Wrath of the Urkuun (Epic of Ahiram Book 2)

by Murano, Michael Joseph

  “Sad tale.”

  “Well that’s not the end of the story.” She smiled and continued. “That happens somewhere in the middle of the story. The end is beautiful.”

  “Good. I love stories that end well.” Banimelek leaned against the tree and closed his eyes. “You should go to sleep now. We’ll have a busy day tomorrow.”

  Sheheluth nodded, and dropped down a few branches where she curled up and closed her eyes. Faernor is not that scary after all.

  The next morning was cold and drizzly. Sondra woke up to the smell of rabbit roasting over a slow fire. She sauntered back down to the ground and performed a series of stretches.

  “Good morning, princess,” greeted Jedarc with his unflappable smile.

  She turned around to scold him for calling her princess and ended up with a peck on her cheek. “You’re a pooch,” he said. He went over to Sheheluth who had just finished climbing down and tousled her hair.

  “Pooch? Tinantel,” she protested. “You’re taking this too far.”

  “Hey monkey,” said Jedarc over Sondra’s protest, “I picked these for you.” He produced a bunch of boysenberries.

  “I am not—”

  Skillfully, Jedarc threw three berries into the young Silent’s open mouth. “Good, aren’t they?”

  “—a monkey,” snapped Sheheluth.

  I wonder what kind of an animal a pooch is, Sondra thought.

  After breakfast, a quick search put them back on Hiyam’s trail. The folks who captured her did not try to be discrete. By midmorning, they reached a small clearing where they found the horse’s remains under a cloud of flies. The saddle lay to one side, and a large portion of the animal’s hind was missing.

  “At least fifteen people were here,” said Sheheluth.

  “Look at the footprints over here,” called Jedarc as he bent down beneath a nearby tree.

  “High Rider’s boots,” confirmed Sondra.

  “How can you tell?” asked Sheheluth.

  “This smudge here,” explained Jedarc.

  “The one that looks like a thunderbolt?”

  “Exactly. Distinctively High Riders.”

  “It’s a perfect footprint,” observed Sheheluth.

  “Hiyam must have left it, hoping someone would be looking for her,” Sondra pointed out. “That’s a bit of good news.”

  “Come see. I know who took her.”

  They joined Banimelek by the horse’s carcass.

  “There’s a pit fire. They ate the horse!”

  “The desert people?” offered Sondra.

  Banimelek nodded. Jedarc winced.

  Commander Tanios had mentioned the desert people in passing once or twice, but did not explain why they were known as the desert people, for they were forest and cave dwellers. Perhaps they acquired this term because of the color of their skin, which was as pale as the sand, or because they were reclusive and exceptionally hard to track.

  “Why take her?” wondered Jedarc. “These folks are reclusive and have very little interaction with the outside world.”

  “They saw she was hurt and wanted to help her, or they have a different purpose in mind,” replied Sondra.

  “Do they know who the High Riders are?” wondered Sheheluth.

  “Unlikely,” offered Banimelek.

  “No use speculating,” said Jedarc. “Let’s go.”

  As time went on, the tracks became fainter and harder to follow until they were gone completely. Despite their extensive training, Sondra, Jedarc and Banimelek were stumped. Hiyam’s captors seemed to have completely vanished.

  But not Sheheluth. Her ability to read her surroundings was uncanny: a patch of grass bent a different way, a fallen bunch of leaves, a cracked blade of grass, and she knew where to go. When she could not find any trace to follow, she would climb up a tree, examine the surroundings, and know just where to go. She led them relentlessly, deeper and higher, until, by the third day around noon, they reached a narrow plateau encased between three mountainsides.

  “They’re here,” she whispered as the four of them lay in the tall grass.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s as plain as the day is day.”

