the streets, crying or supplicating, though a few cursed the bakkal and shook their fists.
As the crowds grew, the parade faltered. Ordered by the first sama, guards knocked citizens aside. Rhinaurs and manscorpions alongside the column howled people flat. Angry cries arose, and shrieks. Still the crowd surged like a single stupid animal. People near the procession tried to back away while others pushed from behind. Ordered on, guards began to stab. Blood fountained overhead and made the cobbles slick. A prolonged wail of terror and panic welled up. Citizens fell bleeding and were trampled underfoot. The half-human giants broke necks, arms, and spines, and pitched jittering bodies to the back of the crowd, who also took to screaming.
Gradually, the slow-witted mob realized the bakkal himself had unleashed the carnage. Cursrahns yelled in fear and confusion. Betrayed, devotion turned into disloyalty and reverence became hatred. Vile names and curses were hurled. The rulers in the procession didn't care, their faces wooden behind the wall of brutal guards. By sheer force, as the crowd surged and receded and died at the edges, the parade crept onto a bridge leading to the palace. Guards jammed behind, shoulder to shoulder, to block commoners from following. Deserted, the abused crowd jeered, shrieked, prayed to various gods, and wept.
Stunned, almost numb to the cruelty, Amenstar yet noted that the palace moat had run dry. By the flickering light of torches, she saw only a few greasy puddles. Otherwise the moat was choked with slime, mud, dying fish, and trash. Just before the parade passed into the palace, Amenstar looked up. More slaves with heavy tools waited along the roofline. Even the palace would be leveled, she thought bitterly. If her parents planned some ethereal future life, they'd have precious few buildings to house them.
With the doors thrown wide, the procession tramped into the palace, along the wide corridor to the huge royal court, the Chamber of the Moon with its round-cut ceiling.
A different crowd jammed the vast room, so late arrivals could not enter but were packed in the side corridors. Candles and torches lit sweating, frightened, noble faces. Huddled there were Cursrah's richest citizens, her civil authorities, sages from the famous library, and the joint chiefs of Cursrah's tiny army. Many had servants or bodyguards, some bloodied by the mob. All scuttled up, agitated, as the bakkal and first sama dismounted their sedan.
The army's general stamped forward, gold helmet under his arm as a sign of respect. So all might hear, he bellowed, 'Lord and Master, He Who Reigns from On High, praise be to Great Calim that you've finally come.
We need your guidance. Scouts report that dust roils on the horizon. Enemies ride in force to attack our fair city. Our army shall muster and ride to Cursrah's defense-'
'No! Great Bakkal, pray listen,' interrupted a noble in a yellow toga. 'The mob riots, and now our soldiers have gone insane. They attack the roofs of the civic buildings-tear them apart with crowbars and levers and mallets-^'
'Why do they not defend us?' called a woman in blue robes. 'Mobs pillage our mansions! Why do you not rouse the troops to slay them? Why do we pay taxes-'
'When will we have water''' demanded another. 'Our slaves ran off when our fountains dried up-'
A mute prisoner, Amenstar wondered why anyone expected the bakkal to solve their problems. Star knew her father would do nothing. A mighty descendent of genies communed with dead ancestors and distant gods. Even had he possessed mystical and arcane powers, he could not and would not, defend the kingdom or protect the populace or unleash a flood of blessed water. Water, safety, and home were concerns of the living. A bakkal served only death.
People clamored, hurling questions and bitter accusations, then hushed as the bakkal raised a hand. The first sama answered for her husband.
'The bakkal of Cursrah, and all the royal family, appreciate your services in this life. We wish you well in your future plans. Do not despair for your sovereigns. We shall be safe after invoking the Protector. Never again shall we emerge in this life, but know that Cursrah will live on in our persons. Go now, and may Calim send you sweet winds.'
'Go?' gargled a hundred mouths.
Blank-faced, they stared, and slowly knowledge dawned, then horror. For them, the bakkal had no plans at all. Cast away, they could live or die-it didn't matter to the royal family they'd supported all their lives. Horror gave way to anger, with shouts of injustice, betrayal, and curses from the gods.
