He was Beladine, raised in a society where women rarely held a leadership role, and she'd expected him to offer some token resistance to her leading the way. He did not, and she was glad for it and his practicality. At least there'd be no foolish arguing over who enjoyed the questionable privilege of being first to carve their way through a spiky bramble thicket.
Darkness had descended fully by the time she caught sight of the closest tower that flanked one side of Haradis's main gate. It rose above the treeline like a spear point, the small windows near the top nothing more than black spots from which no lamplight shone.
“The woodland breathes softly,” Serovek said in quiet tones. “And carefully, as if it either waits for something to come forth or hopes it passes by once it finally does.” The slight change in the way he held the cane knife alerted Anhuset to his rising caution.
She didn't scoff at his observation, feeling too a kind of unnatural hush that thickened around them, growing more and more stifling the closer they got to the city. No animal sounds, no scurrying for food, no howls or the crackle of dead leaves under creeping feet other than theirs. This forest was empty of its creatures.
The night held no mystery for her. She saw better in the shadow than she did in the light, and nothing looked out of the ordinary as they trekked closer to the gate. But the silence—it breathed, just as Serovek said, and Anhuset strained to hear some odd whisper or ghostly conversation float toward her. A burbling sound teased her ears, and she pointed in the direction from which it came, close to the city and growing louder as they walked.
“Water,” Serovek said.
Anhuset frowned. “I used to go adventuring with thehercegesin these woods when we were children. There's no water on this side. The Absu curves around the city's southeastern border before bisecting it.”
“There was no stream on this side when we arrived in Haradis to fight thegalla, but I know what I hear. It's the sound of water.” He groaned softly. “And I'm just now warming up.”
His good-natured complaint didn't lessen her increasing unease. A strangeness clung to these woods now, even without the wet whisper of running water that wasn't supposed to be nearby. It was as if each step closer to Haradis took her one more step away from the living world, where the stars glimmered above, and the shadows cavorted below as they had always done. This felt more like a falling away toward an abyss where everything that pitched into it fell and fell and never stopped. This wasn't her magic sounding a warning; her instincts recoiled ever harder from Haradis with each step taken.
“Anhuset.”
They'd halted. Anhuset frowned. When had they stopped? Serovek stared at her, concern mingled with puzzlement carving lines into his forehead. “Can you feel it?” His voice was barely above a whisper. “Haradis is more than abandoned, more than destroyed. It's befouled. Those who died here...theirs weren't clean deaths. Are you sure you want to do this? We can turn back any time you wish.”
Were he anyone else, she'd assume he either patronized her or considered her weak. Instead, she considered his words for a moment, knowing they were offered in empathy and a shared sense of wrongness suffocating the entire area. “I'm sure,” she said. “Was Haradis like this when you were here?”
Serovek shook his head. “I don't know. Thegallawere spewing out of the heart of Haradis, thicker than a hive swarm. Maybe what we're feeling is the memory of the trees. Such evil leaves a smear on everything it touches and lingers.”
His conjectures were reasonable and only added to her sense of urgency that she scout the city and report back every detail to Brishen, despite his expected disapproval. She might tell him things he already knew or expected, but her instincts, which had always served her well and kept her alive, told her this was something far more sinister than the haunting tragedy of Haradis's ruin.
“You've done me the favor of delaying your own journey to give me this opportunity, margrave, and I'm grateful. You aren't obliged to accompany me into Haradis. I promise to be swift. In, a quick look around, and out again so as not to delay more. But I have to do this.” As Anhuset spoke the words, sense of duty overrode instinct, and she barely controlled the urge to sprint out of the woods for the gate hidden behind the tree line. “I need to.”
He eyed her for a moment without speaking, then lifted the long knife he held to regard it with a measure of disdain. “I doubt this will do much good against anything lurking in the city, but it's better than nothing.” He swept a hand in the direction of Haradis and gave Anhuset a short bow. “Shall we, madam?”
