Chapter 5
ARIENNE
Danras, from up on a nearby hill, looked utterly warped.
Each log that had constituted the city walls was bent, like iron bars a blacksmith had forgotten to finish forging.
The buttresses and pillars of the wooden buildings had been crushed under their own weight.
Only a single stone building in the Imperial style, erected in the middle of the city, had the proper look of a man-made structure weathered only by time.
The ground was paved with stone blocks, but they were covered with red dust blown by the wind from the wasteland that surrounded it.
The city had the look of a tableau created by a mad painter. Arienne gulped. A fear that was different from what she felt when she had faced the mountainous wall of dust for the first time, or when she had faced the ghosts wandering the wastelands, was creeping up from within.
“Not even a dozen legions with Powered weapons could ever do this,” Arienne muttered. But what could kill a whole country, murder everything down to the grass, and still feel the need to corrode and distort what remained, a curse so hateful that it wouldn’t be satisfied with a simple massacre?
To find Danras, she had envisioned ancient ruins—it hadn’t mattered if what she imagined looked like the real Danras or not.
Sorcery, especially Arienne’s sorcery, was about imposing one’s will on what was real.
But there was always a price to pay for one’s imagination clashing with reality, and now the imagined Danras in her mind shattered to pieces at the sight of the real Danras before her.
A dizziness followed, as if the world were turning upside down.
It would’ve been better if she’d done more research on what Danras looked like as she embarked on her travels. The fallout from the discrepancy between the imagined and the real could very well drive her mad.
But her imagination was all Arienne had.
Without it, she would still be eating the food the Imperial Academy fed her and doing the “studies” they insisted she do.
She would have been a living corpse, doing nothing meaningful, with nobody expecting her to do anything besides die and become a Power generator.
She sat down on the ground, crossing her legs and sitting up straight.
Who knew what other strange scenes were waiting below her.
If she didn’t prepare for them, the shock would be even greater than what she had just experienced.
As she pressed down on the urge to avert her gaze from the ruined city, the reality of Danras entered fully into Arienne’s sight.
Each melted building engraved itself into her memory.
But at the same time, there was something she couldn’t prevent herself from imagining—what Danras must’ve looked like before the Star of Mersia had destroyed it.
That tower, twisted now like a reed bending in the storm, must’ve once been a commanding watchtower that rose above the city walls.
An old watcher in a wide-brimmed hat would have looked out at the sea of tall grass.
The ruins below that, where the roofs had rotted away but sections of the walls remained, creating a shape like the sun-dried bones of a dead animal, had once been a market.
The roofs would’ve been made of orox leather, the neatly displayed rows of goods coming from both Mersia and beyond the mountains.
And people as various as the goods had bought and sold things there.
The sunken, dry groove next to the walls had once been a river that had flowed from the northern part of the Rook Mountains.
There had been a busy dock. The hunk of wood that looked like melted, stretched molasses had once been a boat that traversed this river, carrying the leather of Danras to the north or bringing timber from the Rook Mountains.
She drew two cities in her mind. The first a prosperous city on the steppe, the other the devastated ruins before her.
Another giant wall of a dust storm crossed the wasteland in the distance. Aron paced around the hill, looking for grass to feed on. Was there a faint sobbing? Not daring to look, Arienne sat still and continued to commit the two cities in her mind to heart.
Just as a corner of the gray sky was turning dark, something moved at the edge of her vision. Her head quickly turned. The lone stone building, which had probably been the prefect’s office, shook. A heavy thud echoed through the once-grassland.
There was something there.
Heart pounding, Arienne gripped the glass orb around her neck and got to her feet.
Her body tingled a little and a white light began to glow outward from the orb.
Power still flowed in her. Ever since the night she had encountered the ghosts, she had been infusing Power into the orb before going to sleep.
The horse seller had assured her that a friend of his wife’s brother had used this piece of jewelry to ward off ghosts as he crossed the steppe of Mersia.
She wasn’t convinced yet that it had any real effect, but she at least found it to be a useful indicator of whether her Power was flowing or not.
“Aron!”
The donkey had already gone closer to the ruins while Arienne was looking elsewhere.
He must’ve found some dead tuft or other, as his nose was buried in the ground.
At his name, he briefly looked up in her direction and lowered his head again.
She plodded down the hill and grabbed the reins of the donkey as he tried to eat something that looked like fossilized grass.
Arienne recalled the horse seller’s warning that she should not go into places where people had once lived in Mersia.
If the ghosts hadn’t already convinced her, the strange sound earlier made her realize that the man hadn’t just been trying to scare her—not that such a warning would’ve been enough to keep her from coming here, even if she had believed him.
The walls of the city proper were much farther than it looked from the hill. As she went down the path, she stared at the prefect’s stone office that towered over the walls. It was quiet as she approached, and windless and dark by the time she reached them.
She lit her lamp and looked closely at the walls.
Through the twisted mess, she found a gap that would just allow a donkey to pass.
Glad that she did not have to find a gate to enter, she squeezed through, feeling as if she were entering a forest where trees grew thick and tall.
The heroines who entered such woods in the books she had read as a child would always encounter a witch there.
