by Dante King
“Retreat!” I bellowed at Tamsin and Renji as Brenna bolted for the figurative hills.
Our three dragons headed for the horizons, in three different directions.
There was a long, thrumming pause.
Then, the Entropic Mines detonated.
The sound was like a plug being pulled using TNT, like the Oroville Dam rupturing in reverse. It was cataclysmic, and yet at the same time, it was vaguely underwhelming.
The skin of the desert worm rippled outward in an expanding set of concentric wavelets. The whole mountainous beast seemed to flux and flex, kink and buckle, though it stayed in the exact same spot it had been in when I had thrown the mines into its wound.
Then, as if an invisible giant had simply reached down from the vault of heaven and taken the worm in a fist as humongous as the desert itself, the worm was crushed in on itself. It was like seeing a fleshy, squashy, gut-filled chip packet being scrunched up, though it went far beyond the limits of that.
In an instant, in a shattered second that nonetheless managed to somehow stretch for minutes, the desert worm was squeezed down and imploded into a capsule about the size of a trash can.
Its remains hit the sand with a conclusive thud.
Tamsin, Renji, Hana, and I floated down to the sandy deck, far enough away from the body of the worm so as not to be too powerfully afflicted by the potent stench still radiating from it.
We looked around at the surviving members of the caravan that were scattered around the patch of desert surrounding the site of the battle. I could see one guy in a robe and headcloth held down with heavy woolen coils gesticulating at the dead worm and then pointing at us. He looked, bizarrely, upset.
“I bet that’s the head merchant or whatever you call it,” I said to Hana, indicating the gutted man.
“What makes you say that?” the Vetruscan bearmancer asked me.
“Only a merchant could be more pissed off that he has lost one wagon load of merchandise than relieved at having survived an attack by a giant sand maggot,” I said.
“People are incredible, aren’t they?” Hana sighed.
“People’s ability for self-interest is what’s incredible,” I said with a dry laugh. “But there have always been those people who know what is right, and the others who know what will sell.”
Hana laughed sardonically. “So you have that truth in the Mystocean Empire too?”
“The Mystocean Empire. On Earth. The multiverse over,” I said.
Silence once more claimed the desert. The desert silence was one of those things that could be fended off for a while, but not indefinitely.
Then, into the profound silence that can only be experienced in the middle of a desert in the middle of the day, there came a deafening roar that cut through the pressing quiet like a blowtorch through a popsicle.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked my companions, casting about for the source of the sound. “Something else that wants to kill us?”
“Over there,” Noctis said, guiding my senses in the direction of a rising sand dune, which towered over us like a bronze wave.
On the top of the dune, I saw a woman. She was sitting, hands resting casually on her hips, atop nothing less than a giant saber-toothed tiger. I could make little else out of the warrior sitting astride the vicious and regal-looking cat, but that might have been because the saber-toothed tiger drew the eye like Portland draws hipsters.
I grinned as I feasted my eyes on the badass apparition, even as I conjured my Chaos Spear to be on the safe side and made sure that I was still helmeted.
“A catmancer,” I said. “I was hoping it wouldn’t take long to meet one of these guys.”
Chapter 6
None of the wagon drivers, nor the caravan owner or chief merchant or whoever he was, bothered to thank us for saving them. We got a few suspicious nods from some of those accompanying the massive, elephant-pulled sleds. Apart from that, they continued as if the giant desert worm hadn’t appeared and munched on their fellows.
By the time we had regrouped, made sure that the surviving members of the caravan were safely on their way, and checked that the four of us and our dragons were unscathed, the catmancer had disappeared from the top of the dune.
“What the… Where did she go?” Tamsin asked.
“Let’s get back up in the air,” I suggested. “There’s nowhere that she could have gone that we won’t be able to see from a couple of hundred feet up, is there?”
The four of us did as I proposed. I brought forth Noctis for Hana and me to fly on.
When we were one-hundred and fifty or so feet above the rising and falling dunes, we looked around us.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” I said to no one in particular, “but I’m as confused. Where the hell did that catmancer go?”
It was a good question.
As I had noted before, there was nowhere for her to go. The desert stretched out from us in every direction. In that vast expanse of barren land, the line of sled wagons that had left us looked like they were no more than a stone’s throw away, though they must have been about half a mile at least. All around, the dust flats and sand dunes rippled away like a golden ocean.
We had discarded the furs we had worn on our flight over the mountains and were now attired only in our fighting gear and long, hooded ponchos, which shaded our heads, fronts, and backs, but left us able to quickly reach our belted weapons from the side.
The sun beat down mercilessly.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Renji said solemnly. She cast around, shading her eyes with her blue-skinned hand.
“Can you smell anything? Can you hear anything?” I asked Noctis telepathically.
Noctis thumped his wings, adjusting them minutely so that they caught the copious hot air that was rising off the baking sand and allowed him to hover without expending too much energy.
“All I smell is heat and dust and time,” he said slowly. “The desert dries out scents fast, and the wind carries away what’s left. The only thing I hear is the shifting of the sand.”
“Balls,” I muttered.
