The bridge sprang to life, arched up and out of the hole. Still squinting against the unaccustomed brightness, he climbed up, hand over hand, till at last, he was able to poke his head out and gaze at the world above.
Scorio gaped for precious seconds, only to remember at the very last moment that the bridge was about to contract. He scrambled out of the hole just in time. The bridge sprang up under the power of its own recoil and clattered down amid the rocks.
But for the first time since acquiring the treasure, Scorio didn’t immediately reach for it. Instead, he pulled himself out all the way, sat against a jutting rock, and stared.
The sun-wire, or source of light, or whatever it was, stretched like a filament of spun gold through the air above, a central axis around which the city of Bastion curved, its buildings set along the inside of a vast cylinder. Streets rose up on both sides to meet on the far side of the sun-wire, perhaps a dizzying four thousand feet above.
And what a sight. Craning his head he thought he could make out life playing out all around him and on the streets far above. Small dots moving that could have been pedestrians, the tops of vegetation, of buildings. Everybody was pulled toward the street beneath their feet, even if they walked directly overhead.
It made him feel vertigo. He couldn’t have stood up if he’d tried.
The sun-wire’s golden light filled the entire cylinder. Its glow washed out details, reduced shadows to dusty darkness and the rest to shades of yellow, orange, and amber. It was anchored at the left end of the cylinder to a vast, ornate protrusion of pale marble.
But as pristine and glorious as that anchor point seemed to be, the left-most part of Bastion that abutted it was in ruins. Ruins that had consumed a third of the city, ruins in whose periphery he now sat.
In them, he saw the vast, blocky remnants of scorched buildings, the streets between them having often collapsed into chasms whose depths glowed with fire or perhaps smoldering magma. Buildings whose sides had partially collapsed and spilled out into barren avenues, or whose grandiose features were mostly erased by the passage of time and rough erosion. Bridges arched out over the burning depths, some improbably slender and still holding, others having collapsed long ago so that each shattered end reached for the other like yearning lovers cruelly parted.
All the way around the ruins extended, from where Scorio sat, up both sides of the cylinder, to meet at the top. A belt of ruin and gray stone, of burning light from cavernous depths that competed with the sun-wire’s own refulgent glow. Endless city blocks, a cordon of desolation and dark stone. No greenery, no vegetation, no color but the charred remnants of once-grand buildings, their darkened windows, their ruined towers.
What had happened? How had a third of the city been allowed to fall into such disrepair? Was this the cause of the war of which the chancellor had spoken?
Tearing his gaze away, he examined the rest of the city. A large building to his right blocked his view of the cylinder’s other end where the sun-wire was no doubt attached to a similar anchor. But what he could see, however, was the same grand architecture, monumental and imposing, with bridges and broad avenues. These were alive, vibrant with activity, the buildings painted white and trimmed with colored accents, streets with strings of pennants hung across them, squares with purple and blue leaved trees, monuments gilded in gold and silver, and more detail than he could encompass. The buildings weren’t uniform in appearance either; here and there he spotted edifices that were clearly important, hulking over their neighbors, bedecked with flags and hung with monstrous banners depicting their arms or insignias.
There was a huge ring, set on the cylinder’s side so that from his vantage point Scorio could see a great arena within, while stadium seating descended from its high walls right down to the sands. There a great tower some ten stories high, there a ziggurat whose edges were limned in gold, its uppermost level a gorgeous garden whose vines hung down to the lower platforms.
It was too much. He could have sat there all day, taking it all in, and still had more to feast his eyes on. But with great reluctance, he tore his gaze away, found and pocketed his bridge, and rose shakily to his feet.
After so much time spent within the claustrophobic confines of the caverns, the sense of open air above him jellied his knees. It helped to lower his gaze and focus on the rubble right before him. He was in the final bounds of the ruined zone, a belt that bordered the closest inhabited buildings. Taking a deep breath, he set forth, without a plan but knowing that he had to eat, had to find people, had to take the next step and begin defining his new life.
“How hard will it be to hide out there?” he heard Nissa ask, her voice a whisper in his ear. “What kind of life are we going to live?”
The rock beneath his feet seemed to grow younger as he went; lighter, less splintered and shattered, and in growing variety. It was as if some great fire had consumed the ruined zone from the inside out, turning the very rock into brittle scoria, and as he left it the stone took on color again, regained its hardness and clean lines.
There were buildings around him, but these were hollowed out, windowless, the rooms within without furniture or reason to step inside. Husks and hollowed shells, most two or three stories tall. No signs of life but for strange, crimson creatures the length of his arm that tracked him from a distance, slipping smoothly over the sides of the buildings as if untethered from the forces of gravity.
Scorio crouched down and studied the closest one as it curled around a ruined column off to one side; it had four stubby little legs, and large, feather-like frills that swept back from the sides of its face and neck. Small, forward-facing eyes of perfect jet studied him, and a mobile little mouth seemed to be curved into an expression of genial amusement. Its sides were streamed with bands of different hues of red, peppered here and there by dark dots like freckles whose centers were a pale white.
“Can you understand what I’m saying?” he asked, voice hoarse, and then immediately felt foolish. The creature blinked but otherwise made no expression of having understood. After a moment Scorio resumed walking.
He went another block, trying to stick to shadows despite the ubiquity of the sun-wire’s dusty, yellow light. A dull, repetitive clinking sound and the murmur of voices came from ahead, so he slowed, considered his options, and then entered the last building. Slid in through a gaping window, then walked as quietly as he could through its shadowed interior to the far side, where he peered out a window at what looked to be a small market.
A huge patchwork awning was strung up over the intersection of two ancient avenues. Under its expanse were small stalls, most being little more than boards set atop rocks, though a few looked to be actual carts that had been unhitched and used to reveal meager wares.
A sparse crowd was moving leisurely through this ragged market, with most of the customers engaged in conversation with the stall owners, a few haggling half-heartedly, though without animosity. A gaggle of dirty children was clustered around a crude iron cage in which one of the crimson snake-salamanders was caught, laughing and poking at it with sticks, causing it to leap up into a miniature cyclone and give off sheets of red flame before falling back down to the cage’s floor.
There weren’t any guards, at least not any that were obviously on duty. To one side, a couple of women had staked out a spot, one standing with a fiddle propped upon her shoulder, the other playing a battered instrument consisting of a score of iron pipes of different lengths arrayed together so that they emitted beautiful, hollow sounds as she ran her metal-capped fingertips over them.
But Scorio’s attention was riveted to a stall that was little more than a charred grill set over a bed of white, dusty coals. A lantern-jawed man with greasy black hair was tending skewers of glistening meat, and basting them from a small pot with a thicky, syrupy liquid.