A tea cup falling from a table was the first sign of the catastrophe. As if pushed playfully by the paw of an invisible cat, the clay cup jostled and shuffled its way to the edge of the Kashmed's table and curiously fell to the stone floor, splashing and crashing into pieces. Kashmed watched the mysterious action mystified. And then he felt the ground rumble under his feet and heard the bricks of his house grind their sandy way against each other as they shifted minutely.
Down the street, the students of the Reshmaned Madrasa fell silent from their recitations as the earth trembled. They were hastily herded outside the building into the street, joining the crowd of other people who were evacuating their buildings.
From the top of Jeema's pile of oranges in her bazaar stall, a single fruit was dislodged, and then the carefully stacked pyramid tumbled chaotically to the ground like a broken strand of pearls.
Stones fell from the parapat of the Laribihani Shrine several streets away and thudded to the ground before the votive statue of the stern devi.
Throughout the heart of Qaragarh, buildings rattled and awnings swayed as a new tremor shook the city. The wails of fear drowned out the rumble of the ground. Dust rose into the air, shaken loose by the tremor. Strangers clasped strangers close and uttered prayers for their safety.
The ground stilled and the cracking stones silenced. The dust began to settle as people glanced around to check on one another. And in Darwarpur Shukri Fort, Empress Firuzeh Tayyib lay prone on the ground, seized by an unearthly torrent of anguish.
She could hear her husbands Ghiyas and Jagat shouting at her and her children crying out. From the slap of sandals on marble, people seemed to be running frantically around her. Hands lifted her, and as she was laid on a divan, the pain began to fade along with the tremor. They tried to hold her down as she pushed herself up. She had to see what had happened to her city, so she shook off the hands and rushed to the balcony of her mahal and looked below. High in her residence atop the fort, she braced herself against the stone banister and surveyed the scene below.
As before, dust was settling and blowing away and terrified people filled the streets. Birds scattered across the quiet blue sky, driven high into its reaches to escape the danger below.
"Assemble my council," she barked over her shoulder. "We need to organize a….aaAAAGGH!"
The pain shot through her fiercer than before. She clenched the banister with all her might, unaware that her fingers imprinted the stone as if it were made of clay, and forced herself to stay upright to watch with her own eyes.
The center of Qaragarh erupted. An area larger than the fort burst upward, showering buildings, people, and dirt into the air. The screams of a thousand people cast about like pebbles pierced even the deep crack and grind of the stone under the city. Plumes of dirt and rock shot high into the air and showered down upon the city, falling like a deadly rain. Whole buildings, whole neighborhoods shattered and crumbled and slid off the mound that had exploded upward in the center of Qaragarh.
Firuzeh howled from the pain and from her soul, gasping huge lungfuls of air to shout again and again in a continuous shriek of agony and despair as she watched the destruction. Bodies fell in a ring around the protrusion, the bodies of her people. And still something rose from the earth, thrusting up and aside an area about a quarter of her city. Down streets littered with broken buildings and broken bodies, her people fled in panic and terror away from the devastation.
When the top of the mound reached just below the highest dome on the highest point in the city, it ground to halt. The gripping pain in her core waned, but Firuzeh felt no relief.
"La Catrina!" Eladio exclaimed from the roof of the delegates' haveli atop the fort. He took off his woven straw hat in horror and awe as he surveyed the mound that had thrust upward through the center of the city.
Around him the other delegates stood open-mouthed at the sight of the carnage. They had seen awful things in each of their own lands before, but never on this scale. Perhaps a quarter of Qaragarh had been killed by the eruption.
Deland Longully gripped his staff with one hand and ran the other through his greying hair. "So much death. It's happening sooner that we had expected."
Ji-Won peered through the wafting dirt as it cleared, her eyes on a glint she saw piercing the debris cloud. Something was glittering on the mound; there was bright light bouncing off it. She pointed a scaly finger at the mound. "Look!"
A breeze was clearing the air and revealing the mound. It glistened with a white light as the sun bounced off the surface of the thousands of clear cubic pillars that comprised the protuberance, though dirt and the remains of buildings and trees littered the mound. A vast structure of haphazardly stacked clear columns rose high over the city, their edges razor sharp. Hints of orange tinted the translucent cubes. They might have been blocks of ice, or glass, or some other substance. Varied in size, some were as large as buildings, others as small as fists. The enormous mass scattered and reflected light in all directions, gleaming yet cold, brilliant but deadly.
