Back to The Book of Ninety and Nine Doomed Cities
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Long ago, say the great-souled ones of the hradar, when the Soulless Ones were at the noon-height of their power, when their magics were uncorrupted and their cities thronged with strong-limbed warriors, they came in force to the southern lands of Gharmor, where the river Hezreel falls in a single mighty cataract to the basin of Oqhoz. They found a height there that looked down upon the only place for ninety leagues where the Hezreel may be safely crossed in flood, and with their magics established for themselves a city, such as they dwell in their home lands of Dhomin. All the things of Dhomin were transported there - trees to fill it with shade, white stone of the Edalgund to build their holy houses, girl slaves and boy slaves, silver fish, magicians, and red and yellow jessamine birds.
The chronicles of Dhomin say that Lord Sacavar, who had been made to lead this force, or be beheaded for certain crimes, came to that place with his last three nines of men out of many hundreds. He climbed to the top of the great knob of bare rock the hradar called Garruk-Garruk, and looked out on the land below. To the west he saw the Hezreel spilling itself out across the great basin of Oqhoz, and the shimmering vast of the dead Seas; to the east was the great cataract, and stretching away to north and south into the nlue haze was the escarpment, which his party had climbed down so laboriously. “This will do,” he said, planting his staff on the summit of the bald hill. “From here, men will survey empires”. When Acazarund was full built there was a statue of carnelian set in that place, four times as tall as a man, that was said to be of Lord Sacavar planting his staff, and on its base was graven this prophecy. For a thousand years men looked out from Acazarund over an empire of the south, a fit land for heroes far from the will of the Emperors of Dhomin in the distant north. Hunters of dragons, raiders of ancient tombs, warriors and judges who brought the Emperor’s law to the distant ergs and canyons of the lizard men; their statues joined Lord Sacavars, amid a garden of perelanda and carnithine lotus. For a thousand years the ones the hradar call the Soulless Ones dwelt in Acazarund, and it was one of the richest of their cities, for through it all the trahs of the south passed on its way to distant lands. In those days there were many places where trahs could be dug, in Oqhoz and Gharmor and the lands of the Zuugmen Tsuugh, and in a day a few nines of slaves could dig enough of the incense to buy a palace in the lands beyond the mountains. Very many were the adventurers of Dhomin who grew wealthy in Acazarund, and much more numerous the slaves who died in the deserts. The slaves of Dhomin died quickly in that country, with its cold nights and strange illnesses borne on the salt wind, so to replace them the Lords of Acazarund took to hunting the wild hradar of the deserts, and enslaving them to dig the trahs. All the southlands were swept clean of the wild hradar, and further and further afield the slavers roamed, and many forts and prisons and roads were built in wildernesses utterly barren.
The men of Acazarund would have done well to remember the command of the Prophet: “Forgive no man’s injustice.” Time and Chance obey this command, if men do not, for the injustice of Acazarund has not been forgiven. Once again Acazarund is a waste place, shunned by the hradar of the deserts, and to speak of visiting its ruins is to speak as a figure from a legend, a thing risen up out of forgotten years. The mines of trahs that could be dug with ease were exhausted, and then those which could be dug with great feats of earthworking, and lines of supply a season long. With no trahs, with no dnari pearls, there was no more need for slaves, nor for slavers, nor a hundredth part of those who had fed and clothed them. The Lords of Acazarund had always sent their youth to Dhomin to be educated in the ancient cities, and held these cities in their memory, deeper and nobler than Acazarund, and surrounded by dozens of their kind. The Lords had no kinship with the alien sights beyond their walls, the cataract and rushing waters of summer, and the glassy plain stretching to the ends of vision; they did not care for the salt winds, nor the biting cold of winter that not even the magic of the old sorcerors could keep from the heart of the cities. So they returned to Nombrigund, or Sifugan, or Merafigund of Many Pillars - whichever city they had been schooled in. And following them, the soldiers and the caravan drivers, the gardeners and the wine merchants and the carvers of stone. At the end the emperors of Dhomin kept only a little garrison in Acazarund, among the empty palaces and overgrown gardens, so that they might truly style themselves overlords of all the lands that lay within the Great Ranges.
There were many gates of Acazarund, and the garrison that was left was small, too few to man them all when the Black Huntress came up the bald hill an hour before midnight with ninety nines of desert hradar. She was a hradara of the Gharmori, and she came in the season of Hul, when the cold keeps sentries longer at their oil burners than pacing the walltops; it is said her spears were tipped with thaigar horns, and she is remembered as little less than a God by the Gharmori. Kserivere of Vir Corundum, who was little more than a boy, was last mage-tender and last hero of Acazaund. Rather than let the city-forge fall to the hradar, he destroyed it, and himself with it. There is a little memorial to him in Vir Corundum, a stone pillar in a garden in a suburb of his native city. I have seen it, and touched it with my own hands.
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