The Assassin King (30 page)

The legendary city was said to have been located on the Lu-cretoria, the ancient merchant road along which trade in silks and seeds, spices, textiles, salt, jewels, and ore was known to haye traveled. It was not known how long the indigenous population of the continent had been traversing that primitive road, but by the time the Cymrians arrived in what was now the province of Yarim, the Lucretoria had all but crumbled back into the red clay and the sand, and Kurimah Milani existed in nothing more than legend.

The myth was alive enough still, however, to spawn the occasional pilgrimage, small caravans of the sick and infirm for whom all other options had been exhausted, desperately combing the empty desert for even the smallest sign of the renowned healing springs, the fabled sun-beds in which the suffering could bask, like desert lizards, absorbing the red rays of a healing sun, the fountains of crystalline water that poured forth from the hands of gentle-eyed statues, said to be able to purge the most insistent of disease, or die great gem-stone that had been rumored to clear mental deformities or illnesses of the mind with a mere touch.

All they found was the wind and stinging red sand.

Sometimes hope is the only thing that keeps a legend alive. The earthquake mat took Kurimah Milani into the depths of the desert centuries before the Cymrians came swept all trace of it from human sight, but even that enormous temblor could not erase the deeper sense that somewhere, lost in the monotonous, endless landscape of cold red clay and scrubby vegetation, was a place where miracles still lurked, dormant for centuries, but nonetheless waiting to be found by the patient, the intrepid, or the desperate. Hope kept that sense alive, even when all other searching was exhausted.

Sometimes, however, there is more man hope.

Sometimes there is reason. The dragon could hear the music long before she knew what she had found. Exhaustion owned her now; she no longer had the strength to be a slave to hatred.

She had long passed the point of return, her mind fading into the numbness that precedes death. Deep within the ground, her dragon sense could no longer discern any minutiae in the world around her, but rather it was monitoring her fading life, counting the beats of her three-chambered heart as it strained to pump the blood welling within her.

And so, when her darkening mind heard the first notes of the ancient song echoing through the earth, she could not tell whether the sound was from the outside world, or whether it was just the noise of her own death approaching.

After a mile or more of crawling toward it, her thoughts began to clear, her mind to focus, and the beast realized that the tone was modulating in a consistent fashion, following a musical pattern that was soothing to her fractured mind and desiccating body. She could feel her blood-starved tissues rehydrating slightly, humming with a renewed vitality. Her heartbeat strengthened, her sight brightened where it had gone dim.

The dragon stopped and lay still for a moment, listening.

The earth through which she was traveling seemed to recede, leaving her tattered skin buzzing pleasantly. The music reached deep into her torn flesh and revitalized it, giving her just enough strength to gather herself and continue her journey, her dragon sense, now awake again, following the song in the ground like a beacon.

The louder the vibration echoed through the earth, the more confident the dragon felt. There was a sense of revitaiization, rejuvenation, in each mile she traveled, stripping away the despair and fear, encouraging her even as the blood continued to flow from her, even as her heart began to fail.

Perhaps I am entering the Afterlife, she mused as she crawled, though she had little remembrance what the Afterlife was.

She was unaware of the disruption of earth she was causing in her journey. As always, when she traveled at a depth of less than a mile, the strata of earth erupted, leaving fissures in her wake, uprooting what few specimens of scrub vegetation remained in the lifeless desert, uncovering long-dead skeletons of men and animals and carts that had been long lost in the shifting sands. The music filled her ears now, humming in her skin beneath the scales of her hide. It filled her mind with dreams that bled over into her eyes, and so as she traveled, following the sound, the sight into the Past that was her birthright began to take over. What was visible to her eyes was the dry and lifeless clay that the desert had become in the Present, but me second sight within her envisioned something entirely different, a younger, newer land where desert flowers still bloomed, where low-growing trees offered shade to the native animals of the wasteland and the caravans of humans and dromedaries that plied the Lucretoria, passing by Kurimah Milani in great splashes of the color and noise of commerce.