"It's not…" Bulan gasped.
"Surely not," Lu answered her unfinished question, but without certainty. "It's not possible." She turned to Deland. "Is it?"
Deland knew they didn't have time to waste discussing it. "Eladio," he ordered, "you know what to do. Get Lu and Bulan to safety. Tordain's people will be waiting for you." He pulled the cowl of his cloak over his head, enveloping his face in shadow.
"Safety?" the lead delegate asked. "What are you…"
"Ji-Won," Deland spoke over Lu, "the empress. You know the passages, yes?"
The dragonborn Shieldbearer loosened the sword in its scabbard. "I will do my duty," she assured him before dashing down the stairs and away.
Lu grabbed him by the shoulder to spin him her way. "Deland, by the Ancestors, what is going on here? What are you all doing?"
He felt bad that he had kept Qiang Lu out of the loop, and Bulan as well, but it was best that her negotiations with Firuzeh not be colored by any rumors. That was his responsibility, though he had taken the risk of enlisting Eladio and Ji-Won. And a good thing he had, or they would not have been able to develop their network of informers over the last few months and would have been caught completely by surprise. "Trust me, Lu," he assured her, his voice resonating with a calm that washed over her.
"Trust you," she echoed. "I trust you, Deland." Then she shook her head to clear it. "Do not manipulate me with your uncanny tones, Deland Longully! You will tell me what this is about, now."
He should have known he couldn't enchant Qiang Lu. What kind of delegate would she be if she were so susceptible?
Eladio came to his rescue, reaching up to take her by the arm. "I'll tell you, Lu," he assured her. "But you really must come with me. Vamos, Bulan," he reached out to the mystified Dayawlongonan. "I'll explain everything."
Lu pulled back from the dwarf, unfinished with Deland. "You knew this would happen, didn't you?"
He looked out over the walls to the carnage in the city below. "Not this. Something. But not this." They had heard rumors, they had seen signs. Their network of information gatherers had pointed them in certain directions, but they hadn't developed a clear picture of what to expect. This was beyond their imagining. "Go with Eladio, I'll join you soon."
Deland hurried away then, he couldn't wait any longer. He needed to get across the city quickly. Lu's voice followed him until he raced out of the building toward the east darwaza opening to stairs leading down into the city. Eladio would explain everything to her, but she would still be angry with him for deceiving her. It couldn't be helped. Too much was at stake–too much was always at stake for Whisperers.
He hoped Ji-Won would make it in time.
The dead could wait, but not for long. Under the heat of the Qaragarh sun, so much meat would begin to rot and send forth a stench that would draw every fly and rat and ghûl for miles around. Already the crows among the birds that had sought safety in the skies when the earth had burst upward had flocked down to feast on the exposed entrails of her people, tearing great chunks from the corpses or swooping down to grab a bit of flesh before settling on a high wall for their grim feast. The dead deserved better; they deserved an honorable interment or conflagration. But they would have to wait until the living could be clawed out of the rubble to give them such honor.
Firuzeh directed her efforts on the living. She'd be unable to focus on anything else until she knew her family was safe. While staff rushed around the mahal packing trunks and bags for the journey, Sanjar cradled the tiny Nekuzam in his strong arms as Firuzeh placed a kiss on his tiny brow. She kissed each of her five other children as well, entrusting Pashuben, his regal gravity now serving him well, to look after the others. The young man squared his shoulders and nodded resolutely as he corralled the younger.
Ghiyas and Jagat herded the family and attendants towards the stone stairs, followed by Sanjar, but Ahmad stayed behind. Holy light glimmered from the dozens of silver ta'wiz woven into his uncut black beard.
"I will stay and help," Ahmad informed her with determination.
"My sweet," Firuzeh said. She raised a hand to place on his cheek, but he did not like to be touched. He gave a little smile at the gesture, though. They both suspected that none of the children were his, though they had never spoken of it directly. Despite his severe austerity, she loved him in her own way as much as the others. "Our children need their father."
In a move so rare it startled her, Ahmad took her hand in his and raised it to his lips. He then unravelled a small silver amulet from the hair by his ear and wound it into the fall of hers just over her shoulder. "Blessings of Iwa," he whispered with his gaze averted shyly before racing after the others.
