A City Lost By Time: PART 3 by Jeni Meadows
This is part 3 of Jeni Meadows’ serial A City Lost By Time. Click here to read part 2 first.
“I’m sorry, bears?” Taire spluttered. “You didn’t tell me there’d be bears up here.”
“I did, actually,” Staven said, patiently. “At the time you seemed far more interested in your breakfast.”
“You know you shouldn’t tell me anything important while I’m eating,” Taire grumbled. “Why is it only the three of us, if where we’re going there are bears?”
“Because Nyberg insisted we leave immediately,” Anneli sighed. “I did try, but he was convinced that if anyone else came with us we wouldn’t be able to leave until tomorrow, and that was simply out of the question.”
They lapsed into silence. Gravel crunched under their boots as they walked.
“So…” Taire piped up again, “if we do come across any bears, what… what do we do?”
The three of them were armed; Taire and Anneli each carried standard issue Investigations Office broadswords, and across Staven’s back rested a large, ornately carved crossbow, of which he was rather proud. It was the new type, with the capacity to launch two bolts at once, and it glittered in the sun as he walked. The mangy tomcat, insistent on accompanying them even into the mountains, dozed on Staven’s shoulder, its tail brushing across the barrel of the crossbow with hypnotic regularity.
“Bears are very territorial,” Staven replied, “so if we do run into one, as long as we keep out of its way, it probably won’t attack first.” He cast a cheeky glance at Anneli, and grinned as he continued. “It’s the wolves I’d be worried about, if I were you.”
“Wolves?!” Taire spluttered. Staven burst out laughing.
“Did you listen to our mission briefing?” Anneli asked, gently. “At all?”
“The bit about what to pack,” Taire sulked, shifting his rucksack around on his shoulders. “I spent the rest of the conversation trying not to forget anything. Next time, start by explaining what might kill us, and then move on to the inventory.”
“Duly noted,” Staven agreed, still chuckling.
“Seriously though,” Taire continued, a hint of petulance carrying into his voice, “all the years you’ve been hiking up here to commune with nature, or whatever it is you do, you’ve never mentioned the risk of wolf attack.”
Staven looked at him incredulously. “Why do you think I own a double-bolt crossbow?”
“Speaking of wild things,” Anneli cut in before Taire could answer that with something rude, “how likely are we to cross paths with Wildermen up here?”
“Not very,” Staven answered quickly, all traces of mirth gone. “They don’t usually come this close to the valley.”
“You are really not filling me with confidence,” Taire muttered, shoving his gloved hands deep into the pockets of his coat. “We should’ve brought some trained fighters with us.”
“We are trained fighters,” Anneli laughed. “Or were you eating breakfast through Investigators’ Training too?”
Taire pouted.
“Come on, we’ll be fine,” Staven said, clapping him on the shoulder. “We should get to the spot Theodora’s map points to this time tomorrow. If we run into something that could kill us between now and then, frankly I’d just call that bad luck.”
There fell another crunch-filled pause.
“What do you think we’ll find once we get there?” Taire asked.
“If we could answer that, it wouldn’t be very impressive that Ms. Peerson had found the city,” Anneli retorted.
Taire looked hurt, so Staven stepped between them. “Maerûn existed very much in isolation from the rest of the Kingdom,” he explained. “Even before it was lost, nobody really knew very much about what went on in there.”
“Well, they were conducting mad science-magic experiments, apparently,” Taire recalled. “Which I don’t think sounds ethical.”
“It was a different time,” Staven said, vaguely. He sped up, unwilling to let the conversation fall into ancient philosophy. “Pick up the pace everyone,” he called over his shoulder. “We need to reach The Point by sundown.”
The Point was a vast outcropping of rock that jutted out above the landscape like a monument to the Gods. It was the tallest peak in the Ingolst Valley by some considerable distance, and the angles of its features made it look like a stern old man, frowning down at the world below.
They reached the base of the wall of rock with still an hour to go before the sun disappeared completely behind the lesser mountains. Anneli wanted to use the time to their advantage, but Staven knew that beyond it they would have to negotiate steep, narrow pathways with nothing between them and the valley floor, thousands of feet below. If they left now, what little remained of the sun would be on the wrong side of the Point, leaving them in near-total darkness. Better to wait until dawn, and tackle the most dangerous part of their journey in good light with fresh limbs.
“My legs hurt,” Taire whined when they stopped. “And my shoulders. These packs are heavy.”
“What did you expect from a two-day mountain hike?” Anneli teased him.
“I expected it,” Taire pouted, “but that doesn’t stop me complaining.”
“Come over here and help me put the tent up.”
Staven left them to it and wandered across to the edge of their path that overlooked the valley. He felt the tomcat slink down from his shoulder, and heard it pad off in search of dinner back down the way they’d come.
