Chapter 110 A City Under Bone.

The air split open in front of us, and from the tear strode Arianrhod. The woman looked the same as she had every other time I had seen her. That ornate silver armor gleamed, even in this half-light. She took one small look around the clearing, then folded her arms. "It is time," she said. "I trust that you are all ready."

"We are," Ash said, stepping in on my left. She had just finished burying the last of what had been our fire. Solara still sat atop her head, all four wings flared. Alisa stood on my right. The Hero hesitated. "Thank you. For allowing us to come here first, I mean."

The Exarch's eyes drifted to Sol before moving to the Hero. "You said you would do better if you saw something worth protecting first. I believed that was wise. Nothing more." She gestured around us with one gauntleted hand, and took in the whole of the forest with that single gesture. "Now you have seen what you will fight for. And have no doubt that this place needs the protecting. The Blight is ever spreading, and the spread hastens. This will be one of the most important Hunts in many years."

Ash and I shared a look at that. The last of the Blighted Lands, Meria and Cargar, had both fallen in the seventh century of these people's New Dawn calendar. Two centuries had passed without the Blight claiming anything more. Enough time for even the most vigilant of watchers to grow complacent. A few of the books -a small minority- had even claimed it might never spread again. And now here this woman stood, this Exarch, claiming that it would. And soon.

"L-Lady Exarch," Alisa said, swallowing. "The Blight has not spread in two hundred years. There are… there are those who say it never will again. Is what you say true?"

The woman fixed her gaze on Alisa, and the girl flinched from it. "There are those who say many things," she said eventually. "The signs are there, for men with the eyes to read them. Fewer and fewer of those who go out return, and the ones who do slay little and less of any consequence."

"There is still much you are not telling us," I said. It was no surprise. Every priest I had ever known believed that concealment served some greater good. I had meant to press this woman for more answers, and now seemed as good a time as any. "You are sending us to complete a task. If what you withhold from us keeps us from fulfilling it…."

Ash shifted next to me. Solara let out what was undoubtedly an angry chirp from atop the Hero's head.

"And do you share this opinion, Ash Vale?" Arianrhod asked, turning to her. She did not ask Alisa. She could not forbid us from taking the girl along. Perhaps this was her way of saying she did not approve.

"I do," Ash said. "I understand the value of secrecy, even from one's allies. But I've found that people who keep secrets often end up keeping far more of them than they ever needed to." She said the last part softly, in a voice that hardly carried at all.

"You both have spine," Arianrhod said at last. "It has been a very long time since anyone has spoken so plainly before me." I said nothing. Neither did Ash. "I hold a Script, and the two of you carry Sigils. The gap between the heavens and the earth is smaller than the one that stands between us. Nonetheless, I do not disapprove. Provided you bring results."

That did surprise me. I had been certain the woman was about to unfurl the weight of her Essence across the clearing, to put us on our knees for the insolence.

"Tell me," she said. "What do you know of the Sacred Charge?"

The name was familiar to me. I had heard it spoken aloud once by a grey half-demon with two heads. He had named the Great Hunt a sacred charge, and had done so at considerable volume. Then he had strode out to make a name for himself.

I had not thought about Malachor in some time. I wondered, idly, whether he had already reached the city we now made for. Everything else I knew came from the books we had read in the Academy. All of the men and women who set out on the Great Hunt first took on a Sacred Charge. What this charge actually was, none of the books explained in any detail. I had surmised it was some manner of ceremony to anoint the warriors before they set out. No doubt there would be a sermon, and much pageantry besides. The priests always loved their rites.

"We only know that it's the last event before the Great Hunt formally begins," Ash said. "It happens in Azareth, on the final night before the Hunt sets out. Everyone who means to walk the Hunt takes part in it. And once it's over, no one who wasn't there can join."

That was roughly everything the books had said. It was one of the things that had first made me suspect these Hunts were meant to resemble, at least in some part, the Hero's Journeys of old. Every Hero I had ever slain had begun their Journey from just such a procession. From just such a charge.

"That is correct," Arianrhod said. "But it is only a small part of what the Sacred Charge is." She glanced at the two of us, and then she glanced even at Alisa. "On the night of the Sacred Charge, much will be explained. Many of the questions you carry will be answered there. We do not send the people who walk the Great Hunt to their deaths." She said this last part with some strain, and her straight back softened, just by a hair.

We had demanded answers of this woman, and in turn, all she had given us was yet another question. It was an impressive skill, and one even I had never mastered during my reign.

"Now, we make for Azareth," Arianrhod said. "If there is anything you wish to bring, name it now. You will not have another chance."

