The Assassin King

28

No one living, nor anyone dead, had ever known, or at least recorded, the story of how the lost city of Kurimah Milani had come to be built.

Or by whom. Jutting proudly from the multicolored sands of the westernmost part of the borderlands between Yarim and the upper Bolglands, where the desert clay faded into steppes, then the piedmont, then mountains, Kurimah Milani was old when the oldest tales of history were written. Its minarets and heavy stone walls glistened with a sandy patina that was said to have turned iridescent in the sun, giving some of the merchants who first came upon it the impression that it was an illusion, a mirage at the edge of the vast, empty desert of red clay that stretched for miles at the base of the manganese mountains along the Erim Rus, the Blood River.

The legendary city was said to have been located on the Lucretoria, the ancient merchant road along which trade in silks and seeds, spices, textiles, salt, jewels, and ore was known to haye traveled. It was not known how long the indigenous population of the continent had been traversing that primitive road, but by the time the Cymrians arrived in what was now the province of Yarim, the Lucretoria had all but crumbled back into the red clay and the sand, and Kurimah Milani existed in nothing more than legend.

The myth was alive enough still, however, to spawn the occasional pilgrimage, small caravans of the sick and infirm for whom all other options had been exhausted, desperately combing the empty desert for even the smallest sign of the renowned healing springs, the fabled sun-beds in which the suffering could bask, like desert lizards, absorbing the red rays of a healing sun, the fountains of crystalline water that poured forth from the hands of gentle-eyed statues, said to be able to purge the most insistent of disease, or die great gem-stone that had been rumored to clear mental deformities or illnesses of the mind with a mere touch. All they found was the wind and stinging red sand.

Sometimes hope is the only thing that keeps a legend alive. The earthquake mat took Kurimah Milani into the depths of the desert centuries before the Cymrians came swept all trace of it from human sight, but even that enormous temblor could not erase the deeper sense that somewhere, lost in the monotonous, endless landscape of cold red clay and scrubby vegetation, was a place where miracles still lurked, dormant for centuries, but nonetheless waiting to be found by the patient, the intrepid, or the desperate. Hope kept that sense alive, even when all other searching was exhausted.

Sometimes, however, there is more man hope.

Sometimes there is reason. The dragon could hear the music long before she knew what she had found. Exhaustion owned her now; she no longer had the strength to be a slave to hatred. She had long passed the point of return, her mind fading into the numbness that precedes death. Deep within the ground, her dragon sense could no longer discern any minutiae in the world around her, but rather it was monitoring her fading life, counting the beats of her three-chambered heart as it strained to pump the blood welling within her. And so, when her darkening mind heard the first notes of the ancient song echoing through the earth, she could not tell whether the sound was from the outside world, or whether it was just the noise of her own death approaching.

After a mile or more of crawling toward it, her thoughts began to clear, her mind to focus, and the beast realized that the tone was modulating in a consistent fashion, following a musical pattern that was soothing to her fractured mind and desiccating body. She could feel her blood-starved tissues rehydrating slightly, humming with a renewed vitality. Her heartbeat strengthened, her sight brightened where it had gone dim. The dragon stopped and lay still for a moment, listening.

The earth through which she was traveling seemed to recede, leaving her tattered skin buzzing pleasantly. The music reached deep into her torn flesh and revitalized it, giving her just enough strength to gather herself and continue her journey, her dragon sense, now awake again, following the song in the ground like a beacon.

The louder the vibration echoed through the earth, the more confident the dragon felt. There was a sense of revitaiization, rejuvenation, in each mile she traveled, stripping away the despair and fear, encouraging her even as the blood continued to flow from her, even as her heart began to fail.

Perhaps I am entering the Afterlife, she mused as she crawled, though she had little remembrance what the Afterlife was.

She was unaware of the disruption of earth she was causing in her journey. As always, when she traveled at a depth of less than a mile, the strata of earth erupted, leaving fissures in her wake, uprooting what few specimens of scrub vegetation remained in the lifeless desert, uncovering long-dead skeletons of men and animals and carts that had been long lost in the shifting sands. The music filled her ears now, humming in her skin beneath the scales of her hide. It filled her mind with dreams that bled over into her eyes, and so as she traveled, following the sound, the sight into the Past that was her birthright began to take over. What was visible to her eyes was the dry and lifeless clay that the desert had become in the Present, but me second sight within her envisioned something entirely different, a younger, newer land where desert flowers still bloomed, where low-growing trees offered shade to the native animals of the wasteland and the caravans of humans and dromedaries that plied the Lucretoria, passing by Kurimah Milani in great splashes of the color and noise of commerce. She was seeing the place not as it lay buried before her, but as it once had been, two millennia before. Looming before her was a glistening sight, shining in me rays of me setting sun. Minarets towered high toward the clouds, a musical welcome ringing from their domed towers. Beyond the entrance gates clear water from fountains leapt and splashed, catching the sunset’s rays and falling into lapis lazuli pools, carrying the warm colors with it. The dragon’s damaged heart leapt in excitement. The concept of mirage was completely beyond her ability to conceive, me understanding mat she was still within the earth completely gone from her awareness. In her mind she could see all around her me glistening walls of me healing city as she passed through the great gated aqueduct, where streams of crystal water rained down on all those who entered. She closed her eyes as she passed beneath the memory of the medicinal waterfall, feeling the coolness of me spray as it showered her skin, easing her pain, cooling the fire within her.

Insanity must cause the arms to grow, for nothing is out of reach of the madman, a sage once said within her hearing. Had her fragmented mind seen the darkness of the tunnels that, in reality, loomed around her, if it could grasp that the healing spray was nothing more than showers of grit and sand falling upon her, it might have kept her from discovering what treasure still actually remained beneath the blowing sand and red desert clay. Water, the beast thought as she burrowed past the broken towers buried in twenty centuries of sand, past the wreckage of stone walls and shattered statuary, leaving a trail of dark blood in her wake. Nothing but the song of the place was sustaining her now; her body, more shell than flesh, hummed with the vibration of this place of ancient healing, but even the power of the memory of Kurimah Milani could not replace the life’s blood that was leaking from her sundered heart. There is water here, I know it. And she was right. Even though the infamous water gardens had been utterly destroyed in the temblor, and while the copious healing pools and mineral baths filled to overflowing by hot springs running down from the mountains in the distance had been consumed at the same moment of cataclysm, deep beneath the surface sand there were still the remnants of a stream that trickled through the buried vaults that had once been public baths. In her confusion the dragon had come upon one of the central fountains of the city, a deep, long cavern that had, in its heyday, ran the length of a vast interior courtyard surrounded by columns of gleaming marble encrusted with mother-of-pearl from mollusk shells culled from the Erim Rus. Her inner vision led her immediately to the stream, which she saw as a deep pool in which splashing spray danced skyward in time to the fluctuating music of the place. Greedily she drank from it, following its source in search of more water. A vibration surrounded her suddenly, humming in a tone very different from the one she had been following, irritating her eyes and parts of her skin, but she shook it off. At the headwaters of the stream her mouth and eyes were suddenly filled with sunlight, golden and thick enough to be palpable.

The wyrm gasped in delight. The amber nectar was sweet on her tongue and soothing to the caustic burning of her throat that had been plaguing her since her injury. She drank in more of the thickened sunlight, swallowed it in desperate gulps, feeling its sustenance fill her, strengthen her, cooling the fire in her belly, bringing her peace. She rolled onto her back in the stream and exhaled slowly, then fell into dreamless, healing sleep.