Citadels of the Lost (44 page)

All this pain, turmoil, and death because of a story that someone told years ago to people who were just gullible enough to believe it and pass it on to others.

He had tried to avert such a disaster at every step, and if Ch'drei had been bolder or had understood his vision of how to make use of this slave and his legend, then perhaps things would have turned out better for everyone. Now here he was with his back to the sea and a massacre about to unfold around his feet—which might well include his own death.

It was definitely time to leave. He had learned all he thought he could from this Belag. He would find his own way across the Straits of Erebus and track down this foolish human slave if he could. Then he would drag him back and gift him as a present to Ch'drei—although exactly how he would do that to his best advantage would have to be determined later. He had several delicious ideas that he occasionally savored in his mind when time permitted.

All that would have to wait until he was clear of the battle. The goblins seemed reasonable enough so long as Soen bent his pride a little and honored their customs. West, he decided, then around the Goblin Peaks and in search of a ship that equated more coins with fewer questions.

Soen returned to the tent, shouldered his pack, and then reached for his staff.

It was not there.

Soen frowned, baring a few of his sharp teeth. He was in a hurry and having to search through the tent for his staff was irritating. He felt certain that he had left it there against the traveling trunk Belag used but his recollections of the night before were a little hazy. The strategy meeting had fortunately been short but was overcompensated for by the imbibing of a great deal of fortified wine. Soen was no stranger to the drink but its effect on him had been stronger than he had expected.

He pushed aside a number of boxes, baskets, and urns, but the Matei staff stubbornly refused to appear.

Soen ran the long fingers of his hands through the sparse hair rimming his elongated head. He pinched the pointed end of his right ear trying to remember what he had done with the staff but the memory refused to dislodge.

“Soen!” It was a voice from outside the tent.

Soen groaned. It was Vendis. Soen was trying to slip out of camp quietly. Attention was the last thing he needed.

“Soen! I've found something!”

Soen set down the pack. “What is it?”

“Come out! It's the signal! You've got to see this!”

Soen turned and strode out of the tent. If he could deal with the chimerian quickly then . . .

Light exploded around him and his feet left the ground. Soen spun instinctively, readying himself for combat but there was nothing to fight, as he was held weightless in the air. A hazy glowing sphere surrounded him just beyond his reach. He stretched his arms and legs carefully to steady himself and looked down.

Below him, Vendis knelt on the ground gazing up at him with a wide and vicious grin on his otherwise featureless face.

In his hands he held a Matei staff, its base planted against the ground as its Aether magic held the Inquisitor in a stasis bubble twelve feet overhead.

“My own staff?”
Soen seethed through his sharp, clenched teeth.

“Recharged, as promised,” Vendis nodded. “Did you not know that the chimerians were the ones who first
sold
Aether magic to the Rhonas elves?”

Soen was trapped with no Aether of his own and nothing within reach that he could leverage to attack Vendis and reclaim his staff. The entire purpose of the stasis bubble was to render the opponent inert but the drain on the staff was severe. Soen relaxed.

“You can only keep that up for about six hours,” Soen observed. “I can wait that long to tear your heart from your rubber chest.”

“No, you can't,” Vendis replied. “My friends will be here to claim you long before then. You see, the battle has begun. The signal has already been given.”

Soen raised his head. Already the Legions were moving down the slope and into the valley.

“And please appreciate the beauty of this,” Vendis continued. “You
are
the signal!”

M
ALA RAN.

Urulani was both frustrated and amazed. The tan slave woman with the reddish hair was flying through the ruins as though death itself was at her heels. Urulani was a trained and skilled fighter, a woman of the Sondau Clans who had led raiding parties and had run long scouting sorties across the wide savanna of Vestasia but even she grudgingly admitted to herself that she was having trouble keeping up. Mala's red hair bobbed ahead of her, vanishing around fallen marble walls or shattered statuary. It was as though the woman had wings. Urulani followed her down the debris-covered avenue back to the enormous plaza where they had found the fold platforms. The warrior woman was having trouble believing that anything that old or that broken could ever bring them hope of deliverance, but Drakis had said it was so and she had come to believe in him even when he did not believe in himself.

Mala, however, did not even slow her pace as they approached the platforms. Her attention was set on the hilltop still visible to them on the northwest side of the city and the cascade of rocks that, if Mala were to be believed, was once a temple and tower.

If Mala were to be believed . . .

How could she have put her faith in her, too? She was a traitor who deserved death or worse for what she had done to Urulani's crew, let alone what she had done to Drakis and her own companions. How much blood was on Mala's hands—and Sondau blood at that—and yet there was something in Urulani that drove her to believe—to hope, perhaps, that if someone like Mala could be forgiven, then perhaps Urulani could be, too?

Was that what this was about? Urulani thought grimly to herself as she leaped over a masonry stone lying in shards. Who was Urulani chasing through these ruins? She thought for a moment that it might have been herself and, at the thought, smiled grimly.

You can never outrun yourself, she realized, but your past can catch up with you.

“Mala!” Urulani shouted. “Wait!”

“There's no time,” Mala responded as she raced around the southern side of the dark and foul-smelling pools surrounding the broken folds. “They are coming!
He
is coming!”

“Who?” Urulani called after Mala. “Who is coming?”

