And now...now he knew.
The heavens opened up...
Very interesting indeed.
Chapter 8
With Cassias actively working at the control panel and Eithan standing proudly in front of the windows, Lindon and Yerin looked down over the city of Serpent's Grave.
“This,” Eithan announced, “is the birthplace of the Blackflame Empire. The imperial capital has moved over time, and moved again, but here is where it all began: where the last of the dragons who once ruled this land were finally brought down.”
“Dragons?” Yerin asked, unsettled.
“That's where the empire got its name. After the dragons were destroyed, a certain family found a source of their power, ruling for centuries like dragons themselves. That source lies beneath us, although of course it's been all but tapped out over the generations.”
Lindon had been raised to believe dragons were myths—or if they did exist, only in the heavens. But Suriel had shown him a dragon beneath the sea.
And besides, something had left all those bones.
The black mountain beneath them rose from a desert like the crest of a dark, frozen wave. A vast spine, yellowed with age, twisted and curled around the rock, with a serpentine skull resting at the mountain's foot.
It was the most complete skeleton in Serpent's Grave, but far from the only one. A claw here, a pile of sharpened fangs there. And Sky's Mercy had yet to begin its descent—if he could see them from here, what would they look like on the ground?
“Serpent's Grave,” Lindon said aloud, and Eithan pointed to him.
“Well named, isn't it? I have to applaud the empire’s straightforward naming sense.”
The floor fell out from Lindon’s feet.
He caught himself on the edge of a table, which was bolted to the floor, and sank into one of the chairs. He'd discovered over the course of the journey that it was best to take a descent sitting down.
Yerin joined him, and Cassias was braced against the control panel with eyes locked on his landing, but Eithan stood with his hands in the pockets of his red-and-gold outer robe. His head was almost pressed against the glass, which reflected his smile.
As they fell lower, Lindon started to make out details among the bones. Dark spots in the bones resolved into holes—windows and doors, through which people streamed. The streets wound around the biggest bones but cut through others, which had been hollowed out or stacked together to make buildings.
Lindon leaned forward in his seat. Over the years, these people had carved a city into a dragon's graveyard. A long, straight bone, sticking out of the earth, was covered in windows and ringed with stairs. A fractured skull had a huge gong mounted in the eye socket. Four claws reached out of the ground with man-sized lanterns dangling from their tips.
The city had even crawled up the mountain, so that the black stone bristled with towers. More bones rose like a thorny crown from the mountain’s peak, with palaces nestled between its spikes.
Lindon was overwhelmed at the sight of it all. Sacred Valley had what they called towns and cities, but this city dwarfed his imagination. Even leaving aside the size, he had never heard so much as a legend about a city of dragon’s bone.
This was the world Suriel had opened for him. His myths didn’t even come close.
Sky's Mercy was circling one location: a rib cage, with the gaps between each rib closed by pale stone and mortar. A pair of banners—blue and black and white—flew from the highest peaks, proudly displaying the Arelius crest. Cassias descended until they were almost on top of the bones, then drifted to the end closest to the mountain.
Massive greenhouses stretched in rows behind the buildings, their glass roofs letting in sunlight and allowing Lindon to see the fields of crops growing inside. Scripts shone along the outside walls, and rain fell from one of the ceilings.
The sacred artists here had advanced beyond the need to live off the land. They had bottled up their farmland and taken it with them.
One plot with enough space to hold another enclosed farm had been left empty, little more than a wide square of reddish dirt. Cassias steered them until they floated over that square, and slowly edged down the last few feet.
Eithan turned from the window and walked to the door, hair streaming behind him. “I don't know about you,” he said, “but I'm ready to get to work.”
Cassias left the controls, running a hand through his yellow curls. He had worn his best today, and he smoothed every crease in his shirt as though worried about leaving the slightest imperfection.
Lindon was wearing a sacred artist’s robe in the Arelius colors, but it was weathered from the trip. He wondered if he should have asked for something more presentable, but Yerin was wearing the same tattered black she always did, and she didn’t seem concerned.
Eithan threw open the door, revealing a hundred people arranged in ten rows of ten, all clad in blue with the black crescent on their backs. Lindon had a very good view of their backs, as they had all prostrated themselves on the ground with their heads pressed against the reddish dirt.
“The Arelius family greets the Patriarch,” they shouted, in a unified voice that shook the ground.
Yerin winced and knuckled her ear. “Wouldn’t have turned down a warning.”
“Patriarch?” Lindon repeated. Eithan heard him and turned.
“Oh, yes, I’m the head of the family. I expected you to have guessed that by now.”
Cassias stepped in front of Eithan, his steel bracer Goldsign gleaming in the sun. “Number one, step forward and report.”
The leftmost servant in the front row, a heavyset woman in her middle years, stepped up and bowed to the Patriarch.
Even she was dressed for a festival. Polished blue-and-silver combs held back her gray-streaked hair, her servant’s uniform looked perfectly new, and rings glistened on her fingers.
Lindon first thought that even the servants lived like royalty here, but he supposed the Underlord’s arrival was a big day. Perhaps this was like an audience with a king.
She didn’t make her report in front of everyone, as Lindon had expected. Instead, she moved to whisper in Cassias’ ear. After a moment, Cassias turned to address Eithan in a normal tone.
“Since I have been gone, our misfortune has multiplied. Our fourth-ranked crew of lamplighters working on the mountain have returned with severe burns. They refuse to implicate anyone, but they were working on the peak, just outside the palaces of the Jai clan.”
Eithan dipped his head, and the servant woman continued whispering in Cassias’ ear.
Lindon exchanged glances with Yerin. The whispering was pointless. Eithan could hear everything, and could probably read a list of issues pinned against a wall halfway across the city. The Underlord gave no indication that this bothered him, or was in any way unusual.
He nodded through a few more reports before Cassias said, “We’ve recently received reports indicating a natural spirit has formed in the sewer.”
Eithan looked over in surprise, though he must have heard the story at the same time Cassias did. “Have we let the sewers back up so badly, then?”
“It’s a life spirit. Apparently the Jai clan had a mishap some weeks back, when their refiners dumped failed elixirs into the same chamber where the Soulsmiths disposed of their dead matter. It was an…unexpected reaction.”
Cassias’ tone told Lindon exactly how ‘unexpected’ it had been, but Eithan only nodded again. “Two and a half miles east,” the Underlord said. “Just south of the Sandstorm Quarter, directly beneath the fountain shaped like a three-headed dragon.”