I looked at Ash. She shook her head. We both looked at Alisa, who slowly shook hers. Then, finally, all three of us looked to Solara atop Ash's head. The baby phoenix let out a single long chirp. I believed that was her way of saying she was ready.

"Very well," Arianrhod said. In one moment she stood with her arms at her sides. In the next, that massive blade was in her hand, tearing a hole through the world beside her. A great yellow slit, just large enough for me to walk through upright. "Go," she said.

We did.

The air changed in an instant. The forest around Hamel had been faintly warm and damp. Not enough to be uncomfortable, but enough that one could never quite forget it. Now it was cold. Far colder than it had been only moments ago. I shivered. My body betrayed me before I could stop it.

Ash and Alisa stepped in beside me. We stood in another forest, and this one was covered in white. It lay across the ground in every direction I could see. It clung to the trees in varying measure. I took a step, and the step sank. This was snow.

I had seen it before. Always from a great distance. I had read of it as well, in one report or another. It had never been this close. Even when I had gone to the Dwarven cities beneath their great mountains, I had always gone directly below the mountain itself. I leaned down and touched it.

It was softer than I had expected, and oddly grainy. Like pressing a hand into a thousand tiny crystals of ice.

Solara let out a loud chirp, and then she was on the ground beside me. The tiny phoenix did not sink into the snow as I had. She stood atop it, turning slowly in place.

"How do you find this place, Solara?" I asked her. Those golden eyes met mine, and she let out a chirp of tremendous volume. I checked the bond and found… displeasure. It seemed the phoenix did not appreciate this snow. "I apologize. I did not think it would be quite this cold."

There were footsteps behind me. They crunched. "Lys, here." I turned, and there was Ash, holding something brown and heavy out toward me. Behind her, Alisa stood with a large satchel hanging open in her arms -the one Martha had pressed upon us. "Guess these will actually come in handy after all."

Some part of me wanted to tell her the cold was insignificant. Then I took in a breath, and the breath came out white. I took the garment from her. It was more coat than dress, with small brown buttons running it from top to bottom. I put it on, fastening each of those buttons in turn. It was warm, and it kept out the wind far better than the uniform beneath it.

We had never told Martha where we were going, and so the only reason she had given us this clothing at all was thoroughness. Once, I had found the woman's strange concern only displeasing. Now, some small part of me wished she were here, so that I might thank her.

The Hero pulled on her own coat, a shade darker than mine. Alisa wore a third, lighter than either of ours.

Then Solara let out a loud chirp, and flew. She did not fly for my crown, as she always had. She dove instead for the front of my coat, at the small gap above the highest button I had fastened. She should not have fit. The phoenix squished herself in a way no creature with bones inside it should have been able, wedged herself down into the space between coat and collar, and turned about, until only her top-half poked free beneath my chin.

I stared down at her. Ash laughed. Alisa was watching Solara with something close to fascination. Through the bond came only a deep and shameless satisfaction.

"You are surprisingly collapsible, Solara," I said. She answered with a small chirp, and dug in further. I had seen Sara squeeze the baby phoenix in her hands, and she had been very collapsible then too. Perhaps I would do it with my own hands someday. Her warmth, added to the coat, made this cold far more bearable.

More footsteps crunched behind us as Arianrhod stepped through the portal herself. It closed at her back a moment later. "Come," she said. "I have not taken you into the city itself. I have taken you as close as is wise." Then she was walking, and the snow did not slow her at all.

We looked at one another and followed. It was a short walk. The trees thinned as we went, and then the ground itself simply ended.

We came out upon the edge of a great slope down and down into a hollow so vast that its far rim was a blur with distance. Arianrhod stood at the very lip of it. "That is Azareth," she said. "You must make it there before nightfall. There is a great set of stairs two miles to the east. It is called the Ten Thousand Steps. That is the easiest route down. There are others, but I would not suggest them."

I stepped up beside her, and I looked.

The city was massive. Far bigger than Koralis. Koralis had been a crown with three rings set upon a hill. This Azareth was a great spiralling city, its streets winding inward and downward toward a center I could not see from here. Smoke rose from ten thousand small points into the morning air. And yet it was not the city my gaze lingered on. It was what the city was built inside.

Arcs of grey-white bone rose out of the earth on either side of the hollow. Each of them was as massive as a mountain. They curved up and inward, reaching toward one another high above the tallest of the city's spires, so that the whole of Azareth sat beneath them the way a heart sits behind ribs. Because that was what they were. Ribs.

The city had been built inside the ribcage of a beast. And at the hollow's far end, half-drowned in snow, rose the long shape of a skull. The ribcage of a dragon. The ribcage of the dragon these people called Azael, for which this city was named.