She was seeing the place not as it lay buried before her, but as it once had been, two millennia before. Looming before her was a glistening sight, shining in me rays of me setting sun.

Minarets towered high toward the clouds, a musical welcome ringing from their domed towers. Beyond the entrance gates clear water from fountains leapt and splashed, catching the sunset's rays and falling into lapis lazuli pools, carrying the warm colors with it.

The dragon's damaged heart leapt in excitement. The concept of mirage was completely beyond her ability to conceive, me understanding mat she was still within the earth completely gone from her awareness. In her mind she could see all around her me glistening walls of me healing city as she passed through the great gated aqueduct, where streams of crystal water rained down on all those who entered. She closed her eyes as she passed beneath the memory of the medicinal waterfall, feeling the coolness of me spray as it showered her skin, easing her pain, cooling the fire within her.

Insanity must cause the arms to grow, for nothing is out of reach of the madman, a sage once said within her hearing. Had her fragmented mind seen the darkness of the tunnels that, in reality, loomed around her, if it could grasp that the healing spray was nothing more than showers of grit and sand falling upon her, it might have kept her from discovering what treasure still actually remained beneath the blowing sand and red desert clay.

Water, the beast thought as she burrowed past the broken towers buried in twenty centuries of sand, past the wreckage of stone walls and shattered statuary, leaving a trail of dark blood in her wake. Nothing but the song of the place was sustaining her now; her body, more shell than flesh, hummed with the vibration of this place of ancient healing, but even the power of the memory of Kurimah Milani could not replace the life's blood that was leaking from her sundered heart. There is water here, I know it. And she was right. Even though the infamous water gardens had been utterly destroyed in the temblor, and while the copious healing pools and mineral baths filled to overflowing by hot springs running down from the mountains in the distance had been consumed at the same moment of cataclysm, deep beneath the surface sand there were still the remnants of a stream that trickled through the buried vaults that had once been public baths. In her confusion the dragon had come upon one of the central fountains of the city, a deep, long cavern that had, in its heyday, ran the length of a vast interior courtyard surrounded by columns of gleaming marble encrusted with mother-of-pearl from mollusk shells culled from the Erim Rus. Her inner vision led her immediately to the stream, which she saw as a deep pool in which splashing spray danced skyward in time to the fluctuating music of the place. Greedily she drank from it, following its source in search of more water. A vibration surrounded her suddenly, humming in a tone very different from the one she had been following, irritating her eyes and parts of her skin, but she shook it off. At

the headwaters of the stream her mouth and eyes were suddenly filled with sunlight, golden and thick enough to be palpable.

The wyrm gasped in delight. The amber nectar was sweet on her tongue and soothing to the caustic burning of her throat that had been plaguing her since her injury. She drank in more of the thickened sunlight, swallowed it in desperate gulps, feeling its sustenance fill her, strengthen her, cooling the fire in her belly, bringing her peace.

She rolled onto her back in the stream and exhaled slowly, then fell into dreamless, healing sleep.

The holy citadel of Sepulvarta, the City of Reason

Before leaving Sepulvarta in secret to meet with the Lord and Lady Cymrian, the Patriarch had ordered the city sealed. Being the central location of all holy orders within the Patrician faith, as well as a place of pilgrimage to those of other practices, even as far back as the polytheistic religions of the continent that preceded the Cymrian era, Sepulvarta had a long reputation of religious tolerance and free access. The road that led from the trans-Orlandan thoroughfare south to the city, known as the Pilgrim's Road, was always teeming with human and animal traffic, pilgrims and clergy, tradesmen and merchants, all making their way for their own reasons to the independent city-state. On normal days it might take as little as an hour to traverse the road and enter the city; on holy days, or days of heavy import at the time of festivals or famine, the wait could be the better part of a full turn of the sun. On rare occasions visitors to Sepulvarta could pass more than a few nights, sleeping in the street or at one of the many hostels and inns that lined the roadway, waiting to be allowed entrance through the one gate in the enormous wall that circled the entire city.