“What’s that?” Hana asked.
“Never mind,” I replied.
My gaze skittered out from directly below us to the caravan continuing on its stately march toward its destination. My eyes followed on in a straight line, looking toward the southeastern horizon, in the direction the caravan was heading.
There, where the azure sky met the orange plains, glinting and winking like a bunch of dropped needles, was what looked to me like a city. From this distance, I could be sure of nothing except that some of the buildings must have been pretty large; towers and minarets by the way they stood up on the skyline.
“The city of Akrit,” I murmured. “Nice to meet you.”
It was while I was looking out at the desert municipality that a flicker in the air below caught my eye.
It was just a bird, golden in color so that it blended in with the sand that spread out beneath us like a pool of molten bronze. It was winging its way toward the city, flying with economical deep wing beats that leant it some phenomenal speed. With its bullet-shaped head, wedge tail and angular wings, it looked as if it was made for hunting swift prey.
“Mike?” Renji called, breaking my concentration. “Do you think we should look for that mancer?”
I shook my head and pointed toward the distant city. “Nah, let’s keep pressing on. If that’s Akrit, it should only take us two or three hours to reach it. We’ll dismount outside the city walls and go in on foot. I’m no diplomat, but flying over the city walls at high speed on the backs of three dragons is probably not the best way to ingratiate ourselves to the powers that be.”
“Very astute,” Tamsin said sardonically.
“Awfully tactful,” Renji added sweetly.
“Thank you,” I said, grinning over at them. “Now that we’re all in agreement, let’s fly!”
* * *
As it turned out, we didn’t have to wo
rry about showing up uninvited and unexpected.
We landed outside of the Akrit city walls in a swirling downdraft of grit and sand. There was a steady stream of travelers, merchants, farmers, and soldiers going in and out of the city, through an impressive double gate of beaten bronze that flashed and winked blindingly in the glare of the sun.
Not surprisingly, people stopped in mid-stride to stare as our three dragons touched down, beating their wings and sending sand and dust in clouds all over the place.
We had only just dismounted and dispelled our dragons when a contingent of heavily armed and flashily dressed soldiers arrived on the scene. It was immediately apparent that they were not just a bunch of grunts that happened to be passing by on their way home to the barracks after a random patrol.
“Very pretty,” I heard Hana say from over my left shoulder. I could not help but notice the slight note of derision in her lilting voice.
“They do look very… official,” I said, trying my hand at a bit of prudent statecraft early on.
“Official?” Tamsin said, snorting. “Can you imagine trying to fight in those fucking robes they’re wearing?”
I gave the hobgoblin a quick look that told her that we should probably at least try to not piss off these people before we had met their leader and asked him nicely to help us.
Tamsin smirked at me and made a gesture like she was locking her lips with an invisible key.
There were a nice round three dozen soldiers in the company. I saw nymphs, dryads, faeries, and a lot of ifrits among them. Each wore a pair of golden-hafted axes at their bejeweled belts and a large scimitar on their backs. Their helmets were pointed and draped with purple cloth that fell over their shoulders like mulberry-colored hair. They were mostly wrapped and shrouded in purple robes, which made them look more like holy men than warriors, but I caught glimpses of shining bronze armor under the mantles. Instead of the boots that the warriors of the Mystocean Empire and the Vetruscan Kingdom wore, these soldiers wore sandals that twined up their calves and were fastened under their knees by leather thongs.
I made a mental note to go for the feet if it ever came down to a fight. I wasn’t sure if that counted as fighting dirty: if you were dumb enough to turn up to a line dance wearing flip-flops, you couldn’t complain if you got your toes trodden on, could you?
One of the warriors, a female with intelligent green eyes and a couple of severe frown lines in between her brows, stepped forward. If it hadn’t been for that giant stick that she seemed to have wedged firmly up her rectum, she would have been kind of hot.
“Looks like she’s been on the receiving end of a brown flamingo,” Tamsin whispered under her breath.
“What’s that?” I asked, watching the woman walk slowly over to where we were waiting for her with our hands clearly visible.
“A sex position,” the hobgoblin said. “The recipient has their head stuck in the lavatory bowl while the contributor fucks them up the ass.”
I blinked and looked sideways at the stunning raven-haired hobgoblin but said nothing. I had no words for that.
She winked and smiled her wicked white smile, showing off her demonically sharp teeth.
“Greetings, travelers from afar,” the woman said stiffly, “and welcome to the glorious city of Akrit, Jewel of the Desert.” Her accent was thick with a little of the Jordanian and a little of the Brazilian to it, if I were to compare it to similar accents at home.
“Greetings to you,” I said just as stiffly. It wasn’t that I felt awkward meeting this chick, but I wanted to do the Mystocean Empire proud in my comportment. We were, after all, emissaries now. I didn’t think it would do to just say, ‘Hey bud, how’s it hanging? Do you mind showing us to your leaders so we can get the hell on with our business?’
The woman waited for a beat, as if expecting me to elaborate.
I didn’t.
“Rumor of your coming reached us from over the desert,” the female commander said.
