Chapters (51)
- Dedication
- Contents
- PREVIOUSLY …
- PART I
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- PART II
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- PART III
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- PART IV
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- About the Author
- ALSO BY DAVID WRAGG
- About the Publisher
The shouts from the roadway were growing, an ugly unrest uncowed by the lowering spears of the roadside guards. The guards themselves had begun a slow withdrawal, steady backward footsteps moving them up the hill and back to the fortress.
Chel peered through the heat haze, over the surly crowd. ‘What’s going on back there?’
The cries were mounting, the displeased shouts of those overtaken by the wagon now overlaid with cries of rising alarm. Movement drew his eye through the wobbling air, a torrent of rising dust from beyond the dip of the mountain road. Something was coming.
‘Cub! Move your arse!’
The others aboard, Chel pulled himself up into the wagon. It started forward without delay, as another pair of guards jogged beside it then hauled themselves up alongside him. One of them had a moustache.
As the wagon pulled away into the cool darkness beneath the fortress, Chel heard the rumble of the outer gate beginning to close.
TWENTY-FOUR
The heat of the day hit them like a wave as the wagon rumbled out from beneath the fortress and into the blazing daylight beyond. Reddish stone and rock surrounded them as they climbed the widening roadway, the horse-team foaming and champing as they pulled. Then the slope eased and the mountain walls opened up, and Chel got his first sight of Arowan.
The city sat on a plateau, an odd, flat depression in the mountainous surroundings, stretching for several miles in each direction. As they rode the road’s bumps, Chel saw flashes of the gorge that split the plateau, a winding chasm as if the two sides had slowly been pulled apart over centuries. The walls of the city rose from the giant standing pillars of rock that remained in the gorge’s centre, a towering cascade of domes and towers, jumbled over the sheer drops into nothingness below. In the strong, persistent headwind, pennants lashed from spires jostling between the glimmering silken sails of countless windmills, their varied revolutions somehow lazy and frantic. Sunlight gleamed from tiled roofs, bright blues and reds over white and sandy stone, the dazzling ribs of a giant central dome too bright to regard.
‘To answer your earlier question, friend,’ Foss called over the wagon’s racket, ‘never.’
‘What?’
‘Arowan has never fallen. It’s supposedly God’s chosen city.’
‘Supposedly?’
He shifted as the wagon bounced. ‘There’s some, er, difference of opinion on the matter.’
‘On the choice of city?’
‘On the god.’
Two rows of riders fell in alongside the wagon, their strides in unison, silvered armour brilliant in the sunlight. Neither riders nor guards aboard the wagon gave any acknowledgement, all attention fixed dead ahead. Lemon cast an eye over the riders and gave a nod, their manner apparently meeting her approval.
‘Let’s hope we break our streak here, eh, boys?’
‘What do you mean, friend?’