Sharani series Box Set

by Kevin L. Nielsen

The sun rose over the Sharani Desert, warming the sands and adding strength to the upward thrusts of the aevians’ wings. The heated air rose in large columns, which allowed Nabil to slow the frequency of each stroke and soar along with the wind. Still, Gavin leaned forward to keep the massive, white aevian from getting too far above the sands for him to make out the minute details. Despite the fun, Gavin knew they were still on a mission. Kaiden was still out here among the sands. Somewhere.

  They kept the Forbiddence always on their left side and followed its long graceful curve for several uneventful hours. Gavin watched small herds of goats, either wild or ones which had gotten loose when the Oasis had fallen, scamper along the rocks and hard, packed sands that lined the Forbiddence for several hundred spans, radiating outward from the dark, slick rock. The different parts of the Sharani Desert fascinated Gavin. From the rolling dunes around the Oasis, to the harder packed sands and desert plants out here, the Sharani Desert was as different and varied as were the people that lived within it.

  He couldn’t help but glance down at Farah as he thought this. The girl—no, the woman—was like no one Gavin had ever met. Granted, his experience with women involved either his grandmother, Shallee, or the women in the clans, none of which offered him much real insight, but Farah had such a vibrant nature to her. She seemed like an Oasis flower blooming in the middle of the sands, unique, free, and not caring what others perceived of her.

  Nabil screeched, pulling Gavin from his thoughts. The aevian was generally silent in flight, so Gavin immediately looked around for something out of the ordinary. He found it after only a few moments and just as Farah whistled sharply to alert him of a similar discovery. There in the sands below them leading not to, but away from the Forbiddence, were a set of tracks. Gavin leaned forward and directed Nabil into a shallow dive. Talyshan was a smaller, brown shadow paralleling the motion to the left.

  As they picked up speed, Gavin was forced to close his eyes against the stinging wind, but a moment later Nabil pulled out of the dive and landed gracefully in the sands. Almost by instinct, Gavin released the leads from his harness and slid off Nabil’s back, only opening his eyes when he was halfway down to the sands. Gavin’s booted feet crunched against the ground and he reached for his greatsword.

  “Wait!” Farah’s voice was urgent and hard. Gavin froze and looked over his shoulder at her.

  “Leave the sword,” she ordered. She was already deep in the process of removing her flight harness. “Take off anything made of metal. If it is Kaiden, we don’t want to give him any more weapons than he already has.”

  Gavin nodded, grateful for Farah’s pragmatism. He removed his own harness, the greatsword, and his belt and hooked them onto Nabil’s saddle. Farah walked over to him and pulled a long, red knife from under her robes and proffered it to him. He took it, feeling the surprising balance to the cleaver-like blade.

  “Glass?”

  Farah nodded, pulling out a second one for herself.

  “You’ve really thought this one through, then.” Gavin said, approvingly.

  “Khari’s idea.” Farah said giving him a pointed look.

  For a moment, Gavin wondered if he’d done something wrong, then realized that she was waiting for him to take the lead. He nodded and turned back to investigate the trail they’d seen from above. He was going to be the leader of the mystics, after all, if Khari got her way, which she most likely would. Behind him, Farah whistled a few quick notes and the two aevians launched into the air, taking the metal with them. From what Gavin had heard of the Oasis battle, it may not be enough, but then again, recountings of events had a tendency toward becoming stories, and stories drifted to legends when the experience was a horrifying one.

  A few more steps brought them to the tracks they had seen from the air. Footprints marred the otherwise smooth desert surface, prints that were deep, wide, and long, far larger than any Gavin had ever known. Between the tracks, a long groove cut into the sand as well, almost like a tail. Gavin had seen similar markings when he’d stumbled across a sandtiger’s tracks. The groove there had been extremely shallow, and the tracks in two sets of pairs rather than a single one, but it was the only thing Gavin had ever seen remotely similar. He bent down to study them closer, looking questioningly up at Farah after a moment.

