In the Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page A

rose as the morning progressed, but the day remained hazy and dim and the heavens had a glowering sheen. Every sound was muffled by the constant hiss of ash and the layer of soot and mud blanketing the damp ground. It was cool, yet clammy, and the long walk exhausted them and their horses alike.
    “Is it the end of the world, my lord pr—Your Majesty?” Lewenhardt whispered.
    “If it is the end, then why are we not dead? Nay, Lewenhardt, it is as it seems. A terrible cataclysm has overtaken us. We may yet survive if we keep our wits about us, and if we hold together.”
    Duke Burchard drew the Circle of Unity at his chest, but said nothing. The old man seemed too stunned to speak. He was not alone in this. For every soldier who exclaimed out loud at the scorched forest and the marks of the recent flood there were four or five who gaped at the devastation as though they had, indeed, lost their wits.
    “I dislike this, Your Majesty,” said Fulk. “What if the sea returns?”
    “We must see. Besides Queen Adelheid, we must seek out those who survived and hid until daybreak. Liutgard said many of the Aostans marched west along the coast. What of them?”
    Pools of salty water filled the ruts in the road, and a gloomy vista awaited them when at last they emerged from the trees and gazed through the swirling ash that obscured the bay of Estriana, half a league away. The plain looked strangely scumbled, strewn with debris. He could not mark the field where the battle had been fought or the line oftheir retreat because branches and corpses and planks from wagons and all manner of flotsam lay tumbled everywhere. He saw no life at all in the distant town.
    “You are sure?” he asked Duke Burchard. “You left Queen Adelheid behind in Estriana?”
    The old man’s voice was more like a croak. “So I did, Your Majesty. She held a reserve behind the walls in case of disaster. It was already agreed that she would remain in the tower rather than sortie out. She is a strategist, Your Majesty, not a soldier.”
    “So she is,” agreed Sanglant, “if she yet lives. I walked right into the ambush she and Henry laid between them.”
    Burchard shook his head impatiently. “We saw well enough what trap Henry fell into. The daimone with which Presbyter Hugh ensorcelled him spoke his words and moved his limbs according to the presbyter’s command. Henry did not speak. That plan was the queen’s alone.”
    “She is a formidable opponent, then. What do we do with her now?”
    Staring across the plain toward the Middle Sea, Burchard wept softly. “Perhaps bury her?”
    The pall of dust hid the waters, which seemed, impossibly, at low tide, drawn far back across tidal flats.
    “Ai, God!” cried Lewenhardt, who possessed the sharpest gaze among them, able to pierce the haze. “Look!”
    The water was rising swiftly. It swelled at the mouth of the bay into a monstrous wave that crested into a wall of foaming white. The wave surged forward across the bay and smashed down onto the town and the shoreline, engulfing it and inundating the land. The water rose up and up, still climbing as it flooded the plain.
    “Run!”
    The others turned and fled. Sanglant could not bring himself to move. He could not
quite
believe, despite the evidence of his eyes, that the sea could rise so fast and run so far. The whiter crest that battered the town dissipated quickly, subsumed in the vast tidal swell that rolled inland across the plain. Fest snorted and shied, and he reined him in, turning in a complete circle before the horse settled, uneasy and in protest but holding fast.
    “My lord prince!” cried Captain Fulk, returning in haste to rein up beside him. “We’ll be drowned. You must come!”
    The tide lapped to its highest extent a stone’s toss from Fest, not even reaching the outlying trees of the forest, and sucked hissing and burbling back into the sea. All that lay strewn over the plain from the first surge rushed outward with it. Even