Dragon Heart: Sea of Sand. LitRPG Wuxia Series: Book 4

by Kirill Klevanski

  “Two desert dwellers, one northerner, and one islander. Your choices always surprise me, Shakar. You know that northerners can’t survive the Sea of Sand. Not even for a year.”

  Shakar’s eyes flashed with cunning and playfulness.

  “Do you want to bet on it?”

  Kharad winked, put two fingers to his forehead, and bowed slightly.

  “We’ll discuss it tonight, Shakar.”

  With that, the rider made a strange sound and they moved toward the settlement. Out of the corner of his eye, Hadjar noticed Einen gripping his staff tightly. Even the shadow around his legs seemed to foam slightly, like waves before hitting a rocky shore.

  Realizing that he was being observed, the islander calmed down.

  “I don’t like lizards,” he said and followed the chief of security.

  Hadjar didn’t point out that the Big Turtle — the patroness of the islands — was also a reptile. He preferred not to discuss other people’s oddities and beliefs and appreciated when that same lack of nosiness was reciprocated.

  Some children ran past them, followed by a group of teenagers. Among them were several young girls who were so beautiful that many Lidish men would’ve given their right hand to present them with a wedding bracelet, but they were underage. Hadjar noted this thanks to their lack of ankle bracelets. The local girls started wearing them when they turned sixteen, not a day younger.

  “Your main duty is to ensure the safety of your section. You’ll work with six other guards. The man I just talked to is the head of the caravan’s vanguard. They are our scouts, to use military parlance.”

  Shakar squinted at Hadjar, but he pretended not to notice.

  “We will come across many dangers along the way.” Shakar took a beautiful, white desert flower out of his pocket and stuck it in the hair of a girl running past. She laughed and rushed off somewhere, busy with something extremely important and urgent that only children could see as such. “By the Great Stars, you’d better remember that, or you won’t last long.”

  Hadjar heard Azrea’s displeased meow and, taking out a piece of jerky from a special pocket on his belt, stuffed it into his turban. Everyone around looked at him like he was an idiot, but said nothing.

  “We’ll come across several nomadic Bedouin tribes along the way. When we do, nothing will depend on you: if our trade is successful, everything will be okay. If not, we’ll fight then. Then there’s the bandits. We often arrange for a competition among the guards — the goal is to kill the most chekhars possible.”

  ‘Chekhar’ was an untranslatable swearword in the local language. It meant something close to: ‘The son of a cheap, diseased woman who was raped by an old, bald jackal who has nothing left.’ Hadjar had been amazed to learn the sheer depth of the word.

  “Don’t forget to pray to your ancestors every evening so that we don’t end up coming across any sand ghosts or monsters.”

  There was only silence for a moment. Everyone knew what he was talking about. The greatest danger of the desert wasn’t its heat and lack of resources, but its inhabitants, the various monsters and spirits that were a threat to all.

  “Your commander will tell you the rest. Now I’ll introduce you to the owner of the caravan.”

  They entered a small, cozy white tent that resembled what an officer might sleep in — Hadjar felt nostalgic once again. Inside the tent, it wasn’t very spacious: a few pillows, a hookah, and a table with a map were all there was. A gray-haired, thin old man was standing above it and moving figures made of white bone around.

  “Honorable Rahaim,” Shakar saluted. The others simply bowed.

  “Shakar,” the old man smiled, “I see that you’ve brought some fresh blood with you. That’s good. You’ve selected fine people. I like them.”

  He got back to his work.

  Shakar saluted again and led them out of the tent.

  Only Hadjar and Einen didn’t understand. The situation was normal to everyone else.

  By nightfall, Hadjar heard a hundred more instructions. Then a camel was brought to him. Hadjar hated riding a horse, let alone something else. So when he climbed onto a humped, furry, stinking creature, he started cursing up a storm.

  That night, they saw the passage to the Sea of Sand — a small gorge backlit by the scarlet sunset, strewn with the ruins of an ancient civilization’s buildings.

  The caravan slowly moved eastward, toward a sandstorm whirling in the distance. Hadjar paused for a second, turning around. He knew that he wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.

