Sanctuary ee-1

by Paul B. Thompson

  He finally said, “No, lady, elven honor is not dead, merely stored, like the great archive of Qualinost, against the day when we can afford to display it again.”

  Both of them lay down. After a moment, Gilthas reached a hand out, but she edged away, curling up on the side of the bed, as far away as possible.

  That was how they fell asleep-Kerian curled in on herself, facing away from her husband, and Gilthas, face up, one hand outstretched toward her stiff back.

  Chapter 2

  Hard edges, that’s where things is clearest. Where land and sky come together cleanly, with nothing in between. A man can see what’s what, and who’s who. Good and evil are obvious. They say the sea is like that. The desert is, too.”

  The guide, the very opposite of the usual taciturn nomad, folded his hands across his horse’s neck and continued to expound his philosophy. His audience of one, riding a few steps behind, made no reply. Prince Shobbat of Khur was only half listening. Sunrise was an hour past and already the heat was intense. Shobbat adjusted the brim of his broad felt hat and told himself, for the hundredth time, that his goal was worth this suffering.

  As far as Shobbat could see in all directions was sand, broken rock, and scattered boulders bleached to a uniform shade of tan by the unflinching sun. No color at all relieved the trail northwest from Khuri-Khan into the trackless wastes that made up most of the realm of Khur. No shade either. Only hard light by day and perfect, starry blackness at night.

  Surveying the desolation around him, Shobbat wondered if there wasn’t something to the windbag nomad’s notions after all. Devoid of trees and buildings, the vista certainly was pristine.

  “In green lands, there’s trees, grass, and the like, sprouting out of the dirt to tie air and land together,” his guide was saying. “Clouds in the sky are the breath of growing things, fogging the air. Underfoot there’s nothing but corruption, worms, beetles, and rot, spreading over the land like a mantle of decay.”

  Shobbat grunted, eyes squinted nearly closed against the glare. “You’re a poet.”

  “No, my lord. A nomad. I’ve known the hard edges all my life.”

  The guide’s name was Wapah. So dry and leather-like was his face that he might have been any age from thirty to sixty His beard was long, and the same flat brown color as the sand. Plaited into the hair on his head were thin reed staves that supported the light, cloth shade protecting his head and neck. Spiders were embroidered around the hem of the dirty linen cloth. The black-and-orange leaping sand spider was the symbol of Wapah’s clan. A single bite from the creature could kill a man in minutes, or rot the leg off a healthy horse in a day.

  Under brows so thick they were plaited into tiny braids, Wapah’s eyes were pale gray. This was an unusual hue among Khurs, but not unknown in Wapah’s clan. Gray-eyed nomads did not wear the perpetual squint of other desert-dwellers. Wide-eyed in a land of killing glare, the people of the Leaping Spider Clan seemed more intensely aware of their surroundings. Many were seers and given to visions, and for this reason nomads like Wapah were called “mirror-eyed.”

  Prince Shobbat, eldest son of Sahim, Khan of Khur, was not nearly so prepossessing. Past thirty, he was (as a court wit once said) “bearded and bland.” He wore a loose linen tunic tucked into riding trousers of the same material, and tall, dark leather boots. The yellow and red sash at his middle did not, as he intended, hide his princely paunch but merely accentuated it. In the same vein, the beginnings of jowls were poorly concealed by his short black beard. When his father was Shobbat’s age, he’d already been khan for ten years. All the prince had accomplished thus far was to eat a great deal, drink a great deal, and pursue a great many comely women. This journey represented his first significant foray beyond the walls of Khuri-Khan. It had been prompted by a broken wall and a cryptic stone tablet.

  After the Vanishing of the Moons, the dragon Malystryx claimed and occupied Khur. Repeated attacks by the Red Overlord had left the Khuri yl Nor heavily damaged. After Malys was overthrown, Sahim-Khan gave his eldest son the task of overseeing repairs on the palace. It was a dull, thankless job until, one day, the laborers demolishing a cracked wall in the south wing had come upon a stone tablet hidden in a niche inside the blocks.

