The Siege

by Denning, Troy

  “Are you threatening to reveal us?” Caladnei demanded.

  “Sheikh Sa’ar would never betray his guests,” Ruha said.

  She glanced down the hill, where the rest of the Cormyrean scouting party stood in dusty abas, holding the reins of their recently purchased camels stiffly at arm’s length. The handful of women in the company followed Caladnei’s example and refused to wear veils, and there was a marked lack of children and saluki dogs.

  “But he is right,” the witch continued. “We do not make a very convincing tribe. The sooner we find the Shadovar city, the better our chances of surprising them.”

  In truth, Ruha thought it likely they had been discovered already. When Vangerdahast had asked her to lead a scouting party into Anauroch to locate the flying city so Cormyr could launch a surprise attack, Ruha had asked for a company of swarthy, brown-eyed volunteers whom she could disguise as Bedine. Instead, the wizard had provided her with Caladnei and her equally stubborn superior, Hhormun, two fools who seemed to believe that riding camels and wearing abas was all that was required to disguise a company of fair-skinned Cormyreans as a Bedine khowwan. Had she not known that Alusair was preparing to launch a surprise teleport-attack from a secret base in Tilverton, she would have sworn the wizards wanted the Shadovar to notice them.

  After a few moments, Caladnei said, “Very well, Sheikh, but you will take us to Shade, no matter how the raid comes out.”

  She started to back down the dusty slope.

  “If you keep your promise, I will keep mine.” Sa’ar crawled down beside her, then spit in his palm and offered it to her. “It is a bargain.”

  Caladnei spit in her own hand.

  “You are sure Hhormun will agree?” Ruha asked, sliding down to join the pair before they clasped hands. “The bargain is yours if you make it.”

  Caladnei clasped the sheikh’s hand. “Hhormun will follow me in this.”

  Ruha was not so sure. Old and portly though he was, Hhormun had proven surprisingly energetic in directing the activities of the company, from picking campsites to dictating the pace of the daily marches. When they reached the bottom of the ridge, however, he surprised her by not protesting at all and even allowing Sa’ar to plan the raid.

  A few minutes later, Ruha, Caladnei, the sheikh and a dozen of his men were rubbing themselves and the Mahwa tribe’s strongest camels in veserab dung, collected by the warriors a few days earlier for just that purpose.

  “You’re sure this is necessary?” Caladnei asked, wrinkling her nose at the awful stench of the stuff. “I’m sure someone in the company has a spell that could eliminate our smell.”

  “It is not enough to eliminate our own odor,” Sa’ar said. “We must smell like what we want. It pleases the little gods.”

  “And puts our camels at ease,” Ruha added, explaining in terms Caladnei would understand more readily. “If they think the smell is ours instead of the veserabs, they will cause less trouble as we approach.”

  “Less trouble?” Caladnei grumbled. “I suppose none would be too much to ask for.”

  They waited until a lookout signaled that the veserabs had come out of the water to rest for the evening, then Hhormun used his magic to render the entire raiding party invisible, while Ruha and Caladnei used their own magic to cast a pall of silence over the group. Though the Mahwa had been part of the coalition that relied on Ruha’s magic to destroy the Zhentarim army at Orofin, that had been many years earlier, and even the sheikh’s stern glower could not keep the men from grumbling and cringing as the spells were cast over them.

  Finally, the raiding party circled around to the downwind side of the ridge and—with the aid of yet more magic—crept out onto the lakeshore. The nearest veserabs were only a few hundred paces away, mostly solitary bulls so cranky and strong that the Shadovar herders left them to stand guard at the edges of the flight, trusting that the creatures’ instincts would make them follow when the rest were moved. Ruha, who was leading the raid by virtue of being the only person present with any experience at all handling veserabs, picked a serpentine course around the beasts, giving them as wide a berth as possible.

  Once, when they entered an area of tall marsh grass, a nearby bull flared its wings and started over to investigate. Sa’ar released a sand grouse he had brought along as a diversion, and the bird burst skyward with such a riot of flapping wings and terrified screeching that it drew three veserabs into the air after it. Ruha made good use of the distraction, leading the party to within twenty paces of the three Shadovar herders camped on that side of the flight.

