City of Stone and Silence

by Django Wexler

  “I was saying,” Genza moans, “they built over that alley years ago, there’s no way out.”

  A cold hand grips my chest for a moment, and I force it away. No time. “Garo!”

  “A little busy!” he shouts back.

  I scramble to the curtain on hands and knees to see him facing off against a pair of soldiers, with the rest laid out on the floor in various states of distress. The remaining pair have split up to attack from both sides, forcing Garo to swing his gauntleted fists first one way and then another to drive them off.

  Focused on this pair, he doesn’t see the officer on the floor. The man has crawled to within arm’s reach behind Garo, and he’s drawn his sword. Even as I watch, he gets his legs under him, preparing a thrust.

  “Behind you!” I shout. But one of the other soldiers has begun a feint, and Garo has already moved to block, off-balance. In that frozen instant, I can tell he won’t move in time. The sword seems to crawl through the air, but I’m just as slow, one hand extended—

  —and I lash out, Kindre power whipping around me, an invisible wind that sets my hair to whipping wildly. I feel the Ward Guard captain’s mind—his acid fear, his thumping humiliation, the copper tang of bloodlust, a hundred other emotions—and I reach for it. There’s no time for subtlety, so my demand is simple.

  Stop.

  It slams into the delicate garden of his thoughts with all the force of a meteor strike. His eyes go very wide, and he freezes in place, sword still aimed at Garo’s kidneys. A moment later, Garo spins, his boot slamming into the man’s hand and sending the weapon skittering across the floor.

  I reach out for the two remaining soldiers, flooding their minds with the same simple command. Stop. They freeze in turn, and Garo takes full advantage, his Melos gauntlets sending first one and then the other crashing to the ground. For a moment, things get quiet, broken by groans and the scramble of the lone customer frantically making a run for it.

  “Tori—” Garo says, turning.

  “Later,” I tell him. “There’ll be more patrols out in the street. Can you break through a brick wall?”

  “Probably.” Garo looks down at his gauntlets. “I’ve never tried.”

  “Try.”

  Bel, Wik, and Gokto scramble backward as Garo comes through the curtain, his green glow throwing weird shadows. Genza flinches as Garo’s fist pistons into the bricks, raising a cloud of pulverized mortar. The third blow breaks through, making a hole the size of my head. Garo quickly widens it enough to squeeze into a dingy brick-lined hallway. At the far end there’s another door, which I’m hoping leads out into the backstreets.

  “Follow him,” I tell the boys. I feel sick, my guts knotting as though I’d drunk a pint of cooking oil. The sensation of the captain’s mind folding up under my power, giving way like wet paper—Not now. I turn to Genza. “You should get out of here, too.”

  He nods frantically. “I’ll go out the front, tell them you threatened me and made a run for it. It might slow them down.”

  “Good. If you need help, come to Grandma’s. We owe you.”

  He scrambles away. Garo has reached the other end of the hallway, splintering the locked door with another blow. Beyond, blessedly, I can see an alley. The three boys hover some distance behind him, reluctant to get too close, and I go through the hole and follow them. Genza shuts the door behind us.

  “You’d better lead the way,” Garo says, beckoning with a green-shrouded hand. “We’re going to have to stick to the side streets.”

  “Right.” I want to vomit, but there’s no time. “Stay close,” I tell the boys. “We’ll get you to Grandma’s.”

  “You saved my life,” Garo mutters, as we start to run. “Again.”

  “Yeah.” I’m doing what I can with what I have. I swallow bile. “I know.”

  10

  ISOKA

  I can’t tell if Meroe is going to hit me or start crying. Possibly both at once. I hold up my hands and get ready to duck.

  “I thought,” I say, “we agreed on this plan.”

  Her eyes narrow, and the scales tip rapidly toward “hit me.”

  “We agreed it was the right thing for us to do,” she says. “Not for you to run off and get into trouble by yourself.”

  “I’m not going to be by myself. I’m taking all our best fighters. Zarun, Thora, Jack, Aifin—”

  “You know what I mean.”

  What she means is, not her. I’d made the mistake of thinking that went without saying.