  Shobbat immediately set a team of scholars to translating the tablet. It wasn’t easy. The text was written in hieratic Istarian, a difficult, priestly script reserved for the theocratic elite of that lost land, but working in three teams of two, the six scholars completed the translation in a dozen days. Shobbat collected the translations, found they agreed, then had the scholars slain.

  He regretted having to order their deaths, as he respected learning, but he could not risk anyone finding out what they had discovered. He’d seen to it their deaths were quick and painless- Scholars were always thirsty. To celebrate the completion of their work, he sent each of them a special vintage, doctored with arsenic. It slaked their thirsts, permanently. The deaths were attributed to cultists and soon forgotten.

  In secrecy, the prince made plans. He sent trusted men to the Grand Souks to find a desert guide. Wapah was the result. Mirror-eyed nomads had a reputation as peerless navigators of the sands.

  The nomad did not question why a pampered prince wished to travel to an obscure point more than two days’ ride northwest of the city. For ten fine steel swords and a like number of stallions, handpicked from the Khan’s own herd, Wapah would have guided Prince Shobbat to the bottom of the Blood Sea.

  “Hard edges,” the guide repeated. “They make men strong and straight, allow them to see clear and to know what dwellers in green lands never know.”

  Shobbat obligingly asked what that might be.

  “The will of Those on High.”

  Shobbat hid a smile, not wanting to antagonize a man on whom his life depended. Alone among all the peoples of the world, the desert nomads had never stopped worshiping their old gods. Sahim-Khan always said this was because the unfettered sun boiled away their few wits. Shobbat’s father sneered at the nomads because he feared them. Nine times in the violent history of Khur the reigning khan had been slain in battles against his own desert-dwelling subjects. Sahim-Khan had no intention of being the tenth.

  “The laddad came here from the green lands,” Shobbat said. “It is written they drew forth the first life from the land, and their mages can make stone itself blossom.”

  “They do not make this land green.”

  Wapah’s phrasing was ambiguous, but Shobbat did not ask him to explain. Their horses had topped a long, high dune sculpted by wind into the shape of a great curling wave, and a blast of southwesterly air flung grit in their faces. The prince coughed and spat, but his saliva never reached the ground. The dry air swallowed it.

  Wapah cautioned him not to waste precious water. The nomad kicked the flanks of his short-legged pony and started down the windward face of the dune. Shobbat glared after him. He reached back and gave a reassuring pat to the skins of water lashed to the saddle under his gauzy cloak. The old nomad was just trying to frighten him. If they reached their destination in the time promised, they had plenty of water.

  Wind rapidly erased Wapah’s tracks in the soft sand. Shobbat urged his mount on. If he lost his guide, he was doomed.

  The desert would swallow him as completely as it had his spit.

  They had entered an area of sand dunes broken at intervals by intrusions of ancient rock. The rock was layered horizontally in shades of brown and tan. Shobbat grimaced. What a harsh, ugly land. He missed the teeming streets of Khuri-Khan, thick with the scents of cinnamon and cardamom, of sandalwood, and yes, of unwashed humanity. The emptiness of the desert made him feel small and unimportant. He was unaccustomed to such thoughts, and they frightened him. Fear made him angry.

  Wapah had drawn a loosely woven scrap of cloth across his face to keep out the blowing dust. He returned to his earlier theme, explaining how the hard edges of the desert taught his people about truth and made them spiritually superior to outside
rs. It was unclear whether he meant only those from outside Khur, or city-dwellers like the prince as well.

  “We did not fear when the Vanishing came,” the nomad declared. “Our gods were not points of light in the sky, but beings immortal and unchanging. They never left us. They guard us still.”

  Blown sand stung the exposed flesh of Shobbat’s cheeks like a thousand shards of glass. He turned his face away. “Was everyone else in the world wrong when they thought the gods departed?” he asked testily.

  Wapah shrugged one shoulder. “Who knows what godless barbarians think?”

  On they rode, the nomad talking, the prince of Khur riding in uncomfortable silence. In spite of Wapah’s talk of the desert’s hard edges, the land had begun to look molten and soft to Shobbat. The terrific heat smelted the air itself, causing everything to shimmer and blur. Both horses grunted deep in their chests, resenting the task they were obliged to perform. Every two hundred steps, the duo paused for water. Two swallows for each beast and one for each man, as Wapah prescribed.

