EPHER

"Epher!" Olive ran toward him across the plateau. "Epher, they're leaving! A bunch of them. They're leaving!"

For an instant, Epher thought she meant the legionaries, and hope sprang in him, and the weight of mountains lifted—for just a heartbeat—off his shoulders.

"They're climbing down the snake path!" Olive said when she reached him, flushed, damp with sweat. "Issazion and twenty others."

Epher's belly tightened again, the fear rushing back into him. He nodded.

"Stay here, Olive," he said. "Rest."

Leaving her, he ran, climbed a staircase onto the defensive wall, and raced along it. From up here, he could see the legionaries below. They filled the area between the circumvallation wall and the mesa in its center. Slaves still toiled across the ramp under the whips of their masters, raising more wooden platforms and piling up more stone, soil, and mortar. The ramp pressed up against the eastern cliff, rising more than half the way up.

Epher kept racing along the wall. Finally he reached the gatehouse in the defensive wall. Below, the snake path coiled down the cliff toward the canyon.

The gatehouse doors were open. Issazion, mistress of Tarath El, was climbing down the snake path. She wore a simple tunic and held no weapons, and her white hair streamed in the sandy breeze. She paused, nearly falling, then kept walking down step by step, pressed against the cliff. Behind her walked twenty other Zoharites, clinging to the cliff, slowly descending the narrow path carved into the mesa. Legionaries watched from below but fired no arrows.

"Issazion!" Epher shouted from above the gatehouse. "Issazion, listen to me! Return here!"

She paused, already halfway down the cliff. She looked back up toward him. Her voice rose from the distance. "It is over, King Epheriah! Stay there and die if you like. My family and I surrender."

The group continued to walk down the path: Issazion, her elderly father, her siblings, their children, twenty in all. The legions below waited, bows lowered. Epher wanted to run after Issazion and her family, to drag them back, but dared not climb onto the snake path, dared not risk summoning the arrows of Aelar.

"Issazion!" he called down again. "There is no surrender to Aelar. Not anymore."

She stared back up at him. Epher was too distant to see her facial expression, but he heard the fear and doubt in her voice. "They could have shot us the moment we stepped onto the path."

"Only slavery or crosses await you below," Epher said. "Come back, Issazion. Come back to safety."

She emitted a sound halfway between laugh and sob. "Safety? There is no safety from the Empire, Epheriah. Even as we speak, the ramp grows taller, and we are too weak, too fearful to slay the slaves who raise it. There is no victory against the might that has risen across the sea. Farewell, and I pray your death is quick."

She and her family continued walking down the path, finally reaching the legions below. Claudia met them there with open arms.

Epher did not want to look. Did not want to see this, hear this. Yet he stood on the gatehouse, watching, forcing himself to watch, to see what awaited him. He watched as the legions stripped Issazion's family naked. As they twisted their arms until they dislocated. As they nailed them onto crosses. As they swung hammers, shattering the legs of the condemned. As they thrust sharpened sticks into groins. As they left what remained of Issazion and her family—barely human, barely alive—to rot on the crosses in the sun, to slowly die over hours.

"Your death will not be as kind!" Claudia shouted from below. "Do you hear me, Epher? Your death will not be as quick! You're coming with me back to Aelar, Epher. You and your wife and all your soldiers! The crowd will savor your screams for weeks!"

Finally in the night, when the moans of the dying had faded, Epher turned away.

He did not join his wife in bed. For a long time, Epher walked through Tarath El, this fortress in the sky. He walked outside the palace that rose on one side of the plateau, facing north. He walked along the outdoor pool of cool water, then through the bathhouse of heated water that rose from deep wells. He walked between the stone houses of the hundreds who lived here. He walked through the gardens where Tarath El grew its fruit, and he passed the corral where the animals gave forth milk and cheese and fur. Finally he reached the southern tip, where a temple rose at the meeting of two cliffs, a place of solitude where scrolls rested on shelves, where a portico afforded a view of the desert and the countless stars. He walked through an archway and down a staircase. He traveled into the deep recesses below the plateau, carved into the mesa. He found storerooms, armories, cisterns, tunnels. Places of tunnels and silence.

Olive's words echoed in his mind. What do we do?

For hours, Epher searched, seeking some gateway to a hidden tunnel, one that would deliver him to the wilderness like the Gate of Tears. Yet all the paths he took led to dead ends, delving only several stories down into the mesa, then halting.

Just one way out. Just the snake path down the cliff, leading to Claudia.

Any way we climb down, Epher thought, we reach the legions. Even should we carve a path through them, their circumvallation wall awaits us. What do we do? What is the way out?

All night he wandered, seeking, thinking, drawing in sand. There had to be a solution. Had to be some path of escape. Some way to hold off the legions. Some way to survive, to save his wife and unborn child, to save nine hundred people, to save a nation, to save Zohar.

When Epher finally slept, in his dreams, he was still trapped in a labyrinth. Lions chased him, and he ran through dark tunnels, seeking a way out, lost in the dark.