by Teri Mclaren
She leapt the final stair railing and landed catlike in the courtyard.
"Go now!" she screamed over the howl of the wind and the squawking, frightened, parrots. Her lieutenants immediately urged Lesta and Claria, whose small mouth moved in cries of silent terror as the storm took her words away with it, in the direction Charga had pointed, toward the Neffian cliffs and their hidden caves.
Charga clenched her teeth against the stinging lash of the storm and her own grief, pulled her hood over her face, and fought her way back up the stairs to the study. Three feet of sand now covered the floor. The Collector's body lay all but obscured, his treasures scattered by the wind and covered over by the same sand that was burying him. Above the din and heave of the storm, Charga heard another sound: the unmistakable whine and split of timber and rock under the weight of tons of displaced desert. There was no time. She lunged through the sand and wrested the Collector's beloved chroniclave from one hand and the precious magical ring from the other as she straightened his limbs and arranged his purple robes over the body. She cleared the staircase again in a dazzling leap as the roof fell in, a huge piece of marble covering one corner of the study, entombing Samor between it and the wall in an instant.
Making warding signs and mumbling fearful prayers to Caelus Nin and the Seven Brass gods, the bewildered people of Sumifa fled before her, making for the cliffs, their chickens and goats squawking and bleating in front of them. Porros's two small sons clung to their nurse, and his wives herded together with the villagers like lost sheep, Sumifa's royalty mingling with its commoners for the first time ever. Charga could not see anything in front of her but the bright parrots sailing overhead like windbome pennants as the villagers dashed across the cold desert night to the shelter of the Neffian caves.
The shutters broke as the wind squall hit the house full force. It took the winds only hours to fill the study with sand, only a day to bury the house and wipe any trace of the city.
The Raptor rose high above the unnatural storm he had made, climbing the thermals and dropping into sheer dives until his rage had spent itself. He pulled himself over the dunes, trying to find landmarks, his robes fluttering in the wake of the storm, eternity yawning before him, the memory of the Collector's chroniclave ticking out a faceless, nameless, hopeless time.
There was nothing to see. Sumifa lay buried under a new desert, its unmarked face stretching for miles and miles.
The sun rose over the empty, shifting sands in quiet glory, its rosy fingers creeping through the Raptor's shadowy, outstretched hand as if he were not there. His other hand twitched and grasped at the shifting sand, the shimmering grains falling from dark, bloodstained talons.
1
Sumifa. present-day
The King is dead.Hail the King of Sumifa! Long live the king of Sumifa!" The shouts of ten thousand citizens of the new city filled the hot afternoon and carried over the dunes to the old ruin. Cheyne stopped his sketching to lift his head and sort out the words. So old Thedeso had died. And his son would take his place soon. Cheyne smiled under his broad-rimmed hat and went on with his drawing, deftly capturing the hard edges of the broken walls with his charcoal, taking a measurement every now and then with a stick to maintain his accuracy. Most people thought diggers just hunted treasure. Mostly, they were right. But like his foster father, Javin, Cheyne was an archaeologist. He wanted more than treasure; he wanted answers.
Cheyne took out his hand mirror and held it along the inside of a broken edge of basalt block, checking for the rock's stability, and for the scorpions that liked to breed in those big cracks and would come rushing out by the dozens, tails poised and pincers waving, when a man put his foot unwittingly into their nest. Their sting wasn't deadly-but it surely could hurt-and many a deadly fall had been prompted by such sudden pain. Satisfied that he was safe, Cheyne lodged his boot into the crack and hoisted himself up onto the low wall for a better view down the line of ancient blocks that had housed the old city's olive press. He had finished the sides; now he would draw the top of the old barrier.
The crowds in the new city had ceased their shouts. From the top of the old press, Cheyne could see the shining walls of the fortress town, whitewashed and brilliant in the slanting sun. Tomorrow he would go back there and find the tall elf again and get his answers. He breathed on the little mirror to clean it, wiped it on his sleeve, and reluctantly held it up for inspection. No smudges. No streaks.
And, as always, no reflection.
Cheyne stared into the looking glass for a long moment, trying to see himself, trying to see past the blur that he always saw when he had to face a mirror, but like always, nothing was clear. He put the spotless mirror back into his scrip and made the measurements for the top of the wall, thinking of the tall elf, his face savagely scarred, whom he had seen in the city the last time he had gone in with Muni for supplies.
Tomorrow, I will find him, and he will tell me why he haunted my childhood dreams… and what magic it is that keeps my own image from me. He must know who I really am…
"Lift! Lift! No, no, no, forward. Again. Again." The shouts of the foreman rang through the still desert air, directing the sweating men striving to shift a huge fallen marble slab from an upright comer. There was a room under the slab, the first on site with walls higher than a couple of feet. In a moment more, they had succeeded in sliding the chunk away from the corner, but then something besides the weight of the block halted the work.
"By the cracked face of Caelus Nin!" he swore. "Stop and stand clear. We cannot progress."
Muni, the foreman, waved the crew back and stood staring into the dark depth of the vault. The crew obeyed, one or two of them making signs of protection in the air as they stepped away from the opening. Muni glared at them and the gestures ceased.
