Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

At her back, below and beyond, lay the dense bank of fog. Before her lay another city, somewhat smaller than the magnificent city by the lake but no less impressive for its courtyards and platforms laid out in tidy harmony. An avenue lined by buildings marched out from the plaza that lay at the base of the huge pyramid they now stood on. Every stone surface was painted with bright murals: giant spotted yellow cats, black eagles, golden phoenix, burning arrows clutched in the jaws of red snakes crowned by feathered headdresses. The city lay alive with color and yet was so quiet that she expected ghosts to skirl down its broad avenues, weeping and moaning.

Wind brushed her. Clouds boiled over the hills that marked the distant outskirts of the city, and she saw lightning. Thunder boomed, but no rain fell. She couldn’t even smell rain, only dust on the wind and a creeping shiver on her skin. Her hair rose on the nape of her neck.

“It’s not safe so high where lightning might strike,” remarked the old sorcerer.

He descended at once down stair steps so steep that she only dared follow him by turning around and going down backward. Behind, the fog simply sliced off that portion of the city that lay beyond the great pyramid, a line as abrupt as a knife’s cut.

Thunder clapped and rolled. Lightning struck the top of the pyramid, right where they’d been standing. Her tongue buzzed with the sting of its passing. Her foot touched earth finally, dry and cool.

She knew where she was.

Long ago, when she was a child, when she and Da had fled from the burning villa, he had brought her through an ancient city. In that city, the wind had muttered through the open shells of buildings. Vast ruins had lain around them, the skeleton of a city that had once claimed the land. Along the avenues, she had seen the faded remnants of old murals that had once adorned those long walls. Wind and rain and time had worn the paint from those surfaces, leaving only the tired grain of ancient stone blocks and a few scraps of surviving murals, faded and barely visible.

The ruins had ended at the shoreline of the sea as abruptly as if a knife had sheared them off.

Da had muttered words, an ancient spell, and for an instant she had seen the shadow form of the old city mingling with the waves, the memory of what once had been, not drowned by the sea but utterly gone. Wonder bloomed in her heart, just as it had on that long-ago day.

“This is that city,” she said aloud.

The old sorcerer had begun to walk on, but he paused.

“I’ve seen the other part of this city,” she explained. “The part that would have lain there—” She pointed toward the wall of fog.

“But the ruins were so old. Far older than the cities built by the Dariyans. That was the strangest thing.”

“That they were old?”

“Nay, nay.” Her thoughts had already leaped on. “That the ruins ended so abruptly. As if the land was cut away from the Earth.”

He smiled sadly. “No memory remains among humankind of the events of those days?”

She could only shake her head, perplexed by his words.

“Come,” he said.

At the far end of the avenue rose a second monumental structure, linked to the great pyramid by the roadway. Platforms rose at intervals on either side. It was hard to fathom what kind of engineering, or magic, had built this city. The emptiness disturbed her. She could imagine ancient assemblies crowding the avenue, brightly-clothed women and men gathered to watch spectacles staged on the platforms or to pray as their holy caretakers offered praise to their gods from the perilous height of the great pyramid. Yet such a crowd had left no trace of its passage, not even ghosts.

It was a long walk and an increasingly hot one as the storm rolled past and dissolved into the wall of fog. Not one drop of rain fell. She had to stop twice to drink, although the old sorcerer refused a portion both times.

The other temple was also a four-sided pyramid, sloped in stair steps and chopped off short. At the top loomed the visage of a huge stone serpent. An opening gaped where the serpent’s mouth ought to have been, framed by two triangular stacks of pale stone.

Flutes and whistles pierced the silence. Had the ghosts of the city come to haunt her? Color flashed in the distance and resolved into a procession of people dressed in feathered cloaks and beaded garments, colors and textures so bright that they would have been gaudy against any background, although the vast backdrop of the city and the fierce blue of the sky almost swallowed them. At the head of the procession bobbed a round standard on a pole, a circular sheet of gold trimmed with iridescent green plumes as broad across as a man’s arms outstretched. It spun like a turning wheel. Its brilliance staggered her.

The procession wound its way in through the serpent’s mouth, vanishing into the temple.

They came to the stairs, where Eldest Uncle paused while she caught her breath and checked each of her weapons: her knife, her good friend Lucian’s sword, and Seeker of Hearts, her bow. A wash of voices issued out through the serpent’s mouth like the voices of the dead seeping up from the underworld.

“They will not be friendly,” he said. “Be warned: speak calmly. In truth, young one, I took you on because I fear that only you and I can spare both our peoples a greater destruction than that which we are already doomed to suffer.”

His words—delivered in the same cool matter-of-fact tone he might have used if he were commenting on an interesting architectural feature—chilled her. The long avenue behind her lay wreathed in a heat haze. Wind raised dust. The great pyramid shone in uncanny and massive splendor.

“I faced down Hugh,” she said at last. “I can face down anyone.”

They climbed the steps toward the serpent’s head. Coming up before it, Liath found herself face-to-face with those two flanking little pyramids of stone, except they weren’t stone at all.

They were stacks of grinning skulls.

“What are those?” she demanded, heart racing in shock as vacant eyes stared back at her.