CHAPTER 40
“Miramani,” Jani said softly. The three of them fell into an awed silence.
A hundred feet away, on the huge island beyond the bridge, a great white gatehouse and a wall ran along the water’s edge. Within the walls, eight tall, broad columns rose to the top of the cavern, glowing with a pale white light. They could hear voices, raised in argument, echoing from somewhere.
They hurried across the bridge, the silent black waters stinking of brine below. Butu couldn’t sense anyone, but he felt very exposed here. Lujo and Jani followed as he ducked into the gatehouse’s shadow. His shoulder scraped the sharp wall, breaking some of it off. He bent to pick it up and paused to look at the wall itself.
Spiky rivers of brittle, shaped crystals formed the wall. Left and right, up and down, the entire city seemed built of the stuff. The crystal spikes were built of cubes, stacked over and over again on edges and points. Butu pocketed the chunk in his hand.
“Salt,” Lujo murmured with some satisfaction, snapping off a piece. “The legend is true.”
“You didn’t believe it?” Jani asked.
“I believe all the legends. It’s one thing to talk about them. It’s another to see them.”
Butu certainly couldn’t argue with him there, and he didn’t know as many stories as Lujo. The voices had quieted, and the steady plip ploop of water dripping into the Wail grew loud in his ears.
Almost like the first-cyclers are still crying, he thought, and shuddered.
“Come on,” he ordered, ducking through the gatehouse and into the city.
The great gates lay broken and shattered, relics of the forced entry the ancient king’s army had made. Square buildings of solid crystal lined the street ahead of him, themselves untouched by the violence the gates had seen but looking half-melted under the salty growths on them. Tiny crystals grew on the path ahead, too, many of them worn down in what looked like a recent attempt to clear the path. But that wasn’t what made them stop.
Jani gasped, and Butu tried to cough quietly into his hand. Dozens of shriveled corpses littered the square beyond the shattered gate, all dusted with glittering crystal. Many of the mouths were open as if screaming, and the limbs stiffly grasped the air in front of them to ward off whatever horror had silenced those cries.
“They’re still whole,” Butu said.
“It’s the salt,” Lujo whispered back, taking the lead and crossing to a side street, where fewer corpses waited and the path wasn’t cleared. “I have heard that the Kadrak wrap the bodies of their dead in linens soaked in salt and herbs to preserve them from rot. The process comes close to turning bodies into sand. In the time of kings, whenever the Kadrak were outnumbered on the battlefield, their children would quicken the corpses to fight alongside the living soldiers. They haven’t done it since the Treaty of Mnemon, of course, but they still keep the old tradition of preserving the bodies of their dead.”
“You just made that up,” Butu accused, stepping gingerly over a low wall of salt growing over the bones of someone.
Lujo shrugged. “Believe what you want.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Jani said, wiping her gloves on her legs. White dust rolled off them. “At least, he’s telling a story I’d heard before he told it.”
“Those were too big to be the first-cyclers,” Butu said. “Where are all the children?”
Lujo paused in a doorway. Inside, the furniture, protected from the dripping, wasn’t salt-covered. He went in, drew his knife, and chipped at a corner of a chair. The blade barely scratched it. He shook his head. “The king turned them into salt statues, and they crumbled at his touch.”
“Like adults killed by simam,” Butu said, the hair on his neck prickling.
“Yeah.” Lujo pointed at a collapsed building that looked like a sand castle after being doused with a bucket of water. “They could be as much a part of the city now as those.”
“Can you feel Pisor?” Jani asked, sounding faintly nervous.
Lujo swallowed and shook his head. “No, but there are lots of swords over there.” He pointed.
“Which clan?”
“I’m not sure. Sorry.”
“I guess we’d know if they had Pisor already.” Jani said.
“There,” Butu said, pointing at a building several stories taller than its neighbors. “We’ll climb that. Maybe we’ll see a good place to start looking for Pisor.”
Jani nodded, and the three sordenu crunched to the building and started up the stairs. The steps were cracked in a few places, making the footing a bit treacherous at times. Two more corpses lay face-down on the first landing.
“The city is salt, but its foundation is marble. That’s why it hasn’t all melted into the moat,” Lujo said.
Butu grunted and continued up the next flight of stairs. At the top of the fifth flight of stairs, they reached the top of the tower. There were signs of recent visitors here — stale crusts of bread and an empty wine jug — but no one was there now.
They looked over the side of the tower, and were granted a perfect picture of the city.
Once, Urgaruna had stretched out in perfect squares. Glittering white streets connected uniform blocks of crystal buildings, all glimmering in the columns’ light. Scattered here and there were empty courtyards decorated with crystal statues. The whole city had a clear geometry — perfect cubes arranged in perfect squares arranged in perfect squares arranged in perfect squares.
Now, many of the buildings were mere ruins — piles of wet, melted salt. Where the buildings hadn’t melted, salt had grown up and around them, creating spikes of cubes. Many of these lay shattered, collapsed under their own weight or shaken by a quake, their fragile shapes destroyed more easily than the crystal city they grew on. Hundreds of darkened mounds littered the streets like rocks in the desert — the bodies of the Urgarun, forever preserved by the tears of their children.
The tears of the children have never stopped, Butu thought, staring up at the twinkle of light rain falling from the ceiling. The Wail will never dry.
“Why so many squares?” Butu wondered aloud.
Lujo shrugged. “Salt is a cubic crystal, so it would be the easiest shape.”
“And where is that light coming from?” Butu asked. It wasn’t always salt, though, he didn’t say.
This time, Jani answered, shaking her head, “The wishes of children a thousand years dead, I imagine.”
“Do you think it was brighter back then?” Butu asked, imagining a bustling city below him, like watching Jasper at sunset from Sentinel’s Finger. No one answered.
“The swords are that way.” Lujo pointed to a spot near the city’s center.
Wide staircases led to a great palace, easily the size of Jasper and Gordney combined. With pillars and towers and giant, square windows and balconies, it must have been a great seat of power, once. The strange terror of seeing mummified people had kept their eyes focused low, but this building dominated the city even more than that. Guards littered the steps but were barely recognizable from this distance.
“It’s in there if it’s anywhere in this city.”
Butu considered this. Mnemon ended the Age of Kings. Why would he put it somewhere so obvious?
But Jani spoke first. “There’s only one way we’re getting into that without being noticed.”
Butu felt her vanish even as she spoke.
“Jani, wait,” he said, but Lujo had begun his hide-and-seek chant, and she didn’t respond. Butu felt a little uncomfortable, but also confident they’d be able to magic their way out. He began the chant himself and followed Lujo down the stairs. They passed the crumbling remains of buildings and sometimes had to take detours around salty pools. Butu looked around at the ruins as they walked.
Urgaruna was supposed to be something so wondrous, but it’s really very sad. A drop of falling water brushed the back of his hand. Kind of like Pisor’s history, I guess.