It didn’t make sense!
Yet Padishar Creel seemed so positive.
Par fell asleep with the matter still unresolved.
They rose again at sunrise, crossed the Mermidon at a shal-
lows less than a mile upstream and turned south for Tyrsis. The
day was hot and still, and the dust of the grasslands filled their
nostrils and throats. They kept to the shade when they could,
but the country south grew more open as the forests gave way
to grasslands. They used their water sparingly and paced them-
selves as they walked, but the sun climbed steadily in the cloud-
less summer sky and the travelers soon were sweating freely.
By midday, as they approached the walls of the city, their cloth-
ing lay damp against their skin.
Tyrsis was the home city of Callahom, its oldest city, and the
most impregnable fortress in the entire Southland. Situated on
a broad plateau, it was warded by towering cliffs to the south,
and a pair of monstrous battle walls to the north. The Outer Wall
rose nearly a hundred feet above the summit of the plateau, a
massive armament that had been breached only once in the city’s
history when the armies of the Warlock Lord had attacked in
the time of Shea Ohmsford. A second wall sat back and within
the first, a redoubt for the city’s defenders. Once the Border
Legion, the Southland’s most formidable army, had defended
the city. But the Legion was gone now, disbanded when the
Federation moved in, and now only Federation soldiers pa-
trolled the walls and byways, occupiers of lands that, until a
hundred years ago, had never been occupied. The Federation
soldiers were quartered in the Legion barracks within the first
wall, and the citizens of the city still lived and worked within
the second, housed in the city proper from where it ran back
along the plateau to the base of the cliffs south.
Par, Coil, and Morgan had never been to Tyrsis. What they
knew of the city, they knew from the stories they had heard of
the days of their ancestors. As they approached it now, they
realized how impossible it was for words alone to describe what
they were seemg. The city rose up against the skyline like a
great, hulking giant, a construction of stone blocks and mortar
that dwarfed anything they had ever encountered. Even in the
bright sunlight of midday, it had a black cast to it-as if die
sunlight were being absorbed somehow in the rock. The city
shimmered slightly, a side effect of me heat, and assumed a
miragelike quality. A massive rampway led up from me plains
to the base of the plateau, twisting like a snake through gates
and causeways. Traffic was heavy, wagons and animals traveling
in both directions in a steady stream, crawling through me heat
and me dust.
The company of seven worked their way steadily closer. As
they reached me lower end of me rampway, Padishar Creel
turned back to the others and said, “Careful now, lads. Nothing
to call attention to ourselves. Remember that it is as hard to get
out of this city as it is to get in.”
They blended into me stream of traffic that climbed toward
the plateau’s summit. Wheels thudded, traces jingled and
creaked, animals brayed, and men whistled and shouted. Fed-
eration soldiers manned me checkpoints leading up, but made
no effort to interfere with the flow. It was the same at the gates-
massive portals that loomed so high overhead that Par was aghast
to think that any army had managed to breach them-the soldiers
seeming to take no notice of who went in or out. It was an
occupied city. Par decided, that was working hard at pretending ,
to be free.
They passed beneath me gates, the shadow of me gatehouse
overhead falling over mem like a pall. The second wall rose
ahead, smaller, but no less imposing. They moved toward it,
keeping in the thick of me traffic. The grounds between the walls
were clear of everyone but soldiers and their animals and equip-
ment. There were plenty of each, a fair-sized army housed and
waiting. Par studied the rows of drilling men out of the comer