Ekrasios crouched at the edge of the forest waiting for the
torches inside the walls of Norenja to burn down and for the
sounds of human activity to subside. The events at Panem-Doa
had confirmed the assessment of these rebels Lord Vanion had
given him at Sama. Given the slightest opportunity, these poorly-trained
soldiers would flee, and that suited Ekrasios very
well. He was still somewhat reluctant to unleash the curse of
Edaemus, and people who ran away did not have to be
destroyed. Adras returned, ghosting back to the edge of the jungle
through the night mist. ‘All is in readiness, Ekrasios,’ he
reported quietly. ‘The gates will crumble at the merest touch.’
‘Let us then proceed,’ Ekrasios replied, standing up and
relaxing the rigid control that dimmed his inner light. ‘Let us
pray that all within yon walls may flee.”
‘And if they do not?’
‘Then they must surely die. Our promise to Anakha binds us.
We will empty yon ruin – in one fashion or the other.’
‘It’s not so bad here,’ Kalten said as they dismounted. ‘The bones
are older, for one thing.’ Necessity had compelled them to camp
in the hideous boneyard the previous night, and they were all
eager to reach the end of the horror.
Sparhawk grunted, looking across the intervening stretch of
desert at the fractured basalt cliff that seemed to mark the eastern
edge of the Forbidden Mountains. The sun had just come up
above the eastern horizon, and its brilliant light reflected back
from the pair of quartz-laced peaks rearing up out of the rusty
black mountains just to the west.
‘Why are we stopping here?’ Mirtai asked. ‘That cliff’s still a
quarter of a mile away.’
‘I think we’re supposed to line up on those two peaks,’ Sparhawk
replied. ‘Talen, can you remember Ogerajin’s exact
words?’
‘Let’s see.’ The boy frowned in concentration. Then he nodded
shortly. ‘i’ve got it now,’ he said.
‘How do you do that?’ Bevier asked him curiously.
Talen shrugged. ‘There’s a trick to it. You don’t think about
the words. You just concentrate on where you were when you
heard them.’ He lifted his face slightly, closed his eyes, and
began to recite. ‘Beyond the Plain of Bones wilt thou come to
the Gates of illusion behind which lies concealed the Hidden
City of Cyrga. The eye of mortal man cannot perceive those
gates. Stark they stand as a fractured wall at the verge of the
Forbidden Mountains to bar thy way. Bend thine eye, however,
upon Cyrgon’s two white pillars and direct thy steps toward the
emptiness which doth lie between them. Trust not the evidence
which thine eye doth present unto thee, for the solid-seeming
wall is as mist and will not bar thy way.’
‘That didn’t even sound like your own voice,’ Bevier said.
‘That’s part of the trick,’ Talen explained. ‘That was Ogerajin’s
voice – sort of.’
‘All right then,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Let’s see if he really knew
what he was talking about.’ He squinted at the two brilliant
points of reflected light. ‘There are the pillars.’ He took a few
steps to the right and shook his head. ‘From here they merge
into one light.’ Then he walked to the left. ‘It does the same
thing here.’ Then he went back to his original location. ‘This is
the spot,’ he said with a certain amount of excitement. ‘Those
two peaks are very close together. If you move a few feet either
way, you can’t even see that gap between them. Unless you’re
really looking for it, you could miss it altogether.’
‘Ohm that’s just fine, Talen,’ Kalten said sarcastically. ‘if
we go any closer, the cliff will block off our view of the pillars.”
Talen rolled his eyes upward.
What?’ Kalten asked.
“Just start walking toward the cliff, Kalten. Sparhawk can
stand here and keep his eyes on the gap. He’ll tell you whether
to go to the right or the left.’
‘Oh.’ Kalten looked around at the others. ‘Don’t make an issue
of it,’ he told them, Then he started off toward the cliff.
‘Veer to the right,’ Sparhawk told him.
Kalten nodded and changed direction.
‘Too far. Back to the left a little.’
The blond Pandion continued toward the cliff, altering his
direction in response to Sparhawk’s shouted commands. When
he reached the cliff, he went along slapping his hands on the
face of the rock. Then he drew his heavy dagger, stuck it into
the ground, and started back.
‘Well?’ Sparhawk called when he had covered half the
distance.
