Forgotten Suns Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t
even trying to keep up. He was smart. Aisha was completely crazy: she sent
Jinni after Lilith.
    Nobody died. Nobody fell, either. They slowed down when they
were neck and neck, cantering along the bank. Aisha was breathing harder than
Jinni, but her grin stretched from ear to ear.
    Without saying a word, they curved around together and
settled to a walk. Jamal had picked his way down the hill before he speeded up
daringly to a trot. His expression was thunderous.
    Aisha laughed at it, which only made it worse. She tossed
him a coil of hook and line. “Let’s go fishing,” she said.
    Jamal was much better at fishing than he was at riding. Rama
was about the same at both. Aisha wasn’t patient enough, but she had been using
it as an exercise, and she actually caught two fish to the others’ half-dozen
apiece.
    With fish on strings and horses and riders lazy and smiling,
they made their leisurely way back to the house. Aisha deliberately went a
different way, farther along the river where the bank went up in terraces. The
top had the best view of the city that Aisha knew: it was high enough to see
most of the excavations and a good part of the rest, clear across to the old
riverbed and the cliff.
    She was ready to explain to Rama how her parents liked to
come out here and plot the work for a new season, but when she opened her mouth
to begin, something stopped her.
    He sat perfectly still on Lilith’s back. Aisha had seen
effigies on tombs that looked more alive than he did then.
    She looked where he was looking. There was nothing new or
different there. Just trenches and markers, the market square with the
colonnade that they had spent two seasons digging out, the round temple on its
low hill, and a great deal of grass and ruins. They could dig for decades,
Mother said, and barely begin to uncover it all.
    He could see it. Not everybody could. He saw what was there,
and what must have been there before time and weather broke it down.
    “It’s gone,” he said. He was speaking Old Language, which he
hadn’t done since he came out of his fever. “All of it, gone. Even—”
    His eyes lifted. They fixed on the cliff and its broken top.
“Even that? But how—?”
    “That’s my fault,” Aisha said. It was a bad idea, maybe, but
she had to say it. “The rest of it, nobody knows.”
    “How can no one know? Where is everyone? What happened to
the people?”
    “That’s the mystery,” she said. “The planet’s empty. It’s
all ruins.”
    “All of it?”
    “The whole planet,” she said. “We’ve scanned it all.”
    “How long?”
    “Five thousand planet years. A bit more than that in Earth
years.”
    “Five thousand years.” It seemed to be more than his mind
could take in. “They all went away? Where? Why?”
    “We don’t know,” said Aisha. “This planet is at the top of
all the Most Mysterious lists.”
    “They must have left something. Some word.”
    “We can’t read their writing,” she said. “Even if we could,
I don’t think we’d find anything. They took out all the statues and the
paintings. Every likeness of a human, and most of their animals. Smashed them
or wiped them out. Completely destroyed them. We can guess what they looked
like, but nobody can be sure. It’s as if they wanted to keep someone, or
something, from ever recognizing them.”
    He sucked in a breath. “No. No, they can’t have been that
afraid of—”
    “Whatever it was, they can’t have liked it much.”
    His fists were clenched on the pommel of Lilith’s saddle.
Aisha watched him get his breathing under control. “To keep something from
recognizing them. That would be something that had never seen them. Not—”
    “That’s what I think,” she said. “There are all kinds of
theories. But if it already knew them, why hide? Even if it was so awful the
whole population had to run away, what would be the point in covering up what
they were?”
    “Yes,” he said. Then: “There are books