  “How many times have I saved your life, Deepwalker?” she says. We’re in one of the smaller upper chambers of the ziggurat, which I’ve started thinking of as our bedroom. As yet, the only furnishing is a scratchy blanket made from the cloth Catoria’s people brought us, which Meroe kicks aside as she stalks toward me.

  “Too many to count,” I say. “And obviously I’m grateful—”

  “I don’t need your rotting gratitude!” Meroe takes a deep breath, and suddenly she’s blinking back tears again. “You don’t understand.”

  “Obviously not.”

  Meroe swallows. “What happens when you get hurt, and I’m not there?”

  “I—” I shake my head. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Right. Just like when you fell into the Deeps, or when you fought the Butcher, or—”

  “Someone needs to stay here and keep things running,” I interrupt. “You’re the one who’s been holding this mess together ever since we marched to the Garden.”

  “And you’d like me to stay in a nice, safe padded room, is that it?” Meroe says.

  “If anything goes wrong—not that I think that will happen—there’s everyone who stays here to think of,” I say. She stops, and I try a lopsided smile. “You’re the one who told me that we can’t just leave people behind.”

  Meroe’s mouth works silently for a moment. “That’s not fair,” she mutters.

  “Sorry.”

  For a moment we stand, facing each other. Meroe’s breathing hard. Even in moments like this, she’s so beautiful I can barely stand it.

  “Don’t—” She swallows again. “Don’t think that you’re keeping me safe.”

  “I—”

  “If something happens…” She hesitates, then shakes her head. “If you don’t come back, I’ll have no choice but to accept Catoria’s offer. I’ll get everyone delivered to her protection. Then I’m coming after you, if I have to do it all by myself. Understand?”

  “I … I don’t think—”

  “Don’t rotting argue with me, Gelmei Isoka.” She steps forward and kisses me, furiously, her breath hot against my skin. “Just … don’t.”

  Then she tears herself away, turns her back, and stalks off.

  I don’t understand princesses. Or aristos. Or people.

  But it’s time to get to work.

  * * *

  Zarun and Thora have gathered the people we need. They ended up with a group of about two dozen, who report to the entrance chamber on the south side of the ziggurat as the sun begins to climb toward noon.

  Some of them I know well: Zarun himself, of course, Thora and Jack, Aifin. Others I’m familiar with in passing. A tall, blond Myrkai adept named Ylla who’d once served the Butcher, with half her head shaved and streaks of crimson dyed into the rest. An Imperial boy named Kotaga who looks about fourteen, bald as an egg. Vargora, who’d been a pack leader under Karakoa and was the only Melos user besides Zarun and myself. The Jyashtani girl who likes to salute military-style, who introduces herself as Safiya.

  Most of them served in the hunting packs, and all of them went through the march to the Garden. They wait with bags slung over their shoulders, some with weapons, some not needing them. I’ve thought a little bit about what I was going to say, but in the moment all the platitudes I can dredge out of old dramas seem ridiculous.

  “Prime is an Eddica user,” I tell them instead. “Like me. It was his power that sent those monsters against us the night we arrived. They killed four o
f our crew.” One fighter, caught and torn apart, and two of the younger children and a woman who’d gone to try to help them. “We’re going to pay him back for that, and maybe find a way to secure our place here in the bargain. Any questions?”

  Safiya raises her hand, and I nod at her.

  “Do we know if he can do anything more with his power than send dead bodies after us?”

  I shake my head. “Nobody knows very much about Eddica. So stay alert, would you?” I turn to Zarun. “Everything ready?”

  “At your order, Deepwalker,” he says, grinning.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Two guards pull our makeshift barricade aside, admitting brilliant sunlight. I blink for a moment, eyes adjusting, then start down the tunnel. The others follow.

  The stairs down the side of the ziggurat seem to go on forever, but eventually we reach ground level. The forest isn’t as impenetrable as I remember by the light of day. The trunks are well spaced, and a nearly solid canopy overhead keeps the underbrush down. Before we pass into the shadow of the leaves I sight on one of the obelisks, which I’d identified yesterday as being directly on the path to Prime’s ziggurat. I hope there are enough clearings that I can keep us from going off course.

