Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga by Regina Watts (red queen ebook .TXT) 📕

looks that it was hard to notice details, like the slight disfigurement of the fabric of their hoods or the slightly exaggerated facial features that marked them as elves rather than human. Accordingly, when we reached the busy gates of Skythorn, there was no problem other than the wait to get in.

The city’s namesake, not unlike the tower at the heart of El’ryh, was a citadel swirling toward the clouds and punctuating in a sharp black spire. The heart-warming structure had been visible for some leagues by then, but when we rose up the final hill overlooking the city, my heart throbbed with fierce pride at the durrows’ gasps.

For the first time they took full stock of the sprawling scale, a single city comparable in size to some smaller countries. From our new vantage the city seemed to go on forever in all directions, an extraordinary sea of buildings whose greatest towers could not amount to one half the central landmark’s height. Millions of people navigated its streets and, that day, at least a hundred were trying to get in ahead of us. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to call Skythorn its own city-state, save for that it fell under the legal jurisdiction of Cascadia and owed its taxes to the king of the land just as much as any other town.

But that was where the similarities between Skythorn and any other town had a way of stopping. The line of merchants, travelers, entertainers and others seeking entry to the city was astonishing, and dwarfed by far even that entry line to El’ryh. Unlike the guards of El’ryh, who appeared to primarily act in the name of preventing slave escapes, the purpose of the guards here was to filter out known terrorists and occasionally sort through a merchant’s goods to prevent the smuggling of contraband, foreign seeds, dwarvish pistols, or anything else verboten in the city—a very small list of items, truth be told, when compared to how freely the citizens came and went. Most who were not merchants never had to worry about such scrutiny, and in the end, though the line was vast, we took only an hour to reach the front.

All my anxiety was for nothing. The guard took one look at the tattoo of Weltyr’s sigil upon my neck, asked if the women were with me, and let us through without much more than a brisk glance at my face.

Then, as though I were coming to the end of a dream—or deeper in the midst of one than ever—our horses set hoof upon the paving stones of Skythorn.

“And I thought El’ryh was crowded!” Laughing, Valeria stared around the noisy city and pushed her hood back enough that her view was obstructed by nothing more than the rims of the welding goggles. “Why, I’ve never seen so many people…certainly not so many men.”

“This is all a little surreal,” agreed Odile, peering from the low beak of her hood. “Boy, look at that one—he’d be excellent in agriculture! It’s probably what he does here. Why don’t we lure men down to the Nightlands anymore?”

“Because there isn’t any need,” Valeria said, spreading her hands. “So many of our slaves our bred now.”

“I guess that’s true…boy, and that one!”

Odile’s fascination for the existence of free men was funny in some ways, disturbing in others. It was very strange to know someone for whom basic liberties were foreign notions. What would it take, I wondered, to change the culture of the Nightlands?

As much as it would take to change the culture of Skythorn, I’m sure.

One develops blind spots for the shortcomings of one’s only home. Much as the durrow were not used to living in a culture where all those who worked were (ostensibly, at least) paid fair wages, I was not prepared for what our time in Skythorn would reveal to me about the city—and, sadly enough, the Temple—where I was raised.

“Let’s find this tavern Erdwud recommended to us,” I said, glancing at the letter peering from the edge of the saddlebag. “While you ladies rest, I’ll consult the Temple as to the location of Grimalkin and Hildolfr…Skythorn is a vast city, an easy place to become lost.”

Lips parted in amazement as she peered through the protective glass of her occluded goggles, Valeria indicated the citadel in the center of it all. “And this is the Temple?”

“It is…it is, indeed. Which city inspired which, of course, I cannot say for certain.”

Valeria, not given to so quickly scoffing at me, spoke in a dubious tone. “El’ryh has been the hub of durrow existence for well over 150,000 years.”

“No one knows how old the Skythorn is,” I told her, “nor the city around it. The priests have documents with information on the subject, but they are extremely rare and cannot be shared with great ease. One of their most important duties is to maintain this information by rewriting it in new manuscripts.”

“Have you no printing presses in Skythorn?”

“These histories, I have been told, contain things that ought not to be printed for the common man.” I explained this as our horses made their ways down the busy street, pedestrians going to and fro on either side of us and thankfully thinning as we plodded through this heavily-trafficked corner of the city. “It is for the priests to interpret the holy books of Weltyr, and to communicate their contents to laymen. The information is too mentally devastating to the individual.”

“Roserpine’s relationship with her worshipers is a personal one,” she responded.

“As is Weltyr’s, if the individual should will it…but, in a personal relationship, one person does not tell the other everything all of the time. Not when the relationship is between a master and his slave, for instance.”

With a faint sniff, Valeria moved her horse along a little faster and cut ahead of me on the street. I peered up beyond the sullen priestess, at the tip of the Temple vanishing into the clouds.

The Mongoose was not difficult to find, although