by James Derry
Groundbreakers
– Book 2 –
RELICS OF
THE DESERT TOMB
Map
Prologue
I request of thee, oh faithful reader, to picture a scene. A subterranean tomb. A necropolis moldering under a haze of smoke. The hellish glow of ceaseless flames. The stench of burning flesh. Imagine, dear reader, that this is where we find our heroes.
Sygne and Jamal were brought together by dumb luck and dumber plans. Then they were torn apart by the machinations of gods. Now they find themselves reunited—only to face the fate of being torn apart again. I mean literally. Limb from limb.
Jamal squeezes the hilt of his sword. Gaunt figures emerge from the smoke. Their eyes are empty white orbs. Their mouths are frozen in lipless snarls. Their skin is charred—drawn tight over bones that have blackened and petrified.
How did our heroes find themselves in this dire predicament? To answer that question we must journey back to happier times. One might think the journey takes us too far back. But happier times can be hard to find in the so-called Golden Empires of Embhra; especially when magic runs rampant across the world. Especially when its path veers ever so slowly toward certain doom…
1 – The Fleshpots of Sarthoon
Jamal awoke to find himself wedged into the prow of a small boat. The Fecund Mermaid skimmed the edge of the Slumbering Sea, just beyond the point where the waves rolled over each other like lovers stirring under silk sheets. Jamal took a moment to enjoy the salt air—and the way the sunlight played across the water in tiny diamond sparkles.
The dinghy was swiftly approaching a port town on a rugged coast. A thicket of black masts bobbed up and down in the bay.
“A-ho! The great ‘Singing Swordsman’ is finally awake!”
Jamal grinned at Jebrili, who was The Fecund Mermaid’s captain—and also, currently, her only other occupant. Jebrili’s cleanly shaven head gleamed brightly in the sun; his four golden incisors flashed brightly as well.
“Get up, will you?” the captain said. “You can help me string my own fine instrument.” The seafarer gestured to the rigging pulled tight around the dinghy’s small sail.
“What town is this?” Jamal asked.
“This is Sarthoon! The salted pearl of the blighted oyster bed that is the Ruffian Coast.”
“It doesn’t sound like a hotbed of poetic and melodic appreciation.”
“Oh, it’s not!” Jebrili chortled. “I’ve heard your music, ‘Singing Swordsman,’ and I believe you don’t need audiences with refined musical tastes. You need audiences that are too inebriated to have any taste left at all!”
It took them an hour to navigate the bay and establish a mooring. Jebrili wasted a good deal of time ‘deballasting’ the ship, which meant emptying the supply of wine that he kept in the Mermaid’s bilge. He did this by pouring the wine straight down his throat.
Jamal asked, “Shouldn’t you wait until we’re in a bar to start drinking?”
Jebrili belched and asked, “Have you ever heard the one about the drunk man who walked into a bar?”
“No. What happened?”
“He saved a lot of money on drinks!” The salty captain rocked back and forth with another bout of loud laughter.
They flagged down a skiff to take them to the shore. The entire slope of the beach was coated in black slime, like the filth of Sarthoon was oozing down to the sea. Broken oyster shells had been scattered over the slope, to keep people from slipping.
When they were in the city proper, Jamal tried to scrape the black grime from his fine leather sandals.
“This is an inauspicious beginning.”
“Don’t sorry, Wordsman,” Jebrili slurred. “I mean, don’t worry Swordsman. You’ll have a gig every night in Sarthoon. Especially in the fleshpots downtown!”
“Fleshpots? That sounds disgusting.”
“A-ho! They are.” Jebrili grinned as if that were a good thing. “You’ll soon see why indiscriminate travelers call Sarthoon the ‘Capital of Lice!’”
“Lice?”
“Sorry, Swordsman. I meant to say ‘Capital of Vice.’ Although in honesty, Sarthoon does have a severe pestilence problem. Which reminds me…” The captain pointed to his smooth scalp. “You should have shaved your head before we disembarked.”
Jamal set his jaw. “Thanks for the timely reminder.”