  A tug on a guideline attached to her waist brought her to a stop. Several moments later, ten fist-sized sling stones appeared in the darkening sky and rained down on the sentries. Two fell unconscious. By the time the third made enough sense of the assault to turn and see the raiding party—rendered visible when they attacked—galloping toward him on their camels, two warriors were already clubbing him senseless. Bruised as the young herder might be when he awoke, Ruha took the fact that the warriors used the butts of their lances instead of the tips as a sign of Sa’ar’s concern about angering the Shadovar. Bedine raiders usually killed the sentries, so there would be that many fewer warriors available for the counter raid.

  The sheikh and his other warriors were already charging into the flight of resting veserabs, hurling loops of braided rope around the necks of the smallest beasts and securing the other ends to their saddles. Most of them were coughing and reeling, struggling to stay on their mounts as the veserabs filled the air with their noxious fumes. Ruha cleared the air with a powerful wind spell, then saw an angry veserab cow leap onto a camel’s neck and rip the thing’s head off with four sharp-taloned feet.

  More veserabs began to rise all around, filling the dusk air with fluttering clouds of dark wings. Most were simply trying to escape, but a few, especially those with calves whistling for help, were beginning to wheel toward the Bedine warriors. A veserab dived low in front of Sa’ar, pulling a grizzled warrior off the camel ahead, then dropping him back to the ground in pieces. Ruha dismissed the silence spell and pointed toward the wadi they had chosen as their escape route.

  “Enough, Sa’ar!” she yelled. “Flee!”

  The sheikh did not need to be told twice. He sounded three notes on his amarat. His warriors—those who were not fleeing already—turned as one, each pulling two or three panicked veserab calves through the air behind them. Ruha hurled a flurry of magic bolts into the air and dusted half a dozen adults off the raiders’ tails, then Caladnei raised a force barrier behind them. A dozen veserabs slammed into the invisible wall and dropped to the ground with broken necks and wings. The confused survivors circled away, whistling in frustration and sorrow.

  Ruha and Caladnei followed. By the time they reached the mouth of the wadi, the veserabs were beginning to find their way over the force barrier. Ruha leaped off her camel and scraped up a handful of sand, then voiced an incantation and blew it toward the growing number of creatures streaming after them. A howling wind rose at her back and, scraping the canyon mouth clean of sand and dust, roared out toward the lake. The veserabs vanished into a cloud of swirling dust and did not emerge.

  “Your magic has grown stronger, witch,” Sa’ar observed behind her. “Remind me to be patient with you.”

  Ruha turned to find him holding the reins of her camel. The rest of his warriors were emerging from their hiding places in the mouth of the wadi, half of them covering the raiders’ back trail with bows and arrows, the other half pulling the captured veserabs down out of the air and binding them with leather hoods and wing jackets. Though most Bedine were adept at handling falcons and other birds of prey, veserab calves were both larger and more ferocious. The battle was not all that one-sided, and the warriors were paying in blood for every lace they threaded.

  Ruha commanded her camel to kneel, then, as she mounted, heard one roar a little way up the wadi. She pivoted toward the sound and saw a line of tethered mounts collapsi
ng, their throats and bellies being opened by glassy black blades as a Shadovar patrol peeled itself out of the shadows along the gulch. She loosed a lightning bolt at a figure rising up behind Sa’ar’s camel and saw the fellow’s head come apart before he sank back into the murk. Caladnei cried out in shock behind her, and Ruha turned to find the Cormyrean on the ground, pinned beneath her wounded camel with a ruby-eyed Shadovar warrior leaping over the top. She flung a ball of spider silk at the figure and uttered a spell, and he hit the ground encased in a sticky cocoon.

  Finally, there was time to scream, “Shadovar! Defend yourselves!”

  Even Ruha could barely hear her voice over the battle din that had already risen in the wadi. Bedine were shouting to each other about demons and djinn and, finding attackers at their backs no matter which way they turned, falling fast. The Shadovar were rising from the shadows to hack off an arm or leg, then vanishing back into the murk before they could be counterattacked.

