The City of Lies

by Robert J. Crane

  “This is Tarrentius,” he said. “It’s the old capital of the Vardinn Empire.”

  Heidi started, “We—”

  I elbowed her, shot her a look. Yes, we knew, but let him have his moment. Plus, Heidi had missed a spot on the seat of her dark jeans. I figured Carson would need the distraction.

  “Go on, Carson,” I instructed.

  “This was, like, the jewel of the Vardinn Empire. Like Rome,” he said, looking at me. “They quarried the stone from a mountain just south of here. I read they took down the whole thing,” he added with an awestruck breath. “And then expanded the city over where it once stood. Crazy, huh?”

  “Insane,” I agreed.

  “Bull people,” Carson mused. “My book said they grow to twelve feet tall.”

  “More like ten,” Heidi put in.

  “Yeah, but with the horns,” I added.

  “No wonder the buildings are so big.”

  They really were. We’d been able to appreciate their height from outside the city limits reasonably well. Now we walked among them, though, it was hard not to feel like ants crawling through the buildings nestled around a model train enthusiast’s track. They towered so high, their entryways so wide and tall it was hard not to be awed—

  And nervous. One Vardinn could squash the three of us without breaking a sweat.

  Fingers crossed that the sheer quantity of dust was an indication that Tarrentius was deserted.

  As if he were reading my mind, Carson said, “The dust came after the river ran dry.”

  “And all the Vardinn left their city for us to creep around in,” Heidi said.

  “You think?” Carson asked.

  She shrugged disinterestedly. “Dunno. Maybe.” After a moment: “Actually, they probably stayed.”

  A note of panic crossed Carson’s face. “Why?”

  “They’re bull people. That means they’re bull-headed.”

  Carson’s face fell. “Oh. Ha.”

  “Or they left,” said Heidi. “Who knows?”

  Carson shut up, the tour guide hat put away for now.

  For a time, we skirted the streets in silence. Then our path split around a fountain that looked more like a football stadium, and we paused to stare. It was dry, of course, and the statue in the center—a trio of bull people, muscular and naked, all clutching one another—had been damaged. But the picture I saw in my head, of the sculpture spewing perfect arcs of water, was unquestionably incredible.

  Carson was caught for a different reason. Breathily, he said, “Those are the Vardinn?”

  “They are,” I confirmed. “I mean, minus most of the horns. And that one probably had an arm once.”

  His eyes raked their stone forms. He swallowed hard, throat clicking.

  “Big,” he said lamely.

  “Put the block of meat on the front of Men’s Health to shame, don’t they?” Heidi said.

  Carson glanced at her. “Do you like …?” He stopped, shook his head. “Never mind. Let’s go, um …” He consulted his photo of the map. “Left.” And away he went again, not waiting for us.

  “Do I like what?” Heidi asked me under her breath.

  I shrugged and continued in silence.

  Down more forks in the road, we were carried alongside standalone statues, a whole boulevard’s worth, stone Vardinn in place of trees. Time had done a number on these too: sharp edges were lost, rendering every horned tip an uneven snag. The whipping dust had softened their forms over the centuries the way water smoothed a stone. Left for another thousand years, the sculptures would be unrecognizable.

  Then a new wall, intact unlike the outer wall, drew near. A second layer seemed to clutch it around the top.

  “The Vardinn split the city into districts to protect against invaders,” Carson explained. “They could lower barricades to isolate each segment, and defend each more closely. Plus, the walls would’ve helped funnel attackers for more targeted defense.”

  “Did you read that, or know it?” Heidi asked.

  “It’s just logical,” said Carson distractedly. Pressing the lock button on his phone, he stowed it in his manbag again. “There are a series of chambers through the wall. The general’s house is somewhere on the other side.”

  “The general being the Vardinn who brought his army to Ostiagard,” I said.

  Carson nodded. “Right.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked, pointing at the thicker top and the outer stone layer.

  “Lockdown mechanism,” Carson said.

  Oh. Duh.

