Awaken the Three Page 4

  “We must be nearly there,” she said, turning her head. “I know we’re riding in with them, but I can’t help feeling nervous.”

  Thornton looked up at her, seated upon Matilda, and did not have to ask why she felt that way. She wore the hood of her gray robes over her head, doing the best she could to conceal a face scarred with power, a consequence of the energy she had unwittingly released in the Otherworld. But unlike some of the Khyth that Thornton had seen whose skin had been similarly charred, Yasha’s skin was a soft, muted gray that nearly matched her robes. Against her swirling green eyes, it almost made her look beautiful. But both of them knew her robes would not be enough to hide who she was—what she was—from the eyes of the Athrani living in Ellenos.

  “We’ll stay close to Endar when we get there,” Thornton said. “He can vouch for us. I know he will.” His words were meant to be encouraging to his sister, but he wasn’t so sure if even he believed them. He barely knew the Athrani half-eye, and he knew of his intentions even less. In the back of his mind, he was almost afraid of being thrown into a jail cell upon their arrival. After all, both he and Yasha were Khyth, and the blood feud that existed between the Khyth and the Athrani was older than he could comprehend.

  “You come with the protection of Kienar,” Kethras said, surprising Thornton; he’d been silent for most of the journey and he’d almost forgotten he was there. “You will be safe.”

  Standing a whole head above Yasha—despite his being on foot and her being on horseback—Kethras’s words carried well.

  Yasha still had a worried look on her face. “If you say so,” she replied.

  Thornton and Yasha were Khyth, it was true, but neither of them had chosen to be. That was another matter entirely, however, and Thornton hoped the citizens of Ellenos would at least be understanding. Whether they would be, or whether they would choose to lock them up in a dungeon, they would find out soon.

  ***

  The Athrani Legion came to a halt on the edge of a sprawling body of water.

  “There she is,” Endar said from the front of the legion. The big man had a hand to his forehead to shield himself from the rays of the setting sun. “She certainly is a sight for sore eyes.”

  The murmurs of agreement that rippled through the army were punctuated with excited shouts of celebration.

  The legion had come home.

  The old stories say that Asha Imha-khet was beautiful, so beautiful that she captured the eye of not one but two gods. Yet, as beautiful as Asha Imha-khet was, she was equally prideful. Pleased with attention and unwilling to make a choice, she had no desire to choose between the two gods, so she did not. She loved them both in secret, never telling the other. And that was to be their undoing—all three of them.

  —Excerpt from The Night Sky and Its Names

  Chapter 8

  Khadje Kholam

  Rathma

  Djozen Yelto tightened his grip on Rathma as they neared the gray walls of the sprawling compound. Built to keep outsiders out just as much as to keep its residents in, the walls were an effective deterrent to roving nomads and to those, like him, who were followers of the Traveler.

  Rathma said a silent prayer as they approached, knowing he would soon be passing out of the Traveler’s reach and into the clutches of the worshippers of the Holder of the Dead—then, if the trial went how he guessed it would, to the Holder himself.

  Darkness had taken hold of the desert; the air around them had cooled, inviting its night dwellers to once again make their way to the surface. The desert wolves, kings in their own right, were free to roam about with no fear of the sun bearing down on them. Rathma hoped the ones he saw skulking around were friends of Kuu.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t just send someone after me,” he said casually to Yelto. “The mighty Djozen Yelto leaving the protection of his walls . . . I never thought I’d see the day.”

  The words brought a grin to the face of the fat eastern tribesman. “And risk you getting away?” chuckled Yelto. “No, my boy. This was a noose that the hangman himself must tie. It was simply too risky to entrust to someone else.”

  The crackling of the dozens of torches planted high on the wall was the only other sound that accompanied their soft footfalls in the sand.

  ***

  Rathma pulled his cloak tighter around him. In the desert, the temperature swings between night and day were not for the weak, and he was eternally grateful that Jinda had left him such a useful gift. It was just a shame that it would most likely be burned along with him and Kuu.

