Nightlord: Shadows Read Online Free Page A

mountain was my mountain; I woke up feeling it all around me. So, with that as a given, I wondered why it didn’t look like my mountain. The whole thing was covered in what looked like sculpture of buildings—not a single brick or mortared wall, but buildings that looked carved out of the mountain like a scrimshaw town carved out of whalebone.
    The mountain was also much, much broader than I recalled. The center dropped sharply, then curved outward, flattening drastically as it did so into a very slight slope for a little over two miles before hitting an outer wall. It reminded me of some of the more extreme diagrams drawn of spacetime distortion, or maybe a distorted Cissoid of Diocles. Beyond the wall was a wide stretch of water—a hundred yards, perhaps?—that would easily be a lake if it didn’t have a bloody huge mountain taking up most of it.
    Make that “bloody huge city .”
    While these changes were unexpected, possibly startling, definitely disconcerting, I still felt at home. Someone rearranged the furniture in my house, replaced the carpet, and put in new curtains, but it’s still my home. The worst change was the location of the mountain; not only did they remodel, they moved it! It wasn’t in the Eastrange, although there was a suspiciously mountain-shaped bite taken out of the near edge of the Eastrange and a flattened area from there to here. A canal ran westward, down the middle of it, bordered on both sides by a paved road.
    I didn’t move it. I know I didn’t. I can do some amazing things, but mountain-moving takes effort, and I’m usually lazy. I’d remember. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was… familiar. Not exactly a sense of déjà vu, just a sense of something I ought to remember.
    The main door faced north, so I was on the northern part of the wall. I made a circuit of the whole upper courtyard, all the way around the mountain, just to look out over everything. Something seemed familiar about it all…
    Four stone-lined channels ran away from the lake, or moat, or whatever—I think I’m going to call it a moat—each with broad, flat roads running along both sides. One set of canals and roads headed into the Eastrange, right into the gap left behind by my apparently-mobile mountain. Another ran north, roughly parallel to the mountains. Another headed east, into the plains, cutting through the rolling hills. The last headed almost due south, toward the ocean; that one might angle slightly westward. Arched stone bridges crossed each of them, one over each canal, about a quarter-mile from the shore of the moat.
    “Oh, those canals,” I noted. The water level looked about a foot lower than the lip of the canal, at least locally; I had no idea how deep it was. They were about thirty feet wide or so, a very effective barrier to something that looked much like a long-legged buffalo with curling horns like oversized rams. The nearest group of the shaggy things was, possibly, fifteen miles away to the southwest. Dazhu , hmm? Well, now I know what to call them. The smell of them reached me even miles away and a couple thousand feet up. Was that from the intensity of their smell, or just my hyper-acute senses?
    A long, straight stone bridge crossed the lake-moat in a line to the southwest. It ran level over a series of wide arches—suitable for barges to row under, perhaps—until it reached the shore. There it made a long, shallow descent to the dirt. This looked like the only connection between the city and the mainland. It was quite wide, something over fifty feet, with a low divider to form two lanes for traffic. It looked like both ends of a one-way street; traffic entered the bridge in one lane and probably followed the road around to the only obvious city gate, a giant pivot-door on the northeast of the city wall, between the one o’clock and two o’clock position.
    Looking at it, I wondered if it saw much traffic. It certainly seemed needlessly awkward for a pedestrian; the