  For a brief moment, a field covered with scarlet flowers appeared before his inner gaze. The wind whispered a soft “Good luck.”

  Hadjar adjusted the scarf on his face, checked the sword in his scabbard, and spurred the camel on. The caravan set off into the desert.

  Chapter 267

  “Hey, Hadjar! Hadjar!”

  Hadjar turned to a little girl wearing a silk dress and smiled broadly.

  “What do you want, my little princess?” he asked.

  “Will you marry me when I grow up?”

  The little girl was running around Hadjar, stumbling sometimes. Hadjar caught her and put her back on her feet. She was about seven. Her hair had never been cut and now a tight, thick, black braid almost dragged along the sand behind her as she ran.

  “Alas, my little princess, I am only allowed to be your knight,” Hadjar spread his hands in a show of helplessness.

  His camel walked by his side. Their relationship had turned sour at the very beginning of the journey. The animal had thrown its rider off twice in the first night. Hadjar had beaten it with a leather strap three times in retaliation. Shakh had seen him doing that and said that if Hadjar laid hands on his camel one more time, he would take its place. At the time, both Shakh and Hadjar had understood that the implementation of the younger man’s threat would lead to a battle that neither of them was sure to win. At the same time, Hadjar had understood that Shakh was more knowledgeable about these things, more than himself, anyway, and there was no point in arguing with him.

  Since then, Hadjar had walked, and his camel had followed after him. Hadjar only used the animal to carry his meager possessions. The two-legged and four-legged traveler had thus reached an accord and neither of them was trying to make the other’s life miserable anymore.

  The fact that Hadjar was walking and not riding had led to him getting more closely acquainted with the passengers in his section of the caravan. There were almost eighty people under his (and nine other guards’) protection. Not to mention five stagecoaches, forty camels, and fifteen desert horses. Hadjar liked the latter even less than camels. A horse with six legs that grazed peacefully and chewed on sand was simply too unnerving in his opinion.

  The girl running around Hadjar was the daughter of a man whom Hadjar and Einen treated with the utmost care. He looked… weird. Well, he was dressed quite ordinarily: a caftan, sandals, ankle bracelets, a turban, and little jewelry. He rode in an ordinary stagecoach pulled by ordinary camels. Nothing unusual.

  However, Hadjar had seen many nobles in his time and Zurkh looked exactly like an aristocrat of the ninth or nineteenth generation, although he tried to hide it.

  On top of that, he didn’t allow anyone into his stagecoach and always took one extra meal. It was easy to guess that there was someone hidden inside it.

  “And what if you defeat a desert dragon?” the little girl, Zurkh’s daughter, wasn’t giving up. “Maybe you’ll get a title!”

  “In that case, I’ll marry you, of course.”

  The girl stumbled again but Hadjar caught her. The caravan stretched out endlessly along the crest of a dune. The huge slopes went down a long way on either side of it. If a person slipped off the ridge, they would tumble down head over heels. Even if the fall didn’t break their neck or drown them in the sand, they would get many small cuts and wounds. Then sand would pour into them, causing an incredible itch. Under the blazing sun, an infection would take root. Then
the Gods would determine the rest. Or how much money said person had. It was rather expensive to get treated by the caravan doctors.

  “Hurray! Hadjar will marry me!” The girl shouted gleefully and rushed over to her friends who were waiting for her — the other passengers’ small children.

  Watching the girl run off, Hadjar met Zurkh’s gaze for a moment. He was tall, handsome, with an unblemished face and a sharp, black-gray beard. Noticing that the guard was looking at him, Zurkh changed: he dropped his broad shoulders, the light went out of his eyes, and even his skin seemed to turn gray.

  “Faker,” Hadjar hissed and turned away.

  The sun had passed its zenith. The caravan had been moving for almost an hour in the afternoon crossing. According to the rumors that flew faster than the wind here, if the caravan didn’t reach an oasis in the next three weeks, the price of water would triple or get even higher. The people would start to die.

  “Northerner.”

  As always, Einen quietly appeared out of the shadows under Hadjar’s feet. His Technique made Hadjar want to hit the islander with his blade. However, he restrained himself, understanding that that particular fight wouldn’t necessarily go his way, either.

