by L. R. Flint
Being a captain, Harkaitz knew enough magic to be able to get his crew as safely as possible across the ocean. One of the bits of magic he knew gave him the ability to see through the storm clouds and to the stars above so that he would not lose direction even in the worst of storms—even if he was unable to control where the vessel went, he would know where he was headed. The captain had consulted with Koldobika regarding whether or not he should keep us going through the storm, or let it take us where it would until it blew itself out. Harkaitz knew that Wavewing could easily withstand the storm, but he did not want his passengers thinking that he was trying to get them all killed. Koldobika decided that we would stay on course, which pleased me because I found it exhilarating flying up and down the waves. Also, the more rational part of me knew that we needed to hurry and reach Alaia, which we would not be doing if we skirted around the storm.
~ ~ ~
“Land to starboard,” one of the crewmen on lookout shouted. I looked up from a small map Koldobika had brought and sure enough, ahead of us and to the starboard of the ship, a thin strip of land made up of a golden-hued purple, blurred by the distance between it and us, could be seen on the horizon.
“Is that the Eguzki desert?” I asked of the wizard.
“That is the land of Eguzki and yes, the Eguzki desert is located there, just beyond a strip of fertile land bordering the seashore.” While he spoke Koldobika concentrated his gaze on the land before us. I wondered absently what was playing out in the mind behind that calculating gaze; curious of what he saw that I could not, though my eyes were the sharper pair.
~ ~ ~
The sun was almost an hour from setting when Wavewing sailed into harbor. I had not expected that there would be any kind of settlement—since Eguzki was a land reserved for betrayers of overlords and those who had committed treason but had not been sentenced to death—yet settlement there was. Nearly all of the other ships had two floors below the main deck and the ones that did had multiple masts and many sails more than Wavewing.
“Why is this city here?” I asked Izar as the crewmen secured Wavewing in her berth and Harkaitz paid the dock owner for the space we were using. To the far left of the docks I had seen people in chains standing on wooden platforms before small crowds. When one or more of the people were taken from the platform, to be replaced by others, one amongst the crowd would order a group of three or so men to lead them off to one or another of the many ships at port.
“There are many people on this land who do not belong to any King or leader and so are unprotected and thought of as below even the street urchins of Caernadvall. Men greedy for money and power, and not concerned with freedom, come here and turn them into slaves and while they are here doing their bloody business they need somewhere to stay—other than their ships.” There was a tone of steely hatred in Izar’s voice, which she did not even try to hide.
“So they just ban people from the land and then bring them back as slaves?” I asked.
She nodded. “If the slaves were to run away and then be found they would be tortured to death for returning to the land they had been outlawed from.”
“Whether or not they had returned of their own free will,” I mumbled, part question, but mostly stating the cruel irony of it all.
“So the majority of them choose to stay in the false security of slavery.” The green of Izar’s eyes had darkened like a storm, in her anger, as she glared at the four slave ships tied into their own berths to the left of our ship.
“Have the elves or anyone else ever tried to do anything about it?” I asked.
“Yes. Some tribes of different peoples and species have gone on raids for the mere sake of freeing the slaves and those who escape on their own are usually found and taken under the protection of someone, or taken somewhere safe. Unless their crimes truly were evil—then they are judged for them.”
~ ~ ~
That night we stayed at a small inn and though it was the cleanest building in the small settlement, I was positive I had never before been anywhere with more fleas. After a restless night the party who had originally set out from Baso Argi got a week’s worth of supplies and we left on our horses, headed for the heart of the desert of Eguzki. While we were gone, Harkaitz and his crew resupplied our provisions for the return trip to our homeland; though the inns were the worst ever, the food supplies of the settlement were quite the opposite.
~ ~ ~
It took just over an hour of traveling on horseback before the ring of lush vegetation bordering the seaside disappeared and a golden desert stretched out across the land for as far as the eye could see. “And this is the desert,” I stated.
