Elizabeth Bear - Book of Iron

“There are a dozen,” Riordan said. “Did your spider have better intelligence than we’re likely to gain by choosing at random?”

“What about what the ghul said?” Riordan asked.

“A forge would be near water.” Bijou volunteered the information as she realized it, having some experience with such things.

Salamander nodded. “I’m afraid my new friend was left behind in the stampede. But I got a sense of water from her, yes.”

“Good,” said the prince. “Water is this way.”

“How do you know that?” Riordan asked—nevertheless following unhesitatingly.

They hadn’t made it this far into the city last time. And there were no maps of Ancient Erem—none remaining, anyway, to Bijou’s knowledge.

“Can’t you smell it?” It was a testament to the prince’s diplomatic skills that no trace of helpless wetlanders crossed his expression. Bijou was glad Kaulas went veiled, after all: there were none so scornful as those who had had to learn the hard way.

“Is that what that metal smell is?” Salamander asked.

“Yes,” said Bijou.

“Then yes,” she said. “I can.”

The way tended downhill again, which was a good sign, and the night still darkened. Moons set, and soon they were walking only by starlight—but the starlight was enough. They avoided two more myrmecoleon dens, eventually coming upon a tall tongue of sandstone riddled with tunneled doorways. They might once have had rectangular corners, but over centuries the wind and sand had worn their edges smooth. The path downward led them around it, and here the drifted sand had blown back from an ancient road paved with cracked white slabs of stone.

As they walked, Bijou became aware of the brightening of the sky, even though the moons had long slid out of it. At one horizon—not where she thought East lay, in reference to Messaline—a dim glow appeared behind the canyon walls—a line of peach and gold and lavender tracing the top of the cliff face.

Salamander looked at her. “Should we be taking cover?”

“We’ll have a little while no matter which sun it is,” Bijou said. “I’d rather find your mother before she…”

…has time to kill your friend.

Salamander nodded.

Bijou said, “Pray one of the white suns rises first. If your gods are the amenable sort, pray that it’s just the nightsun, and we’re in a year where it rises far in advance of the others.”

“How many suns are there?” Riordan said.

“Four,” said Maledysaunte. “Three daysuns—the blue, the orange, and the white—and the nightsun, which is white also. The daysuns rise and set together; it is the blue one whose light is so feared. Sometimes the orange sun eclipses it, which is safer. A little. The nightsun is a wanderer. Like the moon of Messaline and the moon of Avalon, sometimes it shines alone in the dark, and sometimes it shines with its sisters. There is a pattern to its meanderings,” she finished. “But it lasts a little over 1,864 years. And I’m not sure where we are within it. Once I get a look at the suns, I’ll know better…”

The others had paused to stare, the dead stallion tossing his head in impatience as he checked his stride to avoid trampling Kaulas.

“Of course,” the prince said to break the silence. “It’s all in the book.”

“The Book. The burning Book, the Black Book. The Book of flame. The Book, the Book, the Book.” Her child-soft lips twisted apologetically. “My head is full of it. I could tell you their names in the Ancient Tongue—”

“Thank you,” Salamander said hastily. “All the same.”

Despite the pale light creeping up the sky, Bijou smiled. These foreign wizards had a sense of humor after all. Even if it involved a language whose every syllable was murder.

The adventurers rounded the end of that sandstone tongue and found themselves looking down into a deeper, narrower, and more shadowed canyon. Serried ranks of broken-topped pillars marched its width and length, showing that the whole thing had once been roofed in stone to form a hypostyle.

“They built in the valleys to stay out of the suns,” Riordan said. “Gods, what a life.”

“And what a death,” Kaulas added. “They’re all gone now, and what they built….” He shrugged.

They could not see a sun yet, but a pale brightness—like the light of four moons—crept down one canyon wall: the first light of the nightsun, Bijou hoped. The sky had not paled much beyond that dusty mauve they’d seen on arriving, and she thought it was not yet bright enough to herald the white daystar. Also the air still held the morning cool.

“I think we’re in luck,” said Prince Salih. “Or the gods are with us.”

“You trust them not to change their minds?”

“I think that ghul was trying to trick us,” Riordan said.

Bijou shook her head. “Why should it, when it could lead us to our deaths simply by telling the truth?”

She broke into a shuffling trot, her kaftan trailing in the air behind. Running on dry sand was no joy: her calves ached within strides and the sand that had sifted into her boot gritted between the sock and her sole. But she concentrated on steadying her stride and her ankles as the others fell in. She could see the lakebed now, baked dry, with the fragments of stone roof that had once protected it half-embedded in the hardpan. It was difficult to judge how far away objects lay in such a desert, with no haze to blur distant things, but Bijou guessed the hardpan ended no more than an eighth of a league on—in the long, low arch of a cavern behind it. In that deep shade, Bijou could just discern the glisten of water.

Limping heavily, Riordan was falling behind as they ran until Kaulas stopped the dead horse and let him mount. The bard might have been dubious before, but it wasn’t because he didn’t know how to ride. He vaulted onto the stallion’s back with the same agility he’d shown exiting the roadster, and then he was in the lead at a rocking-chair canter. Clothing flapping, water bottles sloshing, the others raced after.

Bijou felt the air warming as she ran, the too-swift brightening of the rock wall—top to bottom—and then the sand at its foot as the nightsun slid over the edge of the cliff. It might have seemed no more than a star—it was a speck, surely no larger than a very bright planet against the fixéd heavens, and if it had any diameter its width was lost in its glare—but it was brighter than four full moons, easily bright enough to wash the velvet purple-black from the night and bleach it a heavy shade of lilac.

As the nightsun’s rays caught Bijou she shaded her eyes reflexively, but in truth there was no need. The light was no more than a bright candle held over her shoulder, and far from enough to make her squint. What worried her was that the sky continued to brighten behind the nightsun’s rising, incandescent lashings of molten gold and crimson staining half the shard of sky they could see from down in the canyon where they ran. She’d have pulled her hat up, but it wouldn’t stay on her head while she ran.

“I hope you brought a parasol,” Maledysaunte panted between steps. They were almost there. Less than a hundred canes distant, Riordan was already gentling the undead horse to a walk in safe shadow while those behind him pelted for safety.

“Smoked glass,” Salamander gasped back.

“Polarizing filter,” said Bijou, groping beneath her kaftan. The daysuns wouldn’t kill her instantly, and the scientist in her cried out for a glimpse. To come so far, to stand under the last memory of the sky of a destroyed kingdom—what Wizard could resist?

They hadn’t stayed for sunrise the last time they were here.

The sky overhead faded, and kept fading—through amethyst, orchid, lavender, to a horrible pallid shade, a white all dusty thistle-gray along the rim of the canyon. The heat fell down upon them, although the canyon was some protection: the cool air was trapped here and the savage heat only radiated in. Light burned down the canyon wall, brighter than any sun Bijou had ever seen, brighter by far than the twin suns of her childhood home.