Heir Of Novron: The Riyria Revelations (65 page)

“Through his bureaucracy the emperor controlled everything, from the forests to mines, farms, granaries, shipyards, and cloth mills. Corruption was held in check by appointing more than one head of each department and by rotating them out frequently. They never appointed local men who might have ties to those they administered to. Even prostitution was regulated by the empire.

“Percepliquis was a place of great wealth. The center of the empire’s trade that spanned all of Apeladorn and reached even into the exotic Westerlins and north into Estrendor, it bustled with richly dressed merchants and the roads were legendary. They were huge, wide thoroughfares of well-laid stone, perfectly straight, that ran for miles in all directions. Trees were planted on either side of them to provide shade, and they were well maintained and marked with milestones. Wells and shelters were placed at regular intervals for the comfort of travelers.

“There was no famine, no crime, no disease or plague. No
droughts were ever recorded, nor floods, nor even harsh frosts. Food was always plentiful, and no one was poor.”

“I can see why the Imperialists want to recapture that ideal,” Alric observed.

“Which just goes to show how foolish people can be,” Gaunt said. “No famine, no drought, no disease, no poor? There’s about as much chance of that happening as—”

“As you becoming emperor?” Royce asked.

Gaunt scowled.

“So what should we be looking for?” Royce asked.

Myron shook his head. “I don’t know,” he replied, and glanced at Arista.

“The tomb of Novron,” the princess told them.

“Oh.” Myron brightened. “That would be under the palace in the center of the city.”

“Any way to identify it?”

“It’s a huge white building with a solid-gold dome,” Arista answered for him, gaining several surprised looks. She shrugged. “I’m guessing.”

Myron nodded. “Good guess.”

They moved on as before, with Royce in the lead, fleet of foot as always, investigating shadows and crevices, his light bobbing. Alric and Mauvin followed at a distance in a manner that reminded Hadrian of a fox hunt. Arista and Myron walked together, both staring up at their surroundings with great interest. Gaunt and Magnus followed them, occasionally speaking in whispers. Hadrian brought up the rear once more, glancing over his shoulder repeatedly. He already missed Wyatt and Elden.

They followed a passage that wove between collapsed rockfalls until they reached a street of neatly paved stones, each cut in a hexagon and fitted with stunning precision.
Here, at last, the mounds of rubble gave way, allowing them to view the shattered remains of the once-magnificent city that rose around them.

Great buildings of rose or white stone, tarnished by age and curtained in debris, had lost none of their beauty. What immediately captured Hadrian’s attention was how tall they were. Pillars and arches soared hundreds of feet in the air, supporting marvelously decorated entablatures and pediments. Great domes of burnished bronze and stone-crowned buildings with diameters in excess of a hundred feet were far larger than anything he had ever seen before. Colonnades supporting a row of arches ran for hundreds of yards as mere decoration, standing out before load-bearing walls. Statues of unknown men were exquisitely sculpted such that they might move at any minute. They adorned silent fountains, pedestals, and building facades.

The grandeur of the city was stunning, as was its rattled state. Each building, each pillar, each stone appeared to have dropped from some great height. Blocks of stone lay askew and shifted out of place. Some teetered beyond imagination, loose, twisted, and misaligned so that it looked as if the weight of a sparrow would topple a structure of a thousand tons. The devastation was not even or predictable. Some buildings missed whole walls. Most no longer had roofs, while others revealed the shift of only a few stones. Despite the disarray, other aspects of the city were astonishingly preserved. A seller’s market stood untouched; brooms remained standing, stacked on display. A pot stall exhibited several perfect clay urns, their brilliant ceramic glazes of red and yellow dimmed only by a coat of fine dust. On the left side of the street, in front of a disheveled four-story residence, lay three skeletons, their clothes still on them but rotted nearly to dust.

“What happened to this place?” Gaunt asked.

