Nicci retorted, “You were created to transport travelers, and I need to travel.” She had no time to cajole the sliph. Lucy, the sliph that Richard commanded in Stroyza, had also been moody and petulant, but in the end Lucy had done as she was told. Nicci put one foot on the edge of the well. “Carry me back to Ildakar.”
“How will that serve Sulachan?” the sliph demanded.
“Sulachan is gone,” Nicci snapped. “We fight a different battle now. The cause has changed.”
The sliph recoiled at the revelation, and Nicci reached out with her gift, using Subtractive as well as Additive Magic. The sliph required both, and now Nicci proved that she was strong, her new master. “Take me to Ildakar.”
The sliph looked devastated. Her face distorted as the quicksilver re-formed itself. “Sulachan…”
Nicci released more of her gift, hammering hard to assert her dominance over the sliph. “Take me to Ildakar. I command it.”
“Ildakar!” The sliph lunged forward like an attacking wave of molten silver. “Breathe!” she commanded, then engulfed Nicci and pulled her down into a bottomless cold pit.…
CHAPTER 87
As the river thawed again and great chunks of ice drifted apart, the numerous serpent ships broke free, caught in the current, their hulls cracked. Drifting in the slush-choked water were hundreds of dead Norukai men and women who had tumbled from the bluffs or been killed by the defenders of Ildakar.
Bound and bloody, his body bruised from the fall and his head still ringing from a cracked skull, Bannon couldn’t break free from the hideous raiders. Stunned, he couldn’t think straight, but he knew where he was.
The young man had fought with every ounce of energy, fully expecting to die, and when he had tumbled from the platform to crash among the bodies below, he had never expected to awaken. Though he could feel several cracked ribs and blood running down the side of his face, Bannon was worse than dead. He was a prisoner of the hated Norukai! His captors dragged him along with dozens of other Ildakaran prisoners toward the crowded serpent ships in the river. Some of the captives were unconscious, some sobbing, and only a few made halfhearted efforts to escape, which were severely beaten back.
Bannon couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. From the river, he looked up the bluff where he should have seen the towering city above.
Ildakar was gone. Gone!
The entire city had simply been erased, as if the top of the plateau had been shaved off, leaving the lower portion of the bluff intact but the upper levels sheared away.
Though Bannon’s thoughts were scrambled, he recalled the first time he, Nathan, and Nicci had approached Ildakar. They had seen only an empty plain, because the city was hidden beneath the shroud of eternity, a bubble that erased it from time. Had the wizards done the same thing again, whisking Ildakar away and leaving anyone outside to fend for themselves?
What about Nathan and Elsa and the raiding party out in the plain? What about the rest of the people of Ildakar? And where was Lila?
The defenders in the tunnels beneath the bluff had been abandoned, left behind to face the Norukai, who were even now ransacking the tunnels, dragging out prisoners and slaying any who resisted.
Ildakar was gone. Bannon was on his own.
As his captors shoved him across a wooden plank and onto the deck of a serpent ship, Bannon relived a horrifying nightmare from his childhood, when the scarred raiders had come to Chiriya Island, clubbed him and captured him in an isolated cove. Now, all these years later, Bannon was in the clutches of the same monsters again.
King Grieve and Chalk had also survived the fall, and that only increased Bannon’s despair. Now, as they stood among the surviving raiders, Grieve bellowed to his countless fighters, “Search every tunnel. Find what is up there. Climb the cliff and reach the top of the plain.”
The albino shaman laced his knobby fingers together. “Yes, the plain and the whole world! Out there is our destiny, my Grieve, King Grieve. They’ll all grieve!”
The Norukai king snorted. “I don’t know how much to believe you anymore, Chalk. Your visions are flawed.”
“No, my Grieve! I saw the battle. I saw cold, snow, and ice. Remember? Remember, my Grieve? Cold, ice, cold!” He gestured to the thawing river, the ice chunks sliding down the bluff wall. “Ildakar did not win, and you have what is left. It’s yours, my king, my Grieve. Ildakar is gone! I said so!”
“That is not what I expected.”
“Never what you expect,” the shaman said. “But I know it’s true in the end. Go to the plain, and you will see how to take over the whole world.”
Bannon struggled against his bonds. “You’ll fail.” His voice was a harsh croak. “The Old World will rally against you, and Lord Rahl has the entire D’Haran army to defeat you.”
Grieve smashed the side of Bannon’s head with his iron-plated knuckles. The young man collapsed, barely keeping a thread of consciousness. He fell backward onto the icy, blood-slick deck. He blinked, trying to look up and down the river, disoriented.
He could make out the Norukai ships and the countless raiders swarming into the tunnels, to climb up where the city had vanished. He saw the crumbling rocks, the river, and thick brush along the banks. At the edge of his vision, he thought he caught a glimpse of a slender woman wearing only black leather wrappings. Lila? Before he could focus, she darted into the shadows, hiding among the low trees.
Grieve said, “If we are going to take over the world, we will need many more captives, slaves, workers.” With his broad chin he gestured toward the boats as he shouted orders to the other Norukai. “For now, kill as few as you have to. We need to launch a hundred more raids to fill our ranks and take captives, though I expect we’ll have to kill quite a few just to make our message clear.”
Bannon struggled as they dragged him among the shuddering captives. Ignoring him for now, the Norukai king gestured toward the bluff. “Let us make our way up through the tunnels, Chalk. I want to see what awaits us on the plain.”
When she emerged after the timeless journey, Nicci spilled out of the well as if thrown in disgust. She crashed to the ground and rolled, gasping in air and trying to expel the intangible essence of the sliph. Something was wrong. She felt weakened and strange, and her ears rang.
Rather than finding herself in a dank, stone-walled enclosure in Ildakar, Nicci was in the open, late at night, sprawled on broken flagstones. Around her, she saw fallen stone pillars the size of massive oak trees. Great slabs of marble lay tilted at various angles, as if the ancient city had been shaken apart. On the far side of the plaza, a statue of a man as large as a dragon lay toppled, the colossus shattered into pieces.
From behind high patchy clouds, the moon shone down to illuminate the ruins of a vast city where grand towers had crumbled into rubble and majestic archways were overgrown with vines and moss. The jagged silhouettes of nearby mountain peaks hovered behind the haunted, silent buildings. Other than the stars, the only lights she saw were tiny fireflies swirling about like intermittent meteors.
She saw no campfires, no lamps in windows of the dwellings, no sign of life whatsoever in the extensive ruins. She turned back to the sliph, who hovered in the round enclosure. “Where am I? This isn’t Ildakar.” She felt suddenly dizzy, nauseated. “What have you done to me?”
Like an angry spirit, the sliph loomed out of her well. Her quicksilver form shifted and melted, as if she had trouble maintaining her shape. “Ildakar no longer exists. I cannot take you there. I tried, but I … ricocheted. The city is gone.”
“What do you mean it’s gone?” Nicci stepped back toward the well. “We came from there. I need to travel. Take me to Ildakar.”