Pauper's Empire: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 2) by L.W. Jacobs

Author:L.W. Jacobs [Jacobs, L.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2021-03-29T22:00:00+00:00

33

Tai smelled the smoke before he saw it, sitting in a clearing with late afternoon sun spearing through the trees. They’d been flying all day and his leg throbbed painfully, but they were most of the way back to Ayugen already. Ella kept giving him worried looks, but they all knew the sooner he could get to Marrem the better.

Feynrick lifted his head from the last of the millet cakes Ella had stolen, sniffing. “Smoke, isn’t it?”

Tai nodded. “Must be a settlement or outpost near here.” He’d kept them away from the smuggler’s path, just in case, flying on the far side of the river. Still, there were isolated settlements all along the Genga.

Feynrick shook his head. “That ain’t wood smoke. Leastways, not only wood smoke.”

Ella frowned. “What then? A forest fire?”

Feynrick looked troubled but said only, “Best we get back in the air as quick as we can.”

They left as soon as Tai’s mavenstym digested, spine aching but urgency doubled in him to get back. The wind had shifted while they rested, and he could see trails of smoke on the horizon.

Trails coming from Ayugen.

“What the hell?” Feynrick called over the wind, but it was too loud to talk. Tai pressed on faster, fear throbbing in time with the pain in his leg.

The first thing they saw was patches of black in the river bottom, golden fields of wheat and barley burned to ash, circles of a few farmsteads burned as well.

Fear throbbed harder. Food was already dire. They couldn’t afford to lose more.

The black patches increased as they sped east, the Genga’s wide fertile plain blackened like a charred quilt, with only a few patches of color here and there, where fate or farmers had saved the crops from total destruction.

Ayugen was worse. They cleared the final line of forest, Tai’s back screaming, to find half of Hightown in smoking ruins. That the rest of the city looked normal only highlighted the damage, and it didn’t take Tai’s mind long to make the connection. Eastern Hightown. Grain merchants. Burnt fields.

Someone attacked their food supply. And timed it exactly for when he was gone.

Tai should have flown straight to Marrem’s, or to the Tower, to a healworker’s, but he set them down in Hightown instead. He had to see this. Had to touch it with his own hands.

Ella and Feynrick were talking, trying to help him walk, but he just left his uai burning, what little was left of it, and drifted through the shell of a neighborhood he’d spent so much time in growing up. The crooked alley where he’d once fought off a pair of angry Maimers, now waist-high with ash and debris. The wide street corner where Curly would juggle for coins, covering in a tumble of scorched stones, the grain dealer’s shop collapsed from its own weight. Behind it smoke still rose from a long spill of scorched barleycorn, granary toppled in an eerie echo of the one he and Marrem had investigated just days ago.

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