  She shook her head. “We won’t know anything if we don’t follow them.” She glanced off in the direction the tracks were headed and Gavin followed her gaze. It looked like they were headed straight for an outcropping of rock in the distance. It was too small to be a Warren, but it may have once been a piece of one of the stoneways.

  “Come on then,” Gavin said, standing and turning to follow the tracks.

  “On foot?”

  Gavin nodded. “Yes, on foot. It will be harder for whatever it is to spot us on foot. Talyshan and Nabil will be close if we need them.”

  “Alright,” Farah said with a shrug. Her expression had gone grim, but she gave him a forced half-smile when she noticed him looking.

  He didn’t know what to say, so he started walking. Farah followed.

  The outcropping slowly resolved into the broken pillar of an old stoneway. Gavin and Farah approached it cautiously, careful to watch all around them for an ambush. Farah jumped at the smallest sound, glass blade swinging up to the ready in seconds, but it was never anything. It took Gavin a while to realize that, after last night’s nightmares, after reliving the battle of the Oasis in her sleep, she half expected a genesauri to come rising up out of the sand.

  At least, that’s what Gavin assumed. He didn’t have that same fear. As he walked across the sands he knew, without really understanding how, that the genesauri were well and truly gone. It was more of a gut instinct than true knowledge, but that was sometimes more sure a measure than was knowledge.

  As they approached the broken pillar though, Gavin felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and he even started jumping at the slightest sound. As a child, he’d wondered at the stoneways scattered throughout the Sharani desert. They were giant stone and metal roads suspended in the air on the backs of thick pillars. Everyone knew they were safe from the genesauri, though no one knew what they really were or how they had come to be in there. Gavin had asked his grandmother several times, but she only repeated what everyone else already knew. They were safety from the genesauri and a remnant of a different time. And really, in the face of the genesauri Migrations, what else really mattered?

  “Gavin, look there,” Farah whispered.

  Gavin’s eyes darted to Farah and then followed her pointing finger to the shadows behind the large pillar in the sand. He could make out a figure there, stooped over a second. For a moment, Gavin wondered if it was Kaiden, but then realized the sheer scale of what he was seeing. They were still at least a hundred spans from the pillar. In order for the standing figure to be as large as he appeared to be, he would have to be well over seven feet tall and twice as broad shouldered as Gavin was. No one was that big. No one . . .

  “I’m going to circle around them and come at them from behind,” Gavin whispered. “You keep on, but give me a few minutes to get around them. Be ready to signal for the aevians.”

  He moved to turn away, but she grabbed his arm with her free hand and stepped close. She stood up on the tip of her toes and kissed him on the cheek. She didn’t say anything else, but he nodded at her, unable to muster a smile, and then tugged his arm free and broke into a shallow, stooped run.

  Gavin eased through the sand, careful to stay mostly obscured from view. When his line of sight to the mysterious figure was broken by the pillar, he broke into a run. The ground was covered in looser sand around the pillar where wind had blown it into massive drifts. Though it made running difficult, Gavin was also grateful, because it muffled the sound of his footfalls.

  When he got close enough to be heard, even with the sand, he slowed to almost a crawl. He hoped Farah was ready, though he had no way of knowing. He crept along, red glas
s dagger held low, and then leapt around the side of the pillar.

  The smell hit him first, even before the strange sight of the massively tall men. It was a putrid, rotting smell, like decomposing flesh.

  One of the men lay on the ground, covered in bandages. The standing man looked up, slightly-too-large, blue-green eyes widening in surprise.

  The man’s clothes were in tatters, though they had once been fine and unlike anything Gavin had ever seen before. He was dirty, and covered in blood, but there was a chiseled quality to his features, like a work of stone taken flesh. The man hesitated for a moment, then Gavin felt a massive rush of energy and the man’s hands exploded with crackling white energy. The wind picked up and blew sands into the air.

  “How dare you lift a weapon against me, slave,” the man boomed in an accented voice that rolled like thunder. “Drop that thing and go fetch your healers, if you have any.”

  Slave? Gavin didn’t drop his blade. He was outweighed by almost a hundred pounds, he guessed, and the man had at least a foot and half of reach on him, not to mention the crackling bolts of energy dancing up the giant’s arms. How was he doing that anyway?