But tonight, that witch was Arienne. Who knew what the witch would find in the darkness of the forest that wasn’t?
Despite passing through the wall, she was still surrounded by twisted timber. How was this city laid out? Mersia’s night was heavy with darkness, and the lantern could only light so much. Was there a path she had overlooked?
Her lantern light suddenly revealed a skeleton tangled in the wood next to her head. She suppressed a scream and backed away, Aron braying as he also reacted in surprise. Like the walls and buildings, the skeleton was warped.
The remains were entangled in what looked like the window frame of a building.
The finger bones gripped the wooden bars and looked melted into a lump, and the skull was stuck between the bars, halfway outside the building.
The top of the skull had melted, dripping into lumps down the wall below.
Arienne calmed her beating heart, taking deep breaths.
She took a closer look at the skeleton and said, deliberately out loud, “It’s all right. At least it didn’t move.”
Skeletons that moved were very common in adventure stories.
They looked like people but were not; they were simply monsters who had once been human, things that an adventurer could slay without the inconvenience of guilt.
The Grim King who had ruled over this land, the sorcerer Eldred, had indeed been a necromancer who dealt in corpses. Monsters had roamed Mersia.
But there was no more Grim King of Mersia to create and rule the undead anymore. Arienne had made sure of that when she slew the reborn Eldred in the volcano in Arland two years ago.
She returned her attention to the skeleton and the building behind it. It was a very warped building, but she could just about understand where the rooms might be. She would spend the night here.
There was no door on this wall, so she imagined a small saw with a smooth wooden handle and well-maintained sharp sawteeth.
As she imagined it sawing through the window frame in her mind, she chanted the cutting spell.
Eldred had mocked her sorcery, saying it was like that of a baby’s babble, but this very spell had severed Eldred’s arms and ended the life of Grand Inquisitor Lysandros.
The skeleton, along with the wooden bars, fell inside the building.
The donkey would not fit through the window, so she tied his reins to a bent post nearby.
As Arienne was about to crawl through the window, Aron brayed distressingly.
Was he telling her not to leave him behind?
There hadn’t been any indication of danger since coming down the hill toward Danras, but there was definitely something eerie about the city, like that strange thud.
Perhaps Aron could sense something she herself couldn’t.
Arienne opened the door of her mind where Tychon babbled in his crib.
“You’ll have to excuse me, little one; I’m bringing in a friend.”
In her mind’s room, she drew the shape of an oval on the wall with her finger; then light appeared inside the oval, turning into a swirl of violet.
In the dark Danras alley, an identical swirl appeared.
Arienne slapped the donkey’s behind. Aron, understanding, walked through the violet gate and into the room in her mind.
His bulky presence made her head ache slightly. Aron looked around the room before showing interest in the books on the bookshelf. Arienne pulled at his reins and said, “Stay in this corner or else I’ll throw you out.”
Aron blubbered and settled down in the corner as told.
It would be safe here—as long as Arienne herself was safe, at least. She closed the door to the room. The violet swirl faded away.
Outside her mind, she climbed through the window of the building.
On the wooden floor, which was as warped and twisted as the walls, the skeleton lay entangled in debris.
There was a bed with a collapsed bed frame in the center, deteriorating clothes and blankets inside a wardrobe that was barely hanging on to its doors, and on the wall above the bed was another window looking out on what Arienne thought was the main street.
That skeleton had probably been the owner of this room.
Why had they grabbed on to the window instead of leaving through the door?
Arienne now tried to open the door, but no matter how she pushed and pulled, it was stuck.
The doorframe had been twisted too tightly.
Was the skeleton’s family beyond this door?
Were they, like the one here, a pile of melted bones on the floor?
Once more, she heard the sound she’d heard on the hill, a thud loud enough to shake the house. She dropped to the floor and held her breath. There was the creaking of wood and iron—and underneath, a softer but more familiar sound.
A humming that made her blood run cold. It was what the Arlanders called the sound of the sleeping dragon but what Arienne knew as the humming of a Power generator. She got to her feet and stepped up on the crumbling bed frame to look out the window.
The street, which should’ve been shrouded in darkness, was now lit up in blue light, the same color as the streetlights of the Imperial Capital.
With this new light, Arienne could now make out new details around her.
Wooden and leather signs, melted and rotted almost beyond recognizability, swung helplessly along the dusty street.
The letters were so faded and mangled that she couldn’t read even the Imperial translations beneath what she assumed was the native script.
She could, however, make out the text on a rusted plaque of a stone stele in the middle of the nearest intersection, carved deeply in Imperial and illuminated by the Powered lamps.
DA–RAS, THE GLORIOUS CAP–TAL OF THE I–PERIAL PROV—OF MERS–A
In empty Danras, Powered streetlamps had turned on and were now shining on the warped ruins. Where was the Power coming from?
And something stood outside in the street. It was about the size of a small house, on four mechanical legs, with two Powered lights stuck to the front like the eyes of a beast, lighting up the way before it.
Arienne quickly, silently stepped away from the window and went up to the door that would not open. She began to imagine what would be needed to cut through it.