  Once the sun climbed to its zenith, even the nomad fell silent. The air was too dry for speech. Shobbat’s narrow, dark lips, so like his mother’s, cracked. Smears of blood stained the gauze scarf covering his nose and mouth.

  Just after midday they reached the first landmark on Wapah’s itinerary, a shelf of stone rising out of the sand to a height greater than the mounted men. Pointed at one end and rounded at the other, the prominence was known as the Tear of Elir-Sana, named for the divine healer.

  Unlike the monotonous sand or the unvarying hues of other rocks, the Tear of Elir-Sana presented a bold, colorful sight. It was composed of multicolored layers of rock; some were as orange as a sunset, others ash gray, blue-black, or creamy yellow. The eastern face was deeply grooved by generations of wind-borne sand. From tip to rounded end, the perfect teardrop was thirty feet in length. A spring bubbled from a cleft on the west side of the Tear. According to legend, the spring had been born from the tears of the goddess Elir-Sana, when she had collapsed here, half-dead from exhaustion.

  Wapah announced they would refill their waterskins here. The water was said to have healing powers. Although it certainly slaked Shobbat’s thirst, he found the taste nothing out of the ordinary.

  After filling his two empty skins, the prince struggled back to his horse through the fine, drifted sand. His booted toe caught on something hidden just beneath the surface, and he fell forward. The full skins slung around his neck dragged him down. Cursing, he sat up and glared at the object that had tripped him. It was a skull. Clean, dry, and yellowed, it was not human.

  “What unholy thing is this?”

  Wapah leaned down from his saddle and peered at the find. “Dragon-man.”

  A draconian skull? Shobbat’s annoyance vanished as he studied it more closely. The cranium was wide and triangular.

  Fangs as long as Shobbat’s thumb sprouted from the upper jaw, and there was a horny beak like that of a monstrous bird. The skull was half again as big as a human head, and on its rear were several parallel gouges-cuts from a blade, most likely.

  “A warrior,” the prince said, standing and dusting sand from his long coat.

  “A scout in search of water. He found it, but never left. The desert takes no prisoners.” Shobbat did not point out this draconian appeared to have died by the sword, not from exposure.

  Mounted once more, Shobbat spotted something imbedded in a stratum of the Tear. He drew the dagger from his sash and jabbed at the rock. Fragments cascaded around his horse’s hooves.

  Wapah frowned at this wanton destruction but kept silent.

  The prince had uncovered a yellow stone protruding from a layer of similarly colored sandstone. “Is this a shell?” he exclaimed. The object looked very like the top half of a clam.

  Wapah shook his head. “Only a stone, shaped by chance. A jest of the gods.”

  The prince disagreed. He speculated the sea might once have covered this part of Khur. Wapah immediately dismissed this notion.

  “It is told in the Song: the land of Khur is the oldest of the world, the first solid ground created by the gods,” the nomad said flatly. “It has never been under water.”

  The Song was sacred to the nomads. A collection of legends from the distant past, it contained thousands of verses, too many for anyone to memorize entirely, so it was divided into eight cantos, each named for one of the great gods of the nomads: Kargath the Warrior, Rakaris the Hunter, Torghan the Avenger, Elir-Sana the Healer, Anthor the Hermit, Hab’rar the Messenger, Soro the Firemaker, and Ayyan the Deceiver. Wapah was a singer of the Anthor Canto.

  The two men rode on. Progress became more difficult, as the horses had to plow through belly-deep sand. Wapah’s short-legged gray animal, more accustomed to such terrain, kept a steady pace. Shobbat’s elegant chestnut, its long legs meant for speed, floundered. As a result, sundown had come and gone by the time they reached their destination.

  Like the Tear of Elir-Sana, Shobbat’s goal was an island of stone in an ocean of moving sand. Rather than a single formation, it comprised a thick column of gray stone forty feet in height, ringed close around by four black granite towers only half as tall. The four angled inward, their tops touching the central column. Pale starlight gave the formation an eerie feel, like an ancient and forgotten temple.

