Ascending Nidyum

Chapter Four

C h a p t e r F o u r

I dismissed the scratches on my arm by claiming to have encountered a particularly agitated cat on the streets. It was believable enough; farming families often kept cats to ward off the mice, after all. I had a fresh linen bandage encircling my arm by the time the caravan was ready to leave Minzur, and it was easily hidden by a shake of my sleeve. Whatever had happened in the temple, whatever the necklace had to do with it, I knew to keep it to myself for now.

Besides — who would ever believe me? While most of the traders did indeed believe in the gods and anti-gods of this universe, an encounter with one was so rare that it bordered on absurd. I was already assumed to be crazy for buying the necklace; I did not need another mark against my sanity.

We struck out from Minzur before midday, crossing over the bridge to the eastern banks of the River Jipaa. The worst of our travels — the Kishar Desert — was behind us, and this stretch along the river was nearly enjoyable. Southwards we went, keeping the banks of the river always in sight as it curved back and forth in the distance. The Sura Harran Mountains faded away at our backs, and the Tilzun Desert could barely be seen at the horizon on our side of the river. The Tilzun was a much smaller spat of land than the treacherous Kishar. It merely stretched between the two rivers, encompassing the unfertile northern land that Yadid had yet to claim.

That was where Ganzer used to be.

There, where the soil was still a brutal mix of dirt and sand, my homeland had once existed in peace.

The caravan would pass no where near Ganzer's remains, which I counted as a good thing. I had not been back there in nearly a decade, and I had no intentions of changing that.

Of course, passing the unmarked latitude parallel to Ganzer meant something else too: We were now in Yadid's territory. Not a single trader among us would have had a nice word for Yadid. I am fairly certain not a single person in all of Greater Yadid would have had a nice word for that cretin — but then again, one does not rise to power on his own. Yadid had a power-hungry circle of local rulers he had installed throughout his land. Perhaps they, owing to him their wealth and prestige, would have spared the man a kind sentiment.

But I doubted it.

The major problem with crossing into Greater Yadid was dealing with the tax collectors. They set up posts along the most navigable borders, including the one through which we would be passing. Circumventing these posts took days out of the journey and generally left everyone with a rather sour taste in their mouth. And so traders had developed a much simpler way of avoiding them.

We sent a young, staid trader named Arezen ahead of us on horseback to scout. When he returned half a day later, it was with a report of where exactly the tax posts had been established this year, which happened to be right outside Simuri, one of the first true southern cities. Our plan then became to stay in Simuri until nightfall and sneak past the collectors in small groups.

It might have seemed excessive, but it was worth it to keep all of our hard-earned outsider goods. Those tax goons would rob a trader blind if they could, all in the name of King Yadid. It was sickening.

We entered Simuri on the fifty-fourth morning of our journey from Laanur.

The difference between this southern city and the farming villages of the north was striking: dirt roads now became lined with smooth stone, two-story buildings gave way to three- and four-story ones, plain mud-brick façades were replaced with exteriors of marble, limestone, and granite that were extensively decorated with gold and jewels. Instead of only being for administrative and religious purposes, the buildings in Simuri ran the gambit of functions — artisan workshops, permanent food stands, stores that offered scribework and funerary services and the like.