It was midmorning, and yet the streets of Sarthoon were already crammed thick with drunken revelers. Jamal eyed each man as he passed. Two months ago, he had found himself entangled in a murder plot involving a love goddess. Bliss, of the Fabled Pantheon of Issulthraq, had hundreds of thousands of followers, and Jamal often worried that Bliss might send one of those followers his way. A town like Sarthoon—hundreds of strangers from all over Embhra, all of ill-repute—would have been an excellent place to snip a loose end.
“I have to be honest, Captain, I’m not sure that Sarthoon will be the place for me.”
“Oh, that’s just talks nerving.” Jebrili belched so deeply that he had to struggle to keep from adding his own vomit to the vomit-spackled street. “Let’s get you to the nearest fleshpot. I’ll find you a fluffy woman to share a friendly bed with.”
“No. I’m not interested.”
“What kind of red-blooded man—an Ardhian no less—isn’t interested in a fluffy woman?”
Jamal decided to ignore the seafarer’s racist tone. He stepped close and spoke in a low voice. “Long ago I lost the part of me that is interested in such things.”
“Hmm. Mysterious.” The captain shrugged. “Well, more ladies for me then!”
They weaved their way down one more crowded street; then Jebrili led Jamal through a door that was covered with a stained, perfumed sheet.
“Welcome to Madame Efta’s!” Jebrili bellowed. The seafarer was greeted with squeals of joy. There were other men in the lobby of the brothel, but they were abandoned as every available courtesan hurried to surround Jebrili.
Jamal was pleasantly surprised. The women were not unattractive, which was a roundabout way of saying that only two of them wore eyepatches. The captain generously introduced Jamal, “This is the Singing Swordsman! He’s the greatest singer to have ever swung a sword, and to have come from Ardhia, and to be wearing orange silk pants currently in this brothel!”
The women swarmed like bumblebees between Jamal and Captain Jebrili. A smile crept across Jamal’s face. He couldn’t help it. He closed his eyes as fingers wandered all over him. Pinching and prodding. Scratching and clawing.
Jamal opened his eyes. Clawing?
“Hey!” Jebrili complained. “What about me?”
The entire gaggle of courtesans had Jamal surrounded. Limbs had him boxed in. Fingernails raked across his cheeks. Women snarled and grunted.
Jamal struggled to keep his arms up—to make space between himself and the mass of intertwined bodies. Some of the courtesans were trying to pull his pants down; others were trying to pull his pants up. The two opposing parties created a friction that was not at all pleasurable.
“Get off of me!” Jamal elbowed one woman in the gut.
Another woman hissed at him, “Everywhere and everlasting!”
Jamal could see that her eyes were not her own. ‘Everywhere and everlasting.’ That was something Bliss would say.
“Hey! Efta!” Jebrili roared. “It’s an erotic frenzy. Bring your pepper spray!”
With that the captain leaped into the fray, peeling bodies off of Jamal. He spun one courtesan away, and she tumbled over a table. She emerged holding a chair, which she smashed over the captain’s head. He went down immediately. Some of the women picked up pieces of the broken cha
ir and used them like stakes to stab at the mass of bodies. Jamal couldn’t tell if they were trying to fight off the other women to get closer to him, or if they were trying to hack off pieces of his body so that they could each have one.
A spray of hot liquid spattered across his face, and Jamal thought that one of the women had finally broke open an artery. But then the liquid trickled into his eyes and began burning fiercely. It wasn’t blood at all. It was some sort of weaponized hot sauce.
The courtesans dropped their stakes. They whined and rubbed their eyes. Jamal knew how they felt. Tears streamed down his face. The mass of bodies broke apart, and Jamal sat hard on the floor and waited for his eyes to clear. Finally he saw a stout woman standing before him. She wore a heavy cloth scarf over her nose and mouth. She held a dripping straw broom, which she dunked menacingly into a bucket filled with water and mashed chilis that glowed an unearthly green.
Madame Efta called out to the moaning women, “Have you had enough of my pepper spray? Don’t make me break out my mace.” She patted the handle of a spiked club leaning against her hip.
