Kural took it upon himself to guide me, leaving the strange, silent folk around their bubbling cauldron. The eyes of the market followed us as we went, me leading Bran and Kural on my other side. At his direction, I purchased a great length of rope, as well as enough grain to fill my saddlebags and feed all three of us for several days. On the forest floor, Kural said, only the fungus grew, and while some of its many varieties were safe to eat, it was wiser not to take the risk.
“The mushrooms are better used for holy days,” he said, “or times of great need.”
The grain merchant was a woman of about thirty, tall and stately, with her hair covered in a silk wrap the color of the sea. She eyed Kural with suspicion, and caught my eye when his back was turned.
“That man is a heretic,” she said.
I had surmised as much. Clandestine meetings in darkened rooms were rarely the practice of approved religious rites. “I need a guide,” I told the merchant. “It makes little difference to me what gods he worships.”
“Be careful, then,” she said. “He and his people are treacherous. The will of the gods of the tombs means nothing to them. He may slay you and leave your body to be claimed by the fungi, never to rise again.”
“He won’t raise a hand to me—not until I’ve completed my task here,” I assured her. After I had the Sage’s Mirror in hand, however, I might have had cause for concern. “As for the rest, I’d rather be returned to the sea than walk again, with all due respect.”
She gave me a languid shrug. “As you wish. You are an outlander, after all. I only offer you a warning.”
“Then I take it in the spirit in which it was given, and thank you,” I said. “I hope I will pass through this harbor again.”
Kural returned, and we left the market with no more than a sharp glance from the merchant to bid us farewell.
The road into the forest was a wide, paved thoroughfare, scattered with dust and fallen leaves. It passed between two of the grandest tombs: towering stone edifices covered from the ground to their flat roofs in meticulously carved characters, filled in with paint in deep black and brilliant blue. The colors shone in the sun as though they were freshly painted, shimmering like gemstones or the surface of the sea.
“What does it say?” I asked Kural.
He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “Prayers, protective spells, words of scripture. They were carved centuries ago, and the priests maintain them. Very few can read the text now, and fewer still can recreate the script.”
“Can you read it?”
Kural laughed with a forced bark. “Of course not. The gods who gave us the script abandoned us long ago. They deserve to be forgotten.”
“Is that why the merchant called you a heretic?” I asked.
A stiff smile flashed across his face. “Did she, now?”
I pulled Bran closer. The shadow of the forest fell at my feet, and the wind coming from the darkness was cold and smelled of wet earth. “I mean no offense. I wasn’t aware how unpopular you are in the city.”
“That may be,” he said, “but our numbers grow steadily, day after day and week after week. Some come to us like you did, from lands beyond the sea. Others fall out of favor in the upper city or the lower, fail to pay their tithes, and turn to us in their hour of need.”
“And what do you provide for them?”
This next smile was a genuine one. “Shelter, of course, and food; protection from the golden-armored soldiers. Mostly, though, we offer hope that the world will be different, when the gods return, than what has been promised.”
Above, the trees closed in, and the sky disappeared behind their woven branches. They formed an arch higher than even the tallest of the temples. As my eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, the lights of the upper kingdom appeared, flickering like golden candle flames in the distance. The city behind us, under the clear sky, grew darker. Even the temples receded into shadow.
The trees were so large that for a moment, I assumed we walked between walls of mountain stone. Each trunk filled the span of my vision, and it rose ever upward into the black clouds of the canopy. Fifty men with their arms outstretched could not encircle it. I raised my head to search for the point where the tree finally ended, but my eyes lost focus and my feet stumbled.
“The priests of the lower kingdom tell of the return of the gods,” Kural continued, “when the world will be remade, and those who rest in the great tombs will rule at the right hand of the divine, while those buried in common graves will serve at their pleasure. The priests of the upper kingdom tell a similar story, though their tombs are high among the trees, cradled in living wood. When the gods come, the honored dead will rule as they did in life, and those whose hands and backs built both kingdoms will labor as they always have.”
He lit an oil-soaked torch, and a pool of orange light chased away the nearest shadows. I took up a second torch, and thus we made our way through this uncanny, premature night. By my reckoning, barely an hour had passed since midday.
“It’s an old story. I have heard its like before,” I said. In the lands of my birth, far to the north, we told tales of hunting great beasts alongside our gods in the world beyond. Of course, only the strong would be given this honor. Those who could not hunt and fight in life were destined for the fields of ice, a cold, blank stretch of land where they would wander forever.