Gladness sang through her that he chose to join her, but she pushed it down. Such foolery was reserved for the drunken hours after too many pints in an alehouse and no bedmate to help stave off melancholy self-reflection. It had no place here where the darkness that was more than darkness inhaled, exhaled, and waited.
She gasped at the sight greeting them. The last time she'd visited the capital had been when Brishen brought his new bride to face his parents and the royal court. Haradis, far from the sea, now perched on an island.
A series of canals dug by unknown hands in a spiderweb pattern channeled the water she and Serovek heard earlier. From her vantage point, she couldn't see their source, but the water's flow told her it came from the Absu itself. A small portion of the river had been redirected here—not for irrigating fallow fields but to isolate the city within the confines of a liquid labyrinth. A prison for thegalla.
“Someone's been very busy,” Serovek remarked beside her. “And very afraid. This took the labor of many, and they favored speed over neatness.”
He was right. The canals were numerous but shallow, the main one completely surrounding the city with offshoots of others spreading from it in a disorderly fashion. The canals' sides were uneven, higher in some spots than others, undulating in places like a ribbon instead of a spear haft. But they were clear of debris. At no point was a channel blocked or bridged by bits of detritus built up by storms or animals. Whoever had constructed this watery barricade continued to maintain it, providing safe haven in shallow runnels for any who might flee the city from that which couldn't cross water.
Anhuset noted all of it in a sweeping glance before returning to stare at what remained of the once thriving, living city. Saggara was her home, where those who meant most to her lived, but she'd spent her childhood here. Unlike the Kai who'd fled the carnage as refugees, or Brishen, who'd fought the demons to their very gate, she hadn't experienced the horror of thehul-galla's attack or seen the havoc they'd wrought firsthand. Haradis didn't have an emotional grip on her the way Saggara did. She'd believed it true when she declared such to Serovek. She was wrong.
A few seasons had passed since thegallahad swarmed the capital, devouring thousands in a single night. She'd expected a place abandoned if not forgotten. She wasn't prepared for this.
Haradis squatted on its island, a decaying carcass of crumbled buildings half hidden behind what little remained of its fortifications. The once formidable palace, with its spear-point towers and sweeping bridges reached for the unforgiving moon with broken fingers, half of its façade gone to reveal split timbers dressed in bits and pieces of ragged clothing lifted by a long-gone wind and tossed into what remained of the rafters. They resembled funerary flags for the dead whose mortem lights were lost forever to the Kai. The wreckage of more modest structures—shops and hovels—revealed a devastation which didn't spare anything or anyone regardless of status. Haradis wasn't just a ruined city; it was a corpse. Desecrated. Violated. Thegallahad not only consumed its citizens, they'd sucked the life out of the very stone and wood from which the city was built.
She heard a keening noise, shocked to realize it came from her own throat. Haradis wasn't Saggara, but it was Kai to its bedrock, just as she was. Brishen's adamant refusal to come here or send scouts in his stead made sense to her now. Traumatized by what he'd been forced to do to become eidolon, he'd realized what his fellow Wraith kings hadn't, what the Kai themselves refused to acknowledge: Thegallahad shattered the Kai kingdom and the spirit of its fading people in ways the human kingdoms could never understand and must never know. Saggara represented a sliver of hope of what survived. Haradis was the culmination of all that had been lost.
Serovek remained quiet, a solid, comforting presence, as Anhuset continued to keen low in her throat, a soft dirge for all the Kai, both living and dead. She turned to her companion when she finished. Sympathy softened his expression though he didn't offer meaningless platitudes, for which she was grateful. Her unexpected grief still threatened to swallow her.
“We stand before an open grave,” she said. “I'm glad I took your advice and chose not to come alone.”
“I would have followed had you chosen to do so. Even the strongest shouldn't bear the sight of this place in solitude.”
She shook her head. “I didn't think it would be so...” She trailed off, uncomfortable with revealing her turbulent emotions, even when they threatened to burst from in a despairing, raging scream.
“How could you?” Serovek's voice sounded as heavy as her spirit. “More than lives were lost here. You have the right to grieve, but your grief will have to wait.”