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“Oh, Lani!” Elsa wrapped her arms around the dead woman’s shoulders. “Oh, Lani.”
Quentin stood behind them, appalled.
Nathan felt stricken and helpless. “I didn’t know how to stop it. I could not save her. Dear spirits…”
“Dear spirits, indeed,” Quentin said. He turned to Elsa and Nathan. “And now we should be even more afraid. We know that General Utros is calling a dragon.”
CHAPTER 57
Lila never let herself relax, and Bannon suspected that she didn’t know how. The young morazeth remained vigilant, muscles taut, reflexes alert. Even when she shared his bed and showed some small amount of tenderness, she remained a coiled spring ready to react.
Now, when she led him down steep streets to an arched gateway into the rough sandstone bluff, he knew she didn’t just want to go for a walk with him.
“We should always be on our guard,” she said. Since his escape from the enemy camp, she had occasionally stopped calling him “boy.” Perhaps it was an indication of respect, or maybe Lila just forgot herself. “Ildakar’s walls have protected our city for thousands of years, but our river defenses keep us safe as well.”
In the merchants’ district she stopped at an entrance to the supply tunnels within the sandstone bluff, and he followed her into the cool, torch-lit passages. Muscular workers rolled barrels or loaded carts with piled sacks of grain. Some carts were drawn by plodding yaxen, others pulled by broad-shouldered men. Lila walked along at a brisk pace, following the wide tunnel.
“Where did all these supplies come from?” Bannon asked. He had known of previous trade with villages in the hills, but the giant siege army had cut off those routes.
“When we were under the shroud, Ildakar had to be self-sufficient,” Lila said. “Our stockpiles can supply us for many years, and that is why the general’s siege will never succeed, no matter how long he waits.”
Bannon paused at wooden tubs full of fish with drooping whiskers. Their sucker mouths gaped, and their eyes were glassy. “Those are fresh fish, not preserved,” he said. “From the river?”
“Once the shroud came down, many villages upriver came to trade with us,” Lila said. “We still receive plenty of supplies even with the army encamped on the plain.”
As she led him along the tunnel, he spotted daylight ahead, which outshone the torches. Lila brought him to a wide opening that looked out upon the sheer cliff and the river below. She paused at the edge of the opening and peered down the bluffside.
Bannon joined her and saw that while the sheer cliff seemed as unassailable as the high city walls, a network of steps, ladders, platforms, and ramps let people enter and exit through numerous openings on the cliffside to receive deliveries from dock platforms on the riverbank. In the air in front of them, several crows chased each other high above the water.
Lila explained, “We take goods from the trading boats and bring them up here for delivery throughout the markets in the city.”
Bannon remembered the three Norukai slaving ships that had come to the city. Kor and his companions must have led their numerous beaten captives up to the slave market by this route.
“We are secure,” Lila said. “If anyone tried to attack us from the river, we could drop the platforms, disengage the docks, and isolate ourselves.” She stepped right up to the edge and looked down, her feet less than an inch from the drop-off. Bannon felt dizzy just looking at her. “We have never needed to take such extreme measures.”
She stepped out onto the cliff face, finding cleverly hidden stairs in the sandstone. Without a rail or a rope, she began to descend toward a wooden platform twenty feet below them. When he hesitated, she called, “Come with me.” She darted down the path carved into the rugged bluff.
Bannon refused to show fear and stepped after her, seeing wider walkways, wooden steps anchored into the rock so that haulers could carry crates, sacks, and barrels into other openings and holding areas. Lila waited for him on the platform below, and he realized she had been testing him. He joined her without comment or complaint. She hurried along steps to another platform, and they worked their way down the cliff.
When he reached a wide spot to spread his feet, he turned to look up. The bluff face was smooth and sheer, showing little natural weathering of the soft rock. Other pockmarks and cave openings led into a warren of tunnels within the uplift. More than a hundred feet below, the river looked blue-green and placid, and the top of the cliff was just as far overhead.
