Barakas took up the reins of his mount. “Let us be gone from here! This place no longer soothes!”
Reegan and Lochivan acquiesced with great eagerness.
Steering their drakes around, the three urged their animals back in the direction of the city. They had some slight difficulty at first, for these animals were not mindbroke as had once been the way. Mindbreaking back in Nimth had been a simple process by which the Vraad had taken the will of their mounts and shattered it, leaving an emptiness that the master could fill as he deemed necessary. It had always made for very obedient steeds. Unfortunately, mind-breaking now had a high casualty rate and the Tezerenee could ill afford to lose many drakes. Unlike the western continent, where the Tezerenee had intended to go, drakes were fairly scarce on this continent.
Another fault among many that this place had, as far as Barakas was concerned.
The mounts finally gave in to their riders and, building up speed, raced up and over the winding landscape. The crimson cloaks that Barakas and Reegan wore, designating them as clan master and heir apparent, respectively, fluttered madly behind, looking almost like bloodred dragon wings. The refugees’ city lay in a valley and so much of their trek was downhill, though smaller hills forced them to take a route that twisted back and forth often. Here, the drakes held an advantage over their equine counterparts. Their claws dug into the slope, preventing them from stumbling forward and throwing their riders to their death. Horses had their own advantages, true, many more than the reptilian mounts, but a riding drake was more than just a beast that carried a Tezerenee from one point to another. It was a killing machine. Few things could stand up to the onslaught of a dragon, even as simpleminded a one as the mount below the patriarch. The claws would slice a man to segments; the jaws could snap a victim in two without strain.
Most important, they were the symbol of the Tezerenee.
The city soon rose before them, from the distance looking like little more than one massive wall. The new inhabitants had rebuilt the encircling wall first, making it almost twice the height of its first incarnation because their overall loss of power had made them fear everything. The city itself had been a vast ruin when the Vraad had first come, an ageless relic of the race from whom they-and countless others, it appeared-had sprung. Those ancients had been far more godlike than the Vraad could have ever hoped to be, easily manipulating their descendants into a variety of forms. They had sought successors to their tired, dying race. In what could best be described as irony, their final hope lay in one of their earliest failures-the Vraad. The Lord Tezerenee’s kind had been abandoned to their world, a construct of the ancients, where it was supposed they would kill themselves off. Instead, the Vraad had outlasted nearly everyone else. Only the Seekers still held on, but they were already in their decline, so the Dragon of the Depths had said.
To Lord Barakas, the rebuilding of the city was a waste of effort that he had only condoned while he bided his time.
“Dragon’s blood!” Lochivan swore, pointing at the path ahead. “Another!”
Near the very gates of the city there stood a figure identical to the one that they had left behind no more than moments before. For all Barakas knew, it was the same being. They had the power to flaunt. The Faceless Ones were, after all, all that remained of the minds of the very ancients who had built the city. They still sought, in their own mysterious way, to manipulate the future of their world-meaning the Vraad. The Lord Tezerenee gritted his teeth; it was by his doing that they had been given physical forms through which to interfere further.
Of their own accord, the gates swung open in time for the returning Vraad. The Faceless One, like his predecessor, remained passive as they neared. Barakas could not help touching his own face as they rode past the still figure. The skin Barakas touched felt like the skin he had always known, but it was of the same origin as the body that those ghosts now wore. Every Tezerenee, save one, wore a shell created by the now-lost combined magical might of the clan. Even a few non-clan members, outsiders whose loyalties had extended to the patriarch, had such bodies. It had seemed like the perfect solution when no way had been found to cross from Nimth to the Dragon-realm in a physical manner. Through the aid of one Dru Zeree, the only outsider Barakas respected, the Vraad had rediscovered the secret of ka, or spirit travel. The ka, guided by others, could cross the barrier that the bodies could not. There was only one major stumbling block: the spirits needed a suitable host.
It was Barakas himself who had come up with that solution. Though they could not cross, the Vraad could influence their future world through sorcerous means. It meant a dozen or more individuals acting in concert for even the slightest of spells. For the arrogant Vraad, that was an impossibility that only the Tezerenee, who were used to working with one another, could overcome. Under the patriarch’s masterful guidance, they had created an army of golems whose ancestry could be traced to the larger, more majestic cousins of the very mounts he and his sons now rode. Those soulless husks were to have waited for the tide of Vraad immigrants, but things had gone wrong after only a few hundred had been molded. First, those to whom the task of manipulating the spell of formation had fallen vanished without a trace; Barakas suspected that the ancients had been at fault there, also. Then the damned ghosts had stolen most of the bodies for themselves.
The creature was lost from sight as the riders moved farther on into the confines of the city. The patriarch drew no comfort from that. As far as he knew, there were probably half a dozen more of the horrors observing him and his sons from less conspicuous posts. It was their way.
Dru Zeree had once explained to him that the last of the ancients had released their spirits into their world, giving the lands themselves a mind of sorts. The golem forms provided by the patriarch’s plan had offered an opportunity for that mind to provide itself with hands to further its work, an apparent oversight the founders had not thought of until it was too late. Barakas had never known how much of that explanation to believe and did not really think it mattered. What mattered was that an army of ghosts had stolen not only his creations, but the empire he would have had if the rest of the Vraad had been forced to swear fealty to him in return for access to their new world. Worse yet, each of the walking monstrosities reminded him that a part of him lay rotting back in foul Nimth… unless some scavenger still living had already devoured him.
The gates closed behind them, the magic of Dru Zeree flaunting itself once more. As hard as he had strived, he could not match Zeree’s abilities. Even his counterpart’s daughter, Sharissa, was more capable. Yet another bitter pill he had been forced to swallow each day of each year.
A few Vraad wandered about, looking much more scruffy than they had back in Nimth. Without nearly limitless power to see to their every whim, they were being forced to maintain their appearances through more mundane means. Some were not proving adept at the process. They wore robes or shirts and pants, all fairly simplistic in design considering the extravagant and shocking garments most of them had once worn. Several Vraad were clearing rubble from another crumbling dwelling. They were sorting out the good pieces for use in either building the structure that would replace this one or for some other project, perhaps another useless tower. To Barakas the working Vraad looked more pathetic than industrious.
The gods have fallen, he thought. I have fallen.
Still, the city had regained bits of its ancient glory. Someday, it might be completely whole again. Children were becoming more numerous than they had back in Nimth, though that was not quite so impressive as it sounded when one considered there had rarely been more than a few dozen young at any time during the old days. Near-immortals with no taste for familial relationships did not tend to make ideal parents. Those few who chose to do so generally ended up fighting their offspring at some point. Barakas, in creating his clan, had turned that energy outside rather than inside. His people, the only true clan in Vraad society, now numbered over one hundred again, not including additional outsiders who had sworn loyalty to him during the past decade and a half. Children were rampant in the section of the city that he had taken over.