Everything they owned was wet or damp by the second day. Since they had been heading more north than east since they left Shadow’s Fall, Seraph figured that they would be fortunate if they didn’t run into more snow before they found Colossae.
In some places, Rufort’s road had become so overgrown it was impossible to tell roadbed from undisturbed forest floor, as it disappeared under years of soil and reappeared a half mile later. Following the old road was made harder when the forest thickened until it was difficult to see more than a hundred yards in any direction.
In the early afternoon of the fourth day of rain, Jes, who had taken Gura ahead to check out the trail, came loping back from his explorations.
“River ahead,” he said. “Road goes across.”
“We can’t get any wetter,” said Phoran, with a grin. “I just hope it’s shallower than the last river we crossed. I’d hate to float away when we’ve come so far.”
Seraph looked closely at Jes, who was even wetter than most of them from the waist downward. The dog panting happily at his feet was soaked through. “Did you try to cross it, Jes?”
He nodded. “It’s fast,” he said. “Not too deep for the horses, though.”
“We could have sent one of the horses across,” complained Hennea. “You don’t have any more dry clothes.”
Seraph, who had been about to make the same complaint, closed her mouth.
Jes looked down at himself and shook his head. “It’s only water, Hennea. We are all wet.”
“Wait until you’re chafed in all the wrong places from wearing wet clothes,” Hennea said. Then, “I’ll try and dry out some things tonight when it isn’t raining.”
Seraph smiled to herself.
As Jes promised, the road took them to the edge of a river, where the bank led gently down into the water. Upstream and downstream, where mountains arose on either side, the river was narrow and swift, but here it spread out to twice its normal width.
“They must have had a bridge here,” said Tier, riding beside Seraph. “In the spring you wouldn’t have been able to ford it at all. I’d not want to try and take a wagon across here even now.”
“It feels as though no one has ever been here before,” said Ielian, just behind them.
“I feel it, too,” Seraph agreed. “Even the things that are man-made—the road and such—feel as if they’ve been around so long that they’ve been cleaned of human touch.”
“We’ll find a good flat area to camp,” Tier told Seraph, when Jes, who had waited until everyone else had safely crossed, arrived dripping and smiling. Tier started up the rise of land that edged the river, still talking. “If Rinnie can put a hold on the rain for a few hours, we’ll rig something to hang up clothes around a fire…” His voice trailed off, and he stopped his horse.
Seraph stopped her horse beside him and looked down into the valley stretched below them. It was a sight worthy of a Bard’s silence.
Colossae.
CHAPTER 13
If the trip had taught Hennea anything, it was the power of time. Five centuries was enough to bury Shadow’s Fall, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, had died—she’d forgotten which. She’d seen that a thousand years was enough to hide a road built to last through the ages by mages more powerful than the world had seen since before the dawn of the Empire. It was time enough to reduce a great city to rubble.
She’d constructed possibilities for what they would find in the wizards’ city a hundred times on this trip. She’d been prepared for anything except what they found.
Three-quarters of the way across the lightly wooded valley, perhaps a full league away, a hillock arose, cliff-edged and flat-topped. The city covered the entire ridge of the higher land, and spilled out to the valley below, as perfect as it had been on the day the Elder Wizards had destroyed it to save the world from their folly. Rose-colored stone walls surrounded the entire city, protecting it from invaders who had never come.
Even from this far away, the city felt empty and waiting.
“Anyone could have found this,” said Ielian.
Hennea turned her head to look at the smallest of Phoran’s guards. “No,” she told him. “Only Travelers.”
“Only if the city wanted to be found,” said Jes, in an odd voice. It wasn’t the Guardian, not quite.
The gates of the wizards’ city were built of polished brass and were nearly as tall as the wall. They looked just as they must have when the wizard Hinnum had spelled them closed so many centuries ago. Etched into the top of the left gate, in the language of the Colossae wizards, were the prosaic words Low Gate.
Hennea looked up at the gate towers that loomed on either side of the gate and could almost imagine a face looking down at her.
There were few cities in the Empire older than the Fall of the Shadowed, and few cities that old outside of it; the Shadowed King’s claws had sunk farther than the boundaries of the Empire. The older sections of Taela were supposed to have been built by the first Phoran, and they proved that even well-built stone buildings shifted and moved over centuries. The stones in the walls of Colossae sat squarely one atop the other, as if they’d been placed there yesterday.
She shivered, and Jes wrapped a warm hand around her calf in a manner that had grown familiar. “Are you cold?”
“No, it’s not that,” she told him. “This is wrong. Where are the cracks in the wall? Why is the brass still bright without people to polish or wizards to preserve?” She could feel the power here, but it was oddly distant—a memory of magic rather than the real thing.
“Illusion?” said Seraph, dismounting. “It doesn’t have that feel, though there is some magic here, right enough.”
She touched the gates, then jumped back as they began to open. Not swinging inward or outward as the city gates of most places did; nor did they rise up like the smaller gates of a keep or hold. These slid back on oiled tracks set below the road surface and into the walls themselves until the only remnant of the gate was a handspan-wide bar of brass up the middle of the wall edge.
A wagon length in front of them was another wall wider than the gate, that blocked them from the city so people entering would have to go to the left or the right of it. On either side of it, set between the city walls and the inner wall were two wooden gates of the sort a farmer might use to keep livestock in or out. One was open, the other shut.
Tier dismounted and crouched beside the brass door’s track, bending down to sniff. “If this is an illusion, it’s on par with the mermora,” Tier said. “This oil smells fresh.”
“There are people here,” said Kissel. He loosened his sword and tipped his head from side to side, loosening his neck muscles in preparation for battle. “This can’t be a deserted place. Not looking like this.” He pointed at the dirt just the far side of the gate and Hennea saw what he had—there were lines on the ground as if someone had just finished raking the ground clear of debris.
“It’s too quiet,” protested Toarsen. “A city is never this silent, Kissel. Not even a city the size of Leheigh. You can hear the sounds of Taela miles away.”
“It’s magic,” said Jes quietly. “The city was left this way. That’s what the Guardian says.”
“He’s been here?” Tier gave his son a surprised look.
Hennea was startled as well. She knew the Guardian had been remembering things he should not have known, not if the Order had been cleansed after the death of the previous Guardian who bore it. She’d started to believe that might be most of the trouble with the Guardian Order.
If so, then when she and Seraph solved the mystery of what to do with the Ordered gems, they might also stumble upon a way to help make the Guardian Order less dangerous to its bearer. Not that she wanted to change Jes or the Guardian, just keep him safe. But if the Guardian knew about Colossae, then it wasn’t just bits of the previous bearer that the Order contained—it was the first one, one of the survivors of the death of Colossae.