  As they approached the walled fortress, he recognized the robes worn by the Priests of the Holder. He could see the blue and the white long before he could see their skeletal faces, still haunted by tendons and muscles. It made them look like burn victims close to death.

  Those unblinking eyes, Rathma thought. They look so dead. So lifeless. He shivered at the sight.

  “I am pleased you have returned,” said one of the robed figures. His words, directed at Rathma, were raspy and sharp, like the voice of a serpent. “As is the Holder.”

  “How go things here, Priest?” asked Yelto. He did not use his name because Priests of the Holder had no names; they gave up their identities when they entered into servitude. It was one of the reasons for their disfigurement: everyone was equal in the sight of the Holder, and none showed that more than the nameless, faceless Priests of the Holder.

  “We have secured the Wolfwalker inside, as you asked. He was . . . difficult.” If a skeleton could frown, Rathma thought he was seeing it now.

  “I do not doubt that,” Yelto answered. “The southerners spend their whole lives ducking death. I did not expect it to be easy.”

  They stood outside a great metal gate that separated the interior of the compound from the endless burning desert. Rathma knew it was well guarded on the inside, which was why he’d chosen to avoid it entirely when he planned his earlier entrance. To be passing through it now came as an unwelcome twist of fate.

  Yelto barked an order that sent the gate rumbling open, churning upward on chains that were connected to a wheel manned by four sentries. When it lifted, Rathma’s breath nearly left him.

  In the middle of the compound, surrounded by no fewer than fifty of Yelto’s men, was a cage big enough to hold a wolf. But inside was no wolf, as Kuu’s older brothers were always saying. A pathetic-looking gray desert fox was lying on its side, eyes closed, with a long gash running down its rib cage. Its mouth was muzzled, and its left hind leg was chained to the thick iron bars that lined the cage.

  “Kuu!” Rathma shouted. Turning to Yelto, he growled through clenched teeth, “What have you done to him?”

  The fat Djozen raised his hands in mock distress. “Only what was necessary. If he wasn’t so intent on escape, we wouldn’t have had to deal with him so harshly. You heard the priest: the boy was a handful.”

  Rathma yanked at his own restraints while looking Djozen Yelto in the eyes. “If you’ve killed him, I swear by the Traveler . . .” He swallowed his words and tried to replace his anger with rational thought. “He had no part in this plan. Set him free.”

  Yelto laughed. “That will be for the tribunal to decide. Now”—he gave Rathma a shove—“inside.”

  Chapter 9

  Ellenos

  Thornton

  Thornton had seen more of Derenar in the last few weeks than he had in his entire life, but nothing could prepare him for the sight before him: the entrance to the mighty city of Ellenos, First City of the Athrani.

  Outside the city walls, higher than the surrounding countryside by many hundreds of feet, was an enormous steel structure. Its base was situated in an expansive body of water that stretched out like the biggest moat he’d ever seen. The “wheel” that everyone seemed so relieved to see didn’t look like much of a wheel, despite its name; it was mostly steel beams that crossed as they climbed upward, with smooth white brick that dug into a grass-covered mountain beside it. But even more perplexing was the fact that Thornton could not see the city. Why did Endar seem so excited to see this?

  “I don’t understand,” he said as he scratched his thick brown hair. “Where is Ellenos?”

  Endar laughed so heartily that Thornton was afraid he might rupture something. “Up there!” he said as he pointed.

  Thornton followed Endar’s finger to the top of the wheel, where the end of a long, straight canal was flowing into the center of a mass of great green hills. Ellenos, it appeared, was built into a caldera, with the sides of the mountain serving as natural walls surrounding the city.

  “Then how do we get to it?” Thornton asked.

  Turning in his saddle to look at him, Endar smiled. “We ride.”

  The half-eye took off the purple cloak that was draped around his shoulders and handed it to a pikeman who was standing beside him. The pikeman fastened it to the end of his weapon, raised it high into the air, and began waving it back and forth.