  “Over there,” Jedarc pointed at three small, white patches visible far against a dark gray mountainside. How Sheheluth managed to find them, she did not explain, and they did not ask. The origin of each Silent was a respected secret. The Corps attracted candidates the world over for reasons none of the Silent could explain. “Where are you from” was not a question a Silent would ask another. Which kingdom each of them hailed from was anybody’s guess. Sondra was dark-skinned, rolled the ‘r’ sound and snapped her tongue whenever a word ended with a ‘t’ sound. This suggested she hailed from the south, but more than that no one could say with any degree of certainty. Whenever he was upset, Banimelek would drop his voice to a whisper and then stress every word as if he were a foreigner speaking the common tongue for the first time. His thick, curly hair and his olive skin made him a citizen of the world. Jedarc was tall and slender with broad shoulders and hair as blonde as a field of wheat in summer. He was at ease with everyone, implying that he grew up in a royal court or a metropolitan city with a sophisticated social life. He spoke without an accent.

  “When you become a Silent, you leave your past at the door,” Tanios had told them. “Here no one will ask where you are from, how old you are, or whether the name you carry now is your name of origin. We are the Silent and we do not speak of our past.”

  Whether the commander knew of the Silent’s origins was an altogether different question.

  “Sheheluth, how did you know there were people here?”

  Sheheluth pointed to the mountainside. “See the tiny dark patches in the mountain that look like a beehive? Those are caves; lots of them. If they were attacked from this plateau, they could escape through the caves. Then look, you see that stream of water? Everyone needs water.”

  Jedarc nodded. “Sheheluth, you’re the most amazing … ouch! Stop pinching my nose.”

  “I don’t like it when you say I’m a monkey.”

  “But … fine, what do you want me to call you then?”

  “Sheheluth.”

  “You got it. Sheheluth, you’re the most amazing Sheheluth I’ve ever met. One day I’ll bring a banana tree, just for you.”

  Seeing her pout, he tousled her hair. “Wait for me here,” he added. “I’ll scout ahead.”

  Sheheluth rubbed her cheek as she opened her mouth to complain about Jedarc’s public show of affection, but instead she squinted at the field ahead of her.

  Gently, Banimelek placed a finger under her chin. She closed her mouth, and unable to contain her surprise, she whispered, “I can’t see him. He vanished. Does he use magic?”

  “That’s Tinantel for you.”

  “How does he do it? How does he disappear like that?” Her keen eyes scanned the plain, but she could not see him anywhere. “I have never seen anyone disappear so quickly.”

  “A lot of hard work, Sheheluth,” replied Banimelek. “Lots and lots of it. Now let’s go. We have our part to do.”

  Evening came and brought scattered clouds with it. The skies had been clear for the past three days, but now a new storm began to form.

  “It won’t be long before it rains again,” muttered Banimelek.

  “Aren’t you worried about Jedarc?” asked Sheheluth. “He’s been gone for the entire day.”

  Sondra shook her head. “That’s typical. Two hours to cross the field and two to come back, undetected. That’ll leave him three hours to locate Hiyam; plenty of time to observe the people’s movement and figure out the best route to take for the plan of attack. Hardly long, really.”

  “You all learned to do this?”

  “All the Silent are trained in the art of infiltration and observation.”

  “I see.” Sheheluth heaved a deep sigh when Banimelek handed her a piece of roasted rabbit. “Not a
gain. We’ve been eating rabbit for four days, morning and evening. Do I have to?”

  Banimelek smiled. “It won’t be much longer, Sheheluth. We’re really close now. I know you’re tired of eating rabbit meat and wild berries, but you are a Silent, and ‘The Silent rejoices in every trial where he learns to serve a friend.’ See?”

  “That’s from the Book of Siril?”

  “Yep. Chapter eleven, verse two.”

  “She is not our friend.”

  “Hiyam is Jedarc’s friend, which makes her our friend.”

  Sheheluth shrugged her shoulders. She did not want to upset Banimelek, however, she could not help but think that Ahiram would not see it the same way. She changed the topic.

  “Why do we memorize these verses?”

  They were perched up a tall tree from which they could see the field ahead of them. Toward noon, they had seen folks go about their business, but they were too far away to make anything of it. Since then, the camp looked deserted. Sondra leaned over and peeked at the field, but Jedarc had not come back yet. Distractedly, she answered, “‘The Silent shall be united in thought and action,’ chapter one, verse one of the Book of Siril.”

