There was no sign of life. No birds. No creatures. It was the dead of winter here.
She heard a bang in the distance, and looked nervously from side to side. There was no one. But now she looked from window to window, suddenly certain that one of them would reveal a face.
“They left everything,” Wegri said from right behind her.
“Argh!” Tulacha couldn’t help herself. “You startled me…”
“Apparently. There’s no sign of looting, no breakage, no bodies. It was an orderly departure, but a speedy one. They weren’t allowed to take very much with them.”
“Did you find anything interesting?” she asked.
“No, not really,” replied Wegri, innocently. “Let’s get moving, you must be freezing standing here.”
She nodded, distracted from her momentary suspicion.
“No sign of damage here.” Khendam looked about the great storefront. “And no bodies.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Rysil said. “Why would everyone just leave, and then not come back for their things?”
“I don’t know.” Khendam led them out of the immense building, and back into the windswept street. “I don’t like it at all. There’s no sign of anyone, or anything living.”
“Beautiful architecture,” said Rysil. “Simple and well-proportioned. They must have been a very sensible people. Dependable.”
“You can tell that from stonework?” Khendam was not convinced.
“You can tell a lot of things, from a lot of things. Their window panes are often large, which speaks of a certain skill or technology level. There are sconces in the walls, as if for candles, but they have glass balls fixed into them. They must have used magic to light their way. Just imagine magical light filling all these buildings! We haven’t seen fireplaces, so perhaps they heated themselves by magic as well.”
“Why do you think they have all this magic?”
“Magic brought us here, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” Khendam admitted, “but we don’t know if the same people who lived here brought us here.” He sighed. “I don’t like winter.”
“Oh, I do,” said Rysil. The freshness, the stark beauty. The purity of it.”
“You must never have wanted for anything then. My family is not poor, but the winter is a tough time for every family in Brenave. Taxes bite like the frigid winter wind.” Khendam wondered what his family were thinking. Had they noticed he was missing yet? Were they worried? How would they manage if he never returned? He shuddered to think.
“When you reach my age, when you’ve been what I’ve been through, you’re either weighed down by all that has happened to you, or you have learned to face life as it comes.”
“You’re enjoying yourself trudging through the snow in a deserted city? You’re happy to have been abducted from your home? And you don’t care about whether or not you’ll ever return to it?”
“Now, now. We came willingly, didn’t we?”
“It was a lie! A charm! An illusion that evaporated the moment we arrived!”
“All magic relies on belief to some degree. If we’d wanted to, we could’ve fought off the charm, whatever it was. No magic can compel you to do something you truly abhor.”
“I didn’t ask to come here and abandon all those I love.”
“You were a willing accessory to the magic. Didn’t it make you feel like you were going to serve some grand purpose, make a difference, be a hero?”
Khendam blushed, and lost some of his bluster. “I suppose it was something like that. But we aren’t serving any great purpose. We’re just trudging through the snow in a deserted city because some rich foreigner asked us to.”
The gate reared up before them, hewn from gigantic planks of strange wood. Beside it, on either side, dark doorways suggested ways to reach the top of the wall.
They were closest to the left hand door, and as Vardan began to lead them towards it, Chirath tugged at his shoulder.
“Please, let us choose the other gatehouse,” Chirath muttered urgently.
Vardan stopped, eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”
Chirath looked embarrassed to have to explain himself. “Among my people, the left hand side is a bad omen. Let us choose the right side, Friend Vardan.”
Vardan smiled. “If we were beyond the gate, wouldn’t the left one be the right, and the right be the left?”
Chirath nodded, uncertainly.
“So surely, if right can so easily become left, similarly a bad omen can become good?” Chirath nodded. Vardan continued, “So if bad omens are so fleeting, let us chase it away with our ascent.” Vardan strode confidently towards the nearest doorway, on the left side of the gateway, and Chirath trudged sullenly after him.
The gatehouse was dark on the lower levels, and the immense chain mechanism stretched through floors and ceilings as they climbed. Everywhere the snow had drifted, and nowhere did they see any bodies, or any clue as to why the city was deserted.
The higher levels had small windows, but these were as narrow as slits on the outer face of the wall and wide hollows in the inner face. They would have allowed defenders to launch a ranged attack while staying mostly hidden.
“These windows face only into the city,” Chirath said. “Why would they defend against their own people?”
“Perhaps it is rather that they are prepared for the taking of the gate?”
“Aye, and such windows in the outer wall would be a weakness against bombardment.”
They continued upwards, the stone staircase folding back on itself with each successive level. The snow began to drift more heavily as they climbed, and a light came from above showing them their climb was almost concluded.
The sky gaped as they climbed the final set of stairs, and they had to fight their way through the drifting snow and take care not to lose their footing.
They came out into the open, and the cold wind blasted them. The city was spread out before them, immense, stretching into the distance, the far edge hidden by fog, or by falling snow. The great stone walls reached out in either direction, holding the city in their embrace. The central part of the city rose up with taller, grander buildings, but much closer than the distant core was a small square bustling with little figures and a shimmering light-filled maelstrom, the thing which had delivered them here.
Vardan thought of the warm fires of home, and the warm women, bundled in furs, that were his to call upon as he pleased. His stomach grumbled. He was more interested in food than women right now.
Chirath called out to him, and he turned. Another storey of stonework covered the gate, and would offer an even greater vantage point than the level of the walls where they now stood. But Chirath was at the outer face of the wall, where the castellation offered periodic protection from the bitter gusts of wind.
It was what lay beyond Chirath that took Vardan’s breath away.
“By all the gods of Manar and Alfar…” Vardan murmured as he approached Chirath, as if in a trance.
“The Alfar have no gods,” Chirath pointed out.
“Yet they will offer the same protection as those of men.”
A great range of snow-capped mountains encircled the horizon, enclosing a nest of hills and a rough plain. The sight was majestic, and would have been more beautiful in fairer weather. But it wasn’t the natural beauty of the scene that awed him. It was the shuffling horde of dark shapes that covered the ground like a world-filling nest of ants, a teeming mass of living beings, as numerous as the leaves in a summer forest.
“This is the reason,” said Chirath.