But the city was not what I saw first. The River Kasora
begins not from some seep in a swamp, or even from its lake’s overflow, but
from hot springs beneath a glacier hanging high overhead, in a pass of the
Spine of the World. It water tumbles down into the Kasora valley from what must be three
thousand paces, though the distance has never been measured. The sheer drop
suffices to turn the torrent almost entirely into rain and mist, hundreds of
meters wide, which the mountain winds drive this direction and that, so that
there are rainbows whenever there is sun.
The eastern
wall of the valley is granite and sheer; so is the north and the south, thus the jewel city
Kasora sits in a gray oblong bowl of beauty surrounding a lake the color of which
only glaciers make. Only the south, the side of the valley we stood upon, is
gently tapered beneath its cliffs, a smooth slope thousands of paces long and
deep, covered with plush deep moss and emerald grass kept short by grazing
– and now, in the winter, a thin scattered skiff of snow and ice.
The northern side of the vale, the
one across the river, does not rise so gently. Instead it shoots upwards in
cliffs a hundred paces high which run nearly the whole length of the valley, thousand
upon thousands of paces long, buttresses of granite and marble upon which stand the jade
walls of Kasora, the jewel city of the south. Every last bit of its walls and buildings is the soft
green hue of jade, even the towers which spike the wall and the spires and
domes and arches of the temples and other buildings within, though clouds of
nightwind obscured them here and there. One million people had once lived
within those walls, and I saw that, whatever had happened here, the Augers had
not needed much force to take it. The buildings were not true jade, but
Profusionist metal, still, and not replaced by nightwind.
We would need
force. The sole access to the plateau and the city that covered it was one
great gate in the western wall, and a ramp that led up to it, fifty paces wide
and sloped to allow valkyries to pass within. The walls and towers were thick
enough to withstand days of bombardment by artillery, and then there would be
the narrow passage at the gate. At the last, its defenders need hold nothing
else.
“We no
longer have one hundred days,” I said.
He shook
his head. “No. The fleet has only now entered this system, but everything has
changed.”
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