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  Sara Brown

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  They never did find the kid. Even with an army camped up and down the riverbank, there wasn’t any trace. Privately, well out of earshot of Mui and the kid’s parents, Evie told Sara she suspected a jungle creature had dragged the girl away weeks ago. It was likely why the demon had been identified in the first pce; the real child had died, and without the original to repeatedly torture, it had slowly lost its ability to mimic human behavior.

  Sara felt terrible about the whole thing. She was supposed to be the perfect demon-hunter, blessed by the gods to purge their kind from the face of the earth. Yet she hadn’t even been able to find one little kid.

  Discreetly, out of sight of the rest of the vilgers, Sara had slipped Feng’s parents a handful of gold coins. They were Tulian-minted, and not technically legal tender in the Empire, but the weight of gold itself was more than enough to pay for them to rebuild their blood-soaked home, maybe even to move into the safety of a rger city. She wished she could have done more, said something to put them at ease, but even with all her Blessings, she couldn’t think of a thing. No amount of goddess-granted charisma could conjure words that might ease the loss of a child.

  Most of the vilge turned out to watch them go, braving an approach to the massive army camped just off their shore. Sara had extracted a promise from Kuhn-Drah that the vilge would be left unmolested after she left, but there was no way to truly guarantee it. Even the general didn’t have full control of her troops; all it would take was one spark to light the fire.

  It was a peculiar experience to be waving goodbye to an army as she went to negotiate a deal with their mortal enemies. If she’d been anything less than a Champion of the Gods, Sara was certain they would have captured her on the spot, using her as leverage to receive the firearms they so desperately desired from Tulian. But not only had Sara assured them that she’d left specific orders not to give in to any such demands, restraining a Champion in such a way was tantamount to the highest of bsphemies. Even the common soldiers of the army, incensed as they were once they’d learned she was leaving for Tony, barely suggested that she be held back. There was a general assumption among them that such a crime would result in the holy fist of a god pummeling the entire ndscape to oblivion.

  Sara doubted that, personally. The gods were fairly hands-on in the world, but they acted by proxies in all but the most extreme cases. Direct involvement just to rescue a Champion was vanishingly unlikely. Furthermore, if Sara really had been stupid enough to get herself captured in such a way, she got the impression Amarat would be more furious at her idiocy than she would be at the army which caught her. Thankfully, there proved no need to test her theory.

  The boats which carried them towards Tony were, Sara thanked the gods, a far faster form of transport than the lumbering barges that carried the army they were leaving behind. Their guides, who used long poles and stiff oars to carve a swift path down the river, assured them that it would take a week or more for the army to arrive at Tony, while it would only take themselves less than a day.

  Sara could see why. The canoe-like boats that had been reserved for her travel weren’t piloted by your average civilian. They were specialists, men and women who had spent their lives training for the position of government couriers. The canoes were longer and wider than most, fitting ten or so passengers each, three to a row, but the Csses of their pilots let the crew steer them more like speedboats.

  Sara learned over the course of the journey that the couriers weren’t chosen just for their skill and strength in propelling the boats. The jungle’s upcoming rainy season was even more brutal than Tulian’s, flooding half the ndscape after every storm. The frequent deluges were so great that the rivers often overflowed their bounds and smashed holes through the forest soil, forming new forks and bends every year. The riverboat pilots couldn’t just excel at captaining their vessels. They had to be navigational experts, able to intuit the correct path with almost supernatural accuracy. Traveling by river without someone of their skill as a guide was almost as slow as walking overnd, so frequently you would have to backtrack.

  Of course, that was all according to the couriers themselves, who didn’t strike Sara as the most humble of sorts. She could tell they at least thought they were telling the truth, but it wasn’t hard to end up overconfident without ever realizing it. They were common people with an important, risky job. They had a lot to be proud of.

  Like the city they were delivering her to, apparently. Sara and Evie were sitting in the middle of the long canoe, marines spread ahead and behind them, but that didn’t stop the friendly riverboat crew from chatting with her. Moy, a green-scaled azarketi woman at the rear of the vessel, grew particurly excited as they neared their final destination.

