buy copies… He tried to think what he had to offer for trade.
“Prince?”
“What?” Geder said. “Oh, yes. Yes, the old temple. That’s where I’d like to go. Do we have to wait for morning? We could go now.”
“Morning, sir,” the young man said. “You stay with us tonight.”
The village boasted two dozen wooden shacks clustered together in a stand of ash. Perhaps a hundred people lived in the dry, quiet squalor. In the high air above them, hawks called and glided, spiraling up toward the sun. Geder had his squire put his tent beside the lakeshore just outside the radius of the village with each of the servants set to keep watch for a part of the night. Not that five servants would be enough to defend him if the locals turned ugly, but if a little warning was the most he could get, he’d take that.
At sunset, an old woman came to his camp with a bowl of mashed roots with bits of cooked meat in it. He thanked her, gave her a few of his remaining copper coins, and then buried the food without eating a bite. The heat of the day poured up out of the ground, and the chill night air came off the water. Geder lay on his cot, his mind perfectly awake and restless. The long, slow dread waiting for sleep had become the hardest part of his day. The poor food, the mind-killing monotony of the trail, the profound loneliness all grated on him, yes, but in the quiet moments between lying down in the darkness and actual forgetfulness, all the things he was running from seemed to catch up with him.
He imagined what might have happened back in Camnipol. The conspiracy behind the attempted coup might have been rooted out, hung in the streets. That would have been the best hope. Or maybe another wave of hired swords had come and slaughtered half the court. He wondered whether Jorey Kalliam’s father had given him the same advice that Geder had taken. What part of the world would Jorey have gone to, if he were avoiding the upheaval?
Geder imagined coming home to a kingdom utterly changed. What if Asterilhold had paid the mercenaries as the first strike of a comprehensive invasion? When Geder turned toward home, there might be no Antea, no Severed Throne, no Rivenhalm. His father might be dead even now.
Or Klin and his men might have come into favor again. Geder pictured himself riding through the eastern gate only to find guards at the ready to arrest him and throw him into the public gaol. He stood on a platform, looking out over a sea of seared, burned faces-Vanai, killed at his order-before he realized that he was finally slipping down into dream.
In the morning, the dreams faded and his servants brought him a double handful of dried apples and a tin cup of water. Half a dozen men had congregated at a trailhead. A low cart squatted beside them, loaded with baskets of dried beans and three freshly slaughtered goats. Offerings, apparently, for the temple. The oldest of the men clapped his hands fast and loud, and the others grabbed thick ropes, pulling the cart across the thin dirt. Geder followed on horseback, the only man in the company riding.
The trail they followed snaked through the hills, clinging to the sides of crevasses and cliffs. The stone itself changed, becoming more jagged and sharp, as if centuries of erosion had failed to soften it. Geder found himself speculating about the relationship of the landscape to the dragon’s roads. Could the same endurance also have been given to the broken land here? Was this what marked the Sinir mountains from those around them?
The shapes of some stones was peculiarly organic. There were soft, almost graceful curves, and places where the stones seemed to fit together, articulated like bones. In one meadow they passed through, a collection of curved terraces was marked by borders of a pale, porous rock that matched neither the arid desert stones Geder had become used to nor the new, uneven geography. The effect was as if a giant had died there, leaving its ribs in a jumble on the land. Geder looked up and saw the skull.
The broad forehead alone was as long as his horse. He could have crouched inside the empty eye sockets. The muzzle disappeared into the earth, as if the fallen dragon were drinking from the land itself, and five blade-long teeth still clung to the jaw. Centuries of fierce sunlight had bleached the bone, but wind, sand, and rain hadn’t worn it down. Geder pulled his mount to a halt, gaping. The villagers kept hauling their cart, talking to each other, trading a skin of water among them. Geder dismounted and walked to the skull. He hesitated, reached out a hand, and touched the sun-warmed dragon bone. The corpse had lain here for thousands of years. Since before humanity had begun its history.
“Prince?” the young man from the village called. “Come! Come!”
Trembling, Geder lifted himself back into the saddle and trotted along.
The sun hadn’t shifted more than a hand’s span when the group made a final turn around a high stand of scattered boulders each as large as a sailing ship, and the temple came into view. Carved into the stone of the mountain, the dark holes of doorways and windows stared out into the landscape. Geder had the brief sensation of being stared at by a single, huge insectile eye. A wall as tall as the defenses of Camnipol marked the end of the trail. Huge, towering statues of what had once been human figures were set into the stone along the wall like sentries, their features eroded into knobs and stumps, and a huge spread-winged dragon towered above them all. Great banners shifted in the breeze, one at each of the thirteen statues. Each was a field of a different color-blue, green, yellow, orange, red, brown, black, through thirteen distinct shades-with a pale circle in the center cut by four lines into eight sections.
Its sigil was of cardinal and intercardinal showing the eight directions of the world in which no falsehood could hide. The sign of the Righteous Servant. Tears leapt to Geder’s eyes, and something like relief flooded him. Triumph, perhaps. This was the place. He’d found it.
They drew nearer, and the longer it took, the more Geder understood the breathtaking scale of the place. A huge iron gate hung at the front of the wall, imposing and forbidding. Above it, in a brutal script, were the words Khinir Kicgnam Bat, each letter as tall as a man. Geder squinted up at them, struggling to make his translation while still half drunk with wonder.
Bound is not broken.
The villagers brought their cart to a stop still fifty yards from the great iron doors. Geder saw now that a section within the door itself was set with a complex of swirling gears. The interlocked teeth clanked once, shifted, and the section of iron parted like a curtain. Six men walked out toward them. They had the same general features as the villagers, though with more roundness to their cheeks and oil sleeking their hair. They wore black robes tied with lengths of chain at the waist and sandals that wrapped their ankles. The men of the village knelt. Geder bowed, but didn’t dismount. His horse shifted uneasily beneath him.
The priests looked at one another, then turned to the young man who had led the group.
“Who is this?” the eldest of the priests asked.
“A stranger,” the young man said. “He came asking after the Sinir. We brought him to you, the way the Kleron told us.”
Geder urged his horse closer. The grandness of the place had made the beast skittish, but he held the reins tightly. The eldest priest stepped toward him.
“Who are you?” the monk asked.
“Geder Palliako, son of the Viscount Palliako of Rivenhalm.”
“I don’t know this place.”
“I’m a subject of King Simeon of Antea,” Geder said. And then when the priest stayed silent, “Antea’s a very important kingdom. Empire, really. Center of Firstblood culture and power.”
“Why have you come here?”
“Well,” Geder said, “that’s a long story. I was in Vanai. That’s one of the Free Cities, or, really it was. It’s gone now. But I found some books, and they were talking about this… Ah… They called it the Righteous Servant or the Sinir Kushku, and it was supposed to have been designed by the dragon Morade during the fall of the empire, and I thought that if I could use the different descriptions of where it was compared with the times when the accounts were made I might be able to… find it.”
The priest frowned up at him.
“Have you heard of the Righteous Servant?” Geder asked. “By any chance?”
He wondered what he would do if the man said no. He couldn’t bring himself to ride back out. Not after seeing this.
“We are the servants of the Servant,” the man said. His voice was rich with pride and certainty.
“That’s excellent. That’s just what I’d hoped! May I…” Geder’s words tumbled over themselves, and he had to stop, cough, and collect himself. “I was hoping, if you have archives… Or if I could speak with you. Find out