  “Can you stop doing that?” Hadjar asked for the umpteenth time.

  “As soon as you stop listening to the wind, I’ll stop walking among the shadows,” the islander smiled slightly as he responded.

  After a month spent travelling with the man, Hadjar had learned to distinguish Einen’s emotions — when the corners of his lips trembled slightly, he was smiling.

  “Have you learned anything?” Hadjar got down to business.

  They walked side by side, pretending to guard a caravan stagecoach full of water. Shakar had said that four people had to safeguard the water in each section. Only the central section was exempt from this rule. It had turned out that Einen and Hadjar were up to the task on their own. Plus, Ilmena was always ready to help them, capable of moving from one end of the caravan to the other with incredible speed.

  A couple of weeks ago, Hadjar had seen the girl cover a hundred yards in an instant. She’d left a trail of glass behind her. Ilmena had moved so quickly that her Technique had turned the sand into glass. Seeing that had made Hadjar wary of fighting against Einen.

  “To begin with, I don’t like this idea of yours. Spying on our commanders’ conversations is wrong.”

  Hadjar rolled his eyes. Einen was far too good and a real stickler for the rules. It had taken Hadjar a week to convince the islander to take part in his plan.

  Hadjar’s instincts had warned him that something was wrong, despite the fact that they’d been traveling along the Sea of Sand rather peacefully for a month now. The desert monsters had only attacked the caravan twice. They’d been so weak that the guards hadn’t even blown the horn to summon all the other guards to them.

  They hadn’t encountered a single desert storm, nomadic tribe, not even bandits. They hadn’t had a single outbreak of disease, not even a camel stumbling and pulling a stagecoach full of provisions down into a dune. The deadly journey through the endless series of sand waves had turned out to be more like a summer stroll. Despite that, Hadjar’s instincts were screaming that something was wrong.

  Maybe they were doing that because of Zurkh or because Hadjar hadn’t seen Shakh in the past few days. The guy who had constantly hung around, trying to see Ilmena and talk to her, had disappeared somewhere with his uncle and Kharad, the head of the caravan’s scouts.

  “Get to the point, islander.”

  After drying his sweaty, bald head with a handkerchief, Einen banged his staff on the sand. The shadow around his legs seethed and both of them were soon covered with a grayish, almost invisible haze. Unless you peered at it for a long time, you wouldn’t notice it.

  Hadjar suddenly realized that he couldn’t hear anything or anyone except the islander. The same thing was probably true about the people outside the haze. Sounds couldn’t penetrate Einen’s Technique’s dome.

  Hadjar was surprised to see the dome moving with them. He doubted that Serra or Nehen could’ve used such an advanced Technique.

  “They’re afraid of something,” Einen finally said.

  Hadjar waited a little, but the islander wasn’t going to continue speaking.

  “What, exactly?”

  “What exactly, Northerner?” Judging by the twitching of his eyebrow, the islander was annoyed. “The command staff discussed it with Rahaim. The Great Turtle knows, my Technique doesn’t exactly work when used on a Heaven Soldier of the peak Stage.”

  Hadjar swore. He knew the plain old man who owned the caravan was a cultivator on the verge of becoming a Spirit Knight. Why was he in charge of a caravan when he possessed such power? Secrets and mysteries abounded. Hadjar regretted the fact that he hadn’t asked his sister to give him some money so he could travel to the Empire in a noble caravan. It would’ve taken him three months in a luxury stagecoach to reach the Borderlands.

  “Are they afraid of something or someone?”

  Einen thought about it.

  “Both,” he answered. “I don’t like what’s going on here, Northerner. I really don’t.”

  Hadjar looked at the landscape stretching out before them. Wherever his gaze fell, golden waves seemed to be soaring into the sky. It felt like the sands were doing a slow, hypnotic dance. There were no clouds in the unusually clear, bright blue sky. Despite the seeming stillness and serenity of the landscape, even the air here was saturated with the stench of death.

  “We have guests,” Einen whispered and dispelled his Technique.