  “I tell you, Chosen, it’s an honor to be showing you a proper city for the first time.” Moy always spoke in an excitable, easy rush, countless years spent on lonesome rivers having accustomed her to making the most of every conversation. “Tony may not be the capital, but it’s still really something. You picked a good pce to introduce yourself to the Empire, I say.”

  “What makes you think I haven’t seen a ‘real’ city before?” Sara asked.

  “Oh, I was chatting with the others back here and they said your city doesn’t have much of anything, really. No offense, of course, sounds like you had a rough time of it, but is it true you didn’t build much more than three stories up?”

  “For the most part, yes,” Sara said, resisting the urge to scowl at the memory of the Old King’s Keep, whose ominous spires still yawned high over the city. “Why? How high do y’all build here?”

  “Oh, you’ll see, Mrs. Chosen, you will. And I think you’ll see it from a lot further away than you’d be expectin’ to.”

  Evie, whose ears had been twitching to track the conversation, lifted her head from her book. “I doubt it will be quite so much impressive. My wife’s home was–”

  Sara thumped her boot against Evie’s thigh, cutting her off.

  “Don’t get cocky,” Sara loudly told her. “Who knows what we’re going to be seeing here? Can you imagine if we talked ourselves up and then got blown away? That’d be even more embarrassing.”

  “Of course,” Evie said, easily correcting herself as she caught Sara’s intention. “If they find a city of three floors uninteresting, I’m excited to find what they have to show us.”

  “Here’s hopin’,” the azarketi woman said, shifting her long pole to the other side of the canoe as she powered them onward. “Not much more I’d want to be a part of than getting to properly show off to Emotion’s Chosen.”

  In reality, of course, Sara knew that it was pretty damn unlikely the Empire’s cities would impress her and Evie. She’d shown Evie illusions of earthly skylines dozens of times over, conjured up from movies or her own memories. At this point the feline had lost her sense of wonder. Sara had expined the principles of rge-scale construction well enough that downtown New York, while still impressive, no longer struck her as an impossible miracle. Just an economic one.

  Sara didn’t want the riverboat crew to know that, though. The riverboats had been sent by Mui’s side of the warring Empire specifically to ferry her to this city, and she had no doubts that every one of their crew had been carefully selected for the task. Not so obviously that they were spies in and of themselves, of course; Sara hadn’t seen an ounce of deceit from them, save for the usual white lies anyone told. But they were sharp-minded and quickwitted well beyond the average, and loyal to a fault. The moment Sara was out of their sight, Imperial agents would doubtlessly swoop in to pump them for every drop of information on Sara they could get.

  Sara watched the leaf-choked shoreline glide past, the canoe carrying them smoothly over the gentle current. That the crews weren’t outright spies ironically said good things about the skills of the Imperial spymasters. They had to know Sara, Blessed as she was, would sniff out any agent in an instant. Accepting that, they’d picked the sort of people who were not only the most likely to strike up a convenient conversation, but the most likely to coincidentally remember its contents and make important inferences.

  She had no idea which faction was winning in this civil war, but she’d slowly pieced together the sketchy opinion that Mui’s side was, at least on a technical level, marginally more competent. Their troops had won the battle for control of the Tulian fields, they had wisely allowed Sara to travel with a humble, unoppressive escort to their city, and their information-gathering efforts were unobtrusive. All good marks in her book. Evidence of skilled leadership.

  None of that meant they were doing better on the battlefield, though. With the amount of baseless rumors and outright propaganda flying around the Empire’s citizenry, Sara could have easily picked out a dozen data points to support any narrative she so chose. She’d have to speak to someone in charge, an honest one, before she got a better picture of it all.

  “Not long now,” Moy announced, pulling one hand from her steering stick to point ahead. “Should start seeing the spires in a few minutes.”

  At that announcement, every head across the three canoes perked up, staring at the horizon. The river continued to twist and turn, and so Sara was expecting one final bend to finally reveal some grand, sprawling city.

  Instead, Evie was the first to spot it.

  “Look there,” she said, pointing. “Above the treeline.”

  “Ah, you caught it!” Moy called happily. “Most vilge folk comin’ to the city for the first time don’t. Good eye.”