The moans changed to confused chattering. Then the chattering changed to wails of lamentation. The women crawled to the captain’s supine body. He had a huge splinter of wood stuck in his neck. A puddle of blood was growing wider around his head and shoulders.
“What happened?” a courtesan asked.
One courtesan held out her bloody hands. “What did we do?”
“I was possessed!” Another woman cried. “I swear I was.”
One woman rested Jebrili’s head tenderly on her lap. His blood darkened her pink shift.
“Captain!” Jamal scrambled to the seafarer. “Hold on, Jebrili. You’ll live through this.”
“N-no,” Jebrili sputtered. His face was already as pale as bone. “But that’s all right. I’ll die as I lived. Bleeding and delirious in the arms of a woman I barely know.”
The woman in the pink shift stroked the captain’s head. “My name is Tulip, captain.”
“A-ho. Hello, Tulip.” The light was already fading from Jebrili’s eyes. “Of course I know you…” he coughed. “Did you know that you were always my favorite?”
“Yes,” Tulip said. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “You told me that often.”
The other women were weeping as well. They nodded to each other. “You told all of us that.”
“That’s because… you were all my favorites.” The captain closed his eyes and smiled.
Fresh moans of grief filled the room. Made-up ladies and lonely perverts both wept together.
Captain Jebrili rasped, “Goodbye beautiful world.”
And then he was gone.
After a while the room fell silent. Madame Efta stood over Jamal with her broom dripping greenish liquid.
“I think you better tell me who you are!” she said. “And what it was that put my girls in such a state.”
2 – Among Savages
Sygne was having another one of her Jamal dreams. Once again she was inside Jamal’s head, reliving one of his memories as a teenage soldier fighting cavemen for the tin mines of Uhl-Arath. Thankfully this time he was aboveground. Young Jamal blinked beneath the raging sun of the western Tawr Desert. He was surrounded by a half dozen of his fellow Gjuiran soldiers.
Five of the other men were black. They were conscripted slaves like Jamal. Each was thickset—and larger than Jamal, who was still lean and rangy in his teenage years. Sygne realized the five Ardhians were ‘beardless eunuchs,’ meaning they had been castrated before puberty and they had matured into heavy, strangely toneless bodies. Why was it that prepubescent castration could do that to a man? ‘Domesticate’ him while also adding bulk to his physique—thereby making him more suitable for menial or martial tasks? There were priests in the Golden Empire who took this physical manifestation as proof that human castration was a righteous and divine thing. They called it ‘divinity’s cure for man’s ills.’ Some of the more polytheistic churches had probably invented righteous gods of genital mutilation.
Sygne recognized the last man in Jamal’s company as Jamal’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Aszir. The lieutenant watched a pair of color-coded flags hoisted high on the simmering horizon
“Good,” Lieutenant Aszir said. “The northern egress has been closed. It’s time to finish capping this one.”
Sygne’s vision angled down as Jamal glanced at a huge hole in the sandstone.
“Stupid trogs,” said one of the nearest soldiers. “Think they’re safe holing up in their burrows.”
Lieutenant Aszir agreed, “They’re too dumb to know that they’ve already sealed their fate.”
The soldier grinned. “No. We will seal their fate. With these rocks!”
“Good one, Raheed.” The lieutenant chortled.
The soldiers joined in together to heave a cluster of boulders down into the pit, creating a rumble that shook the ground.
Lieutenant Aszir laughed again, but more nervously this time. “That sound will bring the cavemen running. Hurry with the rest.”
There were gaps showing between the fallen stones. The Gjuirans hustled to throw sandbags over those empty spaces. Sygne could see what they were doing—sealing off the troglodytes’ system of caves. Cutting off their supply of fresh air.
Mass suffocation. It was a horrible way to end the conflict, but no worse than the other horrors she’d seen in her previous dreams of Uhl-Arath. All of these dreams were based on Jamal’s memories, and so Sygne knew the Gjuiran side would eventually claim victory. She was grateful that the end might come soon and relieve her of worse visions in the near future.