  “Did you hear me?” the giant shouted. He reached down for a massive war hammer that Gavin hadn’t noticed before.

  Gavin didn’t back down. He took a step forward as the man raised the hammer, the crackling energy on his arms a brilliant white light that danced off the metal hammerhead and crackled intoxicatingly.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Gavin said, keeping his voice calm and flat. “But I am not a slave. If you and your friend are sick, we have healers back at the Roterralar Warren.”

  The giant didn’t release the magic or put down the hammer. “Go and fetch them from the place of the earthen home.”

  Gavin’s brows came to together slightly before he corrected his expression. “The Warren is several day’s walk from here. But we can take you there.”

  “We?”

  Gavin realized his mistake even as the words slipped from his lips. The giant man’s eyes searched the desert and he shifted slightly in his stance. No, he swayed. The giant blinked a few times and Gavin noticed the slight tremble of the hammer. He’d thought it was an effect of the crackling energy, but could it possibly be that he was injured too?

  “Are you alright?” Gavin asked, stepping forward.

  “Get back!”

  The giant steadied himself and whipped his free hand in front of him. Energy sprayed out in a wide arc, crackling and zipping into the stoneway pillar, branching down into the ground, up into the air, toward Gavin, and some even back toward the giant. Gavin didn’t know what to do. He stood there, frozen, unable to move as time seemed to slow. Then Farah was suddenly there. The small woman snatched the energy out of the air and sent it downwards in a cascade of molten sand and shards of glass. Gavin was up beside her in an instant. He reached toward the energy as well and drew it in. Energy crackled in his own hands and he looked up at the blond-haired giant.

  The man blinked at them a few times and swayed on his feet. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. The energy running up and down his arms died a moment before the man’s knees gave out and he toppled forward toward the sand. Without pausing to think and acting purely on instinct, Gavin dismissed the energy he’d gathered and darted forward, catching the giant before he landed on top of his companion. He grunted with the massive effort, struggling with the man’s weight, and then Farah was there beside him to help ease the man to the ground.

  Gavin turned to thank her, but instead of a smile on her face, he saw a thundercloud. Farah balled up a fist, her right one—the left held the red glass cleaver—and, before Gavin could react, punched him square on one shoulder. He grunted from the surprising force and odd little sting and backed up defensively, throwing up his hands.

  “What was that for?” he demanded.

  Farah scowled at him and placed her hands on her hips. For a moment, Gavin saw a striking resemblance to his grandmother in that pose, then the tirade began.

  “What were you thinking, jumping in all alone like that! You were supposed to wait for me. You could have gotten yourself killed. And then what did you do? You go and have to be all noble and offer aid instead of just sticking them with a knife and being done with it. You sun-blinded, goat-brained idiot! You . . .”

  Suddenly she darted forward and Gavin tried to dodge out of the way, but Farah caught him in a rough embrace and squeezed him tight, burying her face into his chest.

  Gavin blinked in confusion for a moment, but then returned the hug. It felt good to have her in his arms, even if he didn’t really follow what had just happened. He was starting to think it may be a constant state of confusion for him where Farah was concerned. Part of him was mildly annoyed, but the larger part of him enjoyed feeling needed and wanted.

  “You fool,” she whispered into his chest, voice catching. “You can’t do things like that and survive very long. Sands, how did you ever make it as an outcast?”

  Gavin chuckled and kissed the top of her head, breathing in her sweet scent. “With a lot of help from a very patient, very opinionated grandmother.”

  “You’re a blustering, naïve, sands-cursed idiot. You’re lucky I was there to save you.”

  “I know.”

  Farah released him and stepped back, scrubbing under her nose and eyes with the back of her hand. She sniffed and then turned to look at the two massive men sprawled on the ground.

  “What do we do with them? Who are they?” Her tone held just a hint of awe in it, and fear.