  We drew to the wall. The looming entryway was closed, a dusty door sealed.

  Carson paused, frowned. “Where’s the handle?”

  Heidi bypassed him and pushed with both hands.

  Slowly and silently, the door glided open.

  She looked over her shoulder at him, eyebrows raised in an expression that said, Really, Carson?

  He nodded, looking flustered. “Right. Well done.”

  We stepped inside, leaving the door open behind us. No sense in closing the thing; the city was so dead, so clearly untouched by even scavengers for decades, if not longer, there seemed no point in taking unnecessary precautions.

  The chamber was sparse—and vacuous for its enormous size. Tapestries had once edged the walls, but only scraps remained in places where they had been torn down. The short fragments of cloth left were emerald green, and terminated in a frayed tangle.

  “Should be straight through,” said Carson, leading the way.

  We crossed the room, steps echoing, pushing through the next silent door—

  And froze.

  There, in the middle of the next room, lay one of the Vardinn.

  Those were not stone horns. These were pure ivory. Its body was covered with tawny brown … and its chest rose and fell with very soft breaths—because this one was alive.

  4

  We stood perfectly still. My breath was held, burning in my chest. I dared not move—and neither did Carson and Heidi, who had gone as still as the statues that lined the street we’d just walked down. I was sure that the only remaining movement in our bodies came from the desperate beating of our hearts.

  I was also certain that the three of us would opt to stop them dead lest they give us away.

  I stared at the Vardinn with horrorstruck eyes.

  It was huge. Even sprawled in a heap as it was, it far outsized us. The thing was all brawn, and stupidly I thought back to Heidi’s comment by the fountain. The height of human male fitness had nothing on the sheer power contained in that bull’s body. It rippled with muscle so taut I doubted a sword could cleave it. A thin brown down fuzzed it, not making it even slightly less intimidating.

  It heaved long breaths, separated by long silences.

  Finally, I whispered, “It’s asleep.”

  Carson nodded. But his face was ashen, and I wasn’t sure he’d have been able to speak if he tried.

  “What’s it doing here?” Heidi muttered.

  “Don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t want to think about it. If there was one, there might be more. A lot more.

  We’d never outrun them.

  “We should turn back,” I whispered.

  Carson’s head jerked around to me. “We can’t!”

  Heidi elbowed him. “Keep it down!”

  “We can’t leave,” Carson said over her head, so quiet I was almost lip-reading. “We need to find the general’s house.”

  “And if there are more of those things?” Heidi asked.

  Carson pursed his lips. He ogled the sleeping Vardinn a moment, looking fraught. He repeated, “We need to find the general’s house.”

  He watched the Vardinn take a long breath in, its chest filling …

  He stepped out—

  Heidi grabbed his sweater at the cuff, tugged him around.

  “Are you insane?” she whispered.

  Carson hesitated.

  But apparently he was taking a leaf from Heidi’s book and wasn’t
about to listen to advice she would certainly ignore. He shook out of her grip, and stepped out into the chamber.

  “Carson!” Heidi hissed.

  He was already four steps gone. Without taking his eyes off the Vardinn, he whispered over his shoulder, “It’s asleep.”

  “He,” Heidi whispered. “He is asleep, and he has horns, and if you wake him up—”

  The Vardinn shifted.

  Carson froze.

  The breath caught in my chest.

  If it woke, saw Carson … that was it.

  The panicked moment stretched … but the Vardinn did nothing more; it just kept taking and loosing those long, slow breaths.

  Just shuffling in its sleep, I told myself, unable to bring myself to say it aloud.

  Gradually, Carson eased into motion again.

  “He’s still going,” Heidi whispered to me. “Why is he still going?”

  “Because that’s what you or I would do if it were our quest,” I told her. “Now hurry up and follow before we tempt fate.”

  She shot me a very dark look, like I’d offended her in the deepest way, but begrudgingly set into motion behind Carson. I brought up the rear, keeping one hand on the door for as long as possible. I didn’t trust this one to remain in place after we left it. Nor did I trust it not to slam, so I gently slid it shut behind us.

