Blinding, raging on all sides.
Udinaas felt a weight push him from behind and he stumbled forward. Through the flames. In the world he had just left, he would now be falling down the cliffside, briefly, then striking the rocky slope and tumbling towards the treeline. But his moccasins skidded across flat, dusty ground.
Twisting, down onto one knee. Feather Witch staggered into view, like him passing unharmed through the wall of fire. He wheeled on her. ‘What have you done?’
A hand closed round the back of his neck, lifted him clear of the ground, then flung him down onto his back. The cold, ragged edge of a stone blade pressed against the side of his neck. He heard Feather Witch scream.
Blinking, in a cloud of dust.
A man stood above him. Short but a mass of muscles. Broad shoulders and overlong arms, the honey-coloured skin almost hairless. Long black hair hanging loose, surrounding a wide, heavily featured face. Dark eyes glittered from beneath a shelf-like brow. Furs hung in a roughly sewn cloak, a patchwork of tones and textures, the visible underside pale and wrinkled.
‘Peth tol ool havra d ara.’ The words were thick, the vocal range oddly truncated, as if the throat from which those sounds issued lacked the flexibility of a normal man’s.
‘I don’t understand you,’ Udinaas said. He sensed others gathered round, and could hear Feather Witch cursing as she too was thrown to the ground.
‘Arad havra‘d ara. En‘aralack havra d‘drah.’
Countless scars. Evidence of a broken forearm, the bone unevenly mended and now knotted beneath muscle and skin. The man’s left cheekbone was dimpled inward, his broad nose flattened and pressed to one side. None of the damage looked recent. ‘I do not speak your language.’
The sword-edge lifted away from the slave’s neck. The warrior stepped back and gestured.
Udinaas climbed to his feet.
More fur-clad figures.
A natural basin, steeply walled on three sides. Vertical cracks in the stone walls, some large enough to provide shelter. Where these people lived.
On the final side of the basin, to the Letherii’s left, the land opened out. And in the distance – the slave’s eyes widened – a shattered city. As if it had been pulled from the ground, roots and all, then broken into pieces. Timber framework beneath tilted, heaved cobble streets. Squat buildings pitched at random angles. Toppled columns, buildings torn in half with the rooms and floors inside revealed, many of those rooms still furnished. Vast chunks of rotting ice were visible in the midst of the broken cityscape.
‘What place is this?’ Feather Witch asked.
He turned to see her following his gaze from a few paces away.
‘Udinaas, where have you brought us? Who are these savages?’
‘Vis vol‘raele absi‘arad.’
He glanced at the warrior who’d spoken, then shrugged and returned his attention to the distant city. ‘I want to go and look.’
‘They won’t let you.’
There was only one way to find out. Udinaas set out for the plain.
The warriors simply watched.
After a moment, Feather Witch followed, and came to his side. ‘It looks as if it has just been… left here. Dropped.’
‘It is a Meckros city,’ he said. ‘The wood at the bases, it is the kind that never grows waterlogged. Never rots. And see there’ – he pointed – ‘those are the remnants of docks. Landings. That’s a ship’s rail, dangling from those lines. I’ve never seen a Meckros city, but I’ve heard enough descriptions, and this is one. Plucked from the sea. That ice came with it.’
‘There are mounds, freshly raised,’ she said. ‘Do you see them?’
Raw, dark earth rising from the flats around the ruins, each barrow ringed in boulders. ‘The savages buried the Meckros dead,’ he said.
‘There are hundreds…’
‘And every one big enough to hold hundreds of corpses.’
‘They feared disease,’ she said.
‘Or, despite their appearance, they are a compassionate people.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Indebted. The task would have taken months.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘That was but one clan, Feather Witch, back there. There are almost four thousand living in this region.’
She halted, grasped his arm and pulled him round. ‘Explain this to me!’ she hissed.
He twisted his arm loose and continued walking. ‘These ghosts hold strong memories. Of their lives, of their flesh. Strong enough to manifest as real, physical creatures. They’re called T’lan Imass-’