  We make surprisingly quick and pleasant progress. In spite of the jungle, I never quite feel like I’m in the wilderness. The ground is too flat, evidence that long ago the hand of man had a role in shaping this place. I don’t know if we’re walking along old roads or across plazas, though. Not even cobblestones remain, just this gentle carpet of green, broken by the knobbled roots of the odd-looking trees.

  The same strange noises I hear from the ziggurat are much in evidence, a continuous chorus of hoots, shrieks, and squawks. We even see a few animals, a pair of brightly colored birds that flap awkwardly away as soon as they spot us and a green reptilian thing that half-walks, half-slithers out of our path. In the distance, I spot a face, huge eyes staring at us, and I pause in alarm.

  “What?” Zarun says, and follows my pointing finger. “Oh. That’s a monkey. You don’t have them in the Empire?”

  “That is a monkey?” I’ve only seen drawings of monkeys in books. “I thought they were bigger.”

  “There’s different kinds,” he says. “That looks a bit like the fruit monkeys we have at home, but they don’t have that white fur.”

  The monkey watches us suspiciously as we pass, and I return the favor. It looks almost spiderlike as it crawls through the tree branches.

  As we continue onward—roughly south, I hope, away from the sea—the jungle thins. I get more glimpses of my guiding obelisk, which reassures me that we haven’t wandered off track. Bits of worked stone start to appear, cracked and rounded by the passage of years, half-submerged in the soil like they’re sinking into a swamp. In places the tree roots are tangled around them or splitting them apart, a centuries-long battle of rock against wood. Mostly they look like bits of flagstone, but here and there a fragment of carving remains, part of a face or something that might have been writing.

  From the top of our sheltering ziggurat, Meroe and I had sketched out as much of the Harbor as we could see. The three great ziggurats form an equilateral triangle, with one side facing north toward the shore and our vantage point. Prime’s ziggurat is the farthest inland, and our path crosses the center of the city. When we finally pass by my obelisk, it’s in the middle of a vast plaza that hasn’t yet surrendered to the encroaching vegetation. Some of its flagstones still sit flat and level, while young trees force their way up through the cracks and tip others on their sides. Something long and brown-furred darts away as we jog through and continue north, now keeping the obelisk to our backs.

  “Catoria said that we didn’t have to worry about Prime’s monsters during the day,” I tell the crew. The sun is at least a few hours from the horizon. “But that’s only until we get close to Prime’s ziggurat, and I don’t know what ‘close’ means. From this point on, stay alert.”

  “Yes, sir,” Safiya barks, practically vibrating with excitement. Zarun chuckles at her enthusiasm. The rest of the crew chorus their agreement, somewhat less eagerly. Bohtal, an uncharacteristically slim iceling boy whose skin is ghostly pale, comes to walk beside me at the head of the group. He’s our only Sahzim user, better able to spot incoming threats than any of the rest of us. A faint yellow glow surrounds his head as we move on.

  The jungle thickens, and my nerves start playing up. The corpse-things weren’t very fast, but the trees offer them any number of places to hide in ambush. I don’t know if they’re smart enough for that. There’s too rotting much I don’t know, and for a wild moment I wonder if I should call a halt.

  But we’ve spent most of the day getting this far, and I haven’t got that many days left.

  “Deepwalker,” Bohtal says. “There’s something off to our left. It’s pacing us.”

  “One of Prime’s creatures?” I pause, shading my eyes against the sun, trying to get a good look.

  “I don’t think so,” he says. The yellow aura intensifies. “It looks more like an angel.”

  There. Something big, slinking through the trees, intermittently dappled with sunlight through the interlocking branches. It does look like an angel, long-bodied and multi-legged. I think it has the head of a dog, like the angel I saw the day we left Soliton. Whether it’s actually the same one, I have no idea—each angel seems to be a unique nightmare, but I wouldn’t swear there aren’t several that look alike.

  In any event, it isn’t coming any closer. I clap Bohtal on the shoulder.

