The Ippos King (Wraith Kings #3) - Grace Draven Page 0,51
trees. Such evil leaves a smear on everything it touches and lingers.”
His conjectures were reasonable and only added to her sense of urgency that she scout the city and report back every detail to Brishen, despite his expected disapproval. She might tell him things he already knew or expected, but her instincts, which had always served her well and kept her alive, told her this was something far more sinister than the haunting tragedy of Haradis's ruin.
“You've done me the favor of delaying your own journey to give me this opportunity, margrave, and I'm grateful. You aren't obliged to accompany me into Haradis. I promise to be swift. In, a quick look around, and out again so as not to delay more. But I have to do this.” As Anhuset spoke the words, sense of duty overrode instinct, and she barely controlled the urge to sprint out of the woods for the gate hidden behind the tree line. “I need to.”
He eyed her for a moment without speaking, then lifted the long knife he held to regard it with a measure of disdain. “I doubt this will do much good against anything lurking in the city, but it's better than nothing.” He swept a hand in the direction of Haradis and gave Anhuset a short bow. “Shall we, madam?”
Gladness sang through her that he chose to join her, but she pushed it down. Such foolery was reserved for the drunken hours after too many pints in an alehouse and no bedmate to help stave off melancholy self-reflection. It had no place here where the darkness that was more than darkness inhaled, exhaled, and waited.
She gasped at the sight greeting them. The last time she'd visited the capital had been when Brishen brought his new bride to face his parents and the royal court. Haradis, far from the sea, now perched on an island.
A series of canals dug by unknown hands in a spiderweb pattern channeled the water she and Serovek heard earlier. From her vantage point, she couldn't see their source, but the water's flow told her it came from the Absu itself. A small portion of the river had been redirected here—not for irrigating fallow fields but to isolate the city within the confines of a liquid labyrinth. A prison for the galla.
“Someone's been very busy,” Serovek remarked beside her. “And very afraid. This took the labor of many, and they favored speed over neatness.”
He was right. The canals were numerous but shallow, the main one completely surrounding the city with offshoots of others spreading from it in a disorderly fashion. The canals' sides were uneven, higher in some spots than others, undulating in places like a ribbon instead of a spear haft. But they were clear of debris. At no point was a channel blocked or bridged by bits of detritus built up by storms or animals. Whoever had constructed this watery barricade continued to maintain it, providing safe haven in shallow runnels for any who might flee the city from that which couldn't cross water.
Anhuset noted all of it in a sweeping glance before returning to stare at what remained of the once thriving, living city. Saggara was her home, where those who meant most to her lived, but she'd spent her childhood here. Unlike the Kai who'd fled the carnage as refugees, or Brishen, who'd fought the demons to their very gate, she hadn't experienced the horror of the hul-galla's attack or seen the havoc they'd wrought firsthand. Haradis didn't have an emotional grip on her the way Saggara did. She'd believed it true when she declared such to Serovek. She was wrong.
A few seasons had passed since the galla had swarmed the capital, devouring thousands in a single night. She'd expected a place abandoned if not forgotten. She wasn't prepared for this.
Haradis squatted on its island, a decaying carcass of crumbled buildings half hidden behind what little remained of its fortifications. The once formidable palace, with its spear-point towers and sweeping bridges reached for the unforgiving moon with broken fingers, half of its façade gone to reveal split timbers dressed in bits and pieces of ragged clothing lifted by a long-gone wind and tossed into what remained of the rafters. They resembled funerary flags for the dead whose mortem lights were lost forever to the Kai. The wreckage of more modest structures—shops and hovels—revealed a devastation which didn't spare anything or anyone regardless of status. Haradis wasn't just a ruined city; it was a corpse.