Bayaz was trying to look confident, but Ferro knew better. She watched his hand tremble when he took it from the reins to rub the water from his thick brows. She watched his mouth work when they stopped at junctions, watched him squinting into the rain, trying to reckon the right course. She saw his worry and his doubt written in his every movement. He knew as well as she did. This place was not safe.
Click-clank.
It came faint through the rain, like the sound of a hammer on a distant anvil. The sound of weapons being made ready. She stood up in her stirrups, straining to listen.
“Do you hear that?” she snapped at Ninefingers.
He paused, squinting off at nothing, listening. Click-clank. He nodded slowly. “I hear it.” He slid his sword out from its sheath.
“What?” Luthar stared around wild-eyed, fumbling for his own weapons.
“There’s nothing out there,” grumbled Bayaz.
She jabbed her palm at them to stop, slid down from her saddle and crept up to the corner of the next building, nocking an arrow to her bow, back sliding across the rough surface of the huge stone blocks. Clank-dick. She could feel Ninefingers following, moving carefully, a reassuring presence behind her.
She slid round the corner onto one knee, peering across an empty square, pocked with pools and strewn with rubble. There was a high tower at the far corner, leaning over to one side, wide windows hanging open at its summit under a tarnished dome. Something was moving in there, slowly. Something dark, rocking back and forth. She almost smiled to have something she could point an arrow at.
It was a good feeling, having an enemy.
Then she heard hooves and Bayaz rode past, out into the ruined square. “Ssss!” she hissed at him, but he ignored her.
“You can put your weapons away,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s nothing but an old bell, clicking in the wind. The city was full of them. You should have heard them pealing out, when an Emperor was born, or crowned, or married, or welcomed back from a victorious campaign.” He started to raise his arms, voice growing louder. “The air split with their joyous ringing, and birds rose up from every square and street and roof and filled the sky!” He was shouting now, bellowing it out. “And the people lined the streets! And they leaned from their windows! And they showered the beloved with flower petals! And cheered until their voices were hoarse!” He started to laugh, and he let his arms fall, and high above him the broken bell clicked and clanked in the wind. “Long ago. Come on.”
Quai snapped the reins and the cart trundled off after the Magus. Ninefingers shrugged at her and sheathed his sword. Ferro stayed a moment, staring up suspiciously at the stark outline of that leaning tower, dark clouds flowing past above it.
Click-clank.
Then she followed the others.
The statues swam up out of the angry rain, one pair of frozen giants at a time, their faces all worn down by the long years until every one was the featureless same. Water trickled over smooth marble, dripped from long beards, from armoured skirts, from arms outstretched in threat or blessing, amputated long ago at the wrist, or the elbow, or the shoulder. Some were worked with bronze: huge helmets, swords, sceptres, crowns of leaves, all turned chalky green leaving dirty streaks down the gleaming stone. The statues swam up out of the angry rain, and one pair of giants at a time they vanished into the rain behind, consigned to the mists of history.
“Emperors,” said Bayaz. “Hundreds of years of them.” Jezal watched the rulers of antiquity file menacingly past, looming over the broken road, his neck aching from looking up, the rain tickling at his face. The sculptures were twice the height or more of the ones in the Agriont, but there was similarity enough to cause a sudden wave of homesickness. “Just like to the Kingsway, in Adua.”
“Huh,” grunted Bayaz. “Where do you think I got the idea?”
Jezal was just absorbing that bizarre comment when he noticed that the statues they were approaching now were the last pair, one tilted over at a worrying angle.
“Hold up the cart!” called Bayaz, raising one wet palm and nudging his horse forward.
Not only were there no more Emperors before them, there was no road at all. A dizzy drop yawned out of the earth, a mighty crack in the fabric of the city. Squinting across, Jezal could just see the far side, a cliff of broken rock and crumbled mud. Beyond were the faint wraiths of walls and pillars, the outline of the wide avenue, melting out of sight and back as the rain swept through the empty air between.
Longfoot cleared his throat. “I take it we will not be carrying on this way.”
Ever so carefully Jezal leaned from his saddle and peered down. Far below dark water moved, foaming and churning, washing at the tortured ground beneath the foundations of the city, and out of this subterranean sea stuck broken walls, and shattered towers, and the cracked open shells of monstrous buildings. At the top of one tottering column a statue still stood, some hero long dead. His hand must once have been raised in triumph. Now it stuck up in desperation, as if he was pleading for someone to drag him from his watery hell.
Jezal sat back, feeling suddenly dizzy. “We will not be carrying on this way,” he managed to croak.
Bayaz frowned grimly down at the grinding water. “Then we must find another, and quickly. The city is full of these cracks. We have miles to go even on a straight course, and a bridge to cross.”
Longfoot frowned. “Providing it still stands.”
“It still stands! Kanedias built to last.” The First of the Magi peered up into the rain. The sky was already bruising, a dark weight hanging above their heads. “We cannot afford to linger. We will not make it through the city before dark as it is.”
Jezal looked up at the Magus, horrified. “We’ll be here overnight?”
“Clearly,” snapped Bayaz, turning his horse away from the brink.
The ruins crowded in tighter around them as they left the Caline Way behind and struck out into the thick of the city. Jezal gazed up at the threatening shadows, looming from the murk. The only thing he could imagine worse than being trapped in this place by day was being kept there in the darkness. He would have preferred to spend the night in hell. But what would have been the difference?
The river surged below them through a man-made canyon—tall embankments of smooth, wet stone. The mighty Aos, imprisoned in that narrow space, foamed with infinite, mindless fury, chewing at the polished rock and spitting angry spray high into the air. Ferro could not imagine how anything could have lasted for long above that deluge, but Bayaz had been right.
The Maker’s bridge still stood.
“In all my wide travels, in every city and nation under the bountiful sun, I have never seen such a wonder.” Longfoot slowly shook his shaven head. “How can a bridge be made from metal?”
But metal it was. Dark, smooth, lustreless, gleaming with drops of water. It soared across the dizzy space in one simple arch, impossibly delicate, a spider’s web of thin rods criss-crossing the hollow air beneath it, a wide road of slotted metal plates stretching out perfectly level across the top, inviting them to cross. Every edge was sharp, every curve precise, every surface clean. It stood pristine in the midst of all that slow decay. “As if it was finished yesterday,” muttered Quai.
“And yet it is perhaps the oldest thing in the city.” Bayaz nodded towards the ruins behind them. “All the achievements of Juvens are laid waste. Fallen, broken, forgotten, almost as though they had never been. But the works of the Master Maker are undiminished. They shine the brighter, if anything, for they shine in a darkened world.” He snorted, and mist blew from his nostrils. “Who knows? Perhaps they will still stand whole and unmarked at the end of time, long after all of us are in our graves.”