they stopped, the cat had its jaws around the hare’s neck, patient now as it suffocated its prey.
Mena looked away, as unsatisfied with the outcome as she had been watching the pursuit. “That’s my decision,” she said.
“But the queen…” Perrin began.
“We leave here immediately,” Mena said. “Sail to Port Grace. From there we march inland to Tahalian. We’ll winter in the fortress and adjust to whatever challenges the thaw brings with it. Go and see to it.”
T he next afternoon Mena sent a ship south to alert the small settlement of Port Grace that they would soon be inundated with a passing army. On it she also sent a note to be flown by messenger bird, once they were far enough south to ensure the bird would know the landmarks. She had spent the previous night composing a long missive to explain the situation in all its complexity. In the morning, she ripped it to pieces. Instead the message she sent was terser.
Queen Corinn,
The plan to meet the enemy in the far north is untenable. I am moving the army to Mein Tahalian. We will winter there, training.
With your permission, I will lift Haleeven Mein’s exile and ask for his aid…
CHAPTER THREE
When Dariel Akaran first looked upon the ruins he had to steady himself by grasping Birke’s shoulder. “Scoop it up,” the young Wrathic man said, grinning and lifting Dariel’s drooping jaw with a finger. “You’ll catch flies like that.”
They stood at the summit of a hill on an old road that snaked down into the valley. A great ruin of an ancient metropolis stretched before them. The city reached up to the hills that held them in, wrapped completely by a defensive wall that rose and fell over the contours of the ridgelines. Dariel got lost in gazing at the maze of thoroughfares and alleys, buildings and spires of what must once have been a grand city. It matched Alecia in size, but the pale green of the building stones showed an intricacy of workmanship that would have left Acacian architects envious.
“What is this place?” the prince asked.
“Amratseer,” Mor said. She came up and stood beside them. She said a sentence in Auldek.
“What?”
“ Seeren gith’va.”
Birke translated. “A dead city.”
“Dead? It’s hardly dead.”
Large beaked birds patrolled the skies in raucous groups; gray doves labored into the air; black starlings darted, seemingly for the joy it. Golden-haired monkeys similar to those on Acacia sprinted around the streets and lounged on rooftops, calling to each other in argumentative bursts. Behind that, there was another sound, the rustle of vegetation slowly engulfing the city, as quiet and relentless as a constricting snake winding tighter and tighter around its prey. There was life in abundance here, just not the sort the makers of the place had intended.
Since Dariel dropped down from those slabs of granite, following Mor eight days before, this new world had swallowed him whole. With Tam and Anira, the other two who had come with them, they spent the first day climbing over high fingers of stone, plunging into damp forests, and climbing up over more fingers of stone. That night they had camped in a cave mouth that opened toward the west. Dariel sat staring at the sun setting over an unending undulation of forest, as vast as the ocean.
The third afternoon they had followed the banks of a tributary of the Sheeven Lek. The river water was crystal clear, rippling liquid glass that displayed the blue stones of the riverbed and banks. When they stopped to eat, Dariel stripped off his shirt and prepared to leap in, ripe with the sweat and dirt of so much walking.
Birke caught him by the arm. “You don’t want to do that.”
A short time later Birke led him to the trunk of a fallen tree, atop which they could look at a deep pool at a bend in the river. Beneath them schools of crimson-finned fish swam in shifting ribbons of motion, stretching thin and then clumping together, one school joining another and then splitting. They could have been dancing some elaborate routine. Dariel asked if they were edible.
“Oh, yes. Very tasty.”
That was when it happened. A section of stones on the bottom of the river slid forward slowly at first and then with a sudden upward rush. Dariel stared as a gaping slit opened. It yawned wider than a person was tall, and engulfed an entire swath of the unfortunate fish. Only when its maw shut again and the creature swam forward with leisurely, pleased swipes of its tail did Dariel understand that it was a massive salamander of some sort. Its back was patterned to replicate the blue stones of the river. It had only to stop moving to become invisible.
“Anything else I should be afraid of?” Dariel asked.
“Plenty of things.”
T he fourth day they snaked down through crevasses cut deep into the whitish stone of the earth by a labyrinthine network of narrow streams. It was a different world, with forests of amazingly thin trees that stood side by side at any bend in the river-anyplace that afforded a chance at sunlight-and stretched upward, branchless, until their crowns could explode in plumes of long, narrow leaves. Tiny birds darted through the trees. They made their nests well up in them, cast between several like hammocks.
In places the walls pressed in so close on either side that the group disrobed and swam with their clothes and supplies bundled on top of their heads. Dariel’s heart thrummed in his chest, more from fear of hidden creatures than from the exertion. Despite this, his eyes still managed to linger on the patterning of tattoos on Mor’s back, on the way her blond hair billowed in the water, and on the lovely motion of her legs. Mor herself rarely looked at him. She may have been his escort to meet the Elder Yoen at the Sky Isle, but the role had not made her any warmer toward him. She made it clear that she had left her heart with Skylene back in Avina.
I guess that makes her heartless, Dariel had thought.
A t the close of the fifth day they climbed back to the surface of the world and camped, sheltered by the thick roots at the base of some massive trees. The next morning the prince awoke lying on his back, with something gripping the sides of his head, pressing on his chest, and still another thing moving inside his mouth. He opened his eyes and stared into the metallic blue, bulbous face of some sort of enormous insect. Its eyes were each the size of a man’s handprint, moist and as delicate looking as soap bubbles. A pulsing tube from the center of the face extended into Dariel’s mouth, and the long stretch of its segmented body pressed him down.
Dariel tried to swat at it, but one of the creature’s many limbs pinned his wrist down. He tried the other hand, but he got no further than wriggling his fingers. He kicked and thrashed and screamed. Or he tried to do those things. He could not actually kick because the creature had lowered its segmented torso onto his, and the cage of its legs trapped his own. So pinned at all his points, he created little actual motion. Whatever the creature had inserted in his mouth made it impossible to vocalize. That did not stop him from screaming inside his mind.
Tam’s face came into view, looking down at him calmly, his eyes shadowed by the dark, circular tattoos of the Fru Nithexek’s sky bear. A moment later Anira and Birke and finally Mor appeared as well. None of them shared his alarm. Anira reached out and stroked the creature’s side gently. Dariel directed all his confusion into wrinkling his forehead. Birke laughed and made some remark. In answer, Anira brushed her palms over the creature’s eyes and then leaned her forehead against it. The tube in Dariel’s mouth withdrew, a feeling like many fingers that had been pressing his teeth and tongue the roof of his mouth releasing all at once. The creature’s bulbous head turned, its legs rippling into motion as it curled away from Dariel.
The prince wrenched himself to one side and scrambled to his feet, spitting and cursing, wiping his mouth. He cast about to locate the monster, and saw it slipping away on its numerous legs. The others laughed.
“They’re harmless, Dariel,” Mor said. “Dou worms, they’re called. You should thank them.” She said something in Auldek. The others grinned. She began to turn away, but could not stop from translating for him. “I said that it has just cleaned your teeth for you. It will improve your breath.”
T hat evening, looking out over Amratseer, Dariel felt the parameters of how he measured the world crumbling. In this place monsters hid in plain sight. One beast might appear to swallow you whole. Another might improve your hygiene. This land was cluttered with signs of a civilization older by ages than his own, and yet cities