Far below them, the town of Ingolst was barely a smudge nestled against the river, itself a thin ribbon reflecting gold with the setting sun and vanishing into the forest that sprawled across the feet of the mountains. Birds flew back to their nests, mere specs of movement against the silent stillness beneath, and a slow breath of wind rippled through the treetops, whispering away south along the valley.
Staven looked northwards, towards and beyond the great forest that fringed the valley, and he tried to picture Maerûn rising above the mountains as it was depicted in the paintings. He imagined the wrought gates, stretching from one side of the valley to the other, glistening in a sunset just like this one, and behind them the great city, its ornate buildings spreading back and up the sides of the mountains. And then, towering above it all, the observatories and libraries, the fabled storehouses of knowledge that were the envy of modern scholars. Their towers clinging to the mountainside, stretching up to skies beyond even the tallest peaks, leaving the Point itself far behind as they reached…
It was here that Staven’s illusion collapsed. The Point didn’t feature in any depictions of Maerûn that survived. Indeed, nothing of the scene Staven was looking at would have stood the same. A thousand years had left their fingerprints upon the mountain range, and the valley itself was no doubt miles deeper than it had been then. To say nothing of the terrible tragedy that caused Maerûn to fall deep within the earth, while time wrought its change around it. The world had moved on while the greatest civilisation it had ever known lay crumbling in the darkness, its knowledge buried, its secrets lost forever.
Staven turned his back on the valley and returned to Taire and Anneli, just as the tent collapsed on them for what he suspected was not the first time.
Most of the second day of their trek passed without incident. They began at dawn, made their way carefully through the narrow pass around the Point, and made good time along the track that ran northwards above the valley floor. Two hours in, the cat reappeared and settled contentedly back on Staven’s shoulder. At midday they stopped, ate, and carried on, barely exchanging a handful of words. They had now gone further than even Staven had explored, and the air around them had grown cold and silent.
On they went. The sun revolved around them, and began to fall in the sky. Patches of grass and shrubbery sprouted up in tufts on either side of the path.
“I think we’re getting close,” Anneli announced, peering at the map. “There should be a sort of basin between the peaks, just over this rise. That’s the place Theodora marked.”
They crested the rise in the path with a growing sense of apprehension and stopped abruptly at the top. The basin was there, just as the map suggested. But it was filled with a circle of tents. Seven in total, three on each side and one proudly at their head on the opposite side of the basin, all of them large and bearing no markings. The remains of cookfires lay dotted in between. Fifty men could’ve been camped here, Staven reckoned, as the three of them crept to the side of the path and took cover behind a jutting rock. He peeked over it. He had no way to tell how long the camp had been there, but from what he could see, it was abandoned, and had been for several days.
“Wildermen?” Taire whispered up at him. He shook his head. Wildermen’s camps were usually far less organised than this, and never left unattended.
Staven crept down into the basin. Still nothing moved. The canvas barely even rustled in the breeze. He beckoned for the others to follow him down.
“If not Wildermen, then who?” Anneli asked softly.
As she spoke, Staven felt something change. He held a finger to his lips. All three of them froze. For a moment, the silence stretched on. Then a low, rumbling growl bubbled out from within the tent.
“Is that what I think it is?” Anneli mumbled.
“Yup,” Taire confirmed. “Remember when we decided it was really unlikely we’d find any bears up here?”
Staven shushed them and motioned for them to follow him around to the right, behind the circle of tents. There was another path on the opposite side of the basin, leading up and out just like the one they’d come down. They must’ve woken the bear up with their talking; he could hear it snuffling around as they crept, and he hoped that the canvas between them would keep their scent away.
They were halfway round the camp when the next break in the tents revealed the bear, huge and black, its nose sticking out through the entrance. It tasted the wind, suspicious. Staven hooked the crossbow off his back.
“Can you hit it?” Taire asked.
“I can,” Staven mumbled, loading two bolts, “but I’m not sure I can bring it down in one shot.”
“Right.” Taire turned to face them. “Keep going round. Head up the other side, and be ready to run.”
Staven frowned as Taire turned back and began walking towards the bear. He watched him go, until Anneli tugged on his arm, and reluctantly he moved on. When they came to another break in the tents, Taire was on his knees in the middle of the campsite, hands planted against the ground, ignoring the bear that stood staring at him hardly thirty feet away. It rose up on its hind legs and roared, spreading its forearms out wide. Staven scrambled up the path, moving sideways, trying to keep Taire in view. When he got to the top, he put the crossbow to his shoulder. Just in case.
