When they stepped onto the bridge, a tilting sensation made him sway, and his ears popped as if he dropped suddenly from a greater height. He widened his stance to keep his balance and saw that Anhuset did the same. The sensation passed as quickly as it struck, leaving behind a cloying heat and the scent of decaying vegetation.
Dressed for winter, the two shed their heavier layers of clothing, but even down to a thin shirt, he still broke a sweat. Beside him, Anhuset wore a sleeveless tunic. A fine sheen of perspiration already glossed her arms, defining long muscles, and she squinted without the protection of her hood. She'd unsheathed one of the knives she wore at her belt, the blade catching the dull gleam of sunlight on its edge.
She stretched out her arm, inviting him to lead. “Ready for a stroll, margrave?”
Up close, the bridge was even more dilapidated. Age and abandonment had left their marks, as had the purposeful defacement by long-vanished vandals. Even half choked in the creeping ivy, it was still a magnificent structure of lavishly carved stone. The statues he'd seen lining the parapets towered above him, standing on plinths engraved with epitaphs in an unknown script. The sculptor or sculptors had rendered the rich texture of silk and delicate embroidery from stone in the garb worn by the effigies, and the crowns they all wore told all who looked upon them that these were kings and queens. Larger than life in both marble and flesh and blood, they loomed over their lesser subjects with haughty majesty.
Anhuset's voice beside him startled him from his contemplation. He'd been so distracted by the sight of the statues he hadn't heard her approach. “I can forgive a mapmaker for overlooking a bridge, even one as grand as this, but an entire city?” She pointed to the other side of the ravine where the mist hung thick as a barrier wall, obscuring everything at the bridge's opposite end. Until now.
The impenetrable gray had fractured in spots, creating gaps in the mist wall to reveal a true fortification complete with imposing gate, battlements, and turrets. Towers claimed by more of the ivy soared skyward behind the walls. The crumbling remains of graceful sky walks once connected a few of the towers, their spans dismembered. In the sun, the city gleamed alabaster pockmarked by lichen and mold.
As much of a ruin as Haradis, this nameless city perched on the cliff's edge in equal silence. Serovek fancied he still heard the faint echo of voices and the creak of wagon wheels as they rolled over a bridge deck clear of ivy and crowded with people.
Unease crawled down his spine. What lay behind the mist and fortifications? Was the silence born of a place devoid of inhabitants or one that simply hid a quiet predator? Agallawaiting to ambush the unwary if they walked through the gate?
He turned to Anhuset. “Have my eyes changed?”
Alarm flashed briefly across her face. She glanced over the parapet to the Absu river, a pale blue ribbon winding a path at the bottom of the ravine. Water. The barrier which nogallacould cross unless there was a solid bridge. Just like this one.
“No,” she replied. “Only one part of your eyes is blue, and that is the blue you were born with. Deep water, not eidolon.”
They both looked back to where Erostis waited with Klanek and the wagon carrying Megiddo. No strange light leaked out from the blanket covering the bier nor shimmered around the wagon itself.
Serovek exhaled a relieved sigh, returning his attention to the city. “If there weregallahere, we'd have known it by now. So would half the countryside. I don't know why the map doesn't show the city or the bridge, but one looks sturdy enough to cross and will get us to our destination quicker.”
“Not a sound from the place,” Erostis called to them. “A dead city, or an abandoned one.”
“Old ruins are as plentiful in this country as freckles on my favorite pub wench's skin,” Klanek argued. “I'm surprised we've only come across this one and Haradis so far.”
“Call it fortune.” Serovek took several steps across the deck. Only the heat bore down on him. “If no one's there, we won't be overwhelmed by beggars when we enter the gate or crowds when we travel through the city.” More steps and only the wind to whisper his name while the statues ignored him in favor of staring at each other with empty gazes.
Solid beneath his feet, the bridge still vibrated under the hard gusts purling beneath its spandrels and joists. “Don't cross until I give the signal it's safe to do so,” he instructed the two men. More sure of the bridge now, he and Anhuset started a basket weave motion as they scouted the bridge, walking the sides, then crossing paths at the center to walk the opposite side, then do the same again and again, skirting tangled mats of ivy as they went.
Serovek eyed the statues as he traveled the deck pausing at one unlike those on either side of it. The difference lay not in the sculptor's hand but in the vandal's. Hammer and chisel wielded by an enraged hand had savaged this particular king, hacking away at the face, breaking the crown, and defacing the epigraph on the plinth until the mysterious words were obliterated.
“The others are mostly untouched,” Anhuset said as she crossed the bridge to reach him.
Serovek leaned toward the damaged statue despite his better instincts warning him against such an action. “Whoever he was, he was hated.” He stretched out a hand toward the plinth.
“Don't,” Anhuset warned.
“I've no intention of touching it,” he assured her. The words no sooner left his lips than a tiny bolt of lightning arced from the stone to jolt his fingertip. Serovek leaped back with a yelp, narrowly avoiding trampling Anhuset.
“I warned you not to touch it,” she snapped.
“And I didn't,” he snapped back.
He glared at her and she at him until a thought occurred to him. Something in his expression must have forewarned her of another one of his uncomfortable questions for the scowl disappeared behind that stoic mask she erected like a shield wall.
“The statue is warded,” Serovek said. “I'm guessing they all are. Human sorcery or not, I'd think a Kai possessing even a drop of Elder magic would sense it, yet you didn't. Again.”
He'd heard rumors in the months following thegalla's defeat of Kai unable to capture the mortem lights of their dead. For a people whose history relied on the stored memories of the dead to record their history, such a calamity was catastrophic, unprecedented, and as far as he knew, unexplained.
“You've lost your magic, haven't you, firefly woman?”
Her lips thinned into a mulish line, while her yellow eyes lightened until they were almost white.
Annoyance, he thought. Anger. The hostile emotions paled a Kai's eyes while the benign ones turned them gold.