Beyond the Moon Sea by Marcela Carbo

Author:Marcela Carbo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Marcela Carbo

Across the Arms two towers stood,

sentinels against the setting sun,

whence order came to set the chaos right.

Why mention the setting sun if not to say that they expected a threat from the west? Had the Alcar been the conquerors? It had been a theory whispered among the early cohorts, and then never again.

Had Derro thought it?

Salo stood in the doorway of the ruin, keeping watch over what must have been the main square, a hundred yards on the long end. He tossed a piece of ancient stone over a field of low walls, the outline of what had once been someone’s home.

“Below ground?” he asked. “Why not below? Would explain why we’ve found nothing.”

Kores shook his head. “It would be above. The Alcar would have made it above.”

“I found this,” Salo said, handing him an iron spike pointed at one end and flat at the other. “Someone has been stealing the stone.”

Kores nodded. “Ahtu mentioned peoples living to the east. Not nomads.”

Nicala called Kores’s name from the tower. She stood on a wall, black against the star light. Salo grimaced as her voice carried over the vast loneliness of the place.

“Go, then!” Salo said to him. “More piles of stone wait for you.” Salo waved him off with a growl and sat down by Mira.

Kores stumbled through the shadows, clambered over the stone terraces, and reached where Nicala stood.

Nicala’s eyes flashed in the night’s light. Her excitement bubbled up in her. “This way,” she said, grabbing his arm and leading him through the maze. The terraces had been deceptive, concealing a path between them—tricks of the mind like the soaring bookshelves of Mahl’s study. They reached the base of the tower.

Yolthin appeared above them, sticking out from what had appeared as a solid section of the tower.

“I felt a strange wind,” the young man said, face beaming. “Like it was pulling me in.”

Kores choked with laughter and recalled the strange window in Mahl’s black tower.

“There’s nothing here,” Yolthin said. “Except one thing.” He pointed down. In the faint consorts’ light, the stone shifted, revealing a walkway with steps winding about the tower. “Come up,” he said, beckoning them, then disappearing.

Nicala went first, feeling her way slowly along the narrow ledge hundreds of feet above the bay. Kores followed her exact steps, and then moved through the secret wall, as she had.

Inside, Yolthin embraced him.

“Well done, Yol,” Kores said, thumping his back.

The lad let him go, wiping his eyes.

The inside seemed more appropriate to Mornae heights, so tall that he couldn’t see the ceiling. Someone had hastily pried mosaics out of the walls and smashed the floor tiles. Leaning down, he picked up a sliver of deep black stone.

“But this is even better,” Yolthin said. He patted a wall and then slipped around it. His head peaked out from the side. “It’s a false wall.”

They followed him around and descended a flight of steps. There, below the tower, was a terrace carved into the cliff wall.

“Look,” Yolthin said, leaning over the terrace wall.

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