‘Ogerajin didn’t know what he was talking about,’ Kalten
shouted.
Sparhawk swore.
‘Do you mean there’s no opening?’ Talen called.
‘Oh, the opening’s there all right,” Kalten replied, ‘but it’s at
least five feet to the left of where your crazy man said it would
be.’
ChAPTER 26
‘Please don’t do that, Talen,’ Bevier said. ‘Either go all the way
in or stay outside. It’s very disturbing to see the bottom half of
you sticking out of solid rock that way.’
‘It’s not solid, Bevier.’ The boy stuck his hand into the rock
and pulled it out again to demonstrate.
‘Well, it looks solid. Please Talen, in or out. Don’t hover in
between.’
‘Can you feel anything at all when you poke your head
through?’ Mirtai asked.
‘It’s a little cooler in there,’ Talen replied. ‘It’s a sort of cave
or tunnel. There’s light at the far end.’
vCan we get the horses through?’ Sparhawk asked.
Talen nodded. ‘It’s big enough for that – if we go through in
single file. I guess Cyrgon wanted to keep down the chances of
anybody accidentally discovering the opening.’
‘You’d better let me go first, Sparhawk said. ‘There might be
guards at the other end.’
‘i’ll be right behind you,’ Kalten said, retrieving his dagger
and drawing his sword.
“Tis a most clever illusion,’ Xanetia observed, touching the
rock face on the left of the gate. ‘Seamless and indistinguishable
from reality.’
‘It’s been good enough to hide Cyrga for ten thousand years,
I guess,’ Talen said.
‘Let’s go in,’ Sparhawk said. ‘I want to have a look at this
place.’
There was difficulty with the horses, of course. No matter how
reasonably one explains something to a horse, he will not willingly
walk into a stone wall. Bevier solved the problem by wrapping
cloth around their heads, and, with Sparhawk in the lead,
the party led their mounts into the’ tunnel.
It was perhaps a hundred feet long, and since the opening at
the far end was still in shade, the light from it was not blinding.
‘Hold my horse,’ Sparhawk muttered to Kalten. Then, his sword
held low, he moved quietly toward the opening. When he
reached it, he tensed himself and then stepped through quickly,
whirling to fend off an attack from either side.
‘Anything?’ Kalten demanded in a hoarse whisper.
‘No. There’s nobody here.’
The rest of them cautiously led their horses out of the tunnel.
They had emerged into a tree-shaded swale carpeted with
winter-dry grass and dotted with white stone markers. ‘The Glen
of Heroes,’ Talen murmured.
‘What?’ Kalten asked.
‘That’s what Ogerajin called it. I guess it sounds nicer than
“graveyard”. The Cyrgai seem to treat their own dead a little
better than they do the slaves.’
Sparhawk looked across the extensive cemetery. He pointed
to the western side where a slight rise marked the edge of the
burial ground. ‘Let’s go,’ he told his friends. ‘I want to see just
exactly what we’re up against.’
They crossed the cemetery to the bottom of the rise, tied their
horses to the trees growing there and carefully crept to the top.
The basin was significantly lower than the floor of the surrounding
desert, and there was a fair-sized lake nestled in the
center, dark and unreflective in the morning shadows. The lake
was surrounded by winter-fallow fields, and a forest of dark
trees stretched up the slopes of the basin. There was a sort of
rigid tidiness about it all, as if nature itself had been coerced
thto straight lines and precise angles. Centuries of brutal labor
had been devoted to hammering what might have been a place
of beauty into a stern reflection of the mind of Cyrgon himself.
The hidden valley was perhaps five miles across, and on the
east side stood the city that had remained concealed for ten eons.
The surrounding mountains had provided the building
materials, and the city wall and the buildings within were constructed
of that same brownish-black volcanic basalt. The
exterior walls were high and massive, and a steep, cone-like hill,
its sides thickly covered with buildings, rose inside those walls.
Sirmounting that hill was yet another walled enclosure with
black spires rising on one side and, in startling contrast to the
rest of the city, white spires on the other.
‘It’s not particularly creative,’ Bevier observed critically. ‘The
architect doesn’t seem to have had much imagination.’
‘imagination is not a trait encouraged amongst the Cyrgai, Sir