Bannon paused to admire the statue cavalry. “They must have been riding out on a sortie.”
Amos pressed both hands against the stone horse with the raised foreleg. “Help me with this.” Jed and Brock joined him without question, and Amos looked at Bannon. “You can pitch in, too. We’ll let you.”
Unsure, Bannon took his place next to the three youths. “What are we doing?” All four of them planted their hands against the stone horse.
“Doing our part to fight the old war.” Amos and his friends pushed, making the stone horse wobble. Bannon’s uncertain assistance did little.
Nathan expressed his biting disapproval. “That’s a historical artifact, lads. You shouldn’t—”
“It’s an enemy soldier.” Amos gritted his teeth, and his cheeks flushed with the strain. With a final heave, they tipped over the stone horse and rider. The heavy statue crashed to the ground, breaking the horse’s foreleg and cracking the statue soldier in half.
The young men stepped back, congratulating themselves. “Only about a hundred thousand more to go,” Jed said, and sauntered onward.
They moved through the large, silent camp, where innumerable ancient warriors were frozen in the midst of frenetic activity. Many of the statues wore armor, ready to fight. Two burly men stood with gauntleted arms crossed over their chests like implacable guardians, apparently standing watch.
“Why are there no tents or banners?” Bannon asked.
Nathan realized the answer. “Any such things would have decayed over the centuries. Even if the soldiers themselves turned to stone, the other trappings rotted away long ago.”
He shaded his eyes in the bright afternoon, scanning across the tableau. Ten fossilized warriors sprawled in a circle on the ground where weeds and grasses had grown up around them. From their positions and state of undress, he surmised they had been at camp, sleeping around a fire, covered with no-longer-existent blankets. Others squatted nearby, arms extended toward the center of the circle, as if they had been holding sticks, roasting meat over flames.
One man stood with his hands at his crotch, gazing toward the ground, preserved in the act of urinating. Amos and his companions found this intensely amusing, and they used their iron-tipped staffs to batter away at the stone hands and pulverize his petrified manhood.
They came to a clearing among the fossilized soldiers, perhaps a place where a large supply tent had disintegrated with time, leaving an unoccupied area. “Here’s a good place to make camp,” Amos said, then looked at Bannon. “Did you bring supplies?”
“I hope you have decent food,” Jed added. “And enough to share.”
Nicci gave them all a hard look. “You should have prepared better for your expedition.”
Amos frowned at the criticism, but Nathan shrugged out of his pack. “We have food. Happy to share.” He undid the strings and opened it to reveal the spell-preserved venison steaks they had carved from one of Mrra’s recent kills.
The strangers gave appreciative grins. “Fresh meat sounds good,” Brock said.
Working together, they gathered armfuls of dead weeds, grass stalks, and fallen branches. Nathan laid out a circle of stones he collected, and the Ildakaran youths piled the debris in the center without finesse.
Looking at the unruly heap, Bannon bent down, getting to work. “Building a fire takes a little more skill than that. Dry grass, then twigs for kindling, with larger branches built up around it.”
Amos rolled his deep brown eyes. “Why bother?” With a gesture, he released a flicker of his gift and ignited the piled debris. The crackling grass and twigs quickly built into a healthy fire.
“Or, I suppose that would be faster,” Bannon muttered. Nicci also usually started their campfires.
As dusk fell, they roasted meat and hunkered down to eat, but Nathan’s attempts to elicit further conversation resulted in few details. Adding their part to the dinner, the young men pulled out honeyed wafers and dense grain cakes from their packs, sharing them. Nathan found them to be flavorful, but the young men claimed they were tired of eating the stuff.
As the darkness deepened, Nathan gazed across the sweeping expanse, which reminded him of the Azrith Plain in D’Hara. The open grassy prairie extended to the steep drop-off at the river that bisected the vast plain, and even the immense open space seemed barely large enough to contain the countless soldiers that had come to conquer Ildakar.
Taking a second honeyed wafer, Nathan gestured with his chin toward the distant river. “That looks like an extreme uplift. Normally, a river like that would have carved a wide valley, but it seems to have cut the plain like an axe. Those are enormous cliffs above the water.”
“It didn’t happen by accident,” Amos said, licking venison grease from his fingers. “In order to defend Ildakar, the wizards’ duma combined their magic to raise this side of the plain, lifting it up like a giant swatch of sod hundreds of feet above the Killraven River. The sheer bluffs prevent any attacks from the water.”
“Only fools would attack Ildakar,” said Brock, chewing on his blackened meat. He plucked a lump of gristle from his mouth and inspected it between thumb and forefinger before flicking it off into the grasses. “General Utros and his army learned that lesson.”
“How can anyone attack the city if they can’t find it?” Nicci asked. “Where did Ildakar go?”
“That was part of our genius,” Amos said, without elaborating further.
As night insects in the grasses set up a soothing chorus of songs, Nathan pondered what he knew from legends and history. If the wizards of Ildakar could do such astonishing things, surely they could help him recover his gift.
First, though, they had to solve the mystery of the vanishing city.
* * *
The next day, long after sunrise, they set off across the plain, wandering among the petrified soldiers. At random times, the three young men found stone warriors that caught their attention. One squatting man with his stone trousers around his stone knees had fallen over onto the ground when the latrine he was using had weathered into dust. Amos and his friends broke that statue into pieces.
They targeted particularly fierce-looking warriors, stone men who looked hungry to conquer Ildakar. Amos and his friends used their iron clubs to batter the eyes, noses, and mouths, leaving the faces chipped and featureless, which they found hilarious.
After all he had read about the glory of Ildakar, Nathan was disappointed in their attitude. He surveyed the countless figures that covered the open plain. “I suppose General Utros is one of these statues. It would be be intriguing to find him, just to look upon his features—for the sake of history.”
“How would we know who he is?” Bannon frowned at the broken statue the others had just smashed. “These warriors wear no identifying badges.”
“Dear boy, I assume that if we looked long enough, we could find one with a general’s garb or armor, probably near the center of camp in a command tent.” Nathan brushed the front of the ruffled shirt he had worn since leaving Cliffwall. “But there would be no tent left after all these years, alas … no tables, no remnants of charts, no banners.”
Nicci looked ahead at the distant river and the sheer cliff drop-off. “If your wizards were so powerful, why were they afraid? Uplifting half the plain, tearing the landscape to create huge cliffs above the river—that is not an act of confidence.”
“It was a demonstration of our invincibility,” Amos said. “The Killraven River brought trade from distant lands, but as times grew darker it also brought foolish invaders who sought to conquer the city, so the wizards created the high bluffs and dragged the river closer. They reshaped the landscape like a potter manipulates clay. Ildakar has stood for all this time, and we are stronger and greater than ever.”