The Empty City

Noah took a deep breath at his camp. In the still of the ruined building, he could hear a faint voice in the distance as one of the Nawyet’s crew called to her mates, but he was unable to make out what she was saying.

He had been watching out the window down the path for a few minutes, making sure he wasn’t followed.

Making sure Hitty didn’t show up? And, what… offer to help?

Maybe convince him to stay?

“No.” With an angry grunt, Noah grabbed his small satchel. He had a days’ worth of food and water, a notebook and his writing kit, a few tools, and a special leather wrapped item that looked like a hardcover book but wasn’t.

“You are being an idiot. You can’t stay, you have to go.”

With a sour chuckle, Noah realized he must be ready now as he was talking to himself again. As someone who spent so much time alone he had gotten used to it, either asking himself random questions about his plans or - more alarmingly - providing a kind of narration to his day as if he was describing his actions as a heroic protagonist to an audience.

“Well, if I ever start giving stage directions out loud, I’ll know it’s time to head home, seeing my family would cure me of any kind of ego inflation,” he mumbled to himself with a wry grin.

He knew he was wasting time now. Perhaps nervous about his search, and honestly more than a little afraid to find nothing, but he was being careful to ensure none of the crew thought to keep tabs on him. He would move much faster alone, away from prying eyes.

The stone city was laid out in a clearly planned fashion. The streets were wide, certainly wider than many cities Noah had been in on this continent which had buildings crowding as much as possible, and more the thoroughfares were of uniform size.

The warehouses next to the port were of minimal interest, but Noah still entered a few. Long, narrow spaces, made of stone as was seemingly every building in this city. The roofs were stone and fired clay shingles, with stone columns to support the weight. The scholars who had first studied the Empty City had assumed the predominantly stone construction was mostly down to the fact that trees were rare in this northern plain, and Noah saw no reason to doubt that. But the result was still impressive - the masonry was clearly exceptional as many of the buildings seemed mostly intact even hundreds of years after they were abandoned.

Naturally, some of the buildings had collapsed over the years. Many had the roofs caved in, and a few of the taller, thinner 3 and 4 story buildings had fallen entirely, covering the streets with rubble. But still, the fact that some of the squat, sturdier buildings had no visible damage other than some cracked walls was surprising.

“Maybe because they didn’t have access to wood in general, they had to develop ways to use stone without wooden braces or beams, so there was no wood in the ceilings to rot away,” Noah mused to himself as he made notes. The doorways and windows were empty, which seemed to indicate the doors were made of wood or some other material that had disappeared. There was enough broken glass - thick and smoky - in the larger buildings to indicate at least some of the windows were covered.

What there wasn’t was much of anything else.

The reports he had read certainly did not understate it - there was essentially nothing in any of the buildings Noah entered. No scraps of rotting wooden furniture, no remnants of fabrics, no personal effects or metal utensils. One building had seemed to be a business of some sort, and it had one wall where the stone had been formed into rows of small alcoves, storage for bottles or jars perhaps. And another wall had some stone bits jutting out, probably to place shelves, but the room was empty except for a thick layer of dust and blown soil. Some weeds grew in the cracks of the floor where they received sunlight through the empty window frame.

It was truly eerie. Something about it struck him as disturbing, even as he told himself that it perhaps meant that whatever compelled the citizens of this city to leave it seemed they had done it carefully over time. No panicked evacuation, no epic battle to leave skeletons bleaching in the sun, unless some future visitors to the city had carefully cleaned everything up but left the homes and businesses totally untouched.

Walking back out into the street, Noah sketched the layout of the roads in his book. The map he had found from a previous treasure hunt/research dig told him the things he was looking for were almost certainly in the large civic buildings to the north west of the river. He could see a few slender spires in the distance, but he wanted to work his way there rather than rush to the center only to find out he had to backtrack and search properly anyway.

Noah looked around carefully, checking down every street. The way forward was blocked by rubble from a wholly collapsed building, so rather than climb over it he went down a side lane and worked his way around it by passing through a courtyard. The buildings surrounding the courtyard had many windows and balconies overlooking the space, and the grasses, weeds and small trees that grew there in the early summer sun hinted at how the communal garden area must have looked in the past.

Nothing moved but the wind, kicking up dust and rustling the plants.

OK, time to get moving.

Quickly covering ground, Noah scanned the neighborhood as he passed. The buildings were of a type with what he had seen already, although there were more with decorative coloured stone and more ornate flourishes. After a couple of blocks, the road he was on met with some others in an open space around a half-collapsed tower.

The round tower looked, at first blush, like the sort of defensive structure you’d see in a fort or castle. The half that was fallen revealed that the interior seemed to be mostly a staircase along the interior and the inner columns of support. Instead of arrow slits, there were oval and round openings spaced irregularly across the remaining surface, too many for windows. The roof looked to have some strange man-sized statues, but Noah did not fancy going up and checking - the whole thing looked like a bird landing on it might be enough to knock the rest of the tower down.

His heart was beating hard in his chest as Noah sketched the tower and streets, comparing it to the map he had found. He took a deep breath and then moved a block to the west, and saw the first pillar, exactly where he expected it.