  Ruha grabbed Caladnei under the arms and pulled her from under her camel.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Stunned,” the wizard replied, mouth gaping at the carnage. She lowered her hand and sent a golden bolt streaking through a Shadovar rising behind Ruha, then shook her head in astonishment. “Where did they come from?”

  “Out of the shadows,” Ruha said.

  She slipped around to Caladnei’s back and shot a long stream of fire at a Shadovar rising behind a Bedine camel boy, no doubt holding reins on his first raid. The fireball exploded without harming the shadow warrior, as Weave magic sometimes did, and the dark figure ran his sword through the young warrior, then melted back into the shadows.

  “This is how it often is with them,” Ruha said.

  “Really?” Caladnei gasped. She was silent for an instant, and Ruha glanced over her shoulder to see the wizard rubbing the purple dragon on her signet ring. “Hhormun, come quick. You need to see this!”

  “Come?” Ruha cried.

  She glimpsed a Shadovar rising up from behind a boulder with a blowpipe in his hands and flung a pebble in his direction, then spoke a single word. The pebble became a bead of magma. When it hit the boulder, the boulder erupted into a thousand drops of molten stone as well, and the warrior vanished in a searing orange spray.

  “We should be fleeing!” said Ruha.

  “Flee?” Caladnei shook her head. “There can’t be more than two dozen left.”

  “And more where they came from,” warned Ruha.

  She had no idea how close they were to the city, but she knew the Shadovar well enough to feel certain this was just the first wave of the attack. Even if they didn’t realize there were Cormyreans involved in the raid, they would send a company of veserab riders to make an example of any tribe that dared steal from them.

  “They’re just trying to delay us,” Ruha said.

  “Yes, so I guessed when they attacked our camels first.”

  The Cormyrean loosed a silver ray at a pair of Shadovar charging Sa’ar, who was still struggling to slip a hood and wing jacket over the last veserab tied to his dead camel. When the attack succeeded only in stunning the shadow warriors back into the murk, Ruha left Caladnei’s side and dodging one black sword and reducing the owner of the second to a cinder even darker than his normally swarthy complexion, stopped at the sheikh’s side.

  “Are you mad, Sa’ar?” She swatted the creature’s head aside as it swung around to bite at her knee, then continued, “Let it go! A few veserabs cannot be worth so many Mahwa lives.”

  The sheikh did not even look up from his work. “Mounts that can fly across the sky? The Mahwa will be the masters of the desert!”

  He finally managed to pull the hood over the creature’s faceless head, then was struck from behind by a bolt of shadow magic that pitched him face first over the waist-high calf. His arm went limp and Ruha saw ground through a jagged hole in it. Before she could sweep a pebble off the ground to counterattack, the sheikh had pulled a throwing dagger with his good hand and pivoted around to whip it at his charging attacker.

  The throw missed, of course, but it distracted the Shadovar long enough for Ruha to pull her own jambiya. She grabbed the laces of the calf’s hood and held it beside her for the half second it took the shadow warrior to close. Ruha came up beneath his guard and opened him from groin to ribs. She was mildly surprised to see that the stuff spilling out of him looked much the same as that coming out of the Bedine.

  “May Elah smile on you,” Sa’ar gasped, his good arm thrown over the veserab’s back, supporting him. “How many times have you saved my life, now?”

  “Too many times for one sheikh,” Ruha said, pulling him to his feet. She took his curved amarat horn and pressed it into his good hand. “Now blow your horn and scatter your warriors. Veserabs are no good to dead men.”

  Sa’ar thrust the horn away. “They are my veserabs now,” he said, “and no man steals from Sa’ar, Sheikh of the Mahwa.”

  Ruha let her chin sink. “You are a fool, Sheikh.”

  “Almost certainly,” Sa’ar said, pushing the calf’s head toward her. “Now help me lace this up, before the battle turns against us again.”

  “Again?”

