The drawing described the country through landmarks: the mighty cliff with its pockmarked face, the absent statues, the long plain running parallel to the cliffs. The monuments that time could not wither, the mountains and plains, remained for them to see, but the Amaran Road was hidden, covered in sand and rocks. They knew where the road would have been, but they could not find it. They combed the rocky desert, shading their eyes against the sun, their progress slow and exhausting. Her caravan had to stop often to water the horses, water themselves, the Harkan soldiers snorting as they took long gulps of amber and laughing at some unheard joke.
The sun ground its circle into the horizon; they made camp and rose early the next day. At midday they passed a line of standing stones, small totems that marked the edge of the Shambles. Not longer after, a sizeable Harkan patrol blocked their path, but when the soldiers recognized her Harkan escort and saw the woman who was still their king’s wife, they quickly let her caravan pass. Sarra had known the Shambles was well guarded, but the size of the force surprised her. Aside from the Elden Hunt there was no reason for anyone to come here—no life, no resources. Nothing anyone wanted. They found only half-buried rocks, stones whose skin was mottled and black, coarse sand, and lifeless plants.
“Perhaps the road is buried underground,” Sarra said.
“Maybe it was covered, concealed by someone,” Ott said. “Perhaps the road’s surface lies just below the sand.” Ott rode astride a low hill pointing to an uneven cliff, its face oddly vertical, like a loaf of bread with one side removed. “The Soleri built their roads from local limestone,” he said. “The wide, flat stones made a cart’s passage smoother, but the large pieces were difficult to transport. So the paving stones were often quarried from cliffs that ran alongside the road.” If they could not see the road, if the trail were buried beneath centuries of sand and rock, they might at least spy the quarries from which the stones were taken. Ott pointed to a cliff. The sheer face seemed too flat to have been carved by nature’s hand. He stopped the caravan and slipped from his horse.
“Dig here,” he said.
The Harkans drove their spears into the hard-packed sand until their points clinked against a layer of stone.
“Shovels,” said Sarra.
The men brought out their digging tools. Clearing away the sand and rocks proved difficult, so much so that Ott suggested that perhaps the road was not covered by windblown sand but had been deliberately buried. Sarra glanced at Noll, who nodded. Perhaps that was why the Amaran Road was so difficult to uncover—it had been buried, concealed by someone beneath a layer of earth.
Shadows drifted across the sand as the soldiers cleared away rocks and hard clay. When their work was done, Sarra walked upon what she guessed was the old road, the trail they had sought. Standing on the stones, she saw the road’s direction and shape. She noted where the hills had been cut and altered, where the road swung to avoid a cluster of stones or a cliff. “So this is it, the Amaran Road, a path once walked by the Soleri,” she said.
They rode on through the rest of the afternoon, passing a circle of rocks where a tower had once stood, a groove left by ancient wheels, a trench where a wall had been. Wind and war had long ago destroyed the buildings and left nothing in their wake but ruin. The ground grew rockier, the road faded in and out, the sun dimmed. Sometimes they saw only gouges in the cliffs where the stones were once quarried; sometimes they saw nothing at all. More than once they lost track of the road completely and had to double back to where they had last caught sight of the trail or its quarry. Up ahead, the day’s last light lingered along a distant ridge. Sarra shaded her eyes and watched a line of dust on the horizon: San warriors moving northward. Sarra needed to hurry.
Near dusk they came upon a shallow hole in the earth that once must have been the cellar of a mighty stone tower, now filled in with sand and rock. A half-collapsed stair led downward from the tower’s base, but rocky debris blocked the remainder of the passage.
Noll pointed to a symbol on his drawing, one of the arrowheads that indicated a house of some kind, a storehouse perhaps, then glanced at the distant landscape. “Those cliffs are on the map, the dry lake bed too. This place, the tower, once sat astride the road.”
“Then we will stop here.” Sarra nodded toward the stair. “Dig.”
The soldiers dug until past dark, until their shovels met stone. They lifted the stones out, one by one, pulling them from the earth and passing them from soldier to soldier in a chain. By morning the soldiers had cleared the rocks from what now appeared to be a subterranean stairway. By afternoon they had found a passage beneath the tower, a door half-buried in sand revealing a set of stairs spiraling downward, and beneath that a well-preserved corridor, its floor only partly covered with sand. The tower they found astride the Amaran Road concealed a warren of underground tunnels. A stout Harkan led them through the passage, a torch held high, its flickering light dancing on the walls.
The walls were black. “Mold?” a soldier asked.
“No. There is no rot in the desert.” Sarra ran her finger across the rumpled black surface. “Ash.” The markings turned to dust at her touch, the air filling with a faint cloud. What happened here?
A snapping sound echoed through the corridor. She saw Noll bending to unearth a broken arrow from the sand. A battle, thought Sarra as she brushed more ash from the wall. Deep grooves marred the stone relief.
Ott ran his fingers through the dust.
Sarra gave him a questioning glance, but he only shrugged. He had no idea what they were looking at either.
The Harkans pushed onward toward the as-yet-unexplored end of the corridor, their black leather blending with the darkness, leading Sarra and her priests deeper into the passage. The corridor widened, and rows of statues flanked the passage. Long folds of drapery hung from the statues’ shoulders, a snake coiled into a circle graced their chests. It was the same symbol she had seen in the map chamber. More wards. Statues and murals built to scare off looters. She brushed her shoulder against a stony hand, its touch feeling like a piece of the past reaching out to contact her, to speak to her.
They found chamber after chamber, destroyed, soot covering the walls, doors broken, tables shattered. “They were beating out a retreat,” one of the Harkans spoke out from the back of the line, a boy named Taig. He froze when the Mother Priestess and former queen caught his gaze.
“It’s a retreat,” he continued. “They were fighting as they retreated, blocking passages, locking themselves in rooms. They were trying to escape.”
“Who? Who fled and who chased?” she asked, but the boy had no reply.
Ott seemed unconvinced. “Where are the victims, their bones at least? Our desert loves its corpses—the sand and salt will keep a body intact for centuries, sometimes longer.”
Taig stammered until his superior clipped him on the head. The Harkan captain, Dasche, finished for the boy, “Isn’t it clear? They escaped.”
The passage led to a wall of sand. The Harkans brought spades and shovels. They found stones beneath the sand, chunks too large to dislodge.
They collapsed the passage. In desperation they sealed the stones behind them and continued onward. Who were they? Who chased and who fled?
“Gods,” Sarra murmured, Ott at her side, “what happened here?”