Marrida frantically shakes the sleeping man in the bed, imploring loudly, “Alagur, wake up, get up… We have to leave NOW…” Her panicked voice echoes through the lodgings.
“What—what’s the matter?” Alagur mutters sleepily.
Marrida answers the question by shaking him hard once more.
“THEY—ARE—HERE…” Marrida answers urgingly, then she rushes fast around the room. She piles all their worldly goods on the bed and almost throws two of the haversacks at the man.
Alagur pushes himself upright in the bed, rubbing a hand over his head. He tries to comprehend what Marrida is telling him.
“Who is here?” he mumbles.
“Wolf Riders. They’re about to attack the city, if they’ve not already started their—” Marrida says before she abruptly stops talking when an audible loud bang in the distance confirms her assessment.
Alagur is instantly wide awake when a moment later the house shakes from the shock wave of the impact heard moments earlier. To emphasise the woman’s words once again, Alagur now also hears a sound that’s closer to their dwelling, which is all too familiar for comfort, and then it repeats. Both sounds interrupt Marrida and him from speaking any further.
He jumps out of bed and starts packing everything Marrida is still carrying to the bed, into the readied haversacks. She’s darting in and out of the room with even more belongings all the time. Alagur’s thoughts betray what he really feels about the situation going on right now.
An agreeable thing. I’ve been doing the same to smuggle me from the city when I went to Alzamar. Less left to pack, really…
They pack the books first as they could not be left behind and pack their last clothing around them to safeguard them, as in nature there was the risk of them being damaged by water, wind, or sun, or by animals, or by being found by a man, woman or child passing by.
When Alagur packs food, Marrida stops him with a hissed comment before she darts to another part of the lodgings. “Leave the food. We can catch what we will need for feeding on our way south…”
Alagur complies. Instead, he packs more clothes, and anything else he fits into the bags as Marrida keeps dumping more belongings on the bed, snapping, “I can also use the bedding as packing material if we run out of time.”
Alagur realises that once they’re away from the city, and out of danger, they can repack and check over what losses they’d suffered in their haste.
Alagur knows that Yalla, and Lya who is Marrida’s much younger wolf, both keep themselves hidden from view a half day’s travel south of the city where he’d left the animals before he had arrived back in Damrachia with Eldagu months earlier. Once they’re reunited with them, they can ride away from the city and be safe within a day.
They both freeze when they hear two loud knocks on the front door. They wait for a few minutes, listening. The same two loud knocks repeat, seemingly with more urge to them.
“Stay here…” Alagur hisses, and he quietly descends the stairs.
Voices trail up the stairs, and Marrida listens for a moment.
“It’s Dargu…” Alagur calls up to Marrida, who is still busy packing in their sleeping room. “He’s helping us out of the city. He’s leaving too but going west to Azaquina.”
Dargu who’d become a good but eccentric friend over the previous year or more, while they lived in the city nods at Marrida, when she descends the stairs partway handing Alagur a haversack and rushing back up for the other.
“There’s a pass which leads up the mountain is at the north side of the city which is usually used by herdsmen for their mountain sheep, but we can go along this route to get away from here,” Dargu explains to Alagur who nods.
He trailed the pass several times out of curiosity, so is aware where the pass would lead them. This is if the Wolf Riders haven’t discovered the road north of the mountain yet.
Alagur helps Marrida first with her haversack, securing it in place precisely. They can’t afford any delays caused by it sliding off. He fastens his own after this. Marrida is wearing one of his trousers for the same reason, which makes Dargu raise an eyebrow when he realises she isn’t in her more familiar long skirt.
“I got my rucksack near the path out of the city,” Dargu mentions quietly. “I put it there before I came to find you...”
“How did you know of the attack?” Marrida queries, curiosity clear in her voice.
“You should remember the height of my house,” Dargu replies, “The top floor easily overlooks the nearby valley. I remembered Alagur mentioning once about how you can see Wolf Riders approaching. I saw the dust cloud, then saw the first projectiles hit the city in the north west and knew the attack you warned about had started. Others are leaving too. They’re going south like you. Like Anayra. Also, the people in the city’s north west seem to have realised it sooner than us it was about to start because many of them started coming towards the south gates from about mid-morning…”
“Will she cope with the journey?” Marrida asks.
“Yes. Don’t worry about her. She’s a tough one…” Dargu acknowledges, smiling warmly.
* * *
The trio walk from the dwelling, and all look up at the now so familiar house. Marrida and Alagur both know they’ll miss the house with its lengthy history, part of which Dargu had explained to them after both had to swear never to let Anayra know that they knew a lot more about what went on inside then she’d ever mentioned.