His gesture moved Firuzeh, and she reached a hand up to touch the amulet. Rarely did the Shuddh part with one of the holy ta'wiz they had acquired and passed down for generations. That action expressed his love for her more than mere words ever could.
From the heights of the mahal's northern balcony, Firuzeh looked out to the causeway leading up the plateau face. Already, masses of frantic people were fleeing northward with hastily gathered baskets and sacks strapped to encumbered beasts or to their own backs. Her own family would shortly be joining those refugees, trudging up the long, steep Wyvern Road to reach the Northern Plateau. It would have been faster for them to go to Menebad by the Hall of Doors, but they would have had to cross the devastated and death-littered city to reach the Vermillion Serpent, if that building even still stood. Better to simply take the long causeway up and away.
She hastened to the southern balcony to assess the city before leaving the mahal. Briefly, her eyes dropped to the banister, imprinted earlier by her hands as if it were wet clay and not carved stone. She didn't have time to dwell on what that boded for her ancestry and her possible connection to the ground quakes or eruption. The unease of it already filled her belly, where the acid of it churned relentlessly.
Like the ripples of a pool into which a stone had been dropped, the people were moving outward from the crystalline monstrosity and the damage it had caused. Many streamed south towards the bridge over the Jangalee Ghodon, but where they might go from there was unclear. The harsh Maaph Desert was all that awaited southward, and there would be no comfort there. Others fled east and west into the empty lands, more focused on getting out of the city than where they were going. And yet the city still clamored with people who remained in its grim environs, seeking out their loved ones, assessing the damage, giving aid to the injured. They needed her to take charge, not gape at them from high above. Flanked by Maham and Shimaz, she raced down the stairs to seek her council in the diwan.
Many of the people she passed were too bewildered to do anything but gaze at the scene below the walls, and Firuzeh prodded them to action with sharp words as she passed. There was no time to gawk at the destruction. Still weakened and pained by the eruption, she took the steps two at a time, her sandals slapping the worn stones but the sound lost in the tumult. Manam cleared the path ahead, shouting and pushing seemingly stunned people aside, with Shimaz following Firuzeh and holding off the people who rushed at the empress with a thousand questions. A roar of sound like the howling wind of a deadly storm had risen all around her, and at first she thought the earth was moaning again in another eruption. Racing out of the lower level of the mahal and onto the fort platform, she realized it was the wails of thousands of voices below her, keening their grief and pain. She covered her ears with her hands for a few steps, but then forced herself to hear their wailing.
The diwan was still decorated from Nekuzam's naming ceremony, though the garland and flowers had started to shrivel and wilt. Guards stood around the perimeter, a couple moving aside as she approached. Fleetingly, she noticed the emblem of the Crescent Tigers on the guards–Sameer's elite company. They would be useful for the myriad dispatches the council would need to send throughout the region.
Gathered under the roof of the diwan were all the administrators and governors who had come for the Radiant Citadel conclave and the aqiqah. Bhima was there, and Sameer, along with governors representing most of the empire's other subahs and territories. Noting Amir Tordain's absence, she sent up a prayer that Kestrel Mahal hadn't collapsed. She would direct a few of Sameer's Tigers to check on the Amir. Though certainly not fortunate, it was advantageous that her governors had been here already. Able leaders and administrators all, they could help marshall the city's resources and organize recovery. She started barking orders even before she came to a halt amidst them.
"We'll need to set up shelters around the perimeter of the city like a ring. Send food and water and healers to the larger mosques and temples at the outer edges. Get the living…"
"Empress," Sameer interjected gently.
"...as far away from that thing…"
"Empress Firuzeh," he tried again to interrupt her, raising his hand to quell her.
"...as we can. We need to get everyone inside a building before night comes and the monstrosities of undead come looking…"
"Firuzeh!" a woman barked at her.
Startled at the impertinence, she turned to locate the speaker and discovered it was Alimah Karamsi. "Good, you're here. We need all the Roshani imams out in the city. Night will come soon, and the people need whatever light you can bring them."
"They are already mobilized, Empress," the head of the Ulema assured her. "Qaragarh is sadly well-practiced in recovering from destruction. We have made arrangements to see to the people."
While you were wasting time seeing to your family, someone said.