Sealing the city was a precaution that was not unheard of. Occasionally the flow of visitors to the sacred spots and shrines overwhelmed the places of hospitality within the city's walls.

With the inns and wayhouses full, the taverns and pubs gained more guests and patrons than they could accommodate, leading to long lines for food and ale, ugly dispositions and threats, and often violence, all of which was deemed unacceptable for a holy city. The previous Patriarchs, rather than removing the hospitality, as had been done in the oldest days, chose to keep the ale and remove the patrons, at least temporarily, until the holy days were over and the flow of traffic returned to normal.

So when the city was ordered sealed, no one thought the better of it.

As it turned out, it was the one thing that prevented its immediate destruction and that of the farming settlements around it. Sepulvarta had the worst of both lands that it bordered. North of mountainous Sorbold, south of the wide-open plains of Roland, it was a city perched on a small hill on the edge of the low piedmont and in the midst of the flattest part of the Krevensfield Plain, which served to make it easily visible to travelers and all but indefensible.

Fortunately, as the holy See of both nations, there had never been any reason for it to mount a defense. Even in the seven hundred years of the Cymrian War, as the Krevensfield Plain burned with atrocities and the mountains rang with horrific battle, the holy city remained untouched, though, as Anborn had informed the Council, that had merely been by coincidence. By the time his army had taken the farming settlements in the region, it had been far easier to quarter the soldiers in places of plentiful

food where they were dispersed, rather than making a headquarters in an obvious place that was just asking to be laid siege. So Sepulvarta remained intact, unspoiled and untainted by the horror that took place all around it.

Anborn's assertions of its lack of strategic value for quartering troops notwithstanding, many citizens of Sepulvarta chose to attribute their good fortune and safekeeping to the beneficence of the All-God and the protection of the Spire. The Spire was a tower with a base that took up an entire city block, reaching a thousand feet in the air to the very top, where it was crowned with a single piece of elemental ether, said to be a fragment of the star Seren that once shone over the Lost Island of Serendair half a world away. That single piece of star illuminated the city by day as well as night, blessing it with light even in the fiercest of rainstorms, or on the cloudiest of days. Pilgrims approaching the city could make out its radiance for almost a week before reaching it, guided not only by the light of the beacon but by the power emanating from it.

The Spire reached to the clouds above the great basilica that was the cornerstone of the city of Sepulvarta, the cathedral dedicated to the element of ether known as Lianta'ar. Each of the five primordial elements, sometimes called the Paints of the Creator, had a basilica dedicated to it, but Lianta'ar, which was believed to mean in the old language of the Cymrians Lord All-God, Light of the World, was by far the grandest, as well as being the youngest. It was me seat of the Patriarch, the leader of me faith, as well as the place where the yearly rituals that protected all adherents to that faith were celebrated. The prayers of me faithful were eventually channeled to this place, and offered to me Creator through the Spire, as close as one could conceivably get to placing one's request directly at the feet of God.

The fourteen-foot-thick wall mat surrounded me city was more for pomp and circumstance, as well as for decoration, man for realistic protection. Being unscathed had led the elite soldiers of Sepulvarta to become primarily ceremonial as well. Their uniforms were no longer the armor of men that had to do battle, but rather grand colorful regalia which displayed the many liturgical symbols and colors of the Patriarchy. They checked the visitors coming in and out of the city, maintained a watch on the wall and a guard at the manse of the Patriarch the changing of which was one of the most sought-after spectacles by pilgrims to the city, the defenses in place were woefully inadequate to withstand anything more than an initial assault.

They had never had to be more than that. The captain of the city's guard, a man named Fynn, was wandering the wall, checking on the archery mounts and enjoying the breeze that was heavy with hints of spring when he happened to gaze off to the south, where the mountains of Sorbold blackened the horizon in the distance. He blinked in astonishment. What had always seemed to be a fairly distant horizon appeared to have moved noticeably closer. After a moment it became clear that it was steadily moving closer still.