  Having finished her frugal meal, Sheheluth took a draft from her water skin. Streams were plentiful in Tanniin and they had no difficulty finding one. Sondra looked affectionately at the young recruit.

  “You have done well, Sheheluth,” she said smiling. “Good job.”

  Sheheluth looked up surprised, and flashed a grateful smile. Unwittingly, she had helped Banimelek and Sondra avoid a painful confrontation with Jedarc: They had both agreed to stop looking for Hiyam after three days and knew Jedarc would not relent without an intense confrontation. By finding Hiyam before the end of the third day, Sheheluth rendered the argument moot.

  While Jedarc had gone scouting, Banimelek set out to make a dozen torches in anticipation of a rescue mission deep inside the network of caves Sheheluth had shown them. Sondra and Sheheluth gathered dry wood for him. Ordinarily, a torch held an oil lamp with a thick wick that burned slowly, and in the best cases, cleanly. But they did not have that luxury here, and the tall Silent knew how to bundle wooden sticks into a makeshift torch that would burn slowly, though not cleanly. “Inside these caves, we can use the smoke to our advantage,” he explained. He prepared the last torch, when Sheheluth felt something creep up her right shoulder. She smacked it and the intruder retreated. As she turned around she let out a scream that Sondra muffled instantly.

  “Got you,” whispered Jedarc grinning widely.

  “Tinantel,” Sheheluth protested, tearing up, “you scared me.”

  “Tinantel, eh? Sondra is rubbing off on you, I see. I did scare you,” he added settling next to her on the tree branch. “You were so busy complaining, you did not hear me climb up. If I were an enemy, you would be dead by now.”

  “Most of us have learned this the hard way,” concurred Banimelek.

  Sondra nodded in agreement.

  “Tinantel did that to you too?”

  “Yes,” sighed Sondra, “he did.”

  “So who did it to him? Who did it to you?”

  “Ahiram,” replied Jedarc without a hint of a smile, while Banimelek and Sondra began to chuckle quietly, “And it wasn’t funny.”

  “Oh yes, it was,” said Sondra, amused. “But that’s a story for another time. What did you find out about Hiyam, Tinantel?”

  “She’s there all right, in a heavily guarded cave. I couldn’t get any closer, but that’s the only cave being watched this way.”

  “What do you think they are planning?”

  “I don’t know, but from the looks of it, the action will take place in the largest cave, which it seems, is at ground level. They were busy cleaning it up. It is mostly empty, except for a tall pole.”

  “I have a plan,” said Banimelek.

  “Let’s hear it,” replied Jedarc eagerly. When it came to caves and plans, he trusted Banimelek.

  “A big cave in a complex of caves seldom has just one way in. So we go with a right-out and left-in.”

  “Why not left-in, right-out?” inquired Sondra.

  Banimelek raised two fingers. “We are closer to the left side than we are to the right, second, the cluster of caves on the left side is denser than the caves on the right.”

  “And if it’s a dead end?”

  “I doubt that it would be, because this is a village. These caves are interconnected, and owing to the importance of the main one, I am confident there are at least two interior passages, one from the left and the other from the right, that lead to this main cave.”

  “What’s a right-out, left-in?” asked Sheheluth.

  “Simple,” explained Sondra, “We create a diversion on the right side of the camp which will draw the people out to it, and while they’re distracted, we sneak inside a cave on the left. See? Right-out, left-in.”

  Sheheluth nodded. “What’s the distraction?”

  Banimelek pointed to the torches and smiled.

  “One more thing,” explained Jedarc, “These guys are massive. They’re huge with long arms, tall legs, oversized muscles, and jaws like flint, even the women. Their skin is snowy white. When roused they’ll be fast. Hit to cripple and we may hurt them. We better make use of our darts.”

  They waited for nightfall and for the moon to disappear behind thick clouds, then they moved like shadows along the left side of the mountain. The Silent used stealth when on approach. A sentry would be looking for fast-moving intruders, therefore, they creeped slowly, cautiously, pausing between every few steps. As they blended with their environment, they became undetectable.