In a flash of recollection, I recalled the golden bird flying away from us as we hovered in the air over the crushed corpse of the giant worm and tried to catch a glimpse of the catmancer that had inexplicably disappeared.
So, it had been a messenger pigeon of sorts, not just some lonely hunting bird.
“I thought it might have,” I said. “Let me guess, the person in charge is awaiting us, right?”
The female commander didn’t do anything so crass as to look surprised at this statement, but she came pretty close.
“That is right,” she said, giving me an appraising look. “If you and your companions will follow me, we will take you to the Shaykh.”
“The Shaykh?” Hana asked. “Who is that?”
The female soldier looked surprised at the question. “He is... the Shaykh,” she said.
It was clear that she had never had to explain what that was to anyone before. She sounded like a Canadian having to explain to another Canadian what syrup was. Amazement and distrust warred in her voice, as if she thought we might be having fun at her expense.
“Right,” I said. “But what does he do?”
“The Shaykh is the ruler of all Akrit,” the female commander said. She waved her hand at the shining bronze gates set into the glaring white stone walls, at the pinnacles of the towers displayed over the parapets like beautifully intricate mushrooms.
“He rules the city?” Renji asked.
“He rules all,” the female commander said simply. “Come. You will follow us now.”
In actual fact, we followed her and her alone. The rest of the charismatic commander’s heavily armed company fell in around us. It was obvious that, if we stirred so much as a single aggressive hair, we were due to be terminally perforated in no short order.
They could try at least, bless them.
We were ushered through the hulking gates, which stood ajar so that the steady stream of traffic could flow unencumbered. The commander guided us through the warren-like streets of the outer city and into the heart of the most amazing and bustling metropolis that I had ever laid eyes on.
It reminded me of some lost civilization, of Babylonia or something along those lines. I felt like I had visited Akrit before via the History Channel or the movies, but walking the streets of such a place was surreal in the extreme.
There were, as we had glimpsed from outside the walls, marvelous towers that rose into the air like perfect stalagmites of ivory and gold and bronze. These tall towers were capped with bulbous rooms with enormous windows that must have commanded incredible views of the surrounding desert.
There were markets of spices, the names of which I didn’t even bother to ask, piled into high pyramids. Roasted desert lizards and snakes hung from hooks on vendor’s carts. I saw a small drake being employed to roast a rack of magically rotating foul, and some strange little gerbil-like creatures that were being pitted against one another in a ring, which reminded me of a cock fighting ring.
People openly stared at us as we passed. They didn’t try to communicate with us, either because we were obviously strangers here or because of the ring of glowering soldiers that surrounded us.
“This place is fucking amazing,” I said to Hana as we passed a giant bed of coals that was being used to grill chunks of meat carved from a dead coiled reptilian creature as wide as a man and as long as two Winnebagos.
“I agree,” Hana said, staring around with wide eyes.
The sheer riot of color and smells and sounds was enough to turn anyone’s head. I was glad that we were being guided to wherever it was that this Shayk dude lived because otherwise I would have been lost in a matter of minutes.
Eventually, after wending our way through the madness and the hustling bustle of what felt like tens of thousands of Akrit’s citizens, we fetched up outside the pearly white gates of another wall.
“This way,” the female commander ordered us.
The gates were opened by stern-faced soldiers, and we trooped inside. The main body of the guard
did not follow us but marched off down the length of gleaming white wall toward a building that I assumed must be a barracks.
“Where are we?” I asked the female commander.
“You, honored guests, are now inside the walls of Shaykh Antizah’s Akrit palace,” the stiff-faced woman replied.
I looked around, as did the others.
“Not bad,” Tamsin said, looking up at the flowing water and vegetation that covered the terraced walls of the incredible palace.
The golden skin of the female commander’s face flushed a darker shade of copper.
“How kind of you to say, honored guest,” she said coolly. “Now, if you will allow me, I shall take you to meet the Shaykh, who does you the great honor of waiting for you.”
Not too long afterward, after being led through a series of gardens in which jeweled fruit hung from the branches of carved ebony trees and fountains tinkled musically, we found ourselves seated on cushions around a low table. The table was groaning under the weight of all sorts of tasty treats. At the table’s head was a handsome man with a neat black beard speckled with gray. His eyes sparkled with the sort of malignant cunning and deadly calm of a rattlesnake.
Standing over his left shoulder, like an ever-watchful sentinel, was a breathtakingly gorgeous woman who reminded me sharply of Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 version of Cleopatra. Dark shortish hair, eyes that were like burning liquid coals in her perfect bronze face, and lips that were crooked up in one corner as if she were in on some private joke that no one else was smart enough to understand. She had the build of a rock-climber; all hard, wiry muscles. Her skin was flawless. She carried no weapon but exuded the sort of aura that told me that she wouldn’t need one to kill me if I had been a mere man and not a dragonmancer.
She was a fucking twelve out of ten, in my book.
There was something oddly familiar about her too.
“Welcome, honored guests,” the man said as we arrayed ourselves around him. “Welcome and well met. I am the Shaykh Antizah. Behind me is my most trusted mancer. It is she who sent word of your coming.”