  Gavin didn’t answer at first, instead dropping to a knee next to the larger, stouter man who had been prone since they’d first seen him. He had a wan, sallow complexion to his otherwise pale-skinned face, but there was a solidness to it as well, like weather-worn rock. The man’s eyes were closed, but Gavin peeled one back to peer down into the eye itself. The dark parts in the middle were small and contracted and the eyes flitted back and forth without seeing. He moved from there to the crude bandage, wrinkling his nose against the smell. He lifted one corner of the blanket-bandage and was nearly overwhelmed by the stench. Farah made a small noise of disgust and stepped backward. Beneath the tattered shirt and gangrenous pus, the man’s chest was covered in long, deep gashes. The skin around them was wet with blood and fluid, but red and hot to the touch. He was boiling up with infection and fever. Gavin hurried over to the other man and more carefully checked the bandages he found on the man’s back and shoulders. The same long gashes, like the marks a sandtiger’s claws would make.

  “Call the aevians,” Gavin ordered. “Bring me the waterskins and the food, then fly straight back to the eyrie. Find Khari or Lhaurel and bring them here.”

  Farah opened her mouth, then snapped it closed. She looked at him, a question clear in her expression. He returned the gaze flatly, then nodded toward her and made an impatient gesture. She did as he asked. Gavin checked the wounds again, trying to decide how best to approach cleaning and dressing them. Nabil and Talyshan plunged from the sky a moment later, the larger aevian in the lead and giving out a fearsome shriek as he came to land near the stoneway pillar. Farah grabbed the supplies from both of them, though Nabil hissed at her and hopped closer to Gavin. He seemed unusually agitated, though Gavin was more concerned with washing the wounds of the taller man with some of the water Farah had passed to him.

  “Fly fast. You’ll be back before anything can go wrong,” Gavin said.

  “Why don’t you go? I can stay and watch these two. I’ve been a mystic far longer than you. If that one wakes up and tried to attack you again, how will you defend yourself?”

  “Do you know anything about healing?”

  “No.”

  Gavin turned and looked Farah in the eye. “I do. I’ll see what I can do to keep them alive until you get back. Don’t worry about me. Now go on.”

  Farah sniffed, opened her mouth again and then snapped it shut. She nodded and, without any further prea
mble, leapt up into Talyshan’s saddle and hooked the leads in their proper place. Gavin hadn’t noticed her putting the flight harness back on. She gave him another look, one that Gavin thought was either one of worry or anger, then whistled sharply and Talyshan launched into the air. Nabil shrieked after them as they climbed higher and higher into the air. Gavin watched them go until they disappeared from his sight, then he turned back to the two men.

  Kaiden leaned against the stoneway pillar between them.

  Chapter 15: Brisson

  “The second Iteration of water is the blood mage, though they are never called such. Of these, there are only seven. The Seven Sisters, to be precise. They overlap in abilities with their prior Iteration, but also hold common portions of each of the other eight.”

  —From Commentary on the Schema, Volume I

  Brisson ignored the guilt of slipping down into the bath water. He was the master’s new steward now, after all, wasn’t he? It was cold but the lingering perfumes the petty Storm Ward poured into it like they weren’t more expensive than a dozen slaves wafted over him. The Great One had left it filled after speaking with the master, assuming the slaves would take care of it. Brisson had conveniently forgotten to mention it to the other slaves.

  He sighed and tried to float. He’d seen some of the younger Orinai children doing it when he’d been a slave on another plantation further to the east, but couldn’t figure it out. Instead he bobbed up and down in the shallow end of the pool, years of grime, dirt, and sweat finally loosening their hold. Even his matted, brown hair loosened and flecks of dirt floated away, revealing a lighter colored brown to his hair and lighter olive skin tone than had previously been present. He could almost see why the Great One enjoyed baths so much.

  Almost.

  The amount of work it required of the house slaves, the amount of water dragged up from the well, the time required to get the temperature just right—that was just plain stupid. Why would anyone want to waste that much water? This though, this wasn’t waste. The water had already been used once, hadn’t it? This was an experiment. Yeah, that was it. This was an experiment to see if they’d been able to get the baths to the Great One’s liking.