Age of War

Chapter 3

Jonis bid farewell to the Seventh in the square outside the city’s southern gates, where she’d first met them what seemed like a lifetime ago. In the time she’d been away, Atlas seemed to have diminished even further. The rain was oppressive and the streets were little better than open sewers. Never the most fragrant city in the world, the miasma of pestilence was now like a headache she couldn’t shift. The soldiers all seemed upbeat as they headed to their barracks or the Whores’ Quarter, but the people watching them from doorways and street corners had hollow cheeks and huge, hungry eyes. It wasn’t a prosperous district, here against the fragmented city walls – the shanty town beyond stretched for miles – but at least here the houses were stone and streets were paved. But there was no sign of industry at all. No shops with their wares on sale, no vendors calling out from their carts, no musicians or performers of any kind. She looked around, feeling suddenly very alone and lost. She’d been born in Atlas, and spent almost every day of her life within it, but she was a breed apart from these people; Cyclops Keepers rarely ventured from the subterranean stable where their monstrous charges resided. She didn’t know this city, not really.

The rain was already starting to soak her, and even her sturdy leather jerkin wouldn’t keep her dry much longer. She shouldered her light pack and turned towards home. Her route took her through narrow, winding streets, but the depressing scenes at the gates were repeated. The walls of the buildings that flanked the dim passages were normally a pale tan colour from the signature stone of the region, but now they were stained with soot and refuse. She noticed flickering fires in every dwelling she passed, and some on street corners where braziers had been dragged out to keep people outside warm. The smoke filled the air and made her cough. It was like being back in Talos with their infernal open hearths everywhere. It wasn’t supposed to be as cold and miserable as this in Atlas – the city just wasn’t designed for it. It was a place of open balconies and wide, bright plazas. Even in winter, only flimsy painted shutters on the windows were required to keep buildings warm enough for habitation.

The Cyclops stables were accessible via a number of entrances at street level. Most gave these dread portals a wide berth, not out of any superstitious feeling, but simply because they knew how dangerous the monsters that had protected Atlantis since time immemorial could be. The street was empty, and there were no shop fronts in sight. Instead it was just blank warehouses backing onto the road and the rear of walled yards. Bare branches shivered in the rain as she passed beneath them. The entrance to the stables was a columned portico, visibly older than the buildings that surrounded it and built of darker stone. The door was black, iron-bound oak, and the pediment above featured a stylised carving of a Cyclops, which looked nothing at all like a real one. Of course, to accurately depict one here on the streets like this would do little to improve the reputation of her people. The true form of a Cyclops was maddeningly grotesque. This fellow was almost cheerful by comparison, a smirking gargoyle with one giant eye in the centre of its forehead, like the children’s story version of the beast. She looked up at it – each door had a different one, but they were all familiar to her, like old friends. Today though it didn’t make her smile. Instead she was struck by the similarity between the design and the symbols of the One-Eyed God that the Talosi worshipped. They’d seen that circular icon everywhere they went during their adventure in the frozen north, and it now carried with it some unhappy associations. It also reminded her that she had questions to ask her superiors upon her return.

She crossed the street at last and placed her hand into the elaborate locking mechanism built into the door. There were no guards at any of these entrances; instead, the secrets of how to open them were known only to the Keepers. It was a metal cylinder that enclosed her hand up to the wrist and within it was a nested series of rings and levers. A wrong move would shred the flesh from her bones, but she’d known the correct motions since before she could read or write. The door yielded to her and opened smoothly thanks to unseen machinery that had worked flawlessly for thousands of years. Inside was a short passage lit by wall sconces and, beyond that, a staircase into the shadowy depths.