  Ruha looked around and saw that while the battle was continuing to rage, the Shadovar were now being assailed by magic and iron whenever they drew near a Bedine. She glanced up the slopes of the wadi and saw Hhormun standing atop a boulder, his aba tossed aside somewhere to reveal the black battle cloak of a Cormyrean War Wizard. He was wielding two wands at once, hurling blazing nuggets of fire or crackling forks of lightning whenever a Shadovar dared emerge from the murk to attack. Flanking him were two full ranks of Purple Dragons, loading and firing their iron crossbows by turn, while a smaller ring of three wizards and two dozen dragoneers stood by staring into the murk, attacking any shadow that so much as flickered.

  “The fool!” Ruha hissed. “Does he think no one will see him? Or that the Most High will think the iron bolts came from Bedine crossbows?”

  “I do not know what he thinks,” Sa’ar said, “only that he is a man of his word. Now, will you help me or not, witch?”

  After a quick glance around to ensure they were under no imminent threat of attack, Ruha helped him lace the hood. By the time she finished, Caladnei was standing at the upper end of the battlefield, waving the Bedine survivors up the wadi.

  “Come along, and quickly!” The Cormyrean’s gaze was fixed on the sky above the lake, where Ruha’s sandstorm was still raging. “Be quick about it.”

  Ruha pushed Sa’ar and the reins of his three veserab calves into the arms of a group of stunned-looking warriors, then turned in the direction Caladnei was facing and saw a large company of veserab riders approaching from the north, flying high above her sandstorm. They were still too distant for her to tell much more than that there were several hundred of them, but she would have bet her veil that a force of that size was being led by a Prince of Shade.

  Hhormun and his dragoneers began an orderly withdrawal toward Caladnei—and Ruha was not at all sorry to see the Shadovar survivors concentrating their efforts on the Cormyreans instead of Sa’ar and his Mahwa. The shadow lords were being more careful now, emerging from the murk just long enough to fling a shadow bolt through a warrior’s knee or hamstring a wizard, clearly attempting to delay their retreat until the veserab company arrived.

  Ruha ran up the wadi and joined Caladnei, who was busily spraying magic into the hillside shadows in an attempt to help her struggling companions. With her attack magic all but exhausted, Ruha prepared a sand dragon spell, but held it in reserve in case Caladnei irritated the Shadovar enough to draw an attack.

  Between the wizardess’s attacks, Ruha said, “Had Hhormun been waiting here with the rest of Sa’ar’s warriors, the Mahwa might have lost fewer lives.”

  “Or we all might have lost more,” Caladnei said. “This way, it was the Shadovar who were surprised, not us.”

  “And you had a chance to watch them figh
t.” Ruha did not bother to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  Caladnei sprayed a pair of Shadovar with some sort of green ray Ruha was not familiar with, reducing both warriors to smoky wisps and opening the way for Hhormun’s battered company to join them in the bottom of the wadi.

  She cocked her brow and glanced at Ruha. “We had a chance to watch them fight, but it was their idea to steal the veserabs.”

  “True—and you took advantage.” Ruha was fighting to keep from yelling. The story was an old one, the berrani from outside Anauroch entering the desert and using the nomads for their own purposes. “Sa’ar would never have attempted such a thing without Cormyrean magic.”

  “It sounds to me like we took advantage of each other.” Caladnei shrugged and pointed up the wadi, where Sa’ar and his warriors were leading their new veserabs into the teleport circle that would carry them to safety—at least temporarily. “I don’t see the sheikh complaining.”

  Hhormun and the rest of the Cormyrean scouts arrived, with half a dozen Shadovar close on their heels. Caladnei took out two with one of her green rays, then Hhormun and another wizard killed three more. The last warrior glanced over his shoulder and, finding the veserab company still too distant to aid him, began to run for the nearest shadow. When no one else started a spell, Ruha scraped a handful of sand off the ground and started hers—only to be interrupted when Hhormun brought his arm down across her wrists.

  “Let him go,” he said. “He’s not hurting anybody now.”

  “Hurting anybody?” Ruha gasped. “He’s seen your wizard’s cloak. He’ll run straight to the Most High and confirm that we’re a scouting party from Cormyr.”

  “Will he?” A faint smile came to Hhormun’s bearded lips, and he turned up the wadi. “Then we had better hurry to our next campsite, hadn’t we?”

  Ruha’s jaw fell behind her veil. She stood there staring after the old wizard until Caladnei took her arm.