The city was built around these columns - this one was a row of a dozen small towers arranged in a line pointing almost but not exactly to the west. Noah had a small astrolabe in his pack, and a sextant in his camp supplies, and could use either to confirm the cardinal directions as used by people on this continent. But he didn’t bother, he knew that Captain Amaruq or Hannah could tell him that based on the sun and stars the row of towers were 2 to 3 degrees off the line from true East-West.

He also knew that any modern sailor would be wrong, and the people who erected these monoliths were more accurate. They had just seen deeper than the rotation of the planet and lines on a globe and were more interested in a larger view than basically anyone else had for centuries.

These structures had a small room at their base. The towers rose about 30 feet into the air, and the small door inside faced a seemingly random direction. But a small hole above the door let in the sunlight, and Noah could see faint carving on the interior wall where the sun would track.

The next tower had the small opening facing a different direction and would presumably show the path of the sun on a different series of markings to indicate something else. The tower after that was collapsed, but Noah could see there were 9 of these towers in all.

As he moved, he could see the large hill, now about a mile away. It loomed over this part of the city, with governmental or religious buildings surrounding it. A large domed building was built on the hill, with a cluster of narrow towers around it.

Closer now, Noah **** himself to slow down, to look at his surroundings. To the south, a wide road led in a straight line to the base of the hilltop facility. Two lines of obelisks bordered the road, unevenly spaced but all seemingly the same height. At the bottom of every obelisk a semi-circle of knee-high stones stood, again clearly marking the sun’s position. Interestingly, the farther obelisks were carved square columns with sturdy bases, but the closer to the dome on the hill you got the rougher they became. The first few in each row that Noah could see looked more like menhirs - large upright standing stones, still retaining the oblong shape of the original boulder.

They all led to the dome. To the observatory, so Noah followed them.

The paths up the hill were steep and many had loose rocks partially blocking them. The inhabitants of this city constructed their buildings to last, but the statues that lined the pathways had not been as sturdy and most had fallen.

He had been travelling through the city for a couple of hours now, and the sun was just past its peak. In the heat, Noah decided to save his energy and clambered up the path slowly, getting dusty and sweaty but pausing frequently to catch his breath and take a swallow of water.

From here, Noah could see more of the large structure. The domed roof had seemed to be pockmarked with holes, but now he could see they appeared to be deliberate openings. The narrow towers and pillars had notches in them, presumably to make marking stars or the sun inside the building easier.

The interior of the dome was cluttered with debris. Some of the upper levels had begun to crumble, but Noah skipped past toward the still open space in the center. Kneeling, Noah wiped some dust to see a line carved into the floor, along with a series of small indentations.

“I wonder if you’d have a staff, put it in the right indentation on the floor and then you’d look through…” lifting his head, Noah could see some of the openings in the wall and ceiling above. “Yeah, you’d mark the sun. Or the stars, I guess. But why? You’d already know where they were, this whole building tells you where the sun is going to be any day of the year, any year. So why bother checking? Just because you can? Maybe some religious significance, or it impressed the locals?”

His voice echoed in the still air. The silence pressed back, the dust he had kicked up drifting in the shafts of sunlight. Clearing his throat, Noah called “Hello!” and listened for his echo. It was muted, but his voice bounced off the dome high above his head and rained down on him.

“This whole city is designed to tell time. But, again, why? It was like they wanted to check their math, but they had to know the answer before they laid the first stone. They already knew how to tell time, even better than people elsewhere in Tembina do now I bet. So why go through all this effort?”

Noah walked over to a small alcove, looking at a series of curved lines carved into the stone. Images of stars were carved along the lines, and Noah had no doubt the concentric lines were astronomically accurate.

To himself, he said, “So they built a city to study the passage of time, or confirm something about it, even though they knew as much as anyone around does to this day. Then they left, but on their own terms. Did they find what they were looking for?”

“They did.”

Noah hadn’t heard a thing, which was all kinds of alarming for a man who prided himself on his awareness.

The voice came from the darkened alcove ten paces away, the dry rasp of an older man. As Noah jumped and spun around, his heart pounding, a shape moved.

The figure walked out of the shadows, his hands clasped behind his back. Taller than Noah, he took a slow step. Long silver-grey hair pulled back, and at first Noah assumed he was still half hidden in the dark. But as he stopped Noah could see his skin was a light blue that looked grey in the dim light. As the newcomer stared at the man in front of him, Noah saw his eyes emit a faint red glow.

The dull red eyes of the Ubyr flickered over Noah, then away as if suddenly disinterested.

His voice was dry as paper, his accent soft but unusual. He said, “So, my loud human, you are here alone? How strange. Well, since you asked an intelligent question, the least I can do is answer it. The inhabitants of this city did find the answer they sought, then they left. Sadly, you won’t enjoy this knowledge for very long.”

Unhurried, the Ubyr brought his hands forward, a slender sword held easily in his right.

“But if you prefer, I can let you live for a few minutes, to enjoy your final epiphany.”