Anomandaris shrugged. ‘I have nothing better to do today.’
The two Ascendants then walked through the gate, and, together, they closed the rent behind them. There were other paths, after all, to this realm. Paths that were not wounds.
Arriving within Kurald Emurlahn, they looked upon a ravaged world.
Then set about cleansing what was left of it.
The Awl’dan, in the last days of King Dishonor
Preda Bivatt, a captain in the Drene Garrison, was far from home. Twenty-one days by wagon, commanding an expedition of two hundred soldiers of the Tattered Banner Army, a troop of thirty Bluerose light cavalry, and four hundred support staff, including civilians, she had, after delivering orders for the setting of camp, slid down from the back of her horse to walk the fifty-odd paces to the edge of the bluff.
When she reached the rise the wind struck her a hammer blow to her chest, as if eager to fling her back, to scrape her from this battered lip of land. The ocean beyond the ridge was a vision from an artist’s nightmare, a seascape torn, churning, with heavy twisting clouds shredding apart overhead. The water was more white than blue-green, foam boiling, spume flying out from between rocks as the waves pounded the shore.
Yet, she saw with a chill rushing in to bludgeon her bones, this was the place.
A fisher boat, blown well off course, into the deadly maelstrom that was this stretch of ocean, a stretch that no trader ship, no matter how large, would willingly venture into. A stretch that had, eighty years ago, caught a Meckros City and had torn it to pieces, pulling into the depths twenty thousand or more dwellers of that floating settlement.
The fisher crew had survived, long enough to draw their beleaguered craft safely aground in hip-deep water thirty or so paces from the bedrock strand. Catch lost, their boat punched into kindling by relentless waves, the four Letherii managed to reach dry land.
To find… this.
Tightening the strap of her helm, lest the wind tear it and her head from her shoulders, Preda Bivatt continued scanning the wreckage lining this shoreline. The promontory she stood on was undercut, dropping away three man-heights to a bank of white sand heaped with elongated rows of dead kelp, uprooted trees, and remnants of eighty-year-old Meckros City. And something else. Something more unexpected.
– War canoes. The seagoing kind, each as long as a coral-face whale, high-prowed, longer and broader of beam than Tiste Edur craft. Not flung ashore as wreckage-no, not one she could see displayed anything like damage. They were drawn up in rows high along the beach, although it was clear that that had happened some time past-months at least, perhaps years.
A presence at her side. The merchant from Drene who had been contracted to supply this expedition. Pale-skinned, his hair pallid blond, so fair as to be nearly white. The wind was blasting red the man’s round face, but she could see his light blue eyes fixed on the array of war canoes, tracking, first westward along the beach, then eastward. ‘I have some talent,’ he said to her, loudly so as to be heard over the gale.
Bivatt said nothing. The merchant no doubt had skill with numbers-his claim to talent. And she was an officer in the Letherii Army, and could well gauge the likely complement of each enormous craft without his help. A hundred, give or take twenty.
‘Preda?’
‘What?’
The merchant gestured helplessly. ‘These canoes.’ He waved up the beach, then down. ‘There must be…’ And t hen he was at a loss for words.
She well understood him.
Yes. Rows upon rows, all drawn up to this forbidding shore. Drene, the nearest city of the kingdom, was three weeks away, to the southwest. Directly south of here was the land of the Awl’dan, and of the tribes’ seasonal rounds with their huge herds virtually all was known. The Letherii were in the process of conquering them, after all. There had been no report of anything like this.
Thus. Not long ago, a fleet arrived upon this shore. Whereupon everyone had disembarked, taking all they had with them, and then, presumably, set off inland.
There should have been signs, rumours, a reverberation among the Awl at the very least. We should have heard about it.
But they hadn’t. The foreign invaders had simply… disappeared.
Not possible. How can it be? She scanned the rows once again, as if hoping that some fundamental detail would reveal itself, would ease the hammering of her heart and the leaden chill of her limbs.
‘Preda…’
Yes. One hundred per craft. And here before us… stacked four, five deep-what? Four, maybe five thousand?
The north shoreline was a mass of grey-wooded war canoes, for almost as far as she could see to the west and to the east. Drawn up. Abandoned. Filling the shore like a toppled forest.
