Dragons of War by Christopher Rowley
To Veronica Chapman with thanks for her help and advice.
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CHAPTER ONE
The sun burned down on the heart of the continent, the ancient land of Padmasa, but there was no warmth in it. Instead a chill wind from the northwest sucked the heat out of the day, leaving the dun-brown hills and withered meadows of lichen as mute testimony to its power. This was a place ruled by winds. A glance at the fantastic shapes carved from the rock pinnacles could tell the traveler that in a second.
Sandstorms blew in from the west, snowstorms came from the north, and desiccating chinooks came down from the mountains to the south. Vegetation of any sort struggled to survive here, and yet this was the center of the greatest power in the world.
Coming over the pass at Kakalon, looking down into the widening valley, the magician Thrembode the New saw the mass of the Square clearly outlined on the dominating, central rise. The jarring straight lines and white stone informed the world that this was the work of men. The smooth-sided walls, two hundred feet high, frowned down like bluffs of pure adamant. The sight chilled the magician and awakened a deep foreboding. This was a place where only wild goats uould choose to live, and yet there stood the great slab, one mile on each side, a single vast building thronged by more than a million people, all of them servants of the power that ruled here.
The magician marveled to himself, for he knew that the Square, for all its majesty was but the anteroom to the Halls of Padmasa, which lay deep below, carved into the rock of the craton by an army of slaves, none of whom had survived the ordeal. Indeed, their very bones had been ground into the mortar holding together the stones.
Coming through the pass and into the valley brought Thrembode back into the full force of the wind, which tore at his clothing. He shivered as he fastened his coat all the way up and tightened the belt. It was always cold here, one reason the great ones liked it. The wind shrieked as it honed the rocks into bonelike shapes, eroding the world's flesh and exposing its very vertebrae.
Thrembode thought of the coming ordeal, and would've prayed to the gods if he thought it would give him strength. After what he'd seen through his service to the Masters, however, the magician could no longer believe in gods. Gods would have stopped the Masters, before they became veritable gods themselves. And no thing, no one, could stop them now.
His horse continued down the slope on the great road. Nine of these roads converged here, two hundred feet wide, all running perfectly straight across the valley and up to the Square. Caravans of camels and mules, bearing tribute from half the world to the buried city of the Masters, crowded these roads.
Thrembode approached the East Gate. A long line of slaves trudged ahead of him, Ourdhi men, chained at the neck, driven by the lash of burl...

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