As we rumbled across the stone landings and wooden drawbridges, I saw why all traffic seemed to drift to the center of the bridge. Even with railings on the outside, the chasm was so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. I found myself craning to get a better look and glad that I wasn’t walking along the railing. We crossed some deep ravines on our way to Sunwrack, but nothing so broad as this, nor deep. The bottom, wherever it was, was lost in shadow.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“No,” Braylar replied, smiling. “You have not.”
“Does this chasm go the entire way around the city?”
“It does. There are four entrances to Sunwrack, of identical construction.”
“Was this a natural formation of some kind? Is that why the city founders chose the site?”
“Not being among their number, I could not say why the site was chosen. You are aware Sunwrack was not built a tenday ago, yes?”
“Yes. Of course.” I stood slightly to look over the side of the next drawbridge. “But this… it’s an island in stone.”
“That is because it is not a natural formation.”
“I knew it!”
“Then why did you ask?”
I barely heard him, looking at the chasm as it stretched around the border of the city and disappeared, another staggered bridge barely visible around the bend. “If this was dug by men, it must have taken… how long? How long did this take?”
Hewspear overheard me. “Twenty years,” he said. “It would have taken much longer had they been using ordinary workers, but slaves do not have the luxury of complaining when worked beyond exhaustion. Countless lives in the making.”
I reminded myself never to complain about my lot in life again. “Not Syldoon, then?”
He smiled. “No. Syldoon start out as slaves, but their lives are valuable and rarely thrown away, and certainly never in the construction of what amounted to a mass grave.”
I tried to imagine blistered and brutalized men, digging out rock and dirt, hauling it out of the largest hole men had deigned to ever dig, deeper than any quarry, and broad, so very broad. Encircling a city that housed at least a quarter million residents, maybe more. And all for what? There were fortified cities in all lands, and none went to this extreme in creating such a defensible position. All those lives wasted. I wondered how many skeletons littered the unseen floor.
“Was it one of your Emperors who did this? Created this?”
Hewspear shook his head, coins jangling in the long braids of his beard. “No. This predated the Syldoon by a few centuries at least.”
I saw something move on the rock wall on the other side of the chasm. At first, I thought it was my eyes playing tricks on me, too tired from scanning ancient documents. But as I shaded them and looked more closely, I saw there were several somethings. They scuttled down the rock face. And they were big.
Braylar was watching me and laughed. “Bull crabs.”
I kept my eyes on them, the dark speckled chitin of their bodies nearly blending in with the stone. They had ten legs, the front two ending in large claws. And while it was difficult to tell from that distance, the bull crabs appeared to be bigger than large shields.
“Those things…” I started.
“Could kill you with one crunch,” he finished. “They are vicious, but thankfully only fast in short bursts.”
We passed through a gatetower, and I noticed the soldiers bearing those curious shields I knew were Syldoonian but had only seen before in illuminated manuscripts, as Braylar’s company had adopted the round shields commonly seen in Anjuria. These shields had an embattled top to simulate the square crenellations of a tower, or in this case, Tower, and then tapered to a point at the bottom rather than the oval shape frequently seen elsewhere. They were all a deep green, with the repeated charge of white ram’s heads strewn across them.
As we continued onto the next section of bridge, I looked at Hewspear and Mulldoos and Vendurro-it was obvious this chasm and its peculiarities were such a familiar sight they didn’t even think twice about it. I asked Mulldoos, “And how would you assail Sunwrack if you had to?”
“Eh? What’s that, scribbler?”
“Every time you and Hewspear enter a city, you like to debate how you would take it if you had to. Sunwrack seems about as impregnable a place as I can imagine. So, if you had to lay siege here, how would you do it?”
Mulldoos looked ready to say something snide or belittling, but then stopped himself. “I never gave it much thought, in truth. You, Hew?”
Hewspear shook his head again. “Strangely, no. We’ve entered this city hundreds of times, and we never stopped to consider it.”
“Seems kind of disloyal, don’t it?”
“Perhaps. But our young friend does have a point. Sunwrack is unassailable.”
“You say that about every plaguing city we come into.” He stroked his invisible beard and adopted passable Hewspear inflections, “‘These fortifications are utterly impregnable.’ Tighter than a priest’s bunghole they are. Every plaguing time.”
Hewspear laughed. “So, my siege-minded friend, how would you bring Sunwrack to ruin if you had the command? What would be your brilliant plan then?”
“Sunwrack’s a tough nut, to be certain. Toughest I ever seen. No question.” He pointed at the top of one of the huge towers. “Those trebuchets up there got range on engines any attacker might be dumb enough to line up on the other side of the Trench, on account of height.”
“True.”
“And once the bridges are pulled, no possible way to assault the walls.”
“True as well. You are making my case for me,” Hewspear said.
“Shut it, you old wrinkled prick.”
“Wrinkled, aye, but wizened with wisdom.”
Vendurro looked up at the red walls and slate great towers. “No way to assault it. How about starve them out?”
Mulldoos shook his head immediately. “This a plaguing city, you lippy pup. They got stores of food to last for years. No army could stay in the field long enough to outlast them.”
Vendurro replied, “No frontal assault maybe, but what if a small group climbed down the trench in the dark of night, up the other side, managed to gain the wall? Open a gate from inside.”
Mulldoos glared at the younger man. “And what if the besieging army had a platoon of horses with pretty wings and they could fly overhead, dropping fiery horseshit from the air.” He pointed at the large gatehouse on the wall we were approaching. “That savvy group of mountain climbers would need to survive the bottom of the trench. Rats as big as weasels down there, feeding on the sewage. Bull crabs bigger than dogs feeding on them. Some say much worse lurking in the dark, feasting on both. So you’re telling me a group survives the climb down in the pitch of night, fights through the nasty critters roaming the trench bottom, and somehow makes it back up the other side, with nobody sighting them and filling them with shafts. That what you’re saying?”
“Might be they do. It could happen.”
“Horseshit. Double horseshit. Ain’t happening. Better luck finding them flying ponies.”
I asked, “What about the aqueduct?”
Mulldoos gave me one of those looks that said he expected the next words out of my mouth to be worthless or worse. “What of it?”
“Well,” I said, pointing at the aqueduct on the hill that fed into the city. “Perhaps scaling the trench wouldn’t work. What if-”
“It wouldn’t.”
“Fine. It’s impossible. But what if they chose to sneak into the city through the aqueduct instead?”
Vendurro pointed at me, “Aye, that’s it! That could work!”
“Couldn’t,” Mulldoos said. “Like to drown or fall to their death more like. But even if they got into Sunwrack by waterway somehow, they got guards posted there, too. And you’re both forgetting something anyway. Even if a group could somehow survive the trench or the aqueduct, which is next to impossible, but let’s say they do.” He pointed to the drawbridge ahead. “They make their midnight raid, and even manage to kill the guards on one gatehouse and lower one drawbridge from the inside. Also ain’t likely, but maybe they’re the toughest bastards who ever lived and they pull it off. Got another real big problem right quick then, don’t they?”