  Following Evie’s finger, Sara eventually did spot something. Poking out above the treeline by the thinnest of hairs was a bit of gilded stone, tinged a hazy blue by the distance. The canoes were traveling at a decent clip, swerving left and right to avoid obstacles, but the pilr seemed stationary.

  “How tall is that?” Sara asked, fumbling blindly in her bag for her spygss. She didn’t want to take her eye off the pilr, lest she lose track of the tiny dot.

  “Oh, I can’t say for sure,” Moy said, drawing out the moment with a gleeful, downright smug smile. “That’s the Visya’s tower, tallest in the city. Think it’s got forty levels or so?”

  “Meaning forty stories?” Sara asked. She put her spygss to her eye and found the glittering stone, confirming what she’d already suspected: it was gold-pted. “As in, forty separate rooms stacked up on top of one another?”

  “Well, there’s plenty more than one room on a level.” Moy grinned wide, clearly having reached her favorite part of the trip. “Give us a few minutes more, you’ll start seeing the others. Most buildings aren’t as tall. I think thirty levels or so? Sound about right?”

  “Sounds right to me,” the man at the front of the canoe answered. “‘Course, it’s nothing like the capital.”

  “Nothing like it, of course.”

  “Hope I’ll get to see that someday soon then,” Sara said, handing her spygss to Evie. The feline took her own appraisal of the building, a very brief one, then put it away. They’d be seeing the entire thing soon enough.

  True to their guide’s word, more buildings began to pop out over the canopy. First one or two, then three or four, until it abruptly seemed the entire roof of the forest was supporting a mountain range of stone obelisks. The tallest of the buildings were in the center, around the Visya’s tower (a title Sara’s mind roughly transted to ‘governor,’ with a light taste of ‘duke’ or ‘mayor’), but they spread outward in neat, geometric divisions. It was as if someone had tried to build the great pyramid of Giza as isoted stacks of stone, rather than one continuous whole.

  It was only when they reached around the final bend in the river that Sara got her first true sense of scale.

  The city of Tony was massive. It dwarfed Tulian as a matter of course, but not only that, it dwarfed the Sporaton capital by a ughable margin as well. The entire city rose out of a sprawling ke, dozens of arching stone bridges reaching hundreds of feet out from the shoreline to slot into the fifty foot wall which ran around the entire perimeter. She couldn’t appreciate the entire city in a single gnce, because it extended well beyond her immediate field of vision to the left and right. Even the smallest of buildings circling the exterior stretched one or two stories above the wall, marking them as at least sixty or seventy feet in height.

  And every single one was covered in deeply eborate stonework. Past a certain height, each building narrowed in their skyward stretch, but not in awkward, blocky chunks at each floor. Instead they were stutter-stepping their way towards the clouds in two-foot increments, creating the illusion, if she blurred her eyes, of an almost smoothly tapered construction.

  While only the tallest and centermost buildings had gold trim and shining decorations, every other structure’s stone was nonetheless deeply ornamented, featuring twisting, looping patterns cut in artistic waves. Some seemed purely decorative, depictions of flowing waves or stretching trees, while others were so geometrically precise that she had to assume they possessed some inherent meaning, almost like a nguage she couldn’t read. She could even recognize temples to the gods, marked by holy imagery that she’d grown accustomed to throughout the world, but far more of the temples than she would have expected, and none seemed to follow the familiar division amongst the nine known members of divinity. Grandiose mages in flowing robes were depicted wearing deeply emotional expressions, padins of shining order were standing side-by-side with skeletal warriors, and there were many other strange combinations besides. She suspected that was why no one referred to Sara as the ‘Chosen of Amarat’ here. They seemed to pce much less importance on individual gods than they did on divinity as a whole.

  The ke around the city, massive though it may have been, was absolutely clogged with boat traffic of all kinds. Barges, canoes, rowboats, even a few tiny sail-rigged vessels. The waterways were almost as congested as the many bridges which pierced the walls, which were so overburdened with carts that Sara felt a spark of concern that they might colpse.

  Yet throughout all the chaos, things were remarkably organized. Each bridge carried traffic in only one direction: either out of the city, or in, with the output flowing much faster. Even then, the input was doing better than she expected. There wasn’t just one group of guards checking the admissions at each gate, but rather teams of them roving up and down the bridges, performing inspections of goods all throughout the line in an attempt to keep things moving. Even the unnaturally circur keshore had been turned into one giant ring road, paved over with cobblestones, and there were two distinct nes of traffic there as well, with intersections where each bridge met nd. Sara could see hundreds of uniformed men and women standing amongst the crowds, screaming at the top of their lungs at anyone who dared step out of line.