  As he did, Thornton felt a rumbling below him. “What—” he started to say, but his words were caught in his throat as he witnessed a marvel of Athrani Shaping. The very water in the lake in front of them started turning into stone, forming a bridge that stretched from the shore, where the army stood, to the base of the so-called Wheel of Ellenos.

  “But first we walk,” Endar said without looking back. His heels did the talking, and his horse, who trotted forward and onto the stony bridge, did the walking.

  Thornton and Yasha stood in awe as the soldiers of the legion streamed past them and onto the bridge. Thousands upon thousands of men, Athrani and human alike, made their way onto the platform, which until o
nly moments ago had been water.

  “Are you going to stand there gawking all day,” Endar shouted back to them, “or are you going to get on?”

  Thornton and Yasha exchanged glances, finally deciding to follow the rest of the men. Kethras walked hesitantly behind them.

  “I guess the worst that could happen is that we drown,” Thornton said, grinning sheepishly. No one was amused.

  The bridge they walked across ended at an enormous platform with great steel beams on both ends. Following the beams up, Thornton saw that they crisscrossed in the middle, halfway up the gargantuan steel wheel, and looked to be attached to a second platform on the top that mirrored their own.

  Just as the two of them planted their feet firmly on the platform, Thornton felt a rumbling again.

  “The Athrani are particularly proud of this next part,” Endar said.

  Thornton looked over the edge of the platform and saw that it was lifting off the ground. Craning his neck upward, he saw the corresponding platform above them starting to come down in a reciprocal, circular arc. With his eyes as wide as the steel floor they stood on, Thornton watched as the world below them fell away.

  “H-How . . . How . . . ?” he stammered.

  “How does it work?” Endar said, finishing the sentence for him. He pointed at the platform that was beginning to come down on the other end of the mighty wheel. “In a word: water. The canal at the top fills up with enough of it to create a counterweight. When it’s full enough, the wheel begins to turn. After that, it’s a simple matter of weight distribution and balance/counter-balance.”

  Despite Endar’s use of the word simple, Thornton thought it was anything but. He looked off the platform to watch the trees below him shrink from sight, and his head was spinning faster than the wheel as he tried to comprehend it all. He’d never seen anything like it, never imagined something like it could even exist, as his blacksmith brain focused on the enormous gears in the center of the wheel that seemed to be responsible for their movement.

  “Believe it or not,” Endar said as he leaned in close, “the wheel was a man’s idea. A human man. It’s a part of Ellenian history that the Athrani won’t tell you. Oh, sure, they built the thing,” he said with a wave of his hand. “And it’s hard to say if something this massive could have been created without the use of Shaping. But Athrani minds don’t work like that. It would have taken them another thousand years to come up with the design.”

  On the edge of the mass of men and Athrani, Thornton was acutely aware of his insignificance as they moved through the air on a ton of steel. He watched the plains disappear as they blended into a singular green mass, dwarfed by the side of the mountain they slowly scaled. When they had nearly reached the top, their starting point looked like one great stretch of green, and Thornton realized just how far they had marched—and how high they had climbed—by the fact that he could take in the whole countryside with a glance.

  The great wheel suddenly shuddered to a stop, opening into a canal that led into the city. As Thornton’s eyes followed the watery road, they fell on a sight that he almost believed he was dreaming instead of seeing: a city draped in gold with forking towers and sky-scraping buildings that he could hardly believe were real. The low-lying clouds that blanketed the city made it seem like a waking dream, and the fingers of fog weaving in and out of the towering houses and buildings provided the most amazing backdrop for the sunset that was working its way through the city as the legion came ashore.

  Waiting for them, just off the edge of the platform, was an enormous wooden ship that was bigger than some of the buildings Thornton had seen in Annoch. It had windows carved all around it, and Thornton counted at least five levels. There was a wooden ramp at the bottom that the men of the legion used to start filing onto the ship.

