girders around her as she reached the tangled iron safety of the Garden’s roof. No man would follow her there—the upper levels belonged to the birds, the clouds, and the Alaphim.
Nobody is going to believe that I escaped an encounter with the Hunter King! I don’t believe it myself. Well, not that I can tell anybody that I was here. Stupid treaty.
Her thoughts turned to curiosity as she rose through a shattered skylight to catch a rising thermal that would carry her to Windroost Spire.
I’ll have to ask old Lamech what an “Oor-Lin” is. Didn’t he used to fly over parts of the Broken Sea on patrol?
She sighed.
Back when there were enough of us to patrol that far.
The melancholy thought was swept away as quickly as it came as Sera enjoyed the gentle caress of warm air on her pinions. She was young, and what could be better than to spread your wings and stretch as the warm earth exhaled you skyward. Even now, in these dark times, to be an angel was sheer joy.
It wasn’t until she had landed at the Spire that she reached back and discovered that her ponytail was missing.
Chapter 8
“They say that she will never get off the ground. Are they worried that the core won’t reach the suborbital construction site due to faulty engineering? Ha! Nothing so mundane. No, they say she’ll never get off the ground because there are too many people in high places who don’t like the idea of folks starting up all by themselves. Settling a world by themselves. And 70 light years is a long way to send the tax men.”
— Admiral Ca’uich Na, at the groundbreaking ceremony for El Arko de Xibalba. The last recorded interview before his assassination.
Despite the danger of entering the city, Enoch found himself trembling with anticipation.
Babel, the city of a thousand tongues ! Mishael Keddrik used to say that it was carved from one of the Serpent’s own fangs.
Indeed, from this distance the city resembled a broken fang piercing the night sky. Rictus had paused at the sight and pulled back his hood, the tattered remnant of a stolen burial shroud. His eyes were hidden in shadow, and Enoch wondered what kind of memories he might have of this old city. With a light wind pulling at his tattered disguise, Rictus seemed even more ghostly than ever.
Well, the disguise was his idea.
Before leaving the refuge of the ruins, Rictus had wrapped the shroud around his body desert-style, telling Enoch that he’d seen nomads from the South dressed so. Enoch had covered himself in similar fashion, cringing at what his master would have surely condemned as desecration. It did, however, hide the nature of the swords he carried. Rictus had whistled through his teeth when he first saw them.
The signature tools of the Nahuati blademasters, he had said, were rarely seen south of Tenocht. They represented an open invitation to a duel if you were lucky, and gallows if you weren’t. As handy as Enoch was with the weapons, he didn’t feel deserving of such a title just yet—nor did he wish to defend it.
He reached under the shroud to adjust his scabbard, which was chafing, and sighed.
I may have been trained in the ways of a Nahuati, but that doesn’t make me accustomed to wearing these swords on a long march.
Rictus had asked to see what Enoch could do with the weapons on their second night of travel, and Enoch had refused. For some reason he felt that drawing his master’s swords for show would be wrong. The specter just shrugged and said that he could “suit himself.” Enoch wondered if the comment referred to the shabby state of his clothing, but after a quick glance at his companion’s ancient leathers—skins kept from the edge of decay by the same tek which animated their owner—he decided that it must be another remnant of his odd language.
The journey that night had felt exceptionally long. Trudging through the crumbled foundations of an abandoned temple, Enoch couldn’t help but make a comparison between the
Nobody is going to believe that I escaped an encounter with the Hunter King! I don’t believe it myself. Well, not that I can tell anybody that I was here. Stupid treaty.
Her thoughts turned to curiosity as she rose through a shattered skylight to catch a rising thermal that would carry her to Windroost Spire.
I’ll have to ask old Lamech what an “Oor-Lin” is. Didn’t he used to fly over parts of the Broken Sea on patrol?
She sighed.
Back when there were enough of us to patrol that far.
The melancholy thought was swept away as quickly as it came as Sera enjoyed the gentle caress of warm air on her pinions. She was young, and what could be better than to spread your wings and stretch as the warm earth exhaled you skyward. Even now, in these dark times, to be an angel was sheer joy.
It wasn’t until she had landed at the Spire that she reached back and discovered that her ponytail was missing.
Chapter 8
“They say that she will never get off the ground. Are they worried that the core won’t reach the suborbital construction site due to faulty engineering? Ha! Nothing so mundane. No, they say she’ll never get off the ground because there are too many people in high places who don’t like the idea of folks starting up all by themselves. Settling a world by themselves. And 70 light years is a long way to send the tax men.”
— Admiral Ca’uich Na, at the groundbreaking ceremony for El Arko de Xibalba. The last recorded interview before his assassination.
Despite the danger of entering the city, Enoch found himself trembling with anticipation.
Babel, the city of a thousand tongues ! Mishael Keddrik used to say that it was carved from one of the Serpent’s own fangs.
Indeed, from this distance the city resembled a broken fang piercing the night sky. Rictus had paused at the sight and pulled back his hood, the tattered remnant of a stolen burial shroud. His eyes were hidden in shadow, and Enoch wondered what kind of memories he might have of this old city. With a light wind pulling at his tattered disguise, Rictus seemed even more ghostly than ever.
Well, the disguise was his idea.
Before leaving the refuge of the ruins, Rictus had wrapped the shroud around his body desert-style, telling Enoch that he’d seen nomads from the South dressed so. Enoch had covered himself in similar fashion, cringing at what his master would have surely condemned as desecration. It did, however, hide the nature of the swords he carried. Rictus had whistled through his teeth when he first saw them.
The signature tools of the Nahuati blademasters, he had said, were rarely seen south of Tenocht. They represented an open invitation to a duel if you were lucky, and gallows if you weren’t. As handy as Enoch was with the weapons, he didn’t feel deserving of such a title just yet—nor did he wish to defend it.
He reached under the shroud to adjust his scabbard, which was chafing, and sighed.
I may have been trained in the ways of a Nahuati, but that doesn’t make me accustomed to wearing these swords on a long march.
Rictus had asked to see what Enoch could do with the weapons on their second night of travel, and Enoch had refused. For some reason he felt that drawing his master’s swords for show would be wrong. The specter just shrugged and said that he could “suit himself.” Enoch wondered if the comment referred to the shabby state of his clothing, but after a quick glance at his companion’s ancient leathers—skins kept from the edge of decay by the same tek which animated their owner—he decided that it must be another remnant of his odd language.
The journey that night had felt exceptionally long. Trudging through the crumbled foundations of an abandoned temple, Enoch couldn’t help but make a comparison between the
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