He had expected them to come in under the cover of darkness. He certainly wasn’t inconspicuous. However, he walked out into full sunlight for the first time in months. Above him, the sky was so blue it hurt, and below, diamond daggers of light lit the water as if someone had scattered broken glass. The deck only moved slightly as Nate blinked at the glare. It took several minutes for his vision to adjust enough for him to see Zorion. Blinking tears from his eyes, it became clear why no one was overly worried about being seen. The ship had lowered sail and set anchor about three or four miles down a marshy coast from the city. South of them, dominating a massive bay, squatted a city as imposing as Manhome. Black stone walls held in buildings that piled around the shoulders of a single massive ziggurat like an architectural landslide. At this distance, and half blinded by sunlight, Nate had no decent sense of scale until he realized the black specks of flotsam he saw bobbing in the waters of the bay were ships five to ten times the size of the vessel he stood on.