“Yes,” Izar said. “Now you must show us where we can find Alaia.”
I replayed in my mind what Alaia had scried to me. “We just keep going straight until we get to some black mountains.” Everyone just looked at me. “What?”
“That is all?”
“We are not yet at the mountains so what does it matter?” The instructions seemed to be good enough for the guards because Alesander headed away in the direction I had indicated and everyone else followed.
~ ~ ~
I fell asleep while we were still traveling and fell from Aitor's back, jolting awake as gravity caught hold of me. The moment I slipped from the saddle my horse stopped and waited for me to resume my position as his rider. While waiting he even moved into the direct rays of the sun so that I would be in the shade. I was amazed that the horse did not fall over dead, with his black coat in the simmering glare of the sun, but I was assured that the elven horses were bred from stock able to withstand the most bitter cold and even hotter temperatures than a human could.
I heard Alesander call a halt and give a few orders as I groaned and sat up. Aitor nudged my back with his nose and whinnied at me; I blew a lock of dark hair from my face and stood, leaning against the horse. “Are you okay?” Izar asked as she led her horse toward me.
I rubbed my horse’s neck and eventually said, “It is scorching out here.” Izar was silent so I turned my head to look at her, she was scowling. “I am fine, just a little tired.” She grunted. Sendoa walked around Aitor and into my view and opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “I am fine, I am fine,” I said.
He snorted in disbelief. “I was going to tell you that we put up some tents and that you can get Aitor and yourself in the shade.” I grabbed Aitor’s reins and started leading him toward the shade. As I turned to go I heard Sendoa tell my sister to take the opportunity and rest too. I gave my horse a drink, unsaddled him and then lay down with my head and shoulders propped against the saddle, in the hopes of actually falling asleep. “How long ‘til we leave?” I asked of whomever chose to answer first.
“We will leave when the air starts to cool, so around sundown,” Alesander replied. I barely had time to mumble ‘oh’ before I was asleep. Whoever had pitched the tents had only put up the top and one side, which was moved, as needed, to block the sun. There was a hot breeze running through the tent most of the time, but the shade was the main thing keeping all of us from shriveling up and dying in the blistering heat of the sun.
~ ~ ~
“Wake up, Izotz.”
I flung the hood of my cloak, which had just been dropped on top of me, from off my face to glare at my sister for waking me. “What?” Then I noticed that it was dark and recalled that we were to be leaving in the cool of night. “Oh,” I mumbled, no longer requiring an answer. The tent had already been taken down and everyone else was almost done readying their steeds for the night’s trekking.
The pale, silvery moonlight gave the desert a soft, glowing accent and even the distant air had a misty look to it as we slowly made our way across the windblown sands. We traveled all through that night, pitching the tent just before the sun came up and the majority of the day we spent dozing in the barely subdued heat of the sun. A couple of hours after we had started on our second night of traveling, we saw a black row of jagged mountains,
shining in the pale moonlight, far in the distance and slightly to the left of our present course.
The next night, as we traveled in the shadow of the forbidding mountain range, Sendoa—who was riding alongside me—asked, “Where do we go after we get away from these cursed mountains?”
“We continue along the line created by the foothills of those,” I pointed toward the mountains, which my companions had dubbed evil, then I pointed forward into the unseen distance where I knew Alaia was awaiting our arrival. “Once they have gone from sight our destination will appear amongst the dunes.”
“What is this place we are searching for?” Alesander asked quietly.
“An archway made of three enormous stones.” That was all I knew about them and so they held no real importance for me. Everyone else in the group stopped their conversations, as if in reverence to what I had mentioned, though I guessed it must have been something else—I mean, if the archway held any importance, would I not already have been told? It was a couple of minutes before Izar interrupted the silence, making sure I was saying that Alaia would be found somewhere near the arch.