  As Carson passed the invisible line to the other side of the Vardinn, Heidi hissed, “Keep your eyes on where you’re going, Yates. You trip once and you’ve killed all of us.”

  “You almost drowned yourself in a box last week,” he snipped back, very un-Carson.

  “Didn’t nearly drown you and Brand though, did I?”

  “Shut up,” I told them both. “Just keep moving.”

  We did. The room shrank beneath our feet all too slowly—slowest of all for me, stuck in the rear, first one to take a horn through the guts if the bull’s dream turned to nightmares or it, I don’t know, farted itself awake or something. But we got to the opposite door, and finally passed through.

  When it was closed behind us, I held back the sigh of relief I wanted to take. The danger had decreased only by as much effort as it took for the Vardinn to push open—or rip through—the door. And I doubted it would take much at all.

  “Well, turns out they didn’t all leave when the river ran dry,” Heidi muttered.

  “Maybe he’s a loner,” I said.

  The noise Heidi made suggested she didn’t think that was likely. To be fair, I didn’t think so either.

  “Come on,” Carson said. “We’re close.”

  He set off with much less care than he’d taken in the previous chamber. I wanted to call at him to slow down, to thud those damned loafers a little more softly lest we incur the Vardinn’s wrath after all our efforts. But there was a certain appeal in quickstepping out of the creature’s earshot, and so I double-timed it alongside Heidi.

  The two remaining chambers were both empty, thank goodness. Then we were outside again—and for a second time found ourselves in the middle of a battlefield.

  This section of Tarrentius looked as if a demolition crew had come in with instructions to knock eighty percent of it to the ground. The majority of the buildings had crumbled, some entirely to their foundations, many more only in part. Great wounds had been carved in the sides, walls buckling and falling in or out as the structure sagged, yet somehow a handful remained upright and undamaged. It was like a game of Battleships: destruction had been rained down around them in perfect blocks, leaving isolated areas unscathed but for the weathering of time.

  “This section was attacked heavily before Tarrentius fell,” Carson said.

  “One of the war machines,” Heidi said darkly.

  “There’s probably another one on the horizon somewhere,” I observed, craning my neck. But just enough of the sector remained intact that I couldn’t see the outer wall, let alone the dark square machine I imagined had been deserted there. “We could probably see it if we climbed …” Heidi gave me a stern look, cutting me off. “No, you’re right. Not safe. Let’s just keep moving, shall we?”

  “Yeah.” Carson reached into his manbag and retrieved his phone. Reopening his picture of the map, he cast it a cursory eye, then began to meander down the rubble-strewn streets.

  Partway down, he muttered, “Less dust here.”

  I responded with a dull, “Mm.” I’d noticed it too; there was barely any of it here. It neither coated the rubble, nor did it fill the blocky paving underfoot, where it might have muffled our footsteps at least a little.

  “Maybe there was … a tornado,” Heidi said uneasily.

  “Just here?” I asked.

  She shrugged awkwardly. “It could happen.”

  “I didn’t read anything about that sort of thing,” Carson said. “But there were earthquakes. And fires.”

  “I bet there were earthquakes with twelve-foot-tall bulls stampeding around the place,” Heidi grumbled. Meanwhile, I racked my brain in a momentary panic, trying to remember if the Vardinn were a fire-breathing species or not. Because that would make things so much better, wouldn’t it?

  “Freak weather is what wiped most of the Vardinn out,” said Carson from up front. “There were floods, too. A lot of them drowned—and a lot of their records, going by my books.”

  I swept around. “No sign of flooding here,” I pointed out.

  “I don’t think it happened to Tarrentius. But I don’t know. How much of a mark would that make, anyway?”

  “Remember the temples en route to the Tide of Ages?” I said.

  He frowned. “Right. Tide marks.” Shaking his head, he went on, “Maybe they just abandoned the city after the attackers breached.”

