They made all the requisite preparations and departed in the morning. Twelve in all, with a few wagoneers and haulers, a team of donkeys and a rickety cart. Lao and Erio rode their horses. Geripor, God of the Sun, blazed hot in the Season of Fire, but Deripor, God of the Wind, sent them occasional clouds and breezes. Scattered across every horizon, jagged like expanses of distant hills, those clouds heralded the coming Season of Rains. Still, they all wore wide hats and rested in the shade around noon. Their road was rocky and old, a relic frrom an unknown age. Sometimes Adilior played them songs on his lute, gentle and melancholy songs of the road, moaning the sorrows of fallen cultures.

  Old stairs, granite flagstones, cobbles sunken in years of mud, parched golden grasses and weeds shaking drifting stars of fluffy seeds into the air, calling distant birds on scant and scraggly trees, rocky hillsides of red dirt baked by the sun, and the sun, the sun, the eternal sun burning down upon it all. Rows of stone posts aside the road, an old fence or border. Embankments crumbling, their jagged stones lying in ditches. Half-bridges without walls, bridges over dry gullies. Abandoned grottoes in hillsides, old towns where only wolves rest now. Bare flagpoles. Waves of dust and ripples of wind through the grasses. Distant eagles. They camped in old stone houses built into the hill. The wheel of stars overhead. Moon in the Star of Silence.

  Pillars and foundations in the sun at dawn. Green fields in the lowland, far side of the hills. Distant bright river where white birds settled among the reeds and flew up in flights, ornary and mysterious, fleeting. Sweet gray clouds covering the low sun. Silver and green on the fields. A distant squadron of League Knights, with two long-necked birds overhead. Huts on the river, trailing smoke into the sky. Two quiet hunters running through the grasses, trailing ragged green cloaks. Wagon wheels on the cobblestones like ancient drums.

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  A wall, ten yards tall, divides the low grassland from the high. Two flat plains, and between them an ancient embankment of well-dressed blocks, older than the road. They pushed the wagon up the ramp. Once, there had been towers there, perhaps a gate. The high-grassland was littered with pillars and old foundations, border-stones and walled alcoves, stone ponds, olives and oaks. Once, it had been a city. Nobody remembered the name or the culture or the language. Their symbols, their statues, their signs, all had been stolen long ago. Now a strew of stones, nothing more. Winds rustled few trees, bees and grasshoppers hummed in grasses and yellow wildflowers, cats lay on ancient walls.

  Far ahead, gray cliffs. The end of the grassy fields, beginning of the Broken Lands, expanses of unnatural undulations and jagged crags, deep chasms and sprawling caverns. Wind whipping in the shadowy gaps...

  They camped in the old grassland city, in the lee of its old stone walls. Dinner of road-grains and olives, a little rabbit. Again the wheel of the stars, again the Moon in the Star of Silence. A few quiet songs and a long sleep.

  The Gray Cliffs loomed up closer and closer, emanating a cool wind. Zephyrs rustled in their shadows, dancing out across the plains. Finally, at the end of the road, they could see the temple. First, it looked like a triangle of tarnished white. Then it looked like a three-tiered ziggurat of dirty marble, a diamond cut into the stone, with spreading roots of stairs and ramps. The Tree of the Earth, The Vines of the Deep. A city of baskets, arbors, terraces, sluices, and aqueducts: once it had been green, watered by deep wells. Then it had been brown, covered in dead plants. Then it had been white, bleached by the sun and scoured by the wind. Geripor and Deripor, the Destroying Twins.

  At the foot of the stairs, under an arching buttress, they built their final camp. A strange oppressive sorrow lay upon them. The wheel of the stars, sometimes occluded by vapors, sometimes crossed by clouds, seemed to morn the forgotten faith of the deep. Yet still the Moon shone in the Star of Silence. And Silence reigned, heavier than ever before.