Mala gave no reply as she continued past the far end of the fold plaza and dashed down the broad, rubble-choked avenue beyond. It was more difficult for Urulani to see her through the jumble of stones. The street rose gently toward the distant hill that seemed to get no closer. Still she ran, frustrated that her long strides were bringing her no closer to Mala. Her own breath was becoming labored with effort. What was driving Mala, she wondered, that she should run with wings of the wind?

Glimpses of auburn hair continued to taunt her, driving her through the ruins. The way was growing steeper now, the streets narrower, and the way more confused. They were drawing higher above the city with every step toward the crest of the hill. The hilltop was near now—perhaps less than three hundred good strides—and she could clearly see the winding road that led to the ruin at its summit.

Urulani's eyes widened as the rubble opened again onto a wide plaza of perfectly fitted stones.

In the center of the plaza stood the feet and legs of a great colossus. Their form was breathtaking in its perfection but it was the head, torso and left hand that lay at the feet of the statue that captured her awed attention.

The face was stern yet passive, with a squared, dimpled chin and a narrow jaw. The bowed lips were small and supple and the brow furrowed over perfect eyes set looking to the left. The hair was curled and substantive, framing the face elegantly. The neck, shoulders, and arm were bare and the single arm was raised with an open palm bent away from the wrist, the fingers splayed as though the figure were either asking a question or beckoning. Urulani had seen sculptures before—the Hak'kaarin were often carting them from place to place across the plains and telling stories about them, but there was something so perfect about this statue that the raider captain found it was beyond definition by mere words or thought. It was the most beautiful thing that Urulani had ever seen—now lying amid the crumbling stones of the dead empire of humanity.

She stopped in her tracks. Tears welled up in her eyes. She bent over as the weight of the lost past settled on her shoulders—her own lost past reflected in the dead eyes of the fallen statue.

“Go back, Urulani,” Mala said. She stood next to the statue's head, stepping up toward the raider captain. “Drakis needs you and they are coming!”

“No,” Urulani said with a rough voice. She found it difficult to take her eyes away from the fallen colossus. “I'm coming with you.”

“You can't,” Mala said, her soft voice rolling across the silence of the plaza. “I have to go alone.”

Mala reached out, taking the long, brilliant red sash of the dwarf from Urulani's hands. Mala carefully rolled up the sash in her hands, cradling it in her arms like a child as she walked around the statue toward the opposite side of the clearing.

Urulani at last took her eyes from the stern, sad face of the statue, gazing across its ruin to Mala on the far side. “She is up there, isn't she?”

“Yes,” Mala said through a sad smile, her eyes fixed on the rolled, red sash. “And she is taking me home.”

“We're going together,” Urulani said, drawing herself upright.

Mala shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on the sash cradled in her arms.

Anger welled up suddenly from deep within Urulani. “I am . . . I am the captain of this expedition! You will do what I say! I am . . . I am in command . . . I command . . .”

Mala shook her head again, looking up with her sad smile. “I have always been a slave, Urulani. You have run the open plains and conquered the winds and the sea—your life is as far from mine as the stars from the ground. All my life—what I have managed to remember of it—I have been a slave to other people's will, other people's choices. The elves enslaved me the day I came from my mother's womb. They stole my choices from me and made them for me. Then I thought I was given back my choice when the Well failed a lifetime ago in House Timuran. I didn't want the gift—I wanted other people to make my choices for me. And they were
still
making them for me because they had broken my mind years ago and made me a slave to my own confused thoughts and memories. Fear made my choices for me then—fear of the elves, fear of freedom, fear of having no one take care of me, fear of having to choose. Now
you
want to make me
your
slave by commanding me. Drakis wants to make me
his
slave by taking me back to the south and helping me forget. He thinks it would be a kindness but it would just be another form of slavery and—benevolent as his intentions would begin, it would destroy us both.”

Mala drew in a breath.

“Now I choose for myself,” she said. She nodded back down the ruined road behind Urulani. “Run back to him. He will fail without you. When the key is found, then I will go home. We will all go home.”

Urulani turned to look back down the road behind her. From their height, she could more easily discern the layout of the city as it must have once been; the broad avenues in spiderweb lines that converged first at the fold platforms and then at a large structure behind that must have been the palace of the draconic lords. Farther past the fold plaza, forming the third apex of the triangle, was the ruin of the Citadel of Light where Drakis and the rest were awaiting their signal.

Urulani's large, dark eyes narrowed.

Something was moving across the dead city, like a slow tide from the southern edges of the ruins. Its flow had shifted to the left and right as it converged toward the ruined Citadel of Light.

“Drakoneti!” Urulani growled turning back to face Mala. “You knew they were . . .”

Mala was gone.

Urulani turned back to face the south, frantically gazing down on the ruined city spread below her. What had Mala said? “They” were coming. “He” was coming.

The drakoneti were flooding into the city by the thousands, moving to encircle the ruined Citadel. Over the river to her right she now could see the dark shape of a dragon, its wings barely visible in the sunlight as it flew directly toward Urulani . . . and the ruined temple behind her at the top of the hill.

Urulani roared in anger and fear.

In that moment, Urulani knew that Mala had betrayed them all, had led the dragon to them and would, she had no doubt, hand over the key to the dragon to save her own worthless skin at the cost of all their lives.

“Not if I can stop her,” Urulani vowed, drawing her sword as she rushed past the fallen colossus and charged up the winding road toward the ruined temple.

She was halfway to the top when she saw the red banner of the dwarf's sash unfurl from a stone peak of a fallen tower near the crest of the hill.