I had seen this sight before. There had been a painting of this very city in the Academy's Atelier. I had looked upon that painting and thought the skeleton familiar. I stood now, watching it from above, and found myself somewhere else entirely. On a battlefield long past, where I had fought the dragon Ozriel, one of the Pantheon's strongest servants. A dragon vast enough to blot out the sky. I had slain him from atop Echidna.

He had crashed to the earth in a great ball of fire, and the impact of that alone had been enough to change the lay of the land. And now I stood watching a city built upon that dragon's remains. How strange, that I should come back here now, and find both the landscape and myself so different from when I had last come. Even the crater looked far larger than I remembered it being.

"Lys?" Ash asked from beside me.

I looked at her. Did she suspect what I suspected? Ozriel had fallen centuries before Ash was ever born. I did not even know if she had seen the corpse for herself. It was a corpse that had never rotted. Nothing touched by Echidna ever should have been able to. Now there was nothing left of Ozriel but bone.

I had slain this beast centuries before Ash or this Divine had ever even been born.

"It's nothing, Ash," I said. Ash frowned at me. "Later," I said.

"Later," Ash agreed.

Solara let out a small chirp from within my coat, as though she too were agreeing. Alisa was giving the three of us an odd look. I ignored it.

"Has the sight of this city frightened you?" Arianrhod asked.

"No," Ash said. "It's just… larger than we expected." She said it easily enough.

Arianrhod nodded. "Many have said the same, when they first lay eyes upon it." She turned, and regarded the city below. "You must reach it before nightfall. You must equip yourselves. And you must find the fourth of your party. The Sacred Charge is in seven days. You will next see me then."

"And just why," I said, "do you not simply take us there yourself? You have power enough for it. It should be a simple thing." The woman had said something strange, before our walk. That she had taken us as close as was wise.

"It is simple," Arianrhod agreed. "But it would make matters more complicated for you, once I left."

"And… and why is that?" Alisa asked.

"Because I claimed them both," Arianrhod said. "If your party is seen entering the city at my side, that fact will become apparent to everyone within its walls. Their fear will hold them only for as long as I remain. And I will not remain long. Besides, it is an honor to walk the Ten Thousand Steps."

Ash and I looked at each other. I believed I understood something of this now. This claiming of hers was something akin to choosing us as her champions in this Great Hunt, the way the Gods had chosen their Hero. And this was a city where men and women came freely, from every corner of the Covenant, for the chance to prove themselves worthy of walking it. They would look upon the three of us and they would seethe.

It was not so unlike my own rule either. The demons I had shown favor had always been made to prove themselves twice over before their peers, for no crime greater than the favor itself. I understood it well enough. That the woman had not seen fit to mention any of it before now was what annoyed me.

"And is there anything else you are hiding?" I snapped.

Arianrhod looked at me, and her face was perfectly composed. "Of course," she said. "But that will come when you take the Charge." She sounded sincere, which only vexed me further.

Then her blade cut the air at her left, and a small tear hung in the world. "Now. For me to return what I took from you." She reached inside, and drew out a familiar dark lump of metal, one that went nearly transparent at one angle and opaque at the next. "Ash," she said.

Ash stepped forward and took the Wraithsteel. Arianrhod reached into the tear a second time, and out came the strange glass bottle, its silver liquid still turning lazily in directions no tilt could explain. "Take this, Lysanthia."

I stepped forward and took the bottle of Protean Steel.

"Step forward, Wulfram," Arianrhod said.

Alisa blinked. Then she stepped forward, slowly. Arianrhod drew out a large pouch and set it in the girl's hands. It clinked.

"This is the local currency," Arianrhod said. "There is enough within for your lodgings, and for whatever equipment you see fit to purchase. It is not an inexhaustible sum. Use it wisely."

I suspected the woman could have handed us an inexhaustible sum, had she only wished to.

"Now," Arianrhod said. "May the Divine's favor be upon you."

None of us said anything to that. Arianrhod carved a greater tear beside the first, stepped through it, and was gone. The yellow closed behind her, and everything was quiet, save for the wind.

We stared at the place where she had been.

"She is…" Alisa murmured. "I've read all the stories. She's still different than I thought she'd be."

"She's strange," Ash sighed. "I can't figure her out."

I could not either. A woman who had kept so many secrets from us, and kept more of them still, and had yet given us our days in the Academy, and a night in Hamel besides.

"There is little point in trying to understand her," I muttered. "Come. Let us make for this 'great city.'"

Solara let out a chirp of tremendous volume from within my coat. She was agreeing with me.