“No one knows exactly,” Myron replied, “although there have been many theories. Theodor Brindle asserted that it was the wrath of Maribor for the murder of his blood. Deco Amos the Stout found evidence that it was destroyed by the Cenzar, in particular the wizard Esrahaddon. Professor Edmund Hall, whose trail we are on, believed it was a natural catastrophe. After crossing the salty sea and seeing the state of the city, he concluded in his journal that the ancient city sat upon a cavern of salt, which was dissolved with a sudden influx of water, thus causing the city above to collapse. There are several other more dubious explanations, such as demons, and even one rumor concerning the bitterness of dwarves and how they pulled it down out of spite.”

“Bah!” Magnus scoffed. “Humans always blame dwarves. A baby goes missing and it was a dwarf that stole it. A princess runs off with a second son of a king and it was a dwarf who lured her to a deep prison. And when they find her with the prince—lo, she was rescued!”

“A king is stabbed in the back in his own chapel, and a princess’s tower is turned into a death trap,” Royce called back to them. “Friends are betrayed and trapped in a prison—yes, I can see your surprise. Where do they get such ideas?”

“Damn his elven ears,” Magnus said.

“What?” Gaunt asked, shocked. “Royce is an elf?”

“No, he’s not,” Alric said. He looked back over his shoulder. “Is he?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Arista replied.

“Royce?”

The bobbing light halted. “I don’t see how this is the time or place for discussing my lineage.”

“Gaunt brought it up. I was just asking. You don’t look elven.”

“That’s because I am a
mir
. I’m only part elven, and since I never met my parents, I can’t tell you any more than that.”

“You’re part elven?” Myron said. “How wonderful for you. I don’t think I’ve ever met an elf. Although I have met you, so perhaps I have met others and don’t know it. Still, it is quite exciting, isn’t it?”

“Is this going to be an issue?” Royce asked the king. “Are you planning on questioning my allegiance?”

“No, no, I wasn’t,” Alric said. “You’ve always been a loyal servant—”

Hadrian started walking forward, wondering if he had returned Royce’s dagger too soon.

“Servant? Loyal?” Royce asked, his voice growing lower and softer.

Never a good sign
, Hadrian thought. “Royce, we need to keep moving, right?”

“Absolutely,” he said, staring directly at Alric.

“What did I say?” the king asked after Royce resumed his advance. “I was merely—”

“Stop,” Hadrian told him. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, but just stop. He can still hear you and you’ll only make matters worse.”

Alric appeared as if he would speak again, but then scowled and moved on. Arista offered her brother a sympathetic look as she passed him.

They continued in silence, following the light. On occasion Royce whispered for them to wait, and they sat in silence, tense and worried. Hadrian kept his hands on the pommels of his swords, watching and listening. Then Royce would return and off they would go once more.

They moved to a much wider boulevard. The buildings became more elaborate, taller, often with facades of chiseled columns. Pillars lined the avenue, tall monoliths covered in
detailed engravings, epigraphs and images of men, women, and animal figures. One very large building was totally shattered, forcing them to climb over a mountain of rubble. The going was treacherous, with slabs of broken rock the size of houses that were loose enough to shift with their weight. Driven to inch along ledges and crawl through dark holes, they all welcomed a rest on the far side.

They sat on what had once been a great flight of marble steps, which now went nowhere and looked down the city’s main road. Each building was tall and made from finely carved stone, usually a white marble or rose-colored granite. Fountains appeared intermittently along the wide thoroughfare, and as he stared, Hadrian could imagine a time when children ran in the streets, splashing in the pools and swinging from the spear arm a statue held out. He could almost see the colorful awnings, the markets, the crowds. Music and the smells of exotic food would fill the air, much like in Dagastan, only here the streets were clean, the air cool. What a wonderful place it must have been, what a wonderful time to have lived.

“A library,” Myron whispered as they sat, his eyes fixed on a tall circular building with a small dome and a colonnade surrounding it.

“How do you know?” Arista asked.

