He heard voices, Vascay’s among them, as the Brethren assessed the situation. Garric braced his hands and levered his torso up so that he could look around. He wasn’t quite ready to stand just now.
“There you are, Brother Gar!” Vascay called, waving his javelin in greeting. “How about the wizard? I’d say I didn’t care, but this time he brought us to a better place than some I’ve seen recently.”
At a quick glance, it seemed that all the bandits on the millipede’s back had made it here. Garric grimaced when he remembered Toster. All who’d dared the wizard’s gateway, that is. Well, Toster had the right to make his own decision.
“Metron’s here with me,” Garric said. “He won’t want to move for a while, but he’s all right.”
He stood carefully, finding as he usually did that he felt better when he started moving again after exertion. Small bees buzzed, trying the flowers. Even the spiky succulent sported orange starbursts that Garric would have guessed were giant asters if he’d seen them from a distance.
Vascay and Thalemos started over to him. Rather than meet them halfway, Garric waited—smiling faintly and looking around to get his bearings. The passage Metron had opened for them twice now seemed to affect some men more than others—and Garric more than most.
It was nearly noon here. Under the sun to the south ranged an arc of craggy hills: rugged, perhaps, but certainly nothing the band couldn’t cross if it wanted to. In the middle was the notch of a pass. Garric thought the hills were less than two miles away, though that guess depended in part on how tall the trees sprinkling the slopes were.
The sea battered the shore north of where Garric stood. Near land the water was green, becoming a deep purple-blue toward the horizon. The plain must be eaten away into a steep corniche rather than a sloping beach, but Garric couldn’t be sure without getting closer.
All around him, covered by flowers and grasses, were boxes hewn from the same coarse limestone that underlay the soil. Garric frowned as he recognized them: they were coffins.
More precisely, they were ossuaries to hold the bones of the dead whose flesh had decayed during a year or two’s exposure on the shelves of common mausolea. That had been the practice in Haft during the Old Kingdom, Garric knew from his reading; though in his own day, the dead were buried in the ground and honored in a general ceremony at the spring equinox.
“We’re in a graveyard,” he said to Vascay. Thalemos had halted a few paces away, bending to look at an ossuary of alabaster or marble. “All of this.”
Gesturing broadly, Garric went on, “It must have served quite a large city, but I don’t see any sign of buildings except crypts and these, well”—he touched an ossuary with his foot—“bone boxes.”
Vascay shrugged, the gesture nonchalant but his expression guarded. “They might’ve built their houses of sticks and thatch but buried their dead in stone,” he said. “It’s a matter of what your priorities are, after all. And this place—”
He carried his glance around the sprawling plain; for as far as a man could see, ruined tombs and ossuaries dotted it. Flowers nodded in the slight breeze.
“—is old, whatever it is.”
Magenta flowers that looked like zinnias—they weren’t; the plants’ leaves were wrong—grew in great profusion where Thalemos knelt and shaded worn lettering with his hand. He looked solemn as he rose to join Garric and the chieftain.
“That ossuary held a Magistrate of Wikedun on the north coast of Laut, washed by the Outer Sea,” Thalemos said. He wore a slight frown. “The city doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I’ve heard of the place,” Vascay said, frowning also. “The rebels of Wikedun fought the Intercessor Echea, back when the Old Kingdom fell two thousand years ago. She defeated the rebels and sank Wikedun under the sea.”
“Well,” Thalemos said, “the Outer Sea ate away the land, but that was over ages instead of whelming the city suddenly. And the rebels were demon worshippers.”
He paused, considering what he’d just said. He added, “According to Ascoin’s History, they were demon worshippers, I mean. I suppose his stories may be false.”
Vascay snorted. “Or they may not,” he said. “What I know for a fact”—he looked toward the range of hills—“is that the present Intercessor has half the Protectors on his payroll patrolling the marshes south of here. And they say other guards as well, to keep honest men out of here. Why is that, do you suppose?”
All three men looked down at the wizard, snoring among the flowers at their feet. Presumably Metron knew the answer. He knew the same answer as Echeon did, at any rate.
“I don’t think he’s faking,” Garric said morosely. “The spells Metron has been working would be impossible for anyone but a great wizard, and even then difficult.”
“You know wizards, do you, Gar?” Vascay said mildly.
“I’ve known some,” said Garric.
“I’d as soon I never had,” Vascay said. He smiled. “But then, I’d as soon a lot of things that turned out differently.”
He gestured toward the edge of the plain a furlong away. “Let’s walk that way,” the chieftain said. “I’d like to take a look at the sea, since I don’t think we’re going back through Echeon’s patrols. Regardless of what else might be waiting for us south of the hills.”
Thalemos glanced down at the wizard with pursed lips. “He’ll be fine,” Garric said. “He’s just tired. There’s nothing we can do beyond letting him sleep.”
The remaining bandits were exploring their new surroundings with cheerful enthusiasm, mostly in groups of two or three. Hame stood alone on top of a ruin that might once have been a temple, shading his eyes with his hand searching the plain.
Looking for Toster, Garric realized. They were friends…. He started to call to Hame, then decided that for the time being he wouldn’t do that. For one thing, it’d force Garric to recall the big man’s last moments with greater clarity than he wanted to.
Halophus disappeared, then popped back into sight holding a broad armlet. He’d apparently jumped or fallen into a sub-surface tomb; this necropolis held burials of a wide variety of styles. From the bandit’s caroling joy and the way sunlight winked, the armlet was made of gold.
“We’re all happy to be out of where we were before,” Vascay said without emphasis. “I am myself. I don’t know that this is a good place—”
He smiled knowingly at his companions.
“—but I know the other was a bad one, at least there at the end.”
“Yes,” said Garric grimly. They’d reached the edge of the cliff; the sea roared up at them, though it was a calm day. The waves didn’t make enough noise against the crumbling rock to drown the screams in his mind, though.
“I’ve had a lot more money over the past ten years with the Brethren than I did for the twenty before when I was a schoolmaster,” Vascay said, his voice barely loud enough for the others to hear him. “Had the money and had more of the things the money could buy. But one of the things I wish turned out differently is that I could’ve lived my whole life as an honest man.”
The corniche was never more than twenty feet above the sea and generally only half that. Green water swirled and foamed about the scree of rocks broken away from the cliff face in the recent past. Garric had led his companions to a notch where the overhang had collapsed perhaps only hours before; the dirt showing at the edges of the fall was still moist and russet in contrast to the grayish yellow where the soil had dried. Standing anywhere else along the edge risked the weight of the spectators bringing down the overhang.
“Doesn’t Echeon have ships on patrol off the coast here?” Garric asked. He couldn’t see anything but sunlit water all the way to the horizon, but there must be something to prevent interlopers. The gold Halophus had found in practically open sight proved nobody came here.