  When they reached the edge of the camp, they looked for a sentinel, but could not find any. Still, they moved forward carefully, trying to get as close as possible to the main cave. Now and then, they heard the whimper of a young child or the heavy breathing of a sleeping adult. A powerful odor of fur, sweat, and something rancid, wafted from the nearby cave and Jedarc—who was in the lead—took a quick peak and signaled for his friends to climb up. Above, they could see two other openings. Fortunately, the jagged wall facilitated their movements. The second cave was also occupied, so they moved on to the third but could not tell if anyone was in it. Jedarc went in first and signaled for them to join him. The cave was empty.

  Time for a distraction. Banimelek stood at the ledge of the third cave. Holding a pair of torches, he eyed Sondra beside him, who stood with a dart crossbow in each hand. These weapons, designed by dwarfs, allowed a Silent to fire darts single-handedly. When folded, they were easily concealed within the dart belt, and each Silent carried two of them. Sondra nodded and he threw the two torches in rapid succession. Sondra pulled the trigger of the first dart crossbow, and a fraction of a second later, that of the second. Sheheluth took the two discharged crossbows away, and Jedarc handed Sondra two newly loaded crossbows. Banimelek threw two more torches. Sondra pulled the trigger twice more. The first torch exploded into a ball of fire, then the next three followed suit. The sound boomed between the mountains amplifying the effect. Pandemonium followed so quickly that it took the Silent by surprise. The desert people streamed out from their caves as if they had not been asleep, but instead of confusion, a quiet order reigned. Some of them pointed at the flying torches, then sniffed the air. In the glow of the dying light, the Silent were dismayed to see a group of women pointing with unnerving precision at their cave, then a dozen men charged them.

  Banimelek quickly lit a torch, and simply said, “Run!”

  The cave slopped downward for a short distance, then leveled into a tunnel high enough to run in. Bones littered the ground. No one wanted to know where they had come from. Abruptly, the tunnel dead-ended.

  “That didn’t go as expected,” muttered Jedarc.

  “We acted without sufficient knowledge,” countered Sondra, “and there was no time to study these people. Tinantel, you couldn’t have known they do not fear fire or that their sense of smell is th
is developed.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Jedarc.

  “Up,” said Banimelek.

  How he knew to look for an opening above his head was anyone’s guess. He handed the torch to Sondra, grabbed Sheheluth by the waist and hoisted her up unceremoniously. The young girl adjusted her position and managed to slip through the opening unharmed. Next, Banimelek cupped his hands. Sondra stepped into them and leaned one arm against his shoulder. He tensed his body and jerked up, raising her toward the ceiling. She reached the opening, grabbed the edges and pulled herself up. Not waiting, Jedarc climbed onto Banimelek’s shoulders, reached and pulled himself up just as the desert men entered the cave. Sondra dropped a rope. Banimelek grabbed it with one hand and waited until the invaders rounded the corner. He threw his torch and heard it slam into one them. Not waiting, he hauled himself up and Sheheluth pulled the rope before their pursuers could use it.

  But the desert people had no need for a rope. With one powerful push, one of them reached the opening and peered through it only to see Jedarc slam him on the head with a rock. He fell back down, more angry than hurt. Sondra threw three smoke pellets down the hole, while Banimelek and Jedarc prevented them from taking a foothold, but it was all in vain. Other members of the desert people streamed into the cave and surrounded them.

  They expected their enemies to beat them and take their weapons, but when the Silent offered no resistance, their pursuers immediately quieted. With no sign of aggression, they nudged the Silent forward and led them to another cave. Two brawny men rolled a stone over the opening and the Silent were left to their own device. They were now prisoners of the desert people.

  Banimelek was grateful for the darkness as he did not have to see the anguish on Jedarc’s face.

  “The Temple knows how to keep the Pit sealed; a store of knowledge, spanning hundreds of years, guides the priesthood of Baal in protecting the seal of the Pit. Still, there is a power source the Temple does not control, nor fully understand: the Letters of Power.”