In the street there is panic, with hundreds of people streaming from their houses carrying the few belongings they could manage to collect in minutes, similarly to Marrida and Alagur, because the many carts, that had left for the previous few weeks, had contained as much of people’s belongings as they could hold. Most people had sent away most of their worldly belongings long before this morning finally came. When the Wolf Riders finally got entry into the city, they’d find that most of what could give them wealth would have vanished, and they would place their blame for not getting more spoils at Samur’s feet, who’d suffer humiliation.
It took some effort but when Alagur explained to the part of the population that wanted to stay; they realised they’d be dead when the Wolf Riders arrived, and they’d contribute to whatever Samur planned. So, everything not bolted down got taken in carts, which only would carry the oldest, youngest, and frail, with as much of the belongings as possible all disguised to appear as additional people to deceive the scouts among the Wolf Riders. In the meantime, all people went through the hidden passages in the mountains north and east of the city and would take hidden paths towards the beaches north of Upper Plains or take a route south past the oasis where the wolves had been, who now were closer to the city because of it, then trek until they arrived at the marshlands where they’d reunite with the people who went with the carts, and then all of them would travel towards Alzamar or Callers’ Camp.
This was Alagur’s deception against the Wolf Riders. They saw the evidence of soldiers on the walls, but that would cause them to not see the departure of an entire city. Many men also went around to set up traps for the approaching attackers, guided by Alagur’s last-minute instructions. He had told various men where to set the traps for when the city empties for a time. Others sheltered those made homeless in the most southern parts of the city. This is also why the screams that Alagur and Marrida can hear are so loud. They tried to prepare the city for the carnage, but when the carnage came, fear still entered many hearts…
* * *
The scenery they see around them reminds both Marrida and Alagur of Ruh’nar from when that city had come under attack of a much smaller group of Wolf Riders which had only numbered five squads in total. When Marrida asked about it she was told by Alagur it was around six thousand men with their wolves. This attack is five times more… if what Jymar stated was even correct. Alagur said he knew of at least forty squads around central Keldarra, and that number didn’t include the Wolf Runners, the squads around Hayzan, or any that may be further away.
Each of them sees the attack differently; this scene seems more pronounced than anything Marrida has ever witnessed before in Ruh’nar. For Marrida, her concern also comes from being concerned about the innocents inside the Temple. Alagur soon comprehends by glancing around him that unlike Ruh’nar this city possesses no defensive stone throwers or any other form of defence.
As they walk up the steep slope, following Dargu, who turns soon on to another path, and then passes the place where the path splits off also towards the plateau where they’d sat watching the progress of the Wolf Riders, Alagur stops and glances for a moment behind him. He can see roofs aflame in the most south-western and western quarters of the massive city and in the north-east, and he knows spear arrows, like those hidden near the wolves, are the cause. For the first time in his life, the man who was the attacker in a past that now seems a lifetime ago, understands how it feels to be on the receiving end of such attacks, and it gives him a renewed sense of purpose to undo what he previously took part in.
As Alagur turns, he notices he had stopped walking, and his two companions are waiting a scant distance away. Approaching them quickly, the glances from Marrida towards the west and then north shows that she’d come to similar conclusions about their surroundings without him saying anything about it.
“Can you see the white rock outcrop there above us?” Dargu remarks, “It’s where the path we’ll take is. It goes partially through a cave, and afterwards it’s a steep slope down, and after this we’ll be at the road where you can go east, and I’ll go down to the beach to follow others going west to Azaquina...”
“When we part ways, be safe…” Marrida says in a quiet tone barely audible over the surrounding turmoil.
“I will. Don’t worry about me…” Dargu comments. “I got the letter you wrote in my pocket here…”
He taps on his chest to emphasise the sentence.
“With this letter Emelyse will know I come to her as your friend if she doesn’t recognise me anymore, and she’ll welcome me with open arms—” Dargu laughs at his own attempt to sound confident about the welcome he’d get when he arrived. It makes Alagur and Marrida laugh too.
“And what will you do if she turns you away?” Alagur flashes a teasing smirk at the old man.
“I guess there’s no option for me. I’ll go to the nearest tavern to drown my sorrows with a well-filled pitcher of wine…” Dargu says as he winks at Alagur before he laughs again. And promptly speaks again in a more serious tone.
“If she’s as kind as you make her out, and if her son is as clever as you say he is, I must hang up my travel boots, become a sober man, and ask her to be my life partner. Even if I’m old enough to be her father really, and really in name only to honour my daughter’s memory…”
The statement brings back memories for Marrida of the day when Alagur asked her. It was sudden, but it was something she wanted. She wonders for a moment how Emelyse would react to this man, and whether he’d succeed… in persuading her.