  Chapter 268

  At the head of the caravan, which looked like a huge snake winding its way across the sand, slithering along the crest of a dune, Kharad was riding a desert raven (a big, white, toothy hen) and heading toward Hadjar and Einen. As always, he wore a white caftan and a green scarf, his spear and shield at the ready.

  Over the past month, Hadjar had rarely felt like a guard. Sometimes, he was more like a nanny to the small children: he played the Ron’Jah for them and told funny or scary stories to amuse them. He sometimes even tucked them into bed.

  Sometimes, he was a repairman and tailor: he helped fix the stagecoaches when some of the moving parts broke, not to mention fixing people’s sandals and sewing their torn caftans back together as needed.

  Sometimes, he was an interpreter, when there was a dispute between people who didn’t understand each other.

  When Shakar asked, Hadjar dutifully carried out any and all orders and even made sure to help anyone he could when asked. Soon enough, he came to understand what Ilmena had meant by everyone needing to help each other out.

  Hadjar helped people and they returned his kindness however they could. If people had money to spare, they paid him, fed him, or gave him new sandals. If they didn’t have money, they presented him with bracelets (Hadjar wore a lot of these now) or funny ornaments for his hair (Azrea didn’t like them, but Hadjar put them in his hair so that people could see that he appreciated their gifts). When they couldn’t even give him that, the people smiled and thanked him sincerely. Therefore, Hadjar really didn’t feel like he was being exploited or taken advantage of.

  He had seen Rahaim repairing the sandals of a poor man from the caravan’s last section. Rahaim hadn’t done that because he was especially virtuous. The simple truth was that if you refused to help others, you wouldn’t get their help yourself when you needed it most. And without help, no one could survive in the desert, all on their own. What was pragmatism might’ve looked noble to outsiders, ignorant of the way things truly were.

  “Hadjar Traves,” Kharad’s voice was calm, but his nervous gaze betrayed his concern. Hadjar took a step forward and saluted, putting his fingers to his lips and then to his forehead.

  “Rahaim and Shakar are waiting for you, Hadjar Traves. Follow me.”

  Hadjar glanced at Einen, but the islander only shrugged. He also didn’t know why such prominent pe
ople might want to talk to a simple guard, someone who wasn’t even the commander of his unit. To be honest, Hadjar had exchanged only a couple of words with his commander and couldn’t even remember his name.

  In order to keep up with the desert raven, Hadjar had to run. As far as Hadjar could tell from the guards’ and passengers’ conversations, Kharad was a complicated person in every regard. He rode his raven without caring whether Hadjar was managing to keep up with him or not.

  The caravan seemed to stretch out for over seventy miles. However, to Hadjar, who was running alongside it, it seemed to grow far longer with every step he took.

  Fifteen minutes later, Hadjar stood in front of a huge stagecoach. Pulled by six of the 15ft tall beasts, it looked more like a large house on wheels than a stagecoach. It set the speed of the entire caravan. In addition, it served another function: it dragged heavy metal carpets behind it that leveled the crests of the dunes and compacted them, allowing the rest of the caravan to follow after it quietly and without fear of the terrain being too uneven and bumpy.

  Kharad jumped down from his ‘hen’, gave the reins over to his subordinate, and then walked over to the stagecoach. He did everything on the go — during the crossing, the caravan never stopped, even for a second. According to the more experienced guards, even if the caravan was attacked, it still wouldn’t stop. This was the most important rule of survival in the desert — you always had to keep moving.

  “Watch your manners, barbarian,” Kharad murmured, climbing the stairs that led up to the huge stagecoach’s entrance.

  Hadjar didn’t respond and simply followed the man. Inside the stagecoach, everything was once again utilitarian: some people were there, sitting on pillows on the floor, and the old man was leaning over a low table with a map on it.

  “Honorable Rahaim,” the head scout bowed. “I’ve brought you Hadjar Traves.”

  “Thank you, Kharad,” the old man nodded. “Sit down.”

  Kharad did so, right on the nearest free pillow. Now only Hadjar and the owner of the caravan were left standing. For a while, they simply looked into each other’s eyes. Hadjar didn’t know what the cultivator saw in his own eyes, but Hadjar saw nothing in the old man’s green eyes... absolutely nothing, as if he was looking at emeralds.