Read Online 04c Dreams of Fire and Gods: Gods by James Erich - Free Book Online

people when they entered Harleh, like something out of one of the fanciful folktales he’d heard as a child. But no, that couldn’t be true. Some of the vek ’s men claimed to have gone into Harleh and returned, and even if they were lying, Seirit and Unid were proof that some were unaffected by the mist.
    Gonim rested and allowed Unid to fuss over him a short time. Then he lied to her about feeling better so they could start moving again. “As soon as we get to Harleh,” he assured her, “I’ll go to the temple. They’ll have healers there.”
    Whether that was true, he had yet to discover. The ömem in Harleh might very well be refusing their services, as those in Worlen were.
    The dizziness wasn’t so bad he couldn’t walk, but he was grateful when Seirit dug out a spare walking stick from the cart and handed it to him. The old man and his wife were using walking sticks of their own.
    Walking became easier for all of them where the road leveled out onto what had once been the plain. The forest that loomed on either side was still unsettling, however, so Unid attempted to keep up a steady stream of banter to distract them, chatting with her husband about the last time they’d visited Döv and Inokh and how little the children had been at the time. Occasionally, she asked Gonim polite questions about his life at the temple. Much of a caedan ’s—or a tadu ’s—life was kept secret from the uninitiated, but Gonim was happy to answer what questions he could.
    It was late in the day when they came to the edge of the forest and found Harleh before them, its massive circular outer wall looming high over their heads. But their sense of relief at having reached their destination was immediately muted by the sight of the pavilions. They were the type of pavilions often set up near a battlefield, where wounded soldiers could be tended by ömem and their assistants, but there were so many of them that they surrounded the keep, and each seemed to contain hundreds of soldiers.
    “Imen have mercy!” Unid gasped, when she saw them.
    Rumors had reached Worlen of the emperor’s army laying siege to Harleh. Were these soldiers from that battle? It had been weeks ago. Could there still be so many wounded? Gonim could see that many of them wore the emperor’s colors—in fact, all of them appeared to. Normally, when enemy soldiers were captured, they might have their wounds attended to, but they were then returned to the enemy encampment, if they weren’t healthy enough to be kept with the soldiers being ransomed. This was considered both honorable and practical. An army rarely had the resources to care for soldiers not its own.
    As he and his companions followed the road through the center of the pavilions, Gonim saw Harleh soldiers standing guard in the pavilions and women who appeared to be nurses, but his suspicion appeared to be correct. There were no ömem among them.
    The soldiers standing guard merely nodded at them as they passed, and soon the road curved around to the west gate of the city. Here a small village nestled against the outer wall, houses and shops lining both sides of the road before it passed through the gate.
    “This doesn’t bode well,” Seirit muttered under his breath. He was looking at the squatter’s camp on the outer edge of the village—hundreds of tents and lean-tos where people were huddling near open campfires and preparing their evening meals.
    The gate into the city was heavily guarded and, as they approached, one of the men stepped forward to greet them with a stern look on his face. “Do you have a pass?”
    “A pass?” Gonim asked.
    “Without a pass, I can’t let you go inside the wall. You’ll have to camp outside.”
    Unid gave out a faint cry of dismay, and Seirit placed a protective arm around her shoulders. “We have family inside,” the old man insisted.
    “I’m sorry, grandfather, but we’re overrun. We already have people camping in the streets in there. It