Chapter 4

      It was like a child’s toy, Mahmett thought, this city so empty and so devoid of life. Squawking birds circled overhead and occasionally the bark of a wandering pye-dog or the meow of a cat might be heard. But the animals kept their distance, avoiding the place the way they might avoid fire, some instinct they chose not to challenge.

       Mahmett was here for two reasons: a city that was empty inevitably contained untold riches. Even more inevitably, he wanted to impress a woman. But now, walking through the echoing streets with his brother Yasseft and his cousin Panenk at his side, Mahmett wondered just how far he would need to go to find one and hence achieve the indulgence of the other.

       “People have died poking around there. There are easier ways to get a woman to notice you,” Panenk had berated before they had set off for the strange city.

       “But this will prove to her that I am brave,” Mahmett insisted.

       “And if you die, then what will you have proved?” Panenk asked. “Better just to buy a trinket in the market and then tell Jasmine that you went to the city and got it there.”

       “But I will know,” Mahmett had argued with all the naivety and conviction of youth.

       “And so will I, and so will Yasseft,” Panenk had said, “but at least we’ll be alive.”

       But Mahmett wouldn’t hear of it. So now all three of them wandered through the eerily silent streets that shone a creamy white in the sunlight, feeling cold despite the warmth of the afternoon. The city itself had not been here six months ago. It had appeared, like the ruins of some ancient civilization washed up on the shores of a dream. Mahmett had recalled the stories he had heard of America, where a terrible cataclysm had befallen a great society leaving only the Deathlands, where scattered monuments waited for brave explorers to make their fortunes. That had been more than a century ago, but the myth prevailed, the same myth of lost treasure that had been told over and over since the dawn of language.

       The city itself was empty. Everything was made of the same substance, a chalky stonelike stuff that slowly crumbled to dust beneath the sun, the streets and buildings and channeled drains all molded from the same. Bisected by the Euphrates, a confusion of spires and domes climbing toward the sky, interior courtyards and ugly, misshapen towers lunging forth as if vying for space among the narrow, alleylike streets. Those claustrophobic streets wound on themselves like string, doubling back as often as not; narrowing and bloating like a series of valves and pipes. Here and there clear water swished along the sides of the streets in drainage channels, reflecting the sun in bright flashes like lightning under glass.

       People had gone missing here, traders and settlers, young and old. No one had explored the place and come back to tell of their findings. Mahmett half expected to find the place full of bones, the remnants of the dead, lost perhaps in the labyrinthine streets and alleyways of the dream. And yet there was nothing, no sign of people, no litter or damage. No footprints or scrapings. No trail of string.

       If this was the labyrinth, then no monster came to greet them even as they neared the center; instead it remained obstinately silent, just the cawing of the birds and the raindrop pitter-patter of beating insect wings as they navigated by the sun. The insects didn’t stop—why would they? Nothing lived here, nothing rotted or discarded, so nothing remained to make them stay.

       The three young men had trekked for hours, and Yasseft regaled them with stories of his own womanizing. Yasseft was older than Mahmett and Panenk, and his exploits seemed a thing of wonder to the younger men. They egged him on, assuring each other of what they would have done in the same situation, of how they would satisfy flocks of maidens. It was nonsense, of course, but it was only natural that the young men would choose to dream when walking within a place that seemed plucked from one.

       They turned a corner, and up ahead they saw a great saurian head looming over them like some dinosaur from another era, its reptilian smile indulgently benign. The thing had narrow eyes that shone with a faint trace of fire red in the blazing afternoon sun as it glared at them from its high arching neck. For a moment all three men took it to be alive, and they reared back in fear, as if the thing might snap down on that thick neck, the flat arrowlike head reaching toward them down the length of bone-white street. But it did not. It merely waited there, serene in its majesty, a lizard sovereign waiting for who knew what.

       “Is it a statue?” Mahmett asked, not daring to look away.

       Yasseft studied the head where it loomed high above them like a cloud, blotting the sun where it waited. He estimated that the head was at least as large as a toolshed; perhaps even larger, like the house of newlyweds.

       “I don’t like it,” Panenk finally said, breaking the silence that Mahmett’s brother had left.

       “Who made it?” Yasseft said aloud, knowing neither of his companions could supply the answer.

       “Six months ago, this whole region was empty,” Panenk reminded them. “This place came to life…” He stopped, embarrassed and scared by his unfortunate choice of words.

       “There’s no life here,” Yasseft stated firmly, as if to reassure himself. “Nothing. Not even death. It’s empty.”

       “But people have searched,” Panenk said. “People have looked and they have never come back. There are things, man-made things…”

       Yasseft fixed him with his stare. “What things?”

       “My grandfather spoke of his time with the army,” Panenk said. “He saw things that had been made. Not just to hurt people, but to change landscapes. Perhaps this is one of those things.”

       He turned to Mahmett, asking the lad’s opinion but the boy didn’t answer.

       Though silent, Mahmett had doubled over, his arms wrapped around his stomach.

       “Hey, Mahmett,” Panenk urged. “Hey, what’s up with you?”

       Mahmett looked up when he heard his name, and Panenk saw the way he ground his teeth, the fearful look in his wide eyes. If he had tried to speak, no words had come out.

       “Yasseft,” Panenk hissed. “Your brother…”

       Hearing the edge to Panenk’s tone, Yasseft turned his attention reluctantly from the dragon’s head at the end of the street and checked on his younger sibling. Mahmett clutched at his stomach as if trying to hold his intestines in place, and sweat beaded on his forehead like cooking oil. “What is it? Something you ate before?” Yasseft asked.

       Mahmett shook his head, the movements jagged and abrupt as if he couldn’t stand to do so for long. “S-something inside…me!”

       As he spoke this last, his mouth opened and a torrent of water rushed up his throat and past his teeth, splashing on the ground in a rapidly forming puddle.