Mostly, the reed beds were left to the current inhabitants, millions upon millions of pink-feathered juit birds.
They were ungainly creatures, plump of body with long, spindly necks and legs, and oversized beaks. They fed on the grasses and waterweed that tangled about the reeds and squabbled among themselves for entertainment.
These past months they had been unusually quiet.
One day the River Lhyl had died. Very suddenly, within the space of a single breath. The river entered at the lake’s northern border in a great marshy swathe ninety paces wide. Normally the river flowed into the lake strongly, rippling the reeds about its mouth and lifting juit birds’ nests up and down in a soothing rocking motion day and night.
On this day, however, everything had stopped. The river had turned in a moment to glass and a clearly defined edge was created: a small cliff of glass, standing half the height of a man, stretching ninety paces east to west. Occasionally, glass beads that once had been water droplets strained out of the glass, held back by a tiny sliver of hopelessness. A single moment more and they would have dropped to freedom and life within the lake, but they had been a splinter in time too late.
The water of the lake lapped disconsolately at this edge of glass, caressing it, murmuring to it, but there was no response. The river was dead.
The juit birds stayed well away from the glass river. Those who’d had their nests close to the mouth of the river moved them away, cradling either chicks or eggs in their oversized beaks as they stalked awkward-limbed through the shallows to safer abodes. No juit bird would come to within two hundred paces of the dead river and, in their daily meandering through the reed beds, constantly kept their backs to the north and the glass.
The juit birds knew what had caused this calamity and they cursed, not the One, but the Magi who had, so many thousands of years ago, raised the glass pyramid from the desert floor.
If it had not been for Threshold . . .
On this night the reed banks were quiet, as usual. There was occasional movement as birds resettled themselves in their roosts among the reed beds, or snapped sleepily at a neighbour, but mostly there was calm and stillness throughout the millions of juit birds who populated the lake.
Then, suddenly, every bird jerked its head upward, bright black eyes fully awake and aware.
Someone called.
“Ah!” Maximilian felt the breath pushed from his chest as he staggered against a stone wall, and he scraped several fingertips as his hand scrabbled for purchase.
He heard movement about him, felt other bodies stumble momentarily against his, heard others gasping for breath.
“We’re here,” Avaldamon said.
“Where?” Maximilian managed to get out, momentarily disorientated and forgetting what it was he did, stumbling about in the unknown.
“Aqhat, I hope,” Avaldamon said. “Are we all here? Ishbel? Serge? Doyle?”
Voices murmured assent, and Maximilian reached out for Ishbel’s hand. She gripped it tightly, moving against him for reassurance.
Maximilian looked around, his eyes becoming more used to the dark. “We’re in a courtyard.”
“In the great courtyard, to be precise,” said Ishbel. “There is a gate over there . . . see it? It leads down to the river. DarkGlass Mountain is in that direction,” she nodded to the west, “over the river. It cannot see us here if we stay close to the wall.”
Serge and Doyle had their swords drawn and had positioned themselves on the outside of the small group, looking for any danger.
“There is no one else,” Ishbel said. “Not even an owl. Nothing.”
“Everything would have been eaten by the Skraelings,” Doyle said. “At least there don’t seem to be any of the loathsome wraiths here.”
“They’re likely all headed for Elcho Falling,” Maximilian said dryly.
“We need to find some shelter,” said Avaldamon. “Then we need to talk while we wait for the dawn.”
The One lay flat on his back in the middle of the desert, halfway between Sakkuth and Aqhat. His limbs were spreadeagled, and his obsidian eyes were wide, staring unblinking at the starry night sky.
The starlight twinkled deep within his glass flesh.
The One was not happy. He could feel movement and power and understood that the Lord of Elcho Falling and his bride from hell had somehow transported themselves far south.
South to DarkGlass Mountain.
“No!” the One whispered.
He knew what they wanted.
They wanted to destroy the pyramid.
And him.
They had their pretty tricky magics at their fingertips and they were going to walk into the Infinity Chamber and —
Suddenly the One remembered what he’d left in the Infinity Chamber.
The Book of the Soulenai.
He hissed, and all the sand surrounding his body began to roll and jump, as if it were being heated on a giant griddle.
Leaving that book had been an enormous tactical error.
“But not one that can’t be fixed,” the One said, leaping to his feet. He stretched out his arms to either side, straining them until the tendons and muscles bulged.
Then, with a slightly worrying creak, the One began to grow.
On Lake Juit, the birds stared into the night.
Then, in the same instant, the entire population of juit birds lifted screaming into the air.
Chapter 14
The Outlands
Once river god and former Tyrant of Isembaard, Isaiah now led some one hundred thousand Isembaardian soldiers north from the Salamaan Pass, heading for Elcho Falling to aid its lord. Each night, with well-honed practice, the Isembaardians established a camp and settled down to sleep, either in tents or on bedrolls under the stars. This night, Isaiah moved restlessly about on a camp bed in his tent, the blanket twisting this way and that until it tangled uncomfortably around his legs. Finally he gave up. Pushing aside the blanket, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up.
He shivered a little in the cold air, then reached for his clothes.
There was no point in staying abed and, with any luck, one or two of the cooks would be up and have prodded a cooking fire into life somewhere among the myriad tents.
Isaiah looked to see if the manservant sleeping at the back of the tent had wakened — he hadn’t — then he pushed aside the tent flap and walked outside.
It was very quiet.
Armed sentries, scores of them, patrolled the outer rim of the sprawling encampment. They walked slowly, but they looked alert, and Isaiah breathed a sigh of relief. These past several days he had been filled with such a sense of dread . . . he’d never missed his power so much as he did at this point.
If only he could scry out with his senses and feel what had gone so wrong.
It could be anything — Armat, the One, Maximilian, the Lealfast . . .
What was happening? What was wrong?
Isaiah’s power was gone, consumed by the One. If Isaiah had still had his power, understanding what was happening would have been easy.
But now . . .
There was only one thing Isaiah thought he knew for sure, and that was that Lister was dead. He knew it instinctively, having shared companionship with Lister over so many tens of thousands of years. Now the companionship was gone. Lister was dead.
Isaiah wondered who had done the deed, and hoped it had been either Ishbel or Maximilian.
Gods alone knew, both had had reason enough.
Isaiah was not terribly upset by the loss of Lister; they had never been close emotionally, but he was wracked with concern about what else might be happening up north.
None of the Icarii had stayed with Isaiah and the hundred thousand men he commanded (the former renegade general, Lamiah, being pragmatic enough to return to the role of second-in-command fairly happily) and Isaiah regretted this. If the Icarii had stayed, then maybe he could have sent them scouting, or maybe, maybe, if one of them had been an Enchanter, he could have communicated directly with Axis, or StarDrifter, and discovered intelligence.
But no, here he was, left with only mortal ability, and Isaiah resented it now more than ever before.
He looked toward the tent where slept Hereward, the former kitchen steward from Isaiah’s palace of Aqhat. He’d hardly had any discourse with her on this hard ride north toward Elcho Falling. Isaiah still harboured some bitterness toward her for the loss of his power, despite what he might say to her. If it hadn’t been for Hereward . . . if he hadn’t surrendered his powers in order to save her life . . . well, then both he and everyone else would have had a far better chance at life than they did now.
Was it better to save Hereward and lose a hundred thousand because of it?