The Kindly One

XI. Introductions

Iona realized her mouth hand been hanging open for a full minute only after Kája pointed it out to her. "I...oh..." she breathed, unable to pull her eyes away from Zaeylael's towering, august spires. They were less than half an hour outside the city now and it had grown from a distant dot to a mammoth metropolis on the seashore.

The road had been long and often nerve-wracking until they crossed the Stonemarch into Leus, which had not been an enjoyable endeavor. Leaving before the thaw meant braving winter storms in the passes, which froze them nearly to death at several points. It was a miracle they hadn't lost anything to frostbite. On the bright side, no pursuit materialized. They'd managed to stay just barely ahead of the news from Tamaris of a rogue blood mage and Leyan renegades. The center of her chest was slowly returning to what it'd once been. Benedikt, Kája, and even Ciar were constant sources of reassurance in their own ways. Iona had to tell herself every night that she did it for the right reasons, but she still woke often from too many nightmares. It would fade in time, she supposed, but was that a good thing? Benedikt's words stayed with her, though. It was defense of herself and her friends. Her hand was forced. Maybe it was a cowardly justification, she wasn't sure, but it did feel true and it was a damn sight better than just wallowing in shame.

"Pretty," Ciar agreed with a grin, seeming to relax slightly at the sight of the city built into the red cliffs.

"It's everything I ever imagined," Iona whispered. The garden city's towers seemed to scrape the sky, the gleaming glass and graven white stone set aflame by the dawn's growing light. Its harbors were deep and packed with ships, docks bustling in the early hours of the morning. The city was larger than anything she'd ever seen in her life. She'd always assumed that the capitals of men were all like Tamaris. But this... Kája had said that in the valley around and in Zaeylael itself, there were a million people. It boggled the mind. But then again, between amazing irrigation, a growing season that spanned all year, and magic, they could support a much larger populace than Tamaris. Gulls cried above, wheeling in the sky as it lightened. Soon it would be a brilliant azure to complement a sapphire sea crashing onto a white sand beach.

The Yssan in her also appreciated it as a fortress. Just the Inner Wall—far more impressive than the Outer Wall a dozen miles away—was more than fourteen miles of wall around the city, forty feet high and fifteen feet thick, reinforced by more than four hundred bastions and studded with ninety-six massive towers, each equipped with siege engines that would have made any Yssan duke weep with envy. The moats around the city were more like rivers, linked to the aqueduct system and controlled by many dams that kept it all uniformly about fifteen feet deep. The Great Moat couldn't have been less than fifty feet wide. The gates were as unassailable as anything she'd ever seen, towering constructions graven with arcane runes from the top to the bottom, slumbering wards that could be activated by the city's magi in times of siege. No wonder military minds called it unconquerable. Iona found herself grateful for the eternal infighting of the Leyans—without it, her own country would have a serious problem. Then again, Zaeylael was not representative of all of Leus.

"Here is the Ouránia Pýles," Kája said, pointing ahead as they joined the many crowds fluxing in and out of Zaeylael. "The Heavenly Gates."

It was a massive construction, a series of several sets of ascending gates and walls that overlapped like shark's teeth. Iona had been around her father and brother to pick up on the fact that not a single tower blocked the line of fire from any other. If an army marched on this place, it was to its own destruction. "Remind me again why Leus doesn't rule the world?"

Benedikt laughed. "Because it's run by Leyans, my dear. Our armies are mercenaries, our rulers are degenerates, and our generals would gladly slit each other's throats in the night."