  “Or retreated to its core,” said Heidi, “leaving the outer edges to be ravaged.”

  “Attack on Titan,” Carson muttered.

  “Huh?”

  He shook his head again. “Nothing. It’s just a weird cartoon. It’s got giants and jetpacks and …” At Heidi’s flat look, he said, “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “I don’t watch TV.”

  “I had to stream it on the internet. It’s not the kind of thing that the, err, the BBC would pick up.”

  “Great.”

  “Sorry. I’m just … distracted.” Carson lumbered atop a fallen, shattered façade, twelve feet long and full of fractures. “The general’s house is somewhere nearby. I think.”

  Heidi hesitated before clambering up after him. “You think?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” said Carson. “There were no records of it, though; no one found it. The damage to this area has been a discouragement to Seekers, I guess. People don’t think this part of Tarrentius is very stable.”

  “You don’t say,” said Heidi. Rolling her eyes at me, looking grouchier by the minute, she hoisted herself onto the slab of debris and crossed in Carson’s wake.

  We continued to follow Carson, diverting around parts of the street where navigation proved close to impossible. We also skirted a wide berth around half-downed buildings. Though they’d held for the long years since Tarrentius, or at least this part of it, was abandoned, none of us trusted that the simple sound of our footsteps would not cause one to descend upon us in an avalanche of tan stone.

  As we pushed deeper, our conversation drew quieter.

  Some ten minutes’ walk from the wall, the three of us stopped.

  Green. And not the tattered remains of a ripped-down tapestry. No, this was a tree. Quite young, I guessed; in its teens probably, or little older. Its spindly trunk had grown in the space between two fragments of brick. A very faint coating of red dust clung to its leaves.

  “Huh,” said Carson. “How ‘bout that.”

  “I guess the river didn’t dry out entirely,” said Heidi.

  “Or a spring surfaced around here,” I added.

  None of us said another word. But it was a worry. Water would allow nature to flourish and one day reclaim this city … but it also could provide nourishme
nt to anything lingering in the city’s ruins.

  Like the Vardinn, for example. We continued in quiet.

  Halfway down another street was a cluster of trees. They sprang through a place where the brickwork paving had been smashed, carved out in a wound twice as long as Carson stood tall.

  And down the next …

  “Water,” Heidi said flatly.

  I’d never been so unhappy to see it. It flowed between the gaps in the bricks underfoot, not quite to the level where it could spill over and wet the stones’ wide surfaces. But it was coming from somewhere, and if awkward it was at least accessible.

  I debated asking whether we should turn back, when—

  “This way,” said Carson, suddenly breaking into a jog. “It’s here!”

  “Volume, Carson,” Heidi complained, but followed.

  I kept up. Nevertheless, I took a backward glance. Nothing was following us. If we hadn’t seen that single sleeping Vardinn in the sequestering wall, Tarrentius might have been empty except for the three of us.

  As it was, we had at least one companion. And if there was one …

  I didn’t finish the thought.

  Carson brought us to a square stone building still intact amidst a sea of its broken companions. Slightly taller than the ones in the last section of the city, it was strangely undamaged, looking as new as the day it had been constructed.

  “This is it,” said Carson.

  “How can you tell?” Heidi asked, squinting up at it. “It’s just like the others.”

  “It’s not. Look. There’s a balcony.” Carson pointed.

  If that was a balcony, it wasn’t much of one. It reminded me of the tiny little slivers some flats had, with doors sliding open to absolutely nothing. With no space for more than toes to protrude, they were more like door-sized windows. The one bordering the first story of this building was much the same.

  Carson stepped toward the door.

  Heidi caught him by the sweater.

  He frowned at her. “We’re here.”

  “Don’t just rush in. You don’t know what’s in there.”

  Carson shifted—

  “Don’t you dare shake out of my grip, Yates.”

  He hesitated, looking at her.

  Something passed between them in that moment, and suddenly I felt out of place, as though I should be anywhere but here—