“It says so,” he replied. “On top there:
IMPERIAL REPOSITORY OF TOMES AND KNOWLEDGE
, roughly translated, at least. I don’t suppose I could…” He trailed off, his eyes hopeful.

“If you go in there, we might never get you out,” Hadrian said.

“We need to camp and we still don’t know anything about the horn,” Arista said. “If Myron could find something…”

“I’ll take a look,” Royce said. “Hadrian, come with me. Everyone else wait here.”

Just as if he were on a job, Royce circled the library twice, making a careful study of the entrances and exits before moving to the two great bronze doors, each decorated in ornate sculptured relief depicting a bisected scene of a man handing a scroll and a laurel to a younger man amidst the aftermath of a great battle. Hadrian noticed a river and a familiar-looking tower at the edge of a waterfall in the upper right. The doors were marred badly, dented and bent, bearing marks from a large blunt hammer.

Hadrian slowly, quietly drew one sword. Royce set down and hooded the lantern, then pulled the doors open and slipped inside. One of the many rules Hadrian had learned from the start was never to follow Royce into a room.

That was how it all had gone so bad in Ervanon.

Royce had slipped into the Crown Tower as delicately as a moth through a window. Yet unlike on the previous night, the room was not empty. A priest sat in the small outer chamber. It did not matter, as he had not seen or heard Royce, but then Hadrian blundered in. The man screamed. They ran—Royce one way, Hadrian the other. It was a coin flip that Hadrian won. The guards came around the tower on Royce’s side. While they were busy chasing and wrestling Royce down, Hadrian made it back to the rope. He was safe. All he had to do was climb back down, retrieve his horse from the thickets, and ride away. That was exactly what Royce expected him to do, what Royce would have done in his place, but back then Royce did not know him.

Hadrian heard the three taps from inside the library and, grabbing the lantern, crept inside. It was black and he was met with a terrible confluence of smells. The dominant odor was a
thick burnt-wood scent, but a more pungent rotted-meat stink managed to cut through. From the darkness, he heard Royce say, “We’re clear, light it up.”

Hadrian lifted the lantern’s hood to reveal a scorched hall. Burned black and filled with piles of ash, the room was still beautiful beyond anything else Hadrian had ever seen. Four stories tall, the walls circling him were marvelously crafted tiers of marble arcades. Towering pillars ringed the coffered dome and supported the great arches joining the arcades to each other. Around the rim, a colonnade of white marble was interspersed with lifelike bronze statues of twelve men, each of which had to be at least twenty feet tall. From the floor they appeared life-sized. Great chandeliers of gold hung around the perimeter. The black cracked remains of tables formed a circular pattern of desks with a great office in the center. A fresco painting of wonderful scenes of various landscapes formed the lower part of the dome, while the greater portion, made of glass, now lay in shards scattered across the beautiful mosaic floor.

In the center of the room, near the office bench, was its only inhabitant. Surrounded by a few singed books, papers, quills, three lanterns, and an oilcan lay what remained of an old man. He was on his back, his head resting on a knapsack, his legs wrapped in a blanket. Like Bernie, this man was dead, and as he had Bernie, Hadrian recognized him.

“Antun Bulard,” he said, and knelt beside the body of the elderly man he had befriended in Calis. He was not as ravaged by death as Bernie—no sea crabs here. Bulard, who had always been pale in life, was now a bluish gray, his complexion waxy. His white hair was brittle and spectacles still rested on the end of his nose.

“Bernie was right,” Hadrian told Bulard. “You didn’t survive the trip, but then again, neither did he.”

Hadrian used the old man’s blanket to wrap him up and together they carried his body out and set it off to the side under a pile of rocks. The smell lingered, but it was not nearly as pungent.

When the others arrived, they stared with disappointment, Myron most of all. Exhaustion won out and they threw their packs down while Royce relocked the door.

Myron looked up, his eyes scanning the tiers and countless aisles where books must have once lay, but now they housed only piles of ash, and Hadrian noticed the monk’s hands tremble.

“We’ll rest here for a few hours,” Royce said.