Two small flatboats had tied up against the receiving docks, where Ildakaran workers helped unload sealed barrels from one boat and quarried stone blocks and slabs of rock from the other. Workers used ropes and pulleys to lift the heavy crates along tracks in the cliff to a receiving cave. Other platforms levitated on their own, and Bannon realized that some gifted merchants were using magic to assist in the efforts.
Two levels below, as they climbed down a ladder, Bannon saw a smaller platform no more than four feet wide, which held two basins of fresh-caught river fish, still flopping. Workers high above pulled ropes to raise the tubs of fish to a different receiving cave. Even though their city was under siege, with thousands of enemy soldiers just outside the thick walls, the workers at the river called out in casual conversation, joking and laughing as if this were any normal workday.
Zigzagging along the sheer rock, he and Lila made their way down the sheer bluff. He held on to the sandstone, keeping his balance, and fixed his gaze on her bare back, not looking down. She went to the southern edge of the main bluff, where the stairs switched direction again, and showed him a stream of river water tumbling and gurgling along a wooden chute. Bannon was startled to realize the water was flowing backward, running uphill from the river into the aqueduct passages. It splashed and sprayed with the speed of its passage, until it plunged like a reverse waterfall inside the cliff. He saw spell runes carved into the rock.
Lila said, “General Utros blocked off the streams that normally provide water from the valley, but we have all we need from the river. We just bring it up into Ildakar. If necessary, we can also release the water. If invaders try to scale the cliffs, we can open the locks and let our cisterns and storage tanks flood the cliffside.”
Bannon followed her to the river’s edge, and they had to step aside as workers trudged up the stairs carrying sacks of grain on their shoulders. Finally, at the waterline, they walked out onto the wooden docks, where the two flatboats were being unloaded. Each had a captain and a handful of crew members.
Ildakaran merchants stood beside the flatboats, tallying up supplies and receipts, paying the captains with bags of gold coins and jewels. One city merchant puffed out his cheeks. “The grain doesn’t cost any more to produce, and the fish are still fish. Why so expensive?”
The riverboat captain frowned. “Sorry for the increased prices, sir, but with your city under siege, our danger has increased. I have to pay my crew more to convince them to come here.”
“War demands higher prices,” said the second captain. “Your need is more desperate now, and if you’re desperate, then prices go up. Simple commerce.”
“We will pay the asking price,” the merchant grumbled. “Ildakar has no use for all this gold anyway. I’d rather have food to eat.” He looked down at the last barrels, where the slippery forms still twitched. “And those are eels, my favorite! I’ll eat half the cargo myself.”
Bannon remained puzzled as he and Lila came forward. “But the siege is on the plains, and the soldiers can’t make their way down to the river. Your work is no more dangerous now.”
“Oh, there are dangers, young man,” said the captain, and the man on the adjacent flatboat nodded as well. “Hanson there comes from downriver, which means he has to skirt the swamps, and if you want the stone he brings from the quarries, he has to take his boat past all those swamp dragons and killer snakes.”
Hanson gritted his teeth and nodded again.
The captain continued, “One of the villages do
wn there was destroyed, thanks to some wizard from Ildakar and a morazeth. There’s almost nothing left of Tarada now.”
Lila frowned at the information. “A morazeth and a wizard?”
The captain nodded. “Tarada was a fine town in a peaceful oxbow. They caused no one any trouble, but then a wizard made himself their new leader, and a morazeth attacked him—a woman just like you. All the villagers suffered, many were murdered, and most of their huts were ruined.”
Hanson crossed his arms over his chest and grunted. “So if you want our goods and you ask us to face dangers like that, you can pay a little extra.”
“We will pay, as I said,” the merchant repeated, eager to be done with the transaction. He had his workers unload the containers of eels onto one of the lifting platforms.
Bannon was confused, looking at Lila. “How can there be a morazeth out in the swamps? Do you think the wizard was Maxim?”
“I have no doubt of that.” Lila stared down the wide river toward the swamps, which looked like a festering scar of vegetation. “And I would wager the morazeth was Adessa.”
CHAPTER 58
