Frey wasn’t so amazed that he couldn’t summon up a bit of indignation. ‘My hand is not manky. I’m cursed, alright?’
‘Whatever you say, Frey,’ he said, then chuckled. ‘Frey, say. Say, Frey, whaddya say?’
Frey ignored him. He’d be entertaining himself with that rhyme for hours if he got any encouragement.
‘I reckon,’ he mused, studying the oasis, ‘those ancient Samarlans were actually pretty bloody clever.’
Ugrik gaped at him. ‘You think the ancient Samarlans did this?’ He bellowed with laughter and lifted up the relic in his hands. ‘This thing is more than ten thousand years old! The Sammies could barely scratch their own arses back in those days!’
‘So who built them, then?’ Frey asked, pointing at the structures beyond the oasis.
Ugrik grinned his infuriating grin.
‘Azryx,’ he said.
And he walked off towards the oasis, leaving Frey staring after him.
Thirty-Nine
Frey pushed through the undergrowth. It was sweltering hot beneath the leaf canopy, but there was shade, and the trunks were dappled in the red light of the evening sun. Bats flitted, hunting insects. Unseen birds called to one another. The air was not so oven-dry among the trees, and Frey thought he smelt water.
Only an hour ago he’d been in the trackless depths of an endless desert, and this oasis hadn’t been here at all. But here he was, and it was real.
Ugrik led the way, red braids swinging, his broad back a mass of tattoos. Frey didn’t quite know what to make of him now. He might have a couple of screws loose, but if he’d been to half the places he said he had, he must be someone to be reckoned with. And after what Frey had just witnessed, he was ready to believe anything the Yort told him.
Then they emerged from the trees into a small clearing scattered with bright flowers, and Frey saw it.
It was a city.
Frey wasn’t someone to be awed by history. He didn’t share Jez and Crake’s fascination with crumbling buildings and pointless art. But even he couldn’t suppress a shiver of wonder at the occasion. A lost city! A lost Azryx city! And he might be the first Vard ever to lay eyes on it.
The oasis was situated in a huge, shallow depression, at the bottom of which was an unevenly shaped lake. The city began at its edge and radiated away up the slopes. For the most part, they were so consumed by the undergrowth that it was hard to see the shape of them, but what he could see was amazingly well preserved. The burrowing plants had toppled some towers and collapsed some walls, but if this place really was as old as Ugrik said, then it had withstood the millennia with miraculous endurance. He glimpsed buildings in snatches, visible through a thick covering of strangling creepers or crowded by ancient trees that grew up against their flanks.
It was an alien place. There was a fundamental strangeness to it. It was not made of brick and mortar. Its curves were too smooth, and it had swooping lines that were beyond the ability of the best architects in Vardia or elsewhere. Whatever material they’d used must have been incredibly strong. Spidery pillars supported structures that seemed impossibly heavy. He saw a building with a vast elliptical space in its side, like a mouth, and realised that it was probably a window once. No Vardic window had ever been built so large.
Not stone, then. Some kind of ceramic, like the material they fashioned the blades of the relic from. Something the colour of yellowed bone, peeping from the trees. Perhaps this had once been a place of bright hues, or perhaps not. Either way, the colours had gone now, and left only the skeleton of a dead city.
But alien as it was, it was built for people. He saw stairs and the remnants of boulevards. There were doorways and walkways and even a ridiculously thin bridge, now a rail for a ragged curtain of vines and moss and flowers. The lake was surrounded by a wall, built one-third of the way up the slope. He traced its outline as it sewed in and out of visibility. There were oval gateways there, but the gates were long gone.
He only had a moment to take it all in before Ugrik grabbed him and pulled him down into a crouch. ‘Don’t get yourself seen,’ he warned.
‘Seen by who?’ Frey asked, faintly alarmed. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be someone else here.
Ugrik moved to the edge of the clearing, back into the undergrowth. Frey followed. Ugrik held aside a spray of leaves, allowing a view down the near slope.
‘Sammies,’ he said.
Some way below them, a large section of the city had been exposed. Vines had been cleared, trees uprooted, soil dug away. The earth-moving machines were still at work down there, carefully quarrying out the extraordinary buildings, reclaiming them from the earth. Around them moved the Sammies, dozens of them, heading in and out of doorways, coordinating the loading of items with small cranes. Some were gathered around tables where they pored over plans, while others milled or loafed in a busy campsite that had been set up in a plaza. Many of them had guns.
With the foliage gone, Frey could see the true strangeness of the city. Low, flat buildings that were little more than boxes sat next to humped, segmented constructions that looked like a row of crouched beetles. Nearby was a colossal ball, flattened at the bottom where it touched the ground, with no apparent windows and only a doorway at its base. He saw a landing pad on the edge of the bared streets, built atop a pillar that branched out like a tree to support it.
But all that paled in comparison to the centrepiece of the excavation.
It looked as if two giant hourglasses of brass and bone had been stood next to each other. They were linked across their lower halves by a complicated building of many curves and angles, but it was the hourglasses that drew the attention. Within their frames were bizarre assemblies made up of twisted rods of metal and squat stacks of discs. Orbiting each half of the hourglass was a brass arm, like a blade, that swept around the interior edge. The upper and lower arms rotated in different directions. Occasionally a section of machinery shifted, moving to a new position as if under its own command. The whole edifice gave an impression of whirling movement contained inside a rigid structure.
There was something inside those hourglasses. A coloured gas, the consistency of cloud, full of pale colours that made Frey’s eyes hurt. Within the gas he saw a hundred storms, miniature flickers of lightning, striking in flurries.
He had no idea what it did, but one thing he did know: it was active. And the Sammies had it.
‘How long have they been here?’ he asked.
‘My guess? Since the end of the Second Aerium War.’
Frey squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t look at those hourglasses any more. ‘This is why they called the truce? We thought they’d somehow found their own aerium source or something. Maybe on Peleshar.’
amp;lsq?w Roman"uo; Reckon they found this,’ Ugrik grunted. ‘And they worked out what it was.’
‘But what good does it do them?’
Ugrik pointed down through the leaves to where a group of Sammies were using a crane to lift a massive metal device of coiled pipes and tubes on to the back of a tractor-trailer. ‘Know what that is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Frey.
‘Nor do they,’ he said. ‘But you can bet they’re gonna find out.’
‘Salvage? That’s what they’re after?’
‘Technology,’ he said. ‘There’s things in this city like you can’t imagine. And the Sammies want it all. They want to know how to do what the Azryx did.’
Frey was only just beginning to appreciate the enormity of the situation. ‘If they manage to reverse engineer Azryx technology…’
‘They’d be well nigh invincible, I reckon,’ said Ugrik. ‘And they’ll be in your back yard before your next shit.’