The nobles' indignation availed nothing. At another command from the first sama, the palace guards fanned out, sweeping citizens before them. The crowd was first bullied, then nudged, then thumped. Before long, as the crowd resisted, swords and spears rose and fell. Shrieks echoed. Blood stained the pink-white marble tiles and ran in trickles between the cracks. Bodies were kicked after fleeing citizens, until brute strength won out, the corridors were cleared, and eight pairs of thick double doors were tugged shut and solidly barred.
'Come.' The sama's single word set three hundred people into motion. Scuffling, splitting, surging, the disjointed procession flowed into corridors and down spiral-ing ramps.
The vizar-in-waiting recoiled from the touch of living beings, so the captive Amenstar and her guards were among the last to descend. The last thing the princess saw was the moon, Cursrah's former protector, shining in the sky; silver white, clean and cool, aloof and distant, it glowered at the foolish mortals scurrying below.
The sedan chair was hoisted. Rocking gently, Amenstar dully bid the moon farewell. She left the world of sun and moon and life, descending to a world of perpetual darkness and death.
Before the tail of the bakkal's parade had vanished into darkness, the palace's destruction began.
The ancient genies and slaves who'd built Cursrah had been canny engineers who cut and fit blocks so square and smooth they needed neither mortar nor tenons. Thus painstaking construction allowed for quick demolition. Teams of men and brawny women started with levers, pry bars, and blocks and tackle at the circular cornice ringing the palace's open roof, the sacred circle that had admitted moonlight to the royal court for centuries. Loosened blocks skidded down the gently sloping roof and smashed awav exterior cornices with tremendous crashes, then all landed with a muffled thud in the mud of the moat. Within an hour, slaves scrambled down rope ladders while master masons winkled free keystones. With an earth-shaking, thunderous rumble, the gilded roof shattered onto the pink-white marble of the royal court.
The pace of demolition increased. Thin internal walls were dismantled stone by stone, carried out along the eight bridges, and pitched into the mud. Working downward from the main walls, slaves tilted giant blocks out to slam into the moat one by one. Vibrant frescoes became marred with cracks, chips, and splits, then obscured by dust. Ancient scenes of glory were nibbled away. Bold warriors and kings and gods stood decapitated, their heads toppled with the walls. Their torsos were tilted after their heads. Morning sunrise washed the vast floor with golden rays, and Calim's Breath, rising, gradually wafted away the worst dust.
Work stopped, as into the royal court skulked a high vizar and two heavily laden acolytes in vulture-brown robes. This priest, short, gaunt, and shaven, with a horned sigil branded onto his forehead, summoned the master mason from off a ladder. Pointing, the.vizar commanded that a single pink-white flagstone near the room's center be pried up. Obeying, masons further plied chisels, star drills, and heavy iron hammers to punch a crude drop shaft through the floor's foundation to the tunnel intersections below. The work went quickly, for all the commoners, from the college-trained mason-engineers to the lowest slaves, feared to look the vizar in the eye. Superstition whispered that anyone who saw their reflection in a vizar's mad eyes would die before the next moonrise.
Over the drop shaft, the vizar ordered a small hut built of fallen stone, with a broken column erected inside as a pedestal. Rapidly, low walls were stacked, then broken slabs laboriously lapped into a roof. The high vizar and his two acolytes were shut inside, which suited the workers, glad to see them go.
In teams of eight, slaves streamed from the vanished palace, fracturing and collapsing all eight bridges as they went. When the last paving stone fell into the mud, the palace foundation became a true island once more. Only shattered and scattered stepping stones gave access to the island, and none dared or wanted to venture there. Sitting outside the former moat on the circular road that led nowhere, slaves ate hearty rations, sipped water carefully rationed by overseers with swords, and napped through the heat of the day.
Awakened as the sun slanted to the west, the workers picked up shovels and baskets to finish the forbidding landscaping. Slaves and overseers and masons worked side by side to fetch and dump sand by the ton. Moving inward, industrious and mindless as ants, they filled the last vestiges of the moat, burying the mud and broken stone and the last of the brilliant frescoes under clean sand. When they reached the vast round floor, the exhausted workers buried the pink-white polished marble floor under a foot of sand, then poured basket after basket of sand over the crude stone hut at the very center, until only a low knob was visible.
