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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Well, Druadaen thought as he topped another rise and saw the next stretch of grassland, at least it’s not as flat as the Gur Grehar.

It was hardly a fair comparison, frankly. Although the north winds upon the Godbarrows became cool with the onset of night, the weather had been fair and he’d been able to supplement his dry rations with small game. And there were signs of habitation, here and there.

But even if Lorgan had failed to warn him against entering them, Druadaen’s own instincts inclined him toward wariness. Although the captain had explained that there were normal towns to be found further north and south, in this particular belt of the Godbarrows, even the smallest hamlet had walls. Of farms there were none, and of strongly built family steadings, one kind was prevalent: burned shells that stared balefully at him with empty sockets that had once been windows.

The one time he veered within bowshot of one of the larger towns, he discovered two things: that it was more a place of refuge than commerce, and that its denizens did not encourage visitors. In most of his travels, Druadaen had found that the caution natural to such isolated places was usually leavened by curiosity and the possibility of trade. Not here on the Godbarrows. The only reaction to his approach was a slight increase in the number of helmeted figures on the walls and the number of readied bows among them.

At least as striking was the lack of roads into or out of the place. Most of the gates were small and well above the level of the ground. The one that was wide enough for wagons could only be accessed by a drawbridge served by a free-standing ramp of rammed earth.

Right angles and straight lines were rarities along the walls, probably because they hadn’t been erected to enclose a core of buildings but mostly plug the gaps between a rough ring of hardened structures that had accrued over time. The lopsided gatehouse before him had clearly begun as two stone barns; they were now joined by indifferent stonework. The central keep—a peculiar, curving, otherworldly structure—had been expanded several times, each addition more slapdash than the last and blocking more useful fields of fire than it added. The spots which boasted an actual curtain wall showed evidence of many breachings and reconstructions. And often as not, lengths of compromised walls had not been rebuilt, but replaced with a squat tower or an earthen rampart studded with abatis. Druadaen wondered how long it took any newcomers to learn their way around the sprawling stronghold.

By the end of the second day, he no longer encountered any of these desperate citadels that purported to be towns, but he did discover how they’d been built without recourse to nearby quarries: they had raided dressed stone from the ruins of the empires that had once held sway here. Druadaen had wondered at the absence of ruins closer to the coast, but now realized that the flattest and most thinly vegetated expanses he’d passed there were just such places, but picked bare of useful material.

Seen from the top of the ridge he’d just ascended, it was clear how the original shape of the land had been altered by the shovels of busy empires. The areas between every south-trailing spine of low hills had been groomed for farming. The winding depression that Druadaen was following had been the roadbed of a wide, paved artery that carried trade in from the coast and produce out toward it. And he wasn’t the only one who’d found them useful for swift movement; the S’Dyxoi had as well.

Although Druadaen’s tracking skills paled beside career Outriders, they were more than sufficient to show him the numbers and direction of the recently passed packtrain. The tracks were only fragmentary—probably older than two moonphases—but that was offset by the lack of other movement upon the Godbarrows and the S’Dyxoi’s utter disregard for leaving a trail. Mere hours after striking inland, Druadaen routinely came across their weather brakes and large cooking fires, usually nestled in low places. This was in stark opposition to what Logan had suggested to Druadaen: that on the Godbarrows, fires were only useful for one thing—attracting trouble. But the S’Dyxoi’s puzzling disdain for such caution made tracking them relatively easy, particularly since their horses left deep prints consistent with a steady canter. And if ever Druadaen feared losing the trail of hoofprints, it wasn’t long before he’d catch sight of an equally distinctive marker: the occasional bodies they left in their wake.

Most of the corpses had been stripped of gear, clothes, and then flesh, apparently in that order. They were all male and, from what Druadaen could gather, lightly built: probably the ones who broke under the strain of carrying their captors’ loads at a brisk pace. On the third day, however, the number of the dead he found around a campsite was much greater and the remains were both human and abominate. However, it took him almost an hour to determine that, since these bodies had not only been picked clean, but pulled apart and strewn over the better part of an acre. Which was how Druadaen, standing at the center of the desiccated carnage, discovered why the fires that Lorgan had decried as great dangers, the S’Dyxoi considered great opportunities.

The broad, deep tracks of five supragants revealed that they had approached the camp on a wide frontage. But their departing prints paralleled those left by the horses of the much diminished group. Once again, the S’Dyxoi had affined with, or dominated, the minds of the great beasts which had obediently traveled on with them. Judging from the depth and space between the prints, they were moving faster than a human could run, and doing so for the entire day. Druadaen wondered how long supragants could endure such a pace, but then remembered that in Sarma, the S’Dyxoi had not scrupled to ride the beasts to death. And here, replacing them might be as simple as building another large fire and waiting for more to arrive.

Druadaen dismounted, considered the distance to the next ridgeline. He would not reach it before dark, so he would have to make camp here. After leading the horse into a small crevice in a rocky spur, he paused before starting to remove its tack. The Godbarrows were becoming so wild and ominous that he had to leave the poor creature ready to ride. So he chose a middle course, and set about unfastening the saddle bags.

As he did so, his thoughts wandered back to the S’Dyxoi. Among all the uncertainties surrounding their intentions and their actions, the one that continued to nag at him was their inexplicable use of time. More narrowly, why had they returned to the watch post half a year after they’d passed through the Shimmer? Perhaps they had come across news, rumors, or legends which indicated the approach of a propitious moment in which to effect a return through it. It seemed unlikely that a highly accomplished S’Dyxan mantic was unaware that the Shimmer only worked in one direction, but then again, Druadaen was not versed in what they did and did not know about it. Perhaps as little as anyone else knew about the strange osmotium they called the Nidus.

