Buried Secrets

The mountains were hulking shadows in the night, blotting out a few more stars with each day of travel. The Knight did not take heart, however. I overheard him say to the Hunter, “The water is almost out. I know of no springs near here.”

The Hunter replied, “The giant lizards drink from springs deep beneath the sand. Theoretically, there’s plenty of water down there.”

“Better start digging,” said the Knight.

The Hunter seemed thoughtful, though.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” said the Wizard. “Let’s talk meteorology. You know, I trust, about sandstorms—desert phenomena capable of moving vast quantities of sand in mere hours. It would take days, but I could perhaps make one…”

“You could make a sandstorm?” asked the Hunter. “That would be very powerful magic indeed.”

“Perhaps,” said the Wizard, feigning modesty. “Peli’s Third Theorem, however, would describe it not as powerful magic, but as the compounding effects of weak magic added up over time.”

The Hunter called a halt, during which everyone watched the Wizard conjuring up a small dust devil over the course of several hours. The swirling pillar peppered my face with flecks of sand. At times it subsided and seemed about to die out; but then it would come back full-force, spinning in the starlight like some kind of ethereal ballet dancer.

“It is stable,” said the Wizard. “It will last like this for several more hours without attention from me. This gives me time to rest. I could then add additional nudges to increase the magnitude.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Lilly.

“It’s science,” said the Wizard.

“No. I’ve seen magic before,” she said, eyes transfixed by the dancing wind. “Everyone has their own unique style. But this is real art, like painting a picture with a thousand tiny brush strokes.”

The Wizard didn’t deny it. Surprisingly enough, he also didn’t boast. “You remind me of a student I had once,” was all he said. “Her magic was beautiful too. Mine, I must admit, I got from my father, who could nudge the wind quite effectively. My mother was the one from whom I received the gift of scrying.”

Lilly nodded with genuine interest. “To have so much magic running through your family lines,” she said, “How lucky! Where were they from?”

I listened to the Wizard give banal biographical details that I would normally have tuned out. I could not help but notice, however, that the Wizard’s parents were both from Lopesa, the member of the South Sea Nations that stretched north/south alongside the mountains over which you find the Nation of Night. Thus, it was the nation that had been invaded, and the one whose territory had been reduced afterward. And, if I recall correctly, it was the nation that boasted the most wizards, which was why the Great Academy had been built there, in the Lopesan capital. Perhaps there was something to this theory that morls were the source of human magic. Lopesa had been separated from the Morl Nation by a mere mountain range for the last two hundred years.

“Can you make it bigger?” asked the Hunter, watching as the dust devil began to cut a small ravine in the sand. “Let’s do an experiment.”

Over the next two days, the storm became incredible to watch. In the end, I could have reached my fingers out to touch the furious wall of flying sand, but I would have pulled back a skeletal hand—all soft tissues picked clean. Luckily, the Wizard’s knack for controlling air currents allowed no more than a breeze to affect us directly. I peered into the opaque wall, trying to see the crater being formed. The sand beneath my feet began to slide toward the storm, forcing me to step back.

“Alright,” said the Hunter, holding up her hand. The magic storm subsided; and when it was gone, so was all the breath from our lungs, and our ability to blink, and our desire to speak. What lay before us paralyzed our muscles and tightened our stomachs. Rooftops! Ones made from ancient gray stones, lying bare in the rising sun. Stained-glass windows sparkled up at us. Mysteries that had been covered for centuries, less than twenty feet below the sand, saw the light of day once more. The architecture was unmistakably similar to the chapel that I had visited so long ago, at the beginning of our journey. In addition to the rooftops, the same massive stones made walls and archways, bridges and roads. A lost city.

“What is it?” breathed Lilly.

“It’s the greatest archaeological discovery of all time,” breathed the Wizard. “They’ll make me headmaster for life!”

Dear Human, needless to say, discovering a lost city beneath the Northern Desert was not part of my mission. When I saw what the pilgrims saw, though, I could not help but conclude that divine intervention was at work. I say this because I knew something that Nial and the rest of the pilgrims did not, for I had been counting the nights since we entered the desert. Although I’d had no contact with other morlish operatives, I knew that tonight was the night of the summer solstice, the night after which each subsequent night would be a little bit longer.

More importantly, I knew that tonight was the night that we would be sending our first three battalions into the South Sea Nations, the first fresh troops in the last fifty-four years. All morlish operatives across the nations were at that moment making whatever tactical move we had been planning in secrecy for the last decade. The South Sea Nations were sleeping now and would wake to the realization that things were no longer the same.

The fact that a handful of carefully picked humans that I was responsible for had somehow stumbled upon “the greatest archaeological discovery of all time” on that very holy night gave me a feeling I can only label as “religious vertigo.” It’s what you would feel if you started to realize that all your carefully laid plains were actually the plans of the universe, of fate, or of the gods. You thought your ideas were your own, but they were someone or something else’s. I yearned to discuss this with my people back home, but it would have to wait.

“What are the odds,” said the Knight, “of us stumbling upon this, given the size of the desert?”

“Not high,” said the Hunter. “Which means that we are incredibly lucky, or…” I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “…or this is only part of something much larger.” It still made my flesh crawl, as I pictured a colossal city that lurked beneath the entire desert. Such massiveness boggled my mind; and I preferred to think that we had indeed just been incredibly lucky. Still, I shivered.

“Not to spoil it,” said the Knight, “but this means we won’t be finding any water. Unless you want to chisel through those streets.” The solid gray slabs were obviously impenetrable.That night, sleeping in the sand near the city gave me nightmares. I dreamed of cosmic forces depositing sand on top of me. A literal sandstorm. Thunder and lighting crashed; and sheets of sand fell from the clouds. Raindrops turned to sand when they hit the ground. My friends turned to salt before my eyes—statues of white powder that blew away in the wind. I cried, but the tears turned to sand too. In the end, I suffocated beneath miles and miles of desert, alone with ancient buildings that—like me—would never see the sun again.

When I woke, the desert was dark, and I climbed out of my sand bed, thinking that dusk had come. The Knight was already awake. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “You’ve only rested for an hour.”

I realized that the sky was thick with storm clouds—as if they had migrated directly out of my dreams and into the world of reality.

“Rain,” I whispered, smelling it in the wind. “How is that possible?”

The Mourner joined us, brushing sand from her veil. She didn’t speak, just sat.

The Knight said, “I had a dream. That this city lay uncovered, stretching the entire length of the desert. All the way back to where we began. And at the southern side of the city, back where we first entered the desert, there was a massive gate inside a massive wall. And I saw people manning the battlements against an army of morls.”

“I saw the whole city get covered in sand that fell from the sky,” I said. Hoping the Mourner was ready to talk, I said, “What did you see?”

But she didn’t answer. The Knight said, “The place is enchanted. I can feel it. I swear the buildings down there are… alive. I’ve been watching them since I woke. If I turn my head even for a moment, the city looks different when I look back. I can never tell what’s amiss… but I swear that something moves whenever I’m not watching.” He said this without turning his head, without blinking. I saw that the man’s eyes were bloodshot. When did he last blink? I wondered. We lapsed into silence. The other pilgrims cried out softly behind us, dreaming of terrible things.

What kind of nightmares are they having? I wondered. The first drop of rain left an ice-cold trail on my peeling cheek.