  “We’ll keep on,” I say to the group. “Tell me if it comes this way.” He nods.

  Not long after, the great ziggurat comes into sight. It’s about half again as tall as our shelter, though clearly following the same basic design, like a pile of giant steps or an enormous version of a child’s block pyramid. Ramps run up all four sides, splitting to go around enormous open doorways, and continue on to the very top. The doorway directly ahead of us is surrounded by some kind of elaborate carving, and long ropes run down the sides of the ziggurat, supported by poles. The converging lines give the impression of a spider’s web.

  There’s still no sign of any walking corpses. We slow as we get closer, picking our way through the last of the jungle. I frown, looking up, trying to place something about the ropes and decoration, but Bohtal with his enhanced vision gets it first and gasps.

  “Bones,” he says, taking a half-step back.

  The “ropes” are strings of bones, long arm and leg bones bound one to the next. Each squat wooden post bears a single skull, fixed to look down at visitors approaching the ramp. They move slightly in the gentle breeze as we approach, with a faint, horrible clatter.

  I’m not sure how many corpses you would need to build a display like that. A rotting lot, that’s for certain.

  The frieze around the doorway is no carved decoration, either. As we get closer, we can see that it consists of more bones, fixed to the stones in elaborate patterns. Skulls in the center of expanding circles of linked ribs, flowers built from hip bones, long, sinuous shapes formed from interlocking fingers.

  I swallow and survey the crew. Even Zarun is looking a little grim.

  “Well,” I manage. “In case any of you worried this was a misunderstanding, and Prime wanted to make friends, consider yourself corrected.”

  There’s a weak round of laughter. Aifin, who can’t understand my meager joke, turns away from the bones and signs with his hands. I haven’t learned the full vocabulary he and Meroe worked out, but I know enough to work in a hunting pack, and he keeps it simple.

  No enemies.

  I nod agreement. “I thought we’d run into something sooner, too.”

  “Once we get inside, we have no idea of the layout,” Zarun says. “It’s a hell of a way to get ambushed.”

  “Yeah.” I shake my head. “Everyone stay close. Zarun and I in front, Vargora in the rear.” The three Melos users should be best able to def
end themselves against a sudden attack. “Bohtal in the middle, and keep your ears open.”

  “As you say, fearless leader,” Jack says with a grin. She doesn’t seem at all discomfited by the bones. Nothing bothers Jack.

  Thora cracks her knuckles. Those of the crew who carry weapons get them ready, and auras of various colors flicker throughout the party. I have a strange moment of homesickness—back in Kahnzoka, as a lone Melos adept, I’d been able to make myself ward boss. If I’d had a crew like this behind me, mage-blood fighters all, I could have ruled the city.

  We climb up the ramp, flanked by slowly converging lines of bone. Ribs arc out over the edge of the doorway, like teeth around a gaping maw. Inside, there’s only darkness, until several of our Myrkai users conjure flames, revealing a stone corridor like the one in our own shelter.

  “Any idea how to find Prime?” Zarun says.

  “Give me a minute.”

  I close my eyes, reaching out with Eddica. As usual, the whole Harbor is thick with flows of Eddica energy, including the massive amount of power still pouring out of Soliton. Closer to, though, I can sense energy moving within the ziggurat itself, a web of power converging somewhere in the interior. I pinpoint it in my mind and open my eyes.

  “I think I know the way,” I tell him. “Follow me.”

  The corridor leads to an intersection, and after another moment with my eyes shut we take the left turn. The Eddica flow leads me through a half-dozen more junctions—I really hope I’ll be able to repeat the trick on the way out. We’ve also been trending upward, deeper and higher into the pyramid. After the last turn, I see light ahead, steady magical illumination spilling through an arched doorway.

  I creep toward it, gesturing the others forward only slowly. Beyond the archway is a large, circular room. Several bright white lights shine down from the ceiling, and by their radiance I can see there’s a balcony running along the far side of the chamber, about thirty feet up. Standing on it is a single human figure, so heavily backlit that it looks like a shapeless shadow.

  “Someone’s waiting for us,” Zarun says.