The ground began to tremble, and a crack formed between Taire’s hands and snaked its way towards the bear. It dropped to all fours and backed away, bumping into the wall of the tent. The rumbling intensified, the crack widening until a gaping chasm stretched across half the camp. One of the tents collapsed in a pile of dust. The bear’s front paw slipped into the chasm and it let out another roar, turned, and loped back up the rise, disappearing without a backward glance. As the rumbling stopped, Taire sagged. Staven ran to his side, but when he got there, Taire was chuckling to himself.
“You nearly died.”
“I know,” Taire said, giggling. “But even you have to admit that was cool.”
“Really?” Anger quickly replaced the concern Staven had harboured moments before. “You took a risk like that because you thought it would look good?”
“Oh, stop it.” Taire lay flat on his back and stared up at the sky, deflated. “Yes, it was what you might call reckless. But that bear would’ve killed all three of us, so.”
Staven stood up, and sucked in a breath to say something that had been on his mind ever since they left town, but Taire pointed over his shoulder.
“Anneli’s waving. You’d better go see what she wants.”
Staven turned, and sure enough Anneli was standing on the top of the opposite rise, gesturing frantically.
“Are you alright?”
“I need to sit here for a minute, but yes.” Colour was coming back into Taire’s face, but still Staven hesitated.
“What if the bear comes back?”
“Then it’ll be your turn to do something stupid.”
Staven snorted, before he crossed the camp and climbed the rise to Anneli.
“Look,” she said before he’d reached the top. She pointed to the floor, to a host of sooty boot prints, travelling in either direction, so thick in places that they formed a black carpet on the stone. They followed the path ahead and off to the right, disappearing behind another wall of rock.
“Our mystery army,” Staven mused.
“Yes, but look.” Anneli pointed off to the left, where a single set of prints made a brief fork in the path, then disappeared over some boulders. They clambered across until, just out of view of the main path, a tiny one-man tent lay nestled between the rocks. Anneli bent inside and came back carrying a pack very similar to their own.
“Theodora?”
“I assume. The obvious question remains, though.”
Whose camp is that back there?” Staven finished. “It’s not a group Theodora liked, that’s for sure.”
“Exactly.” She looked at him. “I don’t like this either. It’s suddenly a lot bigger than we thought.”
They retraced their steps and found Taire waiting for them at the top of the rise, perched on a boulder.
“Let me guess,” he said, out of breath. “We go that way?” and he pointed towards the abundance of sooty prints.
“Eventually,” Anneli said, her voice muffled. She had reached so far into Theodora’s pack that her head was almost stuck inside it too. “There’s a notebook in here, hang on…”
She pulled it out triumphantly and sat down to read it. Taire peered over her shoulder. Staven fidgeted. He paced, knelt down to examine the boot prints to no avail, and then paced some more, until the cat dug a claw into his shoulder.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“She doesn’t seem to know who they are,” Anneli said, gesturing vaguely down into the basin. “She has several theories, but they get more conspiratorial as they go along. They’d already been here a while by the time she arrived, about a week ago. She says they were digging.”
Staven frowned. “Digging?”
“Like they knew exactly what they would find up here, yes. They kept digging until they stopped, at which point they all disappeared down the hole they’d made. Theodora waited a day before following, and that’s where it ends. That was four days ago.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“We need to go home,” Taire declared. “Bring up some more people.”
“We don’t have time,” Anneli argued. “She could be in trouble down there.”
“We can’t go up against all of them.”
“We don’t have to,” Staven said. “Whoever they are, they are a huge problem, but they aren’t the problem we came up here to solve. We came here for Theodora, and we can’t leave without at least trying to get her out.”
“So what? We go sneaking around inside an ancient ruin no one has touched for a thousand years, and hope we find her before we’re found by the small, anonymous army? I thought you were just telling me not to go getting myself killed.”
“I don’t like it either,” Staven said wearily, “but we can’t just leave her here.”
Taire looked at them both, his mouth agape. When it became apparent that neither of them were going to budge, he sighed and got to his feet. “Fine. Let’s go. Quickly, before I decide you’re both mad and leave you up here.”
They followed the footprints a short distance along the path, until they came to a gaping hole hewn into the side of the mountain. The floor dropped away steeply, and was lost to darkness. Their visitors had left a stack of torches and a tinderbox just inside the entrance, so Anneli took one and lit it. They left their packs standing sentinel against the wall on the opposite side of the path.
“Shall we?” Anneli asked. The hole beckoned. They each took a deep breath and plunged into the darkness.
Written by Jeni Meadows
Jeni's professional life involves customer service and office management at a local charity in Lancaster. When she's not doing that, she's organising the practicalities for a small theatre company, writing a series of increasingly complicated novels, or she's trying to learn sign language. Or she's playing video games to procrastinate doing any of the above.