  “Now, to get you to the High Keeper,” Endar said as he started toward the transport. He looked at Thornton and Yasha, and smiled. “I hope she’s in an understanding mood.”

  Thornton felt unease creeping back into his throat as they moved slowly down the waterway. Moods are like the weather, his father used to say. Mostly unpredictable and oftentimes dangerous.

  Looking out past the city lined with gold and fog, he took a deep breath.

  I just hope we can ride out the storm.

  Chapter 10

  Ghal Thurái

  Duna

  The Fist of Ghal Thurái was legendary, respected throughout Gal’dorok and feared just as widely. They had earned their reputation in blood and steel, and were among the greatest fighting forces ever commanded. So when Duna Cullain had marched them from the brink of defeat in Kienar to the foothills of the Great Serpent, Gal’behem, she had most certainly expected more of a welcome than the one she got—the one she got was barely a welcome at all.

  In fact, the only one there to welcome them was the last person she preferred to see: Kunas, Master Khyth of Ghal Thurái. The shoulders and hood of his black robe were painted orange by the flames above, pouring out of the cliffs of the Mouth of the Deep and bringing unwelcome light to a smoke-darkened sky.

  Duna looked at the Master Khyth and noticed that he was not his usual defiant self. She wasn’t quite sure, but she thought she was seeing weakness. Helplessness.

  Even . . . fear?

  “So, the mighty Fist returns,” Kunas rasped, and the sound made Duna cringe. Those Khyth who had undergone the Breaking all seemed to have this quality in common: the essence of their voice was stripped away, leaving only a ragged whisper that was as unsettling as it was powerful. “Yet it does not feel like a victory march.”

  “It is not,” Duna said with a frown. “We suffered a great many losses in Kienar.”

  “What losses, Lady Cullain?” the Khyth asked, narrowing his eyes and peering around her to examine the army. “And where is the commander?”

  “Losses comparable to what appears to have happened here,” Duna replied. “And you are looking at her.”

  Kunas stopped, puzzled, looking back at her. “I do not understand.”

  “Then listen well,” she responded coolly, keeping eye contact with the Khyth. “Tennech has fled, and Commander Durakas has been slain. That leaves me as the highest-ranking officer in Gal’dorok—and, consequently, as general.”

  The Khyth flinched. “Then,” he said, bowing slightly, “you have my apologies, General Cullain.”

  Bowing and apologizing, Duna thought suspiciously. Both were extremely out of character for Kunas, who considered himself above reproach and authority. And technically, being selected by none other than High Khyth Yetz, he was both.

  It made her uneasy.

  “Think nothing of it,” she said with a dismissive wave.

  She tore her eyes off the black-robed Khyth before her and let them wander over the winding road that led to her city. She traced the path upward to the entrance: once a beautiful marble masterpiece and testament to Thurian craftsmanship, it was now a heap of collapsed, smoking rubble. Guard towers that had been carved into the side of the mountain were now abandoned and crumbling. The city was in ruins, and no one had seen it coming.

  She glanced back at Kunas.

  Or maybe someone did.

  There had been a sizable defensive force here when the Fist left. Whoever did this had known its defenses would be down.

  Whoever did this had had a plan.

  “Tell me what happened here,” Duna finally said. She did not let her eyes leave the smoke from her city.

  “It was the Chovathi, Lady—” He caught himself. “General Cullain. Swarms of them. They came from beneath the earth, from the rocks, from all around. They were upon us in no time.”

  “When?”

  “No more than a day ago. We were caught unaware and undefended. It was as if they knew when we would be at our weakest, primed to strike at the perfect moment. And,” he added, “they were organized. Working together. It was a concentrated attack unlike any I’ve ever seen from them.”

  Looking back up to the ruined exterior of Ghal Thurái, she caught glimpses of Chovathi scouts skulking about, in and out of the rocks that made up the mountain city. It was entirely unlike the Chovathi to organize together in the way that Kunas was saying.