Unchanged (Ahriman Book 3) by John French

Author:John French [French, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2015-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

XIV

Perspectives

The city was there when the dust storm had passed. Iobel had seen the storm coming, had seen it rise up against the sky and roll across the land. The wind had dropped just before it had swallowed her. She had had a handful of seconds to look up and see the ochre cliff loom above her. Then the dust had been all around her, whipping her skin and pouring into her nose and mouth. She had folded to the ground. She had stayed there, curled into a ball, her robe pulled across her face as the storm dragged over her.

When the wind dropped, she found her limbs wrapped in a dull heaviness; the storm had half buried her. She rose – blinking at the sunlight – and saw the city. She stood at the centre of an open space, which might have been a square or a broad avenue. Fragments of walls and pillars pointed up at the sky. Sand dunes rose and fell as far as she could see. The wind and sand had dug into the rubble, sculpting it into shapes that resembled half-melted wax rather than stone.

She turned full circle. Column caps and the stones of buildings sat here and there. Most were the same colour as the sand, but some were grey, or dull green and blue. What looked like statues stood submerged up to their waists. Each of them must have been as tall as a battle Titan. She made out the lines of what might have been heads, torsos and limbs, all weathered to blurred impressions. She could imagine that great and grim faces would have looked out to the edge of the world from where she stood. Except, of course, what she was seeing was just as real as what she could imagine. The statues had been weathered, not by sand and wind, but by forgetfulness, slowly grinding down the details and burying them under time.

‘Hello?’ she called. ‘If you are here, Magnus, then show yourself.’

The words sounded foolish, and an echo was the only answer.

‘If you are here…’

‘Show yourself…’

‘Show…’

‘Yourself…’

‘You…’

‘Yourself…’

She walked deeper into the ruins and did not call out again. After several hundred paces she realised that the shadows were moving. They turned around the bases of the statues, as though the sun was tracking behind her. But the sun was not moving.

She paused, and the shadows became still pools. In front of her a breeze lifted a thin tongue of sand from a dune. Her eyes flicked towards it, and then stopped.

Something was standing beside her. Right beside her. Close enough that its face was next to hers. She could not see it clearly, just the outline of it filling the corner of her eye. It had been there before, standing at the edge of sight when she glanced at the windblown sand, but it had been further away. She stayed very still. She was certain that if she turned to look at it there would be nothing there. But it was there.

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