Angrily, Firuzeh spun to find the person who had dared insult her, even as she was cut by the words. No one flinched from her, and by their reactions, no one seemed to have heard what she did. Even Mahan and Shimaz had not reacted.
That was odd, the voice said. I didn't say that aloud, did I?
They all watched her, confused by her reaction. She must have been projecting, her own guilt voicing itself. She shook it off.
"Let's go, then," she waved them away, "send me a report every hour, I'll be…"
"Empress," Karamsi interrupted her again, almost ruefully, this time catching Firuzeh's eyes with her own. "There is another matter."
"It can wait, we'll…"
Enough, we can't wait any longer or more will…
Firuzeh turned in a swift circle, piercing each of her subahdars with her flaming eyes. "Who is interrupting me!" she rebuked them.
Again, the assembled officials shifted uneasily and peered about but no one seemed to know what she was talking about. Almost imperceptibly, Subahdar Ghalnan al-Rusheek of Bijabad placed his hand on the hilt of the sword at his waist. They were all armed, she realized at once, a detail she had failed to notice in her haste. And she was not.
Ghalnan's motion wasn't lost on Mahan and Shimaz either. With seeming negligence, they both eased their blades out and let them hang from their hands toward the ground. Unthreatening, but a warning, nevertheless. But even two urdubegis could not save her from so many veteran warriors. Now she understood why it was Sameer's Crescent Tigers that guarded the pavilion.
She knows, the voice said with both panic and anticipation.
"Another matter?" Firuzeh answered Karamsi, but she turned to speak the words to Sameer, seeking the source of the voice in her head.
His eyes were blank, revealing nothing. The triumph she had expected to shine there was absent. "It is not I," he said, tinged with something like pity.
"It's what's best for the empire, cousin," came the voice of Bhima, as he pushed his way past the others from the back of the circle. "You are a danger to us all."
The talwars of Mahan and Shimaz arced up, ready as they braced close to Firuzeh. The screech of a dozen blades pulled from scabbards pierced the wails from the city below. Only Karamsi remained unarmed. Firuzeh's eyes flicked to the Wyvern Road winding up the cliff face and wondered how far her family had gotten in the short time since their departure. Had they escaped danger?
"Me?" she spat at Bhima. "What danger am I? You're the one committing a coup against your empress!"
His eyes grew hooded and angry. "It's not a coup! Well, it is a coup, technically," he conceded, "but we're trying to save the empire."
"We?" She gazed around slowly to each of her subahdars, some that had served her father before her for years, some–like Subahdar Salef of Churapoor–only recently appointed, and by her. A few refused to meet her gaze, lowering their heads in shame at their actions. But most showed resolve in the set of their features and the readiness of their blades. None of them seemed eager, curiously. Except her cousin.
"How will killing me save the empire?" she demanded of Bhima. "Are you sacrificing me? Am I the price? To whoever is doing that?" She pointed angrily at the crystal mound across the city.
"You are doing that!" he answered with a roar of astonished accusation. "You are the danger to the empire!"
The absurdity of the claim pushed her back a step against Shimaz. She quickly righted herself. "Me?! I didn't do that, I can't do that!" The very idea that she could raise a large hill from the flat earth and destroy a quarter of a city appalled her. And yet her hands had imprinted into the stone banister like it was clay.
Bhima pressed on. "During each event, you were in some kind of wild state of connection with the earth, were you not?"
"I was being affected by it, yes," she answered, less sure of herself. "Like I was being torn apart from the inside."
"Like childbirth?" Karamsi prodded.
"No, like…yes, but…it wasn't my child, it was someone else's," she defended flatly. "Like I was feeling someone else's pain. Bhima, don't do this," she warned him.
"And your eyes," he went on. "Tayyib eyes," he said, pointing at her with his blade. "It's true, then, the legend of Gurkani's offspring, isn't it. We were so close, Firuzeh," he said petulantly, "and you never shared that with me."
"No, it's not true," she scoffed at him and the others, who were nodding their heads at Bhima's words. "That Gurkani's wife was the daughter of a Dao? We're wasting time up here sharing fairy tales about genies while the people of the city are dying." Her hands molded the banister like clay… "You should be ashamed of yourself, subahdar." She raised her chin righteously. "All of you. You will be remembered as traitors and murderers who turned their backs on the people of the empire for their own gain."
She was gratified to see a few heads hang low, a few blades dip in uncertain hands.