I had been absent from my homeland a long time before it occurred to me that this fate might be unjust. Most of the companions I had met and loved since then had been warriors, yes, but not all of them. I would not condemn Khalim to an eternity of wandering because he took up his charge as a healer, nor Garvesh for pursuing a life as a scholar and orator. Even Kural, heretic though he might be, deserved a better afterlife than that.
“An old story, yes,” Kural said. “But it isn’t the only one we can tell. There are other gods here, in this holiest of lands, and they still hold power even if there are few to acknowledge them.”
Dead leaves, damp and sticky, covered the pavement in vast drifts. Some time ago, laborers had cleared the road with shovels, but more had fallen since. Each leaf was nearly as long from tip to stem as I was tall. Bran’s hooves left crescent marks in the veiny surfaces, which bled green under our feet. The lights grew stronger, but they still hovered in the air hundreds of feet up and some miles away.
“I told the merchant—it matters not to me what gods you serve, Kural,” I said.
He climbed over a ridge of rotting plant matter. Even in the absence of the sun, the air was warm and thick, clinging to my skin like a damp cloak.
“That’s where you’re wrong, outlander,” Kural said.
“My name is Eske, son of Ivor,” I told him, stating my name as Kural had told me his, and Ramla had done before him. If he were plotting to kill me and leave my body for the fungus, as the merchant had warned, perhaps knowing my name would give him pause.
The fungus rose up around us. At first, it was low hills, colored a shadowy purple, ridged with a pale, sickly white. Beyond them, the mushroom stalks rose up as large as trees, blooming into discs that stretched across the road.
“Eske, then,” Kural said. “What gods do you serve?”
I had no answer for him. “That’s none of your concern.”
“But it is—it is the foremost concern any of us should have,” he argued. “I serve the gods of the roots, of the ocean depths and the caverns the delvers opened by accident when they dug down to lay the foundations of the great tombs. I work day and night to ensure that when the horn sounds to announce the world’s end, it will be my gods who play it. As their faithful, we will not be condemned to carry water for the arrogant folk of the upper kingdom, nor wash the feet of the haughty spice-dealers of the lower kingdom.”
“Well, then,” I said. “I wish you the best of luck with all of that.”
He shook his head, his face a mask of aggrieved pity at my evident foolishness. “If you died here, Eske the outlander, you would be forced to serve just as we will.”
“It’s not my intention to die here.”
“And it’s not my intention to allow you to,” Kural said. “But the forest floor is a treacherous place, and you intend to take an artifact from the mages of the upper kingdom. You’d do well to consider the event of your death.”
I had considered it, though I had no intention of sharing this with Kural. If it was my fate to die before I had found a way to cross to the world beyond the world, then so be it, but if I had any say in the matter, I would not perish before I had returned to Khalim what had been taken from him. Better for him to live without me, I thought, than for me to continue on without him.
I suspected that had I said this to Kural, he would have called me a fool, and there would have been no small measure of truth in it.
The faint glow of distant sunlight behind us disappeared at last, signaling the end of the day. We set up camp under the trembling gills of a vast, domed mushroom, clearing a dry patch of pavement on which to build a fire. As I waited for water to boil in my tiny pot, I leaned back against the fungal stalk. It was unexpectedly warm, with a texture like human flesh. I recoiled, drawing away from it with the hunch of my shoulders. If I kept my eyes on the mushroom, it appeared to expand and contract with slow, steady breaths. I turned my back to it and busied myself with my tent.
“We aren’t far from the place of ascension,” Kural said. “By this time tomorrow, you will be on your way to the upper kingdom.”
“You’re not coming with me?” I asked.
Kural shook his head. “Alas, my face is known to them. Yours, however, is not. You can seek an audience with the mage-kings above, and win their trust with lies and flattery, or you may attempt to find the artifact without being detected. In either case, my presence will not aid you.”
“Tell me of the palace,” I said. “How will I find the artifact?”
He pulled a stick from the fire and touched its smoldering end to the paving stones, drawing an image of multiple circular rooms built around the boughs of trees. “You will emerge here,” he said, tapping the stick to the edge of one circle, “if you wish to make your presence known. If not, you’ll make the treacherous climb that will place you here.”
He connected the circles with the branching lines of walkways suspended between branches. “The vault is contained within the trunk of this tree, beside the burial place of the mage-kings who came before. I myself have never entered it. You will have to find the mirror on your own.”
Back to Chapter XLVI: Ksadaja, the City of the Dead
Forward to Chapter XLVIII: To the Upper Kingdom
Thanks for reading! I am behind on my writing goals for February, but I’m still on track to finish this draft by the end of March. I want to release this book earlier than December this time.
Space Whales Press 
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