Some time passed before he saw the ruins.
At first he noticed only their sum, like a ghostly pictogram glimpsed through the trees, lines writ for the Heavens to read. Then he found himself picking out individual works, some actually breaching the forest canopy: the arcs of dead towers, the lines of once-imposing fortifications. Where before he had gazed across mere wilderness, now he peered across a monumental cemetery, a place humming with loss and history. It seemed absurd, even impossible, that he had failed to see it. But there it was, as clear as a Galeoth tattoo, only laid across the reach of the earth…
The remains of some mighty city.
Serwa began crying out in her sleep so violently as to send both Sorweel and Moenghus sprinting to her. The Prince-Imperial shrugged Sorweel aside when he hesitated over her thrashing form, then pulled her in his powerful embrace. She awoke sobbing.
For some reason, the sight of her clutching her brother with weeping gratitude unnerved him as much as anything he had witnessed since Sakarpus's fall. Everything but everything seemed to attest to the righteousness of the Aspect-Emperor's war against the World's second ending. The sheer might of the Great Ordeal. Eskeles and his unnerving lesson on the plain. The skin-spy so dramatically revealed in the Umbilicus. The terror of the Horde and the cunning of the Ten-Yoke Legion. Even the trust and charity the Anasurimbor had extended to him, their enemy…
Not to mention the shining presence of the Aspect-Emperor himself.
She had dreamed of the nameless city below them, Sorweel knew. She had relived the horror of its destruction even as he had pondered its overgrown imprint. And it struck him breathless, stationary in a way he had never known. The sight of her weeping somehow resurrected the circumstances that had so reduced her, a woman who seemed impervious to grief. He could almost hear the horns clawing the wind, glimpse the dread Whirlwind that Eskeles had always described in hand-wringing tones…
Nothing is quite so easy as dismissing the folly of the dead-so long as they remain dead.
She brought them to the ruins, though she could have leapt much farther, across the valley if need be. The Cant taxed her as profoundly as any, but she insisted on wandering with them, through the ruins of ancient Tryse, the Holy Mother of Cities.
The trees towered, formed high-hanging canopies that made gloom of the forest floor. The walls and bastions still loomed where not pulled down by the ages, their foundations buried, their torsos stained black, the blocks spangled with moss and lichens. In some places the rising tide of earth had inundated all, leaving only mossed debris scattered across the forest floor, fragments that would be taken for mere rocks and boulders in a deeper gloom. In other places, the loam and life had not so accumulated, leaving random stretches of nude ruin: heaped bricks, canted steps, walls finning the ground, the drums of toppled pillars.
Serwa led them across the destruction, her face flushed with excitement, her voice fluting in the manner Sorweel had heard so many times from girls her age, only about matters far more profound and tragic. The Sakarpi King thought he recognized some of the things she spoke of, either directly or through the slanted similarity of names. But far and away most of what she told them he had never heard before-nor had he imagined that Men period, let alone those who had fathered his ancestors, had battled and strived and conquered in days that were thought ancient by the ancients.
He had never heard of Cunwerishau, the first God-King to extend the might of his hand along the length of the River Aumris. And aside from Sauglish, he had never heard of any of the other cities that perpetually vied with Tryse for dominance: Etrithatta, Lokor, and Umerau, whose might would grow to exceed even that of Tryse, and whose language would remain the Sheyic of the Ancient North long after she was broken by a people called the Cond. " Your people, Horse-King," she said, her eyes alight with connections Sorweel could not fathom. "Or the cousins of your ancestors, to be exact, born to the lands just north of what you Sakarpi call the Pale. More than three thousand years ago, they cracked the walls of ancient Umerau and swept through this valley. Their ardour glutted, they spared all the great works they found and made slaves of those they would pillage."
She spoke as if he should celebrate these facts, take heart in the far-flung incarnations of his people's blood. But again Sorweel was afflicted with doubt and wonder. To know a man among the Sakarpi was to know his father. And here was this woman, telling him the truth of his fathers' fathers… The truth of himself!
What did it mean to be better known by outlanders than by oneself? What kind of fools were the Sakarpi, to find heart and honour-let alone self — in flattering fables spun across the ages?
How wrong had they been? Even proud Harweel.
They came to rockier ground, and she quickened her stride so much that Sorweel found himself breathless for trying to match her pace up the slope. A mysterious clearing opened between the trees, and for the first time they found themselves wandering among truly monumental works: blocks of hewn granite, as tall as a man and as long as a four-wheeled wain, some spilled, others assembled into cyclopean walls. She rushed forward without hesitation, wending through slots of stone and inciting any number of curses from her brother. They raced after her.
Panting, Sorweel paused before the sight of open sky, the blue so much deeper than the plains. He squinted against the sudden collusion of light and openness. A broad rectangle extended before him, heaped with stone ruin, yet miraculously devoid of overgrowth. The encroaching forest loomed about its perimeter as if leaning against some unseen barricade-or restrained by some unknown horror. He stood upon a far corner so that he could see the aisle of gargantuan pillars that braced the concourse in its entirety, as well as the lesser columns that lined its outer precincts. Most of them had tumbled-the smaller, outer columns especially-but enough remained standing to conjure the sense of the whole and to deliver the image of the long-lost ceilings to the soul's eye.
Sorweel watched a bee spiral from the gloom, then reel away to the edges of the clearing until it found a circumventing line. Even the birds he saw batting between the crowns of the surrounding elms and oaks seemed to avoid the open spaces, as if loathe to dare the scrutiny of the stage…
The Sakarpi King caught his breath, knowing he stood before an arena of lost glories-phantoms. A place that had lived too fiercely to ever truly die.
Oblivious, Serwa raced ahead, darted across the heaped stone and between the monstrous columns that remained. "Behold!" she cried with girlish disbelief. "Behold the King-Temple!"
Sorweel and Moenghus shared a hesitant glance.
"Bah!" the Prince-Imperial spat, running after her.
Sorweel trailed walking, trying hard to smile.
"How many times?" she called. It seemed she jostled with long-dead shades in his soul's eye.
"Stow your voice!" her brother commanded.
But she just frowned and continued, crying, "Here! Here! " looking about as though trying to orient her waking eyes with her sleeping. "On this very spot, Podi, I have supped and celebrated with the High-King, Celmomas-our little brother's namesake! — and his Knights-Chieftain."
"Serwa, please!" Moenghus cried. "Recall what Father told you! The skinnies are drawn to places like this!"
"Stow your worries!" she said, mocking his tone. "We leave no trail for them to follow. No trail, no mobbing. Even if we landed in the lap of an entire clan, they would be no match for me. I have reaped legions in the Culling, Podi! You know this…"