The Halcyon Dislocation by Peter Kazmaier

Author:Peter Kazmaier
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Action Adventure, Science, Faith
Publisher: Peter Kazmaier
Published: 2017-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22 The City of the Dead

The two teams started off at dawn the following morning. Al, Dave, and Pam headed directly up the spur, crossing patches of bare solid rock pitted by erosion interspersed by tree filled hollows. Late in the morning, after struggling through the uneven topography, they came out of a hollow and saw the city across a shallow valley. It was nestled against a vertical mountain wall that was more than a thousand feet in height. The outer ramparts formed three sides of a rough rectangle. A road, climbing out of a deeper valley to the east, ran along the top of a ledge of rock under the shadow of the wall and entered the fortress city through a broken gate.

Behind the outer wall, farther back in the city, a second wall rose several hundred feet above the rampart, forming a smaller enclosed area, like a citadel. Against the cliff, the top of a high turreted keep made of jet-black stone was just visible.

“That must be the road from the jetty,” said Al, pointing to the road disappearing into a valley to their left. “The stonework on the road looks identical to what we saw at the river.”

“If that’s true, Jackson, Taylor, and Smith ought to have arrived ahead of us,” concluded Dave.

They headed for the main gate. This stretch of their journey was more open than any they had yet encountered since they had left Linderhof. Whether it was a consequence of the poor soil or some malevolent influence emanating from the city, no living thing grew in the shallow, elongated valley that fronted the gate, except a thorny, gorse-like bush that clung tenaciously to their clothes whenever they chanced to brush against it. The gorse bushes were so troublesome that they gave up trying to cross the valley directly and instead skirted the edge, joining the road at the point where it began to climb. Thus they traveled half a mile on the road under the shadow of the rampart. The wall was higher than it had looked, and they felt naked and exposed; any defender on the wall could kill them with a well-thrown stone. And so they raced to the front gate in fear.

When they finally reached the gate, Al called a halt and looked into the city. The gate had at one time been a long tunnel about a hundred feet in length. The roof of the tunnel and the adjoining wall had collapsed so that large blocks of stone were scattered about. Dave positioned himself inside the walls on a large flat boulder that gave him a good view of the utterly deserted city streets, while Pam watched outside.

Inside the gate, the street was bordered with row upon row of houses, some with collapsed roofs. Each house shared its sidewalls with its neighbors so that only the street or the occasional narrow walkway made an intermittent gap. The windows had no glass.

The main avenue that came through the gate continued into the heart of the city, becoming increasingly narrow and winding as the houses closed in on it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.