Archangel’s Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(77)
Author: Nalini Singh

Her wings brushed the coarse stone of a building as she managed to shift her trajectory enough that she missed the roof and fell into the gap between two of the graceful gray structures. It gave her enough time to stabilize and get herself back up into the sky. She more than half expected Raphael to be furious with her for her defiance, but when she reached him, he was staring down at the city, his wet hair shoved off his face.

“What is it?” she asked, thrusting a hand through her own hair … and realizing that no storm raged here. Rain lashed with unremitting force against the shield, but inside, the whole area was bathed in a golden light that almost succeeded in softening the stark edges of the buildings. “It needs flowers,” she found herself saying. “It doesn’t look quite right.” Unable to hold the hover, she made a controlled descent onto the roof she’d almost crashed into only a minute ago.

Raphael followed her down with far more grace. “It was once overrun with them.”

“With what?”

“Flowers.”

Walking to the edge of the roof, she looked down and saw an amazing array of carvings on the wall of the opposite building, the stone sparkling with hidden flecks of color that would turn this city into a brilliantly cut diamond in sunlight. Her heart slammed against her ribs. “What is this place?”

“The jewel in my mother’s crown. Though it is far from where it should be.”

“You know, most archaeologists believe Amanat never existed,” she said, staggered by the awareness of just how much power it would’ve taken to not only disappear, but move an entire city. “That it’s nothing more than a legend.”

A faint smile on Raphael’s face that didn’t reach his eyes. “I wonder at human archaeologists who do not speak to those of us who lived in these times of legend.”

Elena snorted. “As if any of you angels would answer their questions.”

You know us too well, Elena. Light words, but the way he stood, the way he looked at this strange city of stone and shadow, it spoke of lethal alertness.

Her own guard up, she continued to scan the area for any sign of Illium. They stood on one roof, but other roofs stacked up to her right, lodged directly into the mountains, as if they’d been carved out of rock, had stood there for centuries. Which was impossible. Except of course, she was dealing with an immortal of such power that she scared Lijuan.

And that scared the bejesus out of Elena. “Illium?”

“He’s dropping in and out of consciousness, but I can sense him.” Stepping off the roof, he flew down to the ground with a grace and strength that made her wonder what he’d become in another thousand years. Something extraordinary, of that she was certain. Unless . . . whatever it was that their relationship was doing to him ended up stealing his immortal life.

No. She repudiated the thought as her own feet touched the ground but knew it wasn’t a truth she could ignore.

“What do you see, Guild Hunter?”

For a moment, she thought he’d guessed the direction of her thoughts, but then she followed his gaze. This lost city, its stone walls carved with ethereal, delicate art she recognized as so ancient as to have no modern equivalent, slumbered around them, an elegant lady perfectly preserved. “It should be crumbling into pieces, but everything’s …”

“As if the city is simply sleeping through a long night,” Raphael murmured.

Elena nodded. “Yeah.” Followed the thought through to its logical conclusion. “Raphael, what happened to the people who lived in Amanat at the time it went to sleep?”

Without discussion, they walked through the first doorway wide enough to accommodate wings, and found themselves in some sort of a temple full of light despite being carved into a mountainside. Elena didn’t know what she’d expected to see, but it wasn’t what they found.

32

They lay in peaceful repose, small groups of women curved around each other, faint smiles on their faces, as if they were having the most pleasant of dreams. “My God.” Stunned, she kept watch as Raphael walked across the stone floor inlaid with precious gems of sparkling fire and dazzling brilliance, his wings leaving droplets of water in their wake.

When he bent to touch his fingers to the neck of a maiden—the word fit better than any other given the woman’s gauzy, flowing garment of softest peach, her tumble of curls laced with ribbon—who lay in graceful repose on a silk cushion of gold-shot ivory, she walked to join him.

“We’re right below the dais,” she murmured.

Because that dais was set only a few feet above the rest of the floor, coming to just below her br**sts, she could see across the sweeping breadth of it, see, too, the square of stone that was a different color from the rest. It was, she knew without being told, the place where the statue of a goddess—not a god, not in this place that sang of feminine power—had once stood.

“She is warm.” Raphael rose to his feet. “The Cadre of my mother’s time was wrong—she took her people into Sleep, not into death.”

Elena shoved her hands through hair that was frizzy with damp. “Raphael, this kind of power . . .”

“Yes.” Walking up the steps cut into the side of the dais and to the empty space she’d already noted, he stared down at the square imprint. “The populace of Amanat once had their own gods and goddesses, but when Caliane claimed it as her home, they became her people, their devotion complete.”

“Did she sing them to that devotion?” Elena asked, able to hear the soft breaths of the sleepers now that she was listening for it. It raised the hairs on the back of her neck and nothing was going to get those hairs to go back down—not until they were out of the unnatural grasp of this city frozen in time.

Raphael shook his head. “No. Amanat was hers from long before I was born.”

Elena thought of all she’d read about Caliane in the history texts, all Raphael had told her, remembered, too, that his mother had been called the Archangel of Grace, of Beauty. “The love always went in both directions.”

“Yes.” Crouching down, he touched his fingers to the square of stone that spoke of absence. “Illium.”

Elena began to circle the stone walls below the dais, searching for an entrance. Nothing, the gray walls seamless. Then . . . a tiny blue feather lying at her feet. Illium. Tucking the feather into a pocket, she focused on the wall directly in front of where she’d found it. She felt nothing under her palms on the first pass. Or the second. But on the third . . . “Raphael, I think there might be a seam here.”