumbled stone of various sorts lined the road, most of the pieces no larger than a fist. Amongst the aggregate were stones similar to that of the road, but a large majority were of a different, bluish type. Mar also noticed bits that looked like natural marble, dolomite, and limestone. Presently, mounds of rubble coalesced, though none of the accumulations were higher than an armlength. Though no standing walls appeared, occasionally regular lengths of foundation blocks peeked from beneath the broken heaps. Sand and soil had encroached into the ruins, but not nearly so much as he had seen in the Waste City. Interestingly, there was a greater concentration of vegetation here than previously along their march: large patches of dheaia and other scrub, some thin grasses, spiny stalked weeds, and an odd species of small tree, previously unknown to him, that had a limbless trunk and a flare of fronds instead of leaves.
"They must have rebuilt the road," Eishtren said, swinging his head about as he walked. "It crosses straight over the debris." He pointed to the southwest, where vague signs of dark cobblestones showed through. "That might have been an original street there."
"They built a long time after all this was thrown down," Lord Hhrahld judged. "It is clear that they scraped together some of the rubble for the roadbed."
Aelwyrd pointed ahead. "There are standing buildings up there. Maybe they just didn't get this far when they rebuilt."
As night began to fall, they reached the first cluster of intact structures and Mar called a halt. The mountain was very close and very big, now, and at this distance the mists that surrounded it could be made out clearly. Mar thought that it could only be about two or three leagues away, just three hours walk, but decided that it would be better to deal with any potential difficulties they might encounter in the morning, when they were all rested and fed.
While Eishtren and Aelwyrd investigated the box-like buildings that sat in neat rows alongside the left side of the road, Mar told Wilhm to put him down. He had had enough of being toted about and intended to scoot about under his own power for the rest of the day. As the Gaaelfharenii released him, for just a moment he felt a familiar tightening of his brigandine and bobbed off the surface of the road for an ins
tant before settling slowly on his buttocks.
Thrilled, he delved the spells and found that tendrils of flux responded when he prodded them. With a determined effort, he coaxed almost an armlength from the brigandine and floated unsteadily, swaying slightly from side to side.
Lord Hhrahld looked pleasantly surprised. "Your magic returns, my lord king?"
Mar grinned. "This may only be a ... I don't know ... magic oasis, but hopefully we're leaving the morass, or, at least, the worst part of it. Let's see what the others have found. I want to try out my new 'legs.'"
He drifted toward the buildings, unsteadily and not in a straight line, but pleased beyond words that he could once again move about under his own power.
With solid walls of the formed olive stone and interiors that were a good two manheight from floor to ceiling, the buildings proved all but featureless and, aside from simple alterations in layout, identical. The rather large rectangular holes for the windows and doors were exactly the same size throughout, and the interiors of the rooms sported only blank walls, floors, and ceilings. A few were more than one story, but none had stairs or other means of access to the upper floors. There were no balconies, columns, buttresses, arches, or decorative features of any kind.
As far as Mar could see, there was no indication that any had ever been finished or occupied.
"They made the bones of the buildings but never lived in them," Eishtren proposed, echoing Mar's thought as they moved into one at random to set up their camp. He and Aelwyrd, following routine, set about unloading the keg from Wilhm's pack and measuring out their evening ration of water.
For his part, Wilhm walked to a corner and sat down with his back against the wall. His contribution to supper would be, as usual, staying out of the way.
"It could be that whatever furnishings they had were insubstantial," Lord Hhrahld argued. "The evidence of their lives simply rotted away and blew out with the wind."
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