I shrugged. “That is where her directions came to an end, so as far as I know, that is where she is now.” Everyone fell silent again, which was unusual for that night, because the others had kept up a conversation of some kind—even if it was simple as musing about how long it would take us to get to where Alaia was. We could all feel the dark, depressing feelings that crept upon us while in the shadow of the strange mountains, trying to overwhelm any hope within us when the silence was permitted. It seemed a shroud, emitting from the mountains themselves, for none of us had felt like that without a league of the stony piles of black earth that thrust up toward the sky.
We continued an hour longer into the morning than we had done the mornings previous, so that we could be safely without the range of the mountains’ influence while we slept. That day, while the others of our company slept, the four guards took turns keeping a lookout. While still in sight, the mountains left an echoed sense of trepidation which kept us all anxious to be out of the area. That night also passed uneventfully, with the moonlight reflected off of smooth, black rock slowly growing smaller as we steadily gained a larger amount of distance between us and the mountains. The day after, the sense of foreboding was almost gone and we knew that the mountains would be completely out of sight somewhere around midnight, after we resumed our traveling.
~ ~ ~
The day had been passing quietly while we slept and it was Aitor’s soft nickering in his sleep that woke me from a dream of cool streams running through a forest’s shade. I stood and walked over to the horse; I sat down next to him, leaned against his strong back and began stroking his neck to quiet him. When the other horses also began to nicker—a sound I had realized, when it came from more than one of them, was a warning of approaching danger—I poked my head above Aitor’s back to survey the surrounding dunes.
At first I could see nothing unusual in the landscape before me, but just before I was going to give up and dub the horses’ nickering as being produced by their dreams, I thought for a moment that my eyes were smarting from the sun, because a small section of the sand had risen and was stalking slowly toward the shelter. I looked again and still saw the slowly moving section of sand; I turned to Erlantz who was currently on lookout duty and asked him if he had seen anything.
20 ATTACKED
“Do you jest? It is peaceful as a spring day out here; at least it would be if it not for this bloody heat.” He paused for a moment and then said, “The heat has been making my eyes smart, I keep thinking the sand—of all things—is crawling toward us.” I chuckled sympathetically as that seemed the best response, but inwardly I realized that I was not seeing things, since the other elf was noticing the same exact thing—just without realizing it was not a mirage. A mix of dread and curiosity filled my chest and I swung back onto my stomach to look beyond Aitor.
My sight zoomed in on the moving sand and I saw that it had its own four legs, and a long tail that twitched sporadically behind it, mostly out of sight. Large triangular ears rose from the creature’s head and the snarling maw bore large fangs sprouting from jaws that crushed to kill, powered by muscles tough as steel. Whiskers to the sides of the enormous feline’s dark nose also twitched at the movements of the snarling maw or the nose, as it breathed in the scents of fresh meat.
The large beast of prey would have been beautiful to watch—from a distance—but the problem was that it was streaking across the desert sands toward my group, at an incredible speed. I yelled my horse’s name and at the sound of it he launched into full awareness; I hauled myself onto his back as he quickly stood and turned toward the oncoming hunter. A long spear with a wicked point appeared in my right hand as Aitor took off at full speed toward the approaching danger. I heard a shout from behind me and it was then that I realized that there were many more of the felines than I had realized, my attention being directed on the nearest of them.
A line of the desert beasts zoomed toward me in a spearheaded formation—the one I had noticed first was the tip of the spear. I sent my own spear flying at it, with all the strength I possessed. The force sent the entire spear through the length of the cat’s body. A snarl ripped through the oncoming line as their leader was brought down, and they put on an extra burst of speed. Aitor stopped as quickly as he could (without sending me flying over his head) so that I could kill off—at a distance—as many of the beasts as possible.
The last of five summoned arrows spent, I leapt over Aitor’s head and onto the ground twenty feet ahead of him; I did not wish for him to get torn to shreds by the beasts’ claws. I called twin blades while sending the bow back to Lietha, and before they were even completely formed in my hands I swung one forward to slice the head off the foremost of the beasts; with the throb of adrenaline coursing through me, the movement seemed to take hours, while in actuality it was much quicker.