Karamsi stepped into the circle, drawing near. "It's not a fairy tale," she said sadly but firmly, a teacher explaining an uncomfortable truth. "The Ulema has not forgotten, though we do not speak of it, nor have we since the day your ancestor returned from the mountains with a bride with copper hair and sard eyes. Eyes like yours."
Karamsi tried to raise a hand to Firuzeh's face and place it close to her eyes, but her arm was blocked by Shimaz' blade. "We have to be sure," Karamsi said, pulling her hand back with an insulted glare at Shimaz. "Too many have already died. It's the only way, Firuzeh. Submit for your people and for the Ulema."
Could they be right? Even faced with betrayal, the thought nagged at her. No, it was insane, there were no Dao, no genies at all, they were just the fantasies of overzealous faithful. And surely if it were true, there would be stories of ancient Tayyibi showing some signs of earthly power. But the eyes, and the banister.
No.
"Empress," Sameer appealed to her, "Firuzeh, you've become a danger to the very people you swore to protect. You can't stay here, or you risk doing even more damage."
Uncertainty warred with defiance in Firuzeh. Was it possible she was responsible for this? If there were any small chance it was true, perhaps it would be best if she left the city. At least until she could assess her situation. She looked out at the city, heard her people crying out in grief, heard buildings still collapsing and burning, so much destruction. But what had survived was still vulnerable to be lost.
"We don't want to hurt you, Firuzeh," Sameer continued…
Yes, we do, the voice only she was hearing corrected him. But not here in the open. After we get you away from the urdubegis and out of sight.
A spot on her neck felt suddenly hot and she raised a distracted hand to it, only to find the amulet Ahmad had woven into her hair resting against her skin there. The ta'wiz…she could hear another's thoughts with it. Ahmad must have heard her every thought she'd ever had then, she realized. Who was she hearing now? She turned a slow circle to peer at each of the uneasy men and women around her. Uneasy they might be, but no face betrayed itself. Whoever it was, their intentions were not quite as benign as they seemed.
Men and women she had fought with in the war surrounded her, threatened her, trying to take the empire from her, all while people died by the thousands in the streets below and her city burned. Her city! She had put her blood and sweat into rebuilding this city twice before, and she would do it again, by Iwa! No band of traitorous, self-serving brigands was going to take what was rightfully hers. They might take her from the city–from the empire, even!–but they could never take her concern for its people from her.
"You are wasting time with this absurdity," she roared at them, "while people are dying. You can speak soft words, but the truth is that at least one of you wants me dead. I have work to do, you all have work to do," she shamed them, "and I'm going to get on with it. Kill me, if you think you can."
A rumble in the earth emanated from her, causing the stones of the diwan floor to warp and pop in an outward-moving ring and throwing several of the subahdars and Crescent Tigers off their feet.
"See!" Bhima gloated. "Now there can be no question. Kill her. And kill her children, too!"
"What!?" The words took a moment to pierce her grief, but pierce they did. "My children!"
"All the sard-eyed," he proclaimed to those around him, ignoring his cousin. "They are a danger to the empire."
"My children? My children!"
The earth heaved around her, much stronger this time, throwing back the approaching Crescent Tigers in an explosion of stone and dirt. She didn't feel pain as she had when the quakes had happened before. She felt rage, and power. They would not hurt her children! The columns of the diwan shuddered, and stones rained down on the fallen around her, crushing several, others crawling swiftly away from the devastation. Sameer and Bhima managed to dodge falling stones and escape the hall, but Ghalnan was crushed under a massive block, his legs twitching for a few seconds before stilling. Heedless of her own danger, Firuzeh felt the earth rising with her anger. Holes opened in the ground around the diwan, swallowing whole several of the Crescent Tigers who were racing to safety, as if the mouths of giant creatures in the soil, and then closed again. Waves of earth rose high and then crashed down on others, crushing them under its weight.
She felt the desperate clawing of those trapped under the earth, the moisture of those it crushed seeping inside her. The earth continued to rattle under her, but she stood firmly upon it, Shimaz and Mahan unsteady but standing beside her. Dust rained down on them from the precarious roof above, and then first one column then another toppled on one side of the diwan. Maham and Shimaz each grabbed her by one of her arms and dashed out from under the roof before it collapsed completely.
"You will not hurt my family!" she roared, her clenched fists raised defiantly. There was only that thought amidst the destruction that rained around her.
