Page 46 of City of Stone and Silence

Then she tears herself away, turns her back, and stalks off.

I don’t understand princesses. Or aristos. Or people.

But it’s time to get to work.

Zarun and Thora have gathered the people we need. They ended up with a group of about two dozen, who report to the entrance chamber on the south side of the ziggurat as the sun begins to climb toward noon.

Some of them I know well: Zarun himself, of course, Thora and Jack, Aifin. Others I’m familiar with in passing. A tall, blond Myrkai adept named Ylla who’d once served the Butcher, with half her head shaved and streaks of crimson dyed into the rest. An Imperial boy named Kotaga who looks about fourteen, bald as an egg. Vargora, who’d been a pack leader under Karakoa and was the only Melos user besides Zarun and myself. The Jyashtani girl who likes to salute military-style, who introduces herself as Safiya.

Most of them served in the hunting packs, and all of them went through the march to the Garden. They wait with bags slung over their shoulders, some with weapons, some not needing them. I’ve thought a little bit about what I was going to say, but in the moment all the platitudes I can dredge out of old dramas seem ridiculous.

“Prime is an Eddica user,” I tell them instead. “Like me. It was his power that sent those monsters against us the night we arrived. They killed four of our crew.” One fighter, caught and torn apart, and two of the younger children and a woman who’d gone to try to help them. “We’re going to pay him back for that, and maybe find a way to secure our place here in the bargain. Any questions?”

Safiya raises her hand, and I nod at her.

“Do we know if he can do anything more with his power than send dead bodies after us?”

I shake my head. “Nobody knows very much about Eddica. So stay alert, would you?” I turn to Zarun. “Everything ready?”

“At your order, Deepwalker,” he says, grinning.

“Then let’s go.”

Two guards pull our makeshift barricade aside, admitting brilliant sunlight. I blink for a moment, eyes adjusting, then start down the tunnel. The others follow.

The stairs down the side of the ziggurat seem to go on forever, but eventually we reach ground level. The forest isn’t as impenetrable as I remember by the light of day. The trunks are well spaced, and a nearly solid canopy overhead keeps the underbrush down. Before we pass into the shadow of the leaves I sight on one of the obelisks, which I’d identified yesterday as being directly on the path to Prime’s ziggurat. I hope there are enough clearings that I can keep us from going off course.

We make surprisingly quick and pleasant progress. In spite of the jungle, I never quite feel like I’m in the wilderness. The ground is too flat, evidence that long ago the hand of man had a role in shaping this place. I don’t know if we’re walking along old roads or across plazas, though. Not even cobblestones remain, just this gentle carpet of green, broken by the knobbled roots of the odd-looking trees.

The same strange noises I hear from the ziggurat are much in evidence, a continuous chorus of hoots, shrieks, and squawks. We even see a few animals, a pair of brightly colored birds that flap awkwardly away as soon as they spot us and a green reptilian thing that half-walks, half-slithers out of our path. In the distance, I spot a face, huge eyes staring at us, and I pause in alarm.

“What?” Zarun says, and follows my pointing finger. “Oh. That’s a monkey. You don’t have them in the Empire?”

“That is a monkey?” I’ve only seen drawings of monkeys in books. “I thought they were bigger.”

“There’s different kinds,” he says. “That looks a bit like the fruit monkeys we have at home, but they don’t have that white fur.”

The monkey watches us suspiciously as we pass, and I return the favor. It looks almost spiderlike as it crawls through the tree branches.

As we continue onward—roughly south, I hope, away from the sea—the jungle thins. I get more glimpses of my guiding obelisk, which reassures me that we haven’t wandered off track. Bits of worked stone start to appear, cracked and rounded by the passage of years, half-submerged in the soil like they’re sinking into a swamp. In places the tree roots are tangled around them or splitting them apart, a centuries-long battle of rock against wood. Mostly they look like bits of flagstone, but here and there a fragment of carving remains, part of a face or something that might have been writing.

From the top of our sheltering ziggurat, Meroe and I had sketched out as much of the Harbor as we could see. The three great ziggurats form an equilateral triangle, with one side facing north toward the shore and our vantage point. Prime’s ziggurat is the farthest inland, and our path crosses the center of the city. When we finally pass by my obelisk, it’s in the middle of a vast plaza that hasn’t yet surrendered to the encroaching vegetation. Some of its flagstones still sit flat and level, while young trees force their way up through the cracks and tip others on their sides. Something long and brown-furred darts away as we jog through and continue north, now keeping the obelisk to our backs.

“Catoria said that we didn’t have to worry about Prime’s monsters during the day,” I tell the crew. The sun is at least a few hours from the horizon. “But that’s only until we get close to Prime’s ziggurat, and I don’t know what ‘close’ means. From this point on, stay alert.”

“Yes, sir,” Safiya barks, practically vibrating with excitement. Zarun chuckles at her enthusiasm. The rest of the crew chorus their agreement, somewhat less eagerly. Bohtal, an uncharacteristically slim iceling boy whose skin is ghostly pale, comes to walk beside me at the head of the group. He’s our only Sahzim user, better able to spot incoming threats than any of the rest of us. A faint yellow glow surrounds his head as we move on.

The jungle thickens, and my nerves start playing up. The corpse-things weren’t very fast, but the trees offer them any number of places to hide in ambush. I don’t know if they’re smart enough for that. There’s too rotting much I don’t know, and for a wild moment I wonder if I should call a halt.

But we’ve spent most of the day getting this far, and I haven’t got that many days left.

“Deepwalker,” Bohtal says. “There’s something off to our left. It’s pacing us.”

“One of Prime’s creatures?” I pause, shading my eyes against the sun, trying to get a good look.

“I don’t think so,” he says. The yellow aura intensifies. “It looks more like an angel.”

There. Something big, slinking through the trees, intermittently dappled with sunlight through the interlocking branches. It does look like an angel, long-bodied and multi-legged. I think it has the head of a dog, like the angel I saw the day we left Soliton. Whether it’s actually the same one, I have no idea—each angel seems to be a unique nightmare, but I wouldn’t swear there aren’t several that look alike.