  The tablet found in the ruins of the Khuri yl Nor had spoken of this strange formation as an ancient oracle. It was said there were passages and a cave in the central spire. The cave was the prince’s destination.

  The wind died with the sunset. The air quickly lost the heat of day and grew cold, but warmth still radiated from the broiled sand. Shobbat dismounted and rummaged through his saddlebags. Knowing there would be no wood for torches, he’d brought a small brass lamp. He knelt and placed the lamp on the sand, then struck flint on steel to light the wick.

  Wapah asked his intentions. When Shobbat said he planned to enter the formation, the nomad put heels to his horse’s flanks and moved quickly to the crouching prince.

  “Nothing was said of entering!” he said. “You must not! Do not disturb the spirits of this place!”

  “I didn’t come here just to view the sights. What I seek is within.”

  A cascade of sparks fell from his flint, and Shobbat concentrated on coaxing the flame to life. As he adjusted the wick, he heard a scrape of metal. Wapah had drawn his weapon, a narrow sword bare of crossguard, the style preferred by most nomads.

  “You dare draw on me? I am your prince!”

  Wapah was a motionless silhouette. The feeble lamplight did not reach his face, and his expression was hidden by the night. “If I rode away, what would you do? you’d never make it back to your city,” he murmured.

  For the first time, Shobbat felt a flicker of uncertainty. He quickly quashed it, falling back on all the arrogance and assurance of his privileged upbringing.

  “My whereabouts are known, fool,” he snapped. “If I do not return, for whatever reason, your entire clan will be hunted down and destroyed!”

  This was a lie. No one in Khuri-Khan knew where Shobbat was. The prince didn’t trust anyone enough for that.

  For a long moment they gazed at each other, the pampered prince and the talkative nomad. Then Wapah sheathed his sword and bowed his head. “Let Those on High judge you. I shall not.”

  Shobbat picked up his lamp, his brief fear forgotten. Sentimentalists, that’s what these nomads were. They’d ride to their deaths shouting for joy, but threaten their families and they crumbled. Exploiting that weakness allowed Shobbat’s father to rule them. Sahim-Khan was the least sentimental man in the world.

  The prince labored through the deep sand to the base of the formation. The central column seemed enormously high, rising tower-like against the starry sky. Around its base lay shards of black granite, shivered off the surrounding spires. Shobbat was grateful for the firmer footing they provided. The flickering light of his lamp showed no inscriptions, carvings, or any indic
ation of intelligent handiwork, only rough, wind-worn granite.

  Two-thirds of the way around from his starting point, he found an opening at ground level in the third black column. His heartbeat quickened. The roughly square entrance was partially blocked by drifted sand, and the prince had to drop to his knees to enter.

  A passage rose into the column of stone. Steps had been cut in the dense granite, spiraling around the wall. At last, evidence of an intelligent hand! The information on the tablet was again proven correct. Shobbat drew a jeweled dagger from his sash and started up the steps.

  The dark air seemed to absorb the weak glow of his lamp. With his eyes adjusted to the dim light, the darkness beyond seemed even more intense. The dry, clean air of the desert outside had given way to a rank, fetid aroma that grew stronger as he climbed. The amber light showed gray splotches on the wall. Bat droppings and dried guano crunched beneath his boots. The presence of living creatures so deep in the desert was curious. What did they live on?

  As he drew closer to the top, Shobbat saw that the ceiling of the hollow spire seemed to writhe. Thousands of bats were clustered tightly together across the rough-hewn surface. He could almost feel their tiny black eyes on him, glaring at the intruder who dared penetrate their abode. A few of the creatures dropped from their inverted perches and fluttered by his head. Shobbat pressed his back against the wall and covered his eyes with one arm, waiting for the bats to pass. The irregular steps on which he trod had become narrower as he ascended; here, near the top, they were deep enough only to accommodate the front half of his foot. A misstep, and he’d go crashing to the floor below.

  He had encountered no landings or side chambers along the way, just a continuing inward spiral of rutted steps. Watching the bats circle away and vanish through a black crevice at the top of the steps, Shobbat had to smile. So there was an upper chamber!