Ian C Esslemont
PROLOGUE
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
BOOK II
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
BOOK III
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
EPILOGUE
Ian C Esslemont
Orb Sceptre Throne
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
PROLOGUE
Did we not look out together upon the dark waters of the lake
And behold there the constellations
Of both hemispheres at once?
That day of discovery began as any other. He arose before the dawn and saw to his toilet, aware that the toothless hag he kept as camp cook was already up, boiling water for the morning tea and mealy porridge. He checked in on the tent of the two guards that he’d hired simply because he thought he ought to have
‘Tea’s on,’ he said, and let the flap fall closed.
He kicked awake his two assistants, who lay in the sands next to the dead campfire. These were sullen youths whom he paid a few copper slivers a month to see to the lifting and hauling. Like the ancient, they were of the older tribal stock out of the surrounding steppes, the Gadrobi; no citified Daru would waste his time out here in the old burial hills south of the great metropolis of Darujhistan. None but he, Ebbin, who alone among all the Learned Brethren of the Philosophical Society (of whom he was charter member) remained convinced that there yet lurked far more to be found among these pot-hunted and pit-riddled vaults and tombs.
Sipping the weak tea, he studied the brightening sky: clear; the wind: anaemic at best. Good weather for another day’s exploration. He waved the youths away from the fire where they huddled warming their skinny shanks, then pointed to the distant scaffolding. The two guards drank their tea and continued their interminable arguing.
Ebbin knew that at the end of the day he’d come back to camp to find them still gnawing on the same old bones from the first day he’d hired them. He supposed it took all kinds.The lads dragged themselves down the hill to station themselves next to a wide barrel winch. Ebbin knelt at the stone-lipped well, opened the old bronze padlock, pulled free the iron chains, and heaved aside the leaves of the wood cover. What was revealed appeared nothing more than one of the many ancient wells that dotted this region, once a Gadrobi settlement.
But what might he find down at the bottom of this otherwise unremarkable well?