Troy Denning - The Verdant Passage

The great ziggurat towered above the squalor of the sun-baked city. Each level of the terraced pyramid was finished in glazed brick of a different color: gleaming violet at the base, then indigo, azure, green, yellow, orange, and, finally, blazing scarlet. In the center, an enormous staircase ran straight from base to summit, reaching for two pale yellow moons that hovered overhead in the hazy, dust-laden sky.

Dawn had barely broken, yet thousands of slaves already swarmed over the pyramid. Clad only in breechcloths, they toiled to the rhythm of snapping whips, using a web of ropes and pulleys to hoist crates laden with fired bricks up the sheer walls of each terrace.

At the base of the ziggurat stood a diminutive man wearing a long purple robe. Upon his head was a golden diadem, the crown of the king of Tyr. A wispy fringe of gray hair hung beneath the circlet, but his pate was bald and scaly with age. Deep lines of hatred creased his brow, and a thousand years of bitterness burned in his gaze. Pallid, wrinkled flesh dangled from his jawline. It looked as if the man had been fasting for a hundred years, and for all anyone knew, he had.

Next to the ancient ruler stood an apprehensive man dressed in the black cassock worn by all the king’s templars. His auburn hair hung in a braided tail down the center of his back. His features were gaunt, and his face was populated with a hawkish nose, a thin-lipped frown, and beady eyes the color of liver. At five and a half feet, he loomed over the aged king the way elves loomed over men. That fact made him nervous. Tithian of Mericles, High Templar of the Games and sole heir to the Mericles name, would have enjoyed towering over his peers. He was too shrewd to relish standing taller than the king.

Noting that he was casting a faint shadow over his ruler, Tithian stepped forward to examine the violet-hued bricks of the ziggurat’s lowest tier. Here and there, they were embellished with carved alabaster tiles. Each carving portrayed the Dragon: a stooped beast that walked upright on a pair of massive legs, dragging an immense serpentine tail behind it. Its arms were two scaly stubs, but its hands were shaped like a man’s, and each held a staff that helped support its upper torso. A protective collar covered its shoulders, and above it, the creature’s long, powerful neck supported a flat head with narrow, slitlike eyes, no ears, and a gaping maw filled with jagged teeth.

“This workmanship is exquisite, King Kalak,” Tithian offered, not taking his eyes from the white tiles. “The detail is amazing.”

Kalak reached up and placed his hand on Tithian’s shoulder. With its gnarled fingers and swollen joints, it looked more like a claw than a human appendage.

“Did I bring you here to examine artwork?” Without awaiting a reply, the king led Tithian toward a crate of bricks that was being pulled to an upper level of the ziggurat.

Tithian grimaced. This was the first time he had ever seen the king outside the Golden Tower, and he had no idea why he had been called to meet him at such an uncivilized hour. From Kalak’s acid tone, the high templar guessed that the meeting would be less than pleasant.

When they reached the rising crate, Kalak grasped the rope that hung from its side. The king’s feet left the ground, and he began to float upward. Tithian stifled a scream as Kalak’s talonlike fingers dug into his shoulder. An instant later, the ground slipped from beneath the templar’s feet. He found himself dangling in the king’s grip, staring down upon the heads of the slaves who had been loading more crates at the base of the ziggurat.

The slaves were astonished by the sight of two men rising into the air like wisps of smoke, and they paused to gape. Their overseers, subordinate templars dressed in black cassocks similar to Tithian’s, quickly returned them to work with a few well-placed blows from bone-and-leather whips.

When Kalak and Tithian had risen just above the first terrace, they came face-to-face with four hundred pounds of fur and muscle. The hulking baazrag paused in its difficult task of hauling up the bricks. Creasing its sloped brow, it fixed its eyes on the men, then cocked its highcrested head in confusion. As the beast’s glance dropped to the empty space beneath the king’s feet, its cavernous nostrils flared in alarm and its muzzle fell open, revealing four sharp yellow canines. The baazrag stepped back and raised its arms in a defensive display. The rope slipped from its hands.

Stepping onto the terrace with Tithian in tow, the king barely managed to release the rope before the crate fell to the ground. The bricks crashed upon a human slave, mortally crushing him as they exploded into shards and dust. Kalak stood at the terrace edge, scowling at the rubble. He was squeezing Tithian’s collarbone so hard that the templar expected it to snap at any moment.

The king lifted his gaze and searched for another man wearing the black cassock of a templar, then jabbed a bony finger at him. “You!”

The overseer spun around, blanching as he saw who had addressed him. “Yes, Mighty One?”

“This slave just dropped a full load of my bricks!” Kalak snapped, pointing at the wretched baazrag he had surprised. “Whip him!”

The overseer cringed, for the same lack of wit that made a baazrag a good slave could trigger a murderous rampage when it was beaten. Nevertheless, the man unfurled his whip to obey, for defying the king would mean his own death.

Before Tithian could see what became of the baazrag’s punishment, Kalak ordered another of his priests to throw him a line. Two slaves gingerly guided the king and Tithian toward another crate of bricks, which was being lifted to the next terrace. With his hand still crushing Tithian’s shoulder, the king grasped the rope attached to the crate, and the pair began to rise again. They repeated the process several times, ascending the ziggurat level by level. With each trip, the overseers shouted warnings to their counterparts above, trying to prevent astonished slaves from losing any more bricks.

Most slaves were human, dwarven, or half-elven, but other, more exotic races dominated several terraces. On one level, an entire pack of belgoi labored. These gaunt humanoids were nearly identical to men-save for their broadly webbed feet, clawed fingers, and the toothless mouths with which they chattered.

The next level held a hundred gith, a grotesque humanoid race that seemed half elf, half reptile. They were lanky like desert elves, with long, slender legs, but their legs protruded from the body at right angles, like a lizard’s. The gith were so hunched at the waist that they shambled in a perpetual squat. Their bony heads were slender and arrow-shaped, with bulging, lidless eyes that remained fixed on Tithian and Kalak as the two men floated past.

When Kalak and his templar reached the sixth stage of the ziggurat, the king stepped onto the terrace and released Tithian’s aching shoulder. They could not continue to rise along the face of the wall, for the seventh and final echelon of the great pyramid was still encased in wooden scaffolds. Over this framework swarmed dozens of jozhal, small reptilian bipeds with skinny tails, long, flexible necks, and elongated snouts filled with needlelike teeth. With their small, three-fingered hands, the jozhal were covering the seventh tier with scarlet-glazed bricks. They labored at an amazing pace, running up and down the rickety scaffolds as though they were walking on level ground.

Kalak stepped to the scaffolding and pointed a gnarled finger at the half-completed terrace beyond. “Will my ziggurat be ready in three weeks?”

Tithian dutifully peered through the scaffolding as if to assess the work in progress, but he was hardly the person to ask. Like most people, he wasn’t even sure why the king was building the ziggurat. Kalak had not explained its purpose, and those who had inquired too often were now dead. Furthermore, Tithian understood even less about construction than he did about the ziggurat’s purpose. For all he knew, the terrace could be three days from completion.