Soon the conscripted men were throwing shovelfuls of sand down into the hole. In most places, the powder piled up between the rocks and sandbags, filling the gaps there. But there was one very large gap that kept swallowing sand like the funnel of an hourglass.
“Find another rock!” Lieutenant Aszir commanded. “Fill in that hole!”
The soldier named Raheed called out frantically, “There’s no more sandbags left!”
Jamal stared down into the gap. “I see a big rock down there. It fell wrong.”
Through Jamal’s eyes, Sygne saw a rock wedged into a deep chasm between boulders. The rock was flat like a tombstone; it would have blocked the gap completely, except it had become lodged edge-up.
Young Jamal said, “I can climb down there and turn it.”
The other soldiers looked at each other. The eunuch Raheed seemed terrified and opportunistically nervous.
“You are the smallest among us,” said the lieutenant. “Squeeze in there and give it a try.”
Raheed warned, “I hear hoots. The trogs are coming!”
Jamal checked his scimitar in its curved scabbard. Sygne was afraid for a moment that he might remove it, since the scabbard might catch on the rocks. Then Jamal climbed down into the chasm with his sword still on his belt. The rocks shifted, and again Sygne felt a jolt of dread. Would Jamal be caught in a cave-in? The rocks clattered past and settled against the edges of the tombstone rock, lodging it more firmly into place.
The hoots grew louder; the troglodytes were in full berserker fury.
“It sounds like the whole clan of ‘em!” Raheed cried. “If they come up that hole they’ll tear us apart!” With his next breath Raheed suggested, “Start throwing sand in!”
For a moment, everyone was silent. Jamal had squirmed himself upside down in the chasm, so that he could hammer at the newly lodged rocks with the pommel of his scimitar. He twisted to look up at his brothers-in-arms. And he caught a shovelful of flying sand in his face. One shovel was quickly joined by another.
Jamal screamed, “Stop!” But no one was listening. He had become one more object to fill up the hole. And pound after pound of sand was helping to cement him into place. Sand filled his ears, which distorted the sounds of the approaching cavemen. Their roars of outrage were strangely muffled, yet alarmingly close�
��like whispered threats in his ears.
Jamal’s sword arm was free, dangling into the cavern. He pushed himself downward and let gravity take him farther into the troglodytes’ lair. There was no other way to avoid a death by smothering. He fell to the floor of the cave and scraped grit from his face. He had a clear line of sight of the cavemen as they arrived. There were three savages in the lead of the mob. They were crowded tight together, silhouetted against the light of torchbearers behind them. At the sight of the skinny Gjuiran standing in their lair, the cavemen flew into a mind-numbing rage.
Jamal’s curved blade was heavy, but his sinewy arms were already surprisingly strong. He hacked through the elbow joint of the first caveman. The troglodyte screamed as he saw his forearm hanging loose and useless from a shred of flesh. The other troglodytes had malformed weapons made of sharpened bones. The two closest cavemen flung their arms out wide to deliver killing blows, but here Jamal’s smaller size worked to his advantage. He could move with a full range of motion inside the tunnel. He spun gracefully while the cavemen caught their crude weapons against the rocky walls.
Jamal sliced deeply across one caveman’s chest—then into the other caveman’s guts.
They fell to their knees, but more savages rushed in to join the fight. It was impossible to count how many because one of them carried a torch that obscured the mob with greasy black smoke. The snarling torchbearer didn’t swing his torch; instead he shoved it straight at Jamal’s chest. Jamal’s scimitar was on his offside. He swung it backhanded—with enough force to drive the bundle of timber downward. The fire caught on the back hair of a wounded caveman.
Before the torchbearer could lift his light again, Jamal slashed him across the face. The caveman dropped his torch, and Jamal swatted at the burning embers with his blade, sending sparks flying and smoke billowing back into the faces of his opponents. The mob had ceased their forward momentum.
The wounded caveman flopped around in an attempt to put out the fire on his back, but his efforts just made the flames spread. Through the plumes of smoke, the troglodytes watched Jamal with widening eyes. Perhaps they thought he was some sort of Paleolithic demon in the guise of a dark-skinned teenager.
