More, there was no smell of waste
or food– only the tang of springtime sun and growing plants. Grass spurted
through the rubble of the broken street. The wood of the windows of the
barracks had rotted.
Then
I understood. Ariel was no city being ravaged. It was a ruin. I had not lost
hours or days in that unknown Well. I had lost years.
And
the grey mist that furled around the crumbling edifices was no fog at all. Or
at least not a natural one. It was a skein of the same white that Jerem Cozak
had breathed upon my face. It was the White Swarm, brought to the surface in
his wake and by his person. And it appeared grey here because it was surrounded
by the nightwind.
I
had nearly forgotten that obscenity. It stretched as a shroud of blackness around
the ruined Temple, rising as high as the bell towers themselves once had been.
The enemy had brought it, of course, with their machines of war and death and
the burning of my city. In all Thaeron now, there would be no place where the
nightwind wasn’t.
Except
for where I stood, where only the White Swarm was. I walked forward again,
toward the Temple. The Swarm moved with me, billowing around my feet. It still
came out upon my breath. The tiny white machines rolled out from the square
like fog pulled by some cool breeze.
“What
is happening here?” someone asked from the darkness. “Your machines are very strange.” A man
approached me through the fog. He was taller than me and heavier, with short
dark hair and a broad neck and face and shoulders. He came from behind the
nightwind. He was unarmed, wearing only a short tunic and canvas trousers not
very different from my own.
But
his size would overcome me if we fought. He stopped out of my reach, still in
the nightwind. I cursed myself for leaving my dagger in the sarcophagus.
“We
have not encountered them before,” he said again. “Identify yourself!”
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