James Wyatt - In the Claws of the Tiger

Janik nodded but his brow was furrowed in concentration-he still wasn’t hearing what he was looking for.

“Look, Janik, I saw a lot of people lay down their lives in the war. A lot of them did it because they wanted to be heroes. They thought that their deaths would help Breland somehow. In my mind, they were just more casualties of war. But the couatls made me think of the people I saw who weren’t motivated by their own pride or their belief in the nation-people who gave up their lives to save their friends. Covering their squad’s retreat. Shielding their buddies from a magical blast. Utterly selfless, willing to die-not so their friends could go on fighting, but out of some small, tragic hope that maybe their deaths would allow their friends to live in a better world some day. Like they knew that some day the war would be over, and some people would still be around to enjoy whatever world was left. And maybe their deaths would make it possible for their friends to be there at the war’s end.”

Tears were starting in her eyes again, and she tried to brush them away.

“The vampires taught me that there is very real evil in the world, Janik. Terrible evil, willing to consume the world to feed its own hunger. To me, the couatls are the embodiment of the wonderful good that is also in the world. That good is the only thing preventing evil from devouring all life.”

Dania sat down on the ground beside Janik, looking very tired. It seemed to Janik, for a moment, that she felt the weight of that responsibility very keenly, as if the burden of saving the world from destruction rested on her shoulders alone.

She put her hand on his folded hands and looked into his face. Janik glanced down at her hand and covered it with one of his own.

“I think I know what I saw when the couatl flew by today-the pure good you’re talking about.”

Dania nodded.

“And if it’s possible for such a thing to exist, then perhaps what you’ve been saying about Krael and … and even about Maija is all true. Maybe they are utterly evil and beyond all hope. But I still don’t want to believe it.”

“I can’t pretend that I have it all figured out, Janik. The truth is that I still haven’t found the one thing I want most.”

“What’s that?”

“Peace. I want peace. I want to stop raging and fighting and killing and worrying. I wouldn’t mind a chance to stop thinking. I want to sleep without fear, without setting watches. I want to rest in the warmth I felt in the alley, and never have it fade away.”

She shook her head and stood up, trying to hide the tears that had formed in the corners of her eyes. She walked to the edge of the ridge and looked out at the setting moon again.

“I just want peace, Janik.”

As she spoke, she slowly drew her sword from its sheath. Janik sprang to his feet, afraid of what she planned to do with it. As he reached her side, she pointed the tip of her sword into the desert beyond their camp.

“They’re coming again,” she said. “They’ve found us.”

Janik and Dania raced into the hollow to rouse Mathas and Auftane. They abandoned the tents, which stung Janik bitterly but seemed to give Mathas great satisfaction, and hastily packed up the rest of their gear.

Janik chose a rocky path away from the hollow, counting on the difficulty of tracking them over such ground. He set a quick pace and steered them away from the approaching rakshasas and toward Mel-Aqat.

“Why are we going toward the ruins?” Auftane asked.

“We need to get there eventually,” Janik said. “And given the number of zakyas out looking for us, I’m hopeful that the ones remaining in the city will be caught off-guard.”

Their brisk pace staved off the chill of the desert night, and five nearly full moons lit their way across the barren land. They traveled well into the night, until the disks of the moons silhouetted the walls of Mel-Aqat in front of them. They approached the walls under a cloak of shadow. Moving slowly and as quietly as they could manage, they crept up to the ruins without hearing any sign that they had been detected.

Janik led them to the base of the wall. He ran his hand over the stone, looking up. It appeared that the rakshasas had, as Mathas described, simply rearranged the crumbling stone blocks of the ruins, forming them into a ring around the city and then stacking another layer on top of the first. From where he stood, Janik thought he could see a gap between the blocks forming the upper layer above him, allowing access to the city-if they could get over the lower block.

“I’m pretty sure I can climb this,” he said, turning to his companions. “If I get up there and drop a rope down, will the rest of you be able to make it up?”

“Of course,” said Dania. Mathas nodded, though he looked almost too tired to speak.

Auftane looked uncertainly at the stone block, but then he nodded as well.

“Up I go,” Janik said.

He slid one hand up the wall until he found a good handhold in the worn rock, then did the same with one foot. A moment later he was sliding up the side of the wall like a spider. He only slipped once and caught himself quickly. He reached the top of the block and squeezed into the gap between the two upper ones. He checked above him, still not seeing any guards, and peered down the length of the gap. It narrowed considerably at the other end.

“Wait there,” he hissed down to the others. “I want to make sure we can get through the other side before you all climb up here.”

Turning sideways, he crept along between the two stone blocks until he was sure he could fit in the gap all the way through. He peered out the narrow space at the far end and gasped as he got his first look at Mel-Aqat in over three years.

It had changed considerably, as Mathas had said. On their last visit, only the merest suggestion of ancient buildings marked what had once been a great city, with the exception of the towering ziggurat in its center. Janik and his companions had dug away some of the parched earth to reveal more of the crumbling walls in places, and they had found one ancient vault underground that was almost completely intact-and there they had found the Ramethene Sword. But above ground, nothing had stood-barely two stones stacked on top of each other.

This time, in addition to the reconstruction of the wall, there were strange, crumbling towers erected in various places around the central ziggurat. They were nothing more than huge stone blocks in haphazard stacks, like the constructions of a young child’s toy blocks, but on a much larger scale. Some leaned far to one side, while others buckled in the middle and then righted themselves. For a moment, Janik almost thought he saw some pattern to their arrangement around the ziggurat, but it escaped him and he made a mental note to consider the question later. He needed to help his friends over the wall-and quickly, before any guards appeared.

He pulled a coil of fine silk rope from his backpack and looked for a good place to tie it as he moved back to the outside edge of the wall. The worn stone surface offered no large protrusions-barely more than the narrow fingerholds he had used to climb the lower blocks. He reached the outer edge and threw one end of the rope down.

“Wait another second,” he whispered. “I need to secure this end.”

He tied a large knot in the other end of the rope as he made his way back along the narrow gap. On the inside edge, he crouched down and worked the rope in between the upper and lower blocks so that the knot would catch in place. He pulled hard on the rope to make sure it was secure, checked one more time for guards, and, seeing none, went back to the other end of the gap.

“Come on up,” he said.

Dania tested the rope with her weight and then handed it to Mathas. The old elf glanced at the rope, then handed it back to Dania.