  “How many people live here?” Sara asked Moy. She didn’t have to try particurly hard to sound impressed. The Tulian soldiers, meanwhile, were outright gawking, mouths agape, earning their fair share of ughter from their Imperial escorts.

  “Oh, that I can’t tell you, Mrs. Chosen,” the azarketi apologized. “A good few hundred thousand though, I’d wager. Like I said, nothing like the capital. Tony’s doing well for itself, of course, but there’s grander sights to be seen.”

  “Damn busy, though,” the man at the front grumbled. He was in charge of steering the canoe, which had suddenly turned into a very unenviable job as he was forced to navigate the cavalcade of rival vessels.

  “This is not normal, then?” Evie asked. “There are more often less people traveling to and from?”

  “Gets this busy from time to time, sure,” the man at the front said, “but usually only when something big’s happening. Festival or some such, or when there’s some sort of event, like when the Visya’s kid was born.”

  “Could be because they heard about the army coming,” Sara suggested.

  “I don’t think so, dear,” Evie said, nodding to one of the intake bridges, which was stuffed with idling crowds and carts. “If they wished to flee the city, they’re doing a poor job.”

  “Might be from nearby vilges, hoping to find shelter in the walls.”

  “Hope they’re smarter than that,” Moy chipped in. “If the city comes under siege, the people that didn’t live there before get kicked right out. Not enough food to feed whole streets packed with people, after all. Hard enough to get enough food in as it is.”

  “Actually, that’s a point,” Sara said, brightening up. “How in the hell are all these people getting fed? We passed a few farming vilges on the way, but not near enough to keep even Tulian full. Where’s the food coming from?”

  For the first time of their little river adventure, Moy didn’t respond immediately. Sara gnced back at the azarketi, finding a nervous expression on her face.

  “...can’t say I know,” the woman lied, poorly enough that Sara wouldn’t have needed a single Blessing to catch her out on it. Her verdant green scales had gone pale enough to be mistaken for Sara’s own skin. “I’m a courier, ma’am. Haven’t done a lick of farming in my life.”

  Well that’s a damn weird thing to lie about, Sara thought. Did the people who told her to come pick me up tell her not to talk about food supply? Are they going to try and leverage that to their advantage somehow?

  Whatever the case was, Sara wasn’t interested in pressing some random woman into betraying her orders.

  “Alright, no problem. I’m sure I’ll find someone else I can ask. How much longer ‘till we’re in the city proper?”

  “If it weren’t so stuffed up around here, I’d say five minutes,” the man at the front of the boat grumbled. “I’ll try and get you in quick as can be, Chosen, but can’t make promises. Not unless you want to risk going for a swim.”

  Sara looked down at the opaque, murky water. It was so filled with churned-up mud that she couldn’t see an inch beyond the surface. More than once on the journey had she seen crocodiles, startled by their approach, slip soundlessly into the river.

  “Yeah, I’ll pass, thanks. Take your time.”

  “Figured you’d say that, ma’am.”

  While Sara’s guides waited for an opening in the press, Evie turned to her, whispering in Continental.

  “This city is remarkable, Master. Have you noticed the wealth of all those we pass on the water and roads? Fine clothes, jewelry, and a sense of healthy well-being. I have not even spotted a single individual for whom the others part to clear their path. I understand you will never respect an Emperor, but is this egalitarianism not a good sign for a prospective ally?”

  Sara snorted derisively. “As if. They spped fuckin’ gold on top of their towers, Evie. You don’t get that kind of money without screwing people over. I’m sure we’ll find where they hide their poors soon enough.”

  “If you wish to search for inequality, it may be some time yet. Without the pressure of an army on the march, I expect our negotiations with the Adjutant’s representative are likely to take considerable time.”

  Sara looked at Evie.

  Evie looked at Sara.

  And she sighed.

  “We’re not going to the meeting at its appointed time, are we?”

  Sara grinned.