of wind swept the flies back down to their reeking hollows by the lake.
Sena worked her way above the skree.
She moved gracefully. She was trained for this.
After three thousand vertical feet and five miles, the spires and dome of Esma rose slowly into view. It was an ancient thing. Ugly and old like a fractured skull.
She checked her watch as the first small drops of rain began to fall.
From here she could see most of the valley in ominous panorama. All around her, the mountains rose in tortured gray piles, blasted back from the valley’s pit as if by a synchronized cacophony of screams.
Sena climbed into a flat barren clearing before the desolate temple. Perspiration licked tight curls along her neck.
The whole of Esma had been raised in cryte, a white rock that held light like velvet. But the closer she got the grayer it looked. Ruinous after eighteen thousand years of storms, if it had not been for the cryte’s extraordinary granite-surpassing durability, the whole edifice would have dissolved like a sugar lump. As it was, great chunks had given way. Unseen blocks and entire substructures had slid cataclysmically down with the skree into the lake.
As if someone had plunged broken femurs into the ground, jagged fragile towers, sundered and hollow, stretched with ghastly luxuriance toward the sky. The ruptured dome, graven and blackened by its own encrusted ornateness, pushed fatly at the towers that buttressed its enormous weight. Almost against gravity it seemed to hold together, bulging and loose, gawping and precarious to enter.
Sena watched swallows float in and out of Esma’s orifices. They cast fluid shadows over friezes in the walls.
Inside the immense foyer, leaves and twigs shuffled in the gloom. She entered one of the gargantuan rooms that opened off to either side. In the vaulted space, walnuts rotted in the shadows and the floor had been decorated with inlays.
A vague uneasiness smothered everything. Though the designs were striking, hundreds of long sharp-edged lids overshadowed their beauty. Sunk in the foundations, designed as part of Esma’s vast floor plan, over two hundred crypts rested underfoot. Their lids rose, low, oblique and sharp across the spacious floor.
Sena had walked lines from her cottage to this very spot. There were old stories written in the walls of Esma, vague frightening prophecies. But Sena could not afford to be superstitious. She had been desperate. And in desperation she had hidden the Csrym T before stumbling down to find her sisters by the lake. Myhr through Psh, when the weather was typically mild, the Sisterhood could be found in Eloth, delving into the past, unearthing things from the ruins near Ryhd l.9 Even so, with the rash of thunderstorms, she had almost missed them.
It was just as well that Caliph hadn’t followed her here. He would have found the ruins empty.
She bent over one of the elegant lids that decorated the floor and pushed. It ground away to reveal a dark trough. The bones inside had dried and long since lost their odor.
She found her pack just where she had left it, crouched in a corner by the yellow feet. She pulled it out, loosening the buckles.
The crimson book slid smoothly into her palms, leather soft and cool against her fingertips.
“Megan’s looking for you,” she whispered to it.
Almost reassuringly, the faint howl that only she could hear floated up onto the moldy draft. Outside, the sky flickered. Thunder rolled like a boulder over the Javneh Mountains and sweet-smelling water began to trickle from cracks a hundred feet overhead.
Sena didn’t give a damn about Megan and her errands. All she wanted was to open the book. And Caliph remained her best chance of that. Now Megan actually wants me stargazing over his shoulder! And I was worried about fårn10at Desdae!
Sena thought about seeing the pages of the Csrym T, covered with Inti’Drou glyphs. Secrets larger than the world, like an infinite opalescent mobile hung above her crib, cutting across and out: away from the planet. Past the sun. Past the blackness.
Sena let herself wallow in anticipation for a moment. Then she stood up and left Esma, walking lines back to the Highlands of Tue.
8 I.: The Place of Burning.
9 O.S.: Water of Apparitions.
10 W.: The Betrayal.
CHAPTER 11
Caliph’s week with Mr. Vhortghast had been just what he expected, exhausting, numbing and filled with rancorous, often disconcerting details. He despised being king.
He had seen warehouses filled with qaam-dihet seized from drug lords in Thief Town and Maruchine. Stockpiles of munitions. Gas mines and