By Iwa, what had she done? She had called to the ground and it had answered her! The city…everything that had happened was her fault!
Lost in horror at what she might have done, she was blind to what was happening to her. The urdubegis fairly dragged her between them in their mad dash to find safety. They were headed to the south gate, she realized, just before she was dropped roughly to the ground. Maham and Shimaz had taken position a few steps back the way they had come, their talwars at the ready.
Six Crescent Tigers raced towards them, swords in one hand, their others open with the claws of their bagh ready to slash in close combat. Shimaz roared and leapt at the nearest with a swiftness that surprised him. She struck off his head with one stroke and it rolled away as his legs carried the body on a few steps further before collapsing. Shimaz rolled and came up with a blade through the chest of another Tiger. Mahan stayed close to the empress, who crab-walked her way back from the fight. Mahan seemed everywhere at once, forming a wall between three attackers and Firuzeh. Her blade swooshed through the air as swift as a kestrel as she fended off the warriors. She blocked one blade as she dropped low and swept the legs out from under another attacker, before spinning to slice the sword arm from a third.
There were too many Crescent Tigers for even the two. The deadly claws of a bagh ripped through Shimaz' neck as she closed with a warrior, her blade caught in the sinews of her second victim. Blood spurted from her severed artery and she fell slowly to first her knees and then to her belly as her life drained out into the stones. Behind the fray, more Crescent Tigers were dashing toward them from across the fort grounds. Other people were shouting and racing across the fort–residents and attendants and administrators–all away from the battle.
Firuzeh pushed herself up and grabbed the sword from the severed arm that had fallen near her. She would meet them on their own terms and die fighting if she had too. Maham spun her talwar like the wind, dispatching another Crescent Tiger, leaving only two, though with many others closing in quickly.
"Run, you fool!" Maham cursed back at Firuzeh. "Get out of here!" She rallied and parried the blades of the pair before her and slammed one to the ground with her shoulder. "Run!"
Four more Crescent Tigers pelt into the fight, encircling them. Firuzeh quickly sliced at the two closest to her, and each one parried her blade but didn't attack. They were trying to capture her, not kill her. She pressed an attack against one, high and then low, her blade singing along with Maham's. Each time, she met with defense but not offense.
Not so with Maham. The urdubegis was besieged and surrounded, taking cuts as she was overwhelmed by her attackers. They had separated her from Firuzeh so they could dispatch her and take the empress. "I told you to run!" the woman shouted at her.
Firuzeh tried another feint, to no effect. "I'll give you a palace!"
Maham roared a laugh as she swung her blade. "Only if it has…"
The sharp claws of a bagh ripped Maham's face open, her final words lost in blood.
"Maham!"
Alone now, Firuzeh reached inside herself to summon the earth to her will but found nothing. Her only hope was escape down the south gate stairs behind her into the ruins of the city. She thrust the blade of her sword at the nearest attacker, then spun through the gap his retreat opened, dropping the now-useless weight of the talwar. She pelted across the fort stone, her sari flapping behind her as she ran, and she could hear the Crescent Tigers racing after her, close behind.
As the steps came into view, a large, armored form barrelled up towards her, sword in one hand, rage in both. She skidded to a stop on the top steps just as the figure roared past her right into the soldiers trailing her, knocking them to the ground like pins. Golden armor covered the figure's scaly, blue body, with a top-knot of black hair poised on the top of her head.
"Ji-Won?"
"Stay behind me!" the Shiledbearer warned, her snout crackling with blue tendrils of energy.
Ji-Won sucked in a long deep breath as the Tigers rose from the ground around her. Her chest and stomach puffed out with the air sucked noisily through her sharp teeth. And then with a roar, Ji-Won wooshed out the air in a torrent of electricity that shot through the surrounding warriors, sparking throughout their bodies. Convulsing in agony, the Tigers collapsed to the ground in twitching heaps.
"Forgive for my late arrival, Empress," Ji-Won brusquely bowed her head to the stunned Firuzeh.
Firuzeh was snatched under the free arm of Ji-Won like a rag doll, pressed into the sharp edges of the armored chest. The woman smelled of cinders and fresh air at once, as she jostled her living bundle quickly down the stairs and into the debris-strewn streets of the city.