Druadaen removed some dried meat and unleavened crackers from his kit and told himself that if he didn’t stop pondering such things he would not get the sleep he needed. As he ate, he paid close attention to the tastes and textures of the dull food, hoping that focus on his physical senses would prevent him from pondering his many unanswered questions.

As strategies went, it proved to be a dismal failure.


Just before noon the next day, a lone bird soared overhead, wings wide on its southward journey. It was the first sign of movement in three hours. And given the lateness of the season and the increasingly cooler weather, Druadaen allowed that it might be flying before a northern storm. He resolved to stay closer to terrain, even ruins, that offered shelter: cold, wet horses—or riders—rarely acquitted themselves in battle as well as warm, dry ones.

Consequently, when Druadaen spotted the next ruin, he urged his mount to make a closer approach than usual, the structure’s strangely smooth west-facing remains shielding whatever might lay behind it. But before reaching the far side, his nose told him at least one thing he would find there: carcasses.

For a moment, he was oblivious to everything except the remains of two supragants, their ribcages reminding him of rafters in the early stages of a barn raising. A veritable cloud of vultures and other, unfamiliar carrion birds rose up at his approach. The vultures were the least skittish; they resettled quickly on the ruin, covering its upper parts in a rustling cloak of black, wing-flicking impatience. A small number of wolves looked up from their sniffing inspection of the second, more distant supragant’s blunt-snouted head. They seemed to measure the potential threat of newcomer against the meat’s advanced stage of decomposition and decided it was not worth the effort. They loped off, unhurried.

Only then did Druadaen notice the rest of the carcasses: seven horses, at least a dozen humans, and about half that number of abominations. The charred remains of a sizable bonfire predicted what he discovered next: tracks of four new supragants that converged upon the camp. Druadaen glanced up at the ruin, realizing, This spot was carefully chosen. Although it was no longer a towering edifice, parts of it were still tall enough to be ideal vantage points from which to keep watch—or to work a mantic effect—in any direction.

But the most significant feature of the killing field was the direction in which the majority of tracks departed from it: due north. And in this group, there was only one kind of print: the deep, loam-churning strides of the four new supragants, traveling in a close and regular formation. The footprints and hoofprints that had arrived at the site did not exit it; clearly, the S’Dyxoi had decided that both their human and equine pack animals were no longer needed.

However, two loose groups of abominations had continued to the east, clearly running—fleeing?—toward the distant, higher hills said to be a haven for their kind.

Druadaen resisted the urge to inspect the readiness of the concoctions the Sarmese had provided for subduing abominations. Not that he was any more likely to need them now than yesterday or the day before. But so long as he’d been traveling in the S’Dyxoi’s wake, even at so great a distance, he’d benefited from a measure of safety not unlike that enjoyed by the small fish that swim behind a shark. But now that his eastward path was diverging from theirs, he was truly on his own.

He almost flinched as the vultures rose in a startled mass—and a new, very different bird rushed just over his head: the same bird that he’d seen earlier in the day. The close pass showed it to be much larger than he’d thought, and as it winged eastward, he noted the heavy wings and almost stubby body. Was it an owl? Out here? During the day?

For no logical reason, he scanned the horizon quickly. Nothing. Just the vultures behind him and what might be an owl dwindling toward the hills ahead. Druadaen hunched more closely into his cloak and touched his spurs to the horse, gently prompting it toward the mist-shrouded ridges rippling the horizon.


The number of ruins decreased, but their size burgeoned beyond any proportions to which Druadaen’s prior travels had accustomed him. Immense fortifications seemed to rise up from the plains, some towering as high as the hills beyond them. As square and stolid as a citadel built from a child’s blocks, some were formed from single slabs of stone over fifty feet high and twice as wide, stacked as if the builders had meant to bump against the sky itself.

However, it was the rounded ruins—agglomerations of curving walls and domes and crumbling galleries—that had evidently given the region its name: they did indeed look like the burial mounds of gods. Instead of climbing toward the clouds, they sprawled across improbable expanses of the plain. Their parapets and revetments were almost as large as the Consentium’s wallways, which—until now—had defined Druadaen’s concept of truly gargantuan constructions.

The closer he approached, however, the more evident their advanced state of decay and decrepitude became. Their walls and surfaces were riven as if struck by a dying god’s battle-axe. The openings in them—shattered gatehouses, casemates, sally ports, even fortified stables—yawned as great black wounds. And wherever doors or gates were missing, Druadaen observed that the absence was not the result of fires or rams or catapults or even the passage of time; whatever metal had bound those portals together or held them in place was gone. Not reduced to rust, or sundered, or twisted, but methodically and carefully removed.

As the sun continued further along its arc, the winds from the north grew cooler. And when a particularly chilly gust came whistling over the low grasses, Druadaen found himself recalling the miserable and dangerous days he’d spent heading north upon the Gur Grehar. And the parallels did not end there. He’d ventured upon those plains to bring back an urzh from which he might better learn how that race lived and why they emerged as Hordes every ten years or so. Here, too, he was charged with recovering a specimen of an even more mysterious species. And in both places, he’d come to regret pressing onward despite the advice of those who had deemed his mission a sign of madness, suicidal intent, or both. At least all the ground cover on Hystzos seemed to be sweetgrass, rather than the insidious sourgrass which had done in his horse on the Gur Grehar—and just when he’d needed to flee.

Hoping that the Death Lands supposedly scattered about the Godbarrows were nothing more than fearsome rumors, he peered ahead. One, maybe two final lumps rose from the plain between him and his destination. With the threat of foul weather rolling in, he needed shelter, but there was no certainty that either of those dim shapes would provide it. On the other hand, he didn’t have any other options.

Drawing the reins slightly in that direction, he urged the horse into a slow canter and hoped for the best.


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Framed