Bergas needs a father, she thinks. Someone to guide him into adulthood…
When the trio reach the higher elevation leading to the path out of the city, they stop for a moment to watch the city behind them. They catch sight of the bright orange glow slowly spreading itself in the western quarter of the city, and the beginning of the same at the southern end of the city. It has an eerie, otherworldly quality to it, which is even more prominent at the height they stand.
The smell of burning pitch fills the air, and gradually the volume of the screams of residents who were so rudely awoken by the carnage unleashed on them lessens as more of them exit from the city through the hidden passages only they know of. The sound penetrates the deepest recesses of Marrida’s insides, and she notes that unlike the soft bee-like hum she’d heard in Azaquina during its spring festival, this is a sound of terror and pain.
“You’ve both seen this before?” Dargu says solemnly. Alagur and Marrida both nod.
“And you may have done this to others in the past, haven’t you, Alagur? How does it feel to be on the receiving end of it?”
Alagur looks at the man beside him who has an expression of concern and not the anger he expected to see on his face, which surprises Alagur somewhat.
“This is what we’re trying to end…” Alagur says hesitantly after a few moments.
“If you do, then make sure also that the things they do in this city don’t continue…” Dargu says. “Promise me this…”
“A time will come when the Order of Truth will be the original pure version, and not what exists now…” Marrida responds. “I observed it in a vision of three years ago when we passed the old watchtowers that we told you about…”
“I remember you telling me about them,” Dargu says. “You said the fourth one you saw is interesting…”
“It was, and if you arrive at a ravine, you’ve passed it,” Alagur adds. “Make sure you look at the back of the bottom floor. There are—some interesting drawings there.”
Alagur looks at Marrida, who nods agreement. They’d never figured out who the two people depicted are precisely, although a book she carries seems to offer a clue, and Marrida maintains the assertion they will find the answer in the cities they plan to visit that are somewhere ahead of them.
After looking at the turmoil of the city for a few more minutes, two men and a woman turn silently and start the final ascent towards the tunnel offering a safe exit from the city. Their three-year tenure in the city has ended. It is only two seasons ago, when Alagur and Marrida bonded as life partners, but now it feels like a lifetime ago. Alagur and Marrida see they aren’t the only ones using this tunnel as an exit…
They use old tunnels and the many hidden passages, which had served a function of smuggling people from the city when it was under constant occupation by northern invaders one last time. Alagur, Marrida and Dargu are possibly among the last to use the passages to get away from the city. On the other side they would split up, and Dargu would go down to the beach, which is a hundred paces below them, while Alagur and Marrida were going to travel along a path high in the eastern mountain range, leading them to a small copse just west of the oasis.
This route was earlier taken also by Anayra and others travelling at the same time as she did. Almost all those who left earliest were the civilians and the reason for it is to make sure they didn’t become unwilling conscripts for the army defending the city, and with men or boys, it’s so they wouldn’t end up as one of Samur’s recruits…
The journey over the mountain range will take them two entire days, and Dargu warns them they’d get a ‘excellent view of the action.’
* * *
Parting is hard for all three of them. Their friendship grew in the time since Dargu first approached them and had grown even more after Marrida’s heroic actions within the dark building, which everyone knew only ever as the Temple of the Hidden until recently but is more and more just being referred to as the ‘False Temple’. Its fate is unknown in the current events, and although both Alagur and Marrida have seen glimpses of that fate, with so much changing every day, they don’t know if the fate is the same as before.
As she glances in its direction, Marrida sees a trickle of smoke coming from a tower that’s part of the False Temple. She recognises what part of the building this is. The people left behind inside were told of her vision. All had stated it was best if none of them remained alive to allow anyone among the impending attackers to use their skill similarly as Ladrysa had once done. They knew they’d have to kill themselves after killing the Elder, and all those around the Elder who were in her service. It was a dangerous task.
Marrida shuts her eyes for a moment, and her mind asks for mercy for those in the False Temple who’d give their lives. She’d been learning some old knowledge that once, in the days of Keltana, might have been a ‘prayer for a soul,’ which she’d learnt from books that she and Anayra translated and which they both explained to as many as possible.
Although Marrida is uncertain what a ‘prayer for a soul’ is, she hopes that what she’s doing is it. Anayra explained the words to her in Sab’ruhi dialect, and even then, the words made little sense to her, even after the many more explanations from Anayra.
Marrida opens her eyes, and glances sideways towards two men standing beside her who both didn’t notice her pause, and chose not to out of respect for her. Alagur is the first to see her looking at them, and nods at her to show that he understands she wants to go. It still surprises her even after three years of them travelling and living together that he can understand her this well.
She nods once. More to state an unspoken confirmation than anything else…