Even this far out from the crystalline eruption, the streets were littered with dirt, stone, parts of trees ripped from the ground, pieces of buildings. And bodies. These fallen hadn't died in battle with honor, they were victims of this atrocity, civilians just going about their days when life was horrifically ripped from them.
"Many gwishin have been created here today," Ji-Won said as she, too, took in the bodies. "How can so many be appeased? Much sorrow will come from this."
Firuzeh wriggled against the scaly arm cradling her until she wrested herself free, her feet stumbling a bit at Ji-Won's pace as they hit the ground. "I can run on my own."
"Then hurry, onegaishimasu," the Shieldbearer chided her smaller step.
Firuzeh chased after the broad back of the surprisingly fleet warrior, despite the armor she wore. Ji-Won led her straight into the city away from the fort and towards the crystal, and she wondered why they were heading there. Then she wondered why she was following the dragonborn at all. Yes, Ji-Won had rescued her from the Crescent Tigers, but why? What reason would she have to come for her, and where was she taking her now? Whose purpose was this serving, because it wasn't Firuzeh's. She barely knew Ji-Won or the other Radiant Citadel delegates, no more than she had learned during their meetings or polite conversations at the fort.
She found her feet slowing–Crescent Tigers speeding from behind to catch her, a dubious ally in front of her, leading who knew where. Traumatized citizens stumbled through the streets around them, covered in dust and blood and loss, unable to even process the sight of their empress chasing after a fully-armed dragonborn woman.
What is she doing? Firuzeh heard as the amulet by her neck pulsed. The baka will get herself killed and shame me to her family.
"My family!" Firuzeh picked up her pace. "Where are they?"
"You ask many questions for someone running for her life," Ji-Won barked grimly over her shoulder.
Now that she had something to run to–at least a hope to run to–Firuzeh pumped her sandaled feet to catch up with the warrior, who took a sudden turn west and then a series of switches left and right, moving now away from the crystal mound. Risking a glance back, Firuzeh couldn't spot the Tigers that must be spreading out through the side streets to find them. Abruptly, Ji-Won ducked under the lintel of a short doorway into a building that Firuzeh realized was a temple to Bruengar, and she ducked as well before banging her head against the stone.
It was dark inside, but for the flickering light of numerous candles pooling wax around the shelf circling the room. Little sunlight angled its way in through the low open door, illuminating only a small square at the front. The three-legged votive statue of Bruengar al-Ghair Manqolah against the back wall was draped with both fresh and withered chains of flowers and small, carved, stone statues left as offerings.
Firuzeh shrunk back from the doorway light and into the shadows, catching her breath. The Tigers would surely search the temple eventually. "We can't stay here, we have to keep going."
Ji-Won disappeared behind the statue, her clawed hands pressing against the back wall. "Hai," she agreed, "but not that way."
Where is it? Which one?
Ji-Won was looking for something on the wall, Firuzeh realized. They hadn't come in here by accident. She joined the warrior. "What are we looking for?"
Ji-Won's scaly palm slid over the rough blocks in front of her. "A loose stone. It will click when you press it. I am certain this is the temple he said."
Firuzeh saw the problem at once and squatted down. "You're too tall, Ji-Won. A dwarf wouldn't be able to reach that high. It would be lower." She pressed both hands over the stones at her waist level until she felt one give, followed by a sharp click. They both jumped back as a portion of the wall opened into darkness beyond them, the light from the candles etching the outline of stairs descending down. Firuzeh grabbed a candle from the nearby shelf and hurried down a few steps. Ji-Won followed and with a push closed the stone door behind them. They were alone and they were safe for the moment. But where were they?
"Where is my family?" she demanded in a harsh whisper, lest any of the Tigers enter the temple "What's happening?"
Ji-Won started down the stairs, unaided by the candle, her talons clicking on the stone steps. "We must go," she urged the empress. "We must join the others."
"What others?" She hastened after the warrior, who had not waited to see if she followed. "Ji-Won, where are we going?"
Ji-Won had to squat down to clear the low ceiling, and even Firuzeh had to bend her knees. "These are not my tunnels, Empress. I was told only to go down. They will meet us at the bottom."
"Who told you? Who are they?"
"Amir Tordain," Ji-Won assured her, her brow arched as she turned her head back. "You did not piece that together? We are in a dwarven tunnel below a dwarven temple. Mireu willing, his people will have rescued your family. Come."