I turned the end of that killing arc into a swing that sent the blade flying in circles to my right, taking down the nearest cat in that direction. I only watched long enough to know that it was a killing stroke. I did not see the animal being sliced in half, with the droplets of blood splaying out in all directions. The blade’s replacement appeared in my hand as I sliced the clawing forearms off another cat and then removed its head, along with its pain.
I used the two swords to slash across each other’s paths and sliced through the chest of the nearest beast. The blood splattered me as the animal’s heart burst and I had to leap out of the way of its lifeless body as it thudded to the ground, never to permanently go cold because of the merciless heat of the desert. The next two were just as easy to kill as the others, but then the last three circled me in a unison effort to stop me from eliminating their unsuspecting group. I guessed the remaining creatures must be veterans, because none of the others had shown any wisdom by attacking with stratagem rather than speed, unity rather than recklessness.
I looked back to see that I was too far away from my companions for them to make it before the creatures decided to attack. They took the glance as hesitation and it gave them a bit of encouragement; I barely had time to react and drive my swords through them. As the two felines in front of me attacked, I ducked and somersaulted to miss the falling bodies of the beasts who had just pounced, then I rose and turned to defend against the third, but it was nowhere in sight. I turned to look behind me but the beast was not in that direction; then I found it in a very unexpected and uncomfortable way.
The beast’s fore claws latched into both my lower-left back and right shoulder; I yelled in pain and dropped the sword in my right hand, because one of the claws in my shoulder had hit a nerve and paralyzed my arm. With the whole weight of the creature’s body on my back, I fell to my knees and the beast let out a deafening roar for the kill. A globule of spittle landed on my cheek and slid down to fall on the ground, where it evaporated. Through the pain I did not even notice the spit, which
would have been disgusting otherwise. I still yelled in pain as I felt the animal tense for the kill, then I let out another yell, that time it carried no pain—it was the equal of the beast’s own cry for blood. I shoved the blade in my left hand behind my head, hoping it made the correct mark. I heard a choking, pain-filled cough behind me, as if the beast was trying to get rid of a particularly large hairball.
The cat unlatched its claws and backed away; I pulled the sword from its throat. A gurgled howl tore from the weakened beast as blood seeped into cavities in which admittance had never before been possible. With its last strength the cat leapt at me; I thrust my sword into its lower chest, hoping to pierce the heart. I was crushed under the weight of the beast and the hilt of my sword dug into my chest, so I returned it to Lietha. With the sword gone, the animal’s blood gushed from its wound and seeped into my clothes, covering my chest. I got a nose and mouthful of the beast’s fur before I was finally able to try and heave its body off me, though it was far from easy with my right arm out of commission. Unable to feel my right arm, I got it stuck under the beast’s massive body. After a moment I also realized that the main artery in my arm had been sliced open and I was losing large amounts of blood. That problem, however, was easily fixed with a bit of magic.
Dizzy from blood loss, I sat, and then laid down, since it was too hot to have my body curled up. When I felt the slight change of shade covering me, I opened an eye long enough to recognize Aitor before I closed it again. Next, I heard the slight crunching of footsteps on the sand as my companions joined me on the death scene. I heard a gasp and then my sister knelt beside me, trying to get a response—to make sure I was still alive. I let the prodding continue for a little while because I was exhausted and unwilling to deal with the others and their questions just then. It was not until Izar began yelling my name that I decided I had to let her know that I was actually alive and conscious. “Leave me alone,” I grumbled. When Izar slapped me all I could say was ‘ouch’ and then she hugged me, which did not last long because of the heat. Someone asked if I could walk back to the camp, to which I replied that I did not want to, but I did get up and climb (with help) onto Aitor’s back. It was a shorter trip than stumbling back on my own would have been.