"Javin, would you come over, please?" he called, his voice carefully void of excitement. A tall, brown-haired man of about forty-five, working at the other end of the twenty-foot-long block, shrouded in white robes, turned and made his way around the slab to see what Muni wanted.
"Look there," said Muni softly, his wide mouth curling in disgust and trepidation.
Javin peered into the opening, shading his eyes to adjust to its darkness. A dozen feet down below the broken wall slab lay, not the preserved remains of the long dead man they had expected to find, but the crumpled body of a modern day Sumifan, his black eyes frozen with fright at their last sight, a pool of congealed blood on the thin layer of sand beneath his head.
Javin's gray eyes went almost as wide, and deep furrows creased his brow. "By the seven stars! No one has removed the slab until today?" He looked at the foreman levelly.
"Yes, Javin. You may check Cheyne's drawing of the marble wall. He sketched this area late yesterday evening," Muni replied, his face inscrutable.
Javin shook his head. "That won't be needed."
Javin trusted Muni more than he did himself sometimes. They had worked together for years, traversing the huge continent of Almaaz in search of Javin's burning ambition: to find the fabled Collector. Back in Argive, Javin had become convinced that old Sumifa was the final resting place of the man who had been chief mage to the ancient artificer Mishra.
The climate of this region was deadly hot and the politics treacherous. The true nature of the dig had been kept secret, Javin giving out to the Fascini, Sumifa's royals and their courtiers, only that he wished to study the architecture of old Sumifa, the ancient buried city known and shunned for its mysterious abandonment long ago. The Fascini had not cared. They never had believed there was an old city. After all, no one had ever found it before. And archaeologists were just diggers, and diggers were just treasure hunters to them, whatever their reasons. As long as they gave the standard half of what they found to the city's coffers, and didn't stir up the locals against Fascini decrees, the court turned a blind eye.
Javin had brought with him only his foster son, Cheyne, who had traveled with Javin to every site he had dug in the last ten years, a
nd Muni, who spoke every modem language in Almaaz, even some that didn't have words, and told the truth in all of them.
Javin nodded, and Muni brought his crew around him, asking for two volunteers to go down into the room to bring up the body. Finally, Rij and Hadi stepped forward, drawing their long, curved daggers from their hips. Disdaining the ropes, they leapt into the dim chamber.
"Pay these men double today. Give those two double that. Only make sure they stay quiet. Keep everyone else on the site down by the other side of the wall. Business as usual. And ask Zu to bring Cheyne up from the eastern perimeter. I told him to sketch the olive press walls today until we opened this room," muttered Javin.
Muni's crew had been handpicked and worked the most sensitive areas in the dig, but Javin knew that even they would have a hard time with this discovery. Sumifans were notoriously ancestor conscious, and a corpse, especially a fresh one, would send their officials into a frenzy of ablutions and liturgies and sudden new decrees forbidding further excavation on the site. If word got round to the city fathers that there had been a body, even the fragrance of his money wouldn't keep them from closing him down. Javin
knew he was right on top of finding the old Collector's grave. And when he found the Collector, he would find the thing he really searched for.
For years, Javin's colleagues, all eminent scholars, had mocked his theories of where the old mage's grave really lay. Most of the experts believed that the stories of the secret societies and an Armageddon Clock and the fabulous wealth supposedly buried with the Collector or with the Clock were pure folktale, rehearsed and embroidered as local mythology by the primitive Sumifans. Others, who gave the Collector's story any credence at all, thought that the grave must be in the Chimes, a place largely associated with the Borderlands, a place more or less divided from the rest of Almaaz by a mysterious curtain of light held to be located beyond the desert and past the ore kingdom in an isolated mountain range. But the exact location of the Chimes was not recorded in either current memory or on an ancient map. Not that it mattered. Certainly, no one of any respectable academic standing thought the stories were worth acting upon.
favin knew otherwise. He was the last living member of the Circle.
Recently, in a dark corner of the stacks of Argivia's oldest library, Javin had made a discovery that had sent him to Sumifa, against his greatest personal wishes. While cataloguing some old shards, he had found some scrolls packed inside a pottery jar made by the Sarrazan elves. The scrolls had mentioned details of Old Sumifa and the Collector in their stories, and the ley lines measured correctly for where Javin had begun to dig weeks ago. If Javin could but find the old mage's grave, then his writings, specifically the Holy Book of the Confessors, supposedly the original sacred text of his order, would surely be close by also.
There was a chance that Javin would then be able to accomplish what he had been trying to do all his life: find the Armageddon Clock and somehow disarm it. The secret of the Clock had died with Samor, and all through the hundreds of years since, the members of the Circle had passed down to their sons or daughters the mission of destroying it. But one by one, they had all been murdered, or disappeared with absolutely no trace.
The mages of the lost Circle, though their deaths had been as different as their personalities, all shared the same killers. They were the victims of the Ninnites, once their brethren in magic, now their sworn enemies, pledged to the service of a mysterious dark prince. The Ninnites, too, searched for the secrets of the fabled Clock, believing it to be the marker for inestimable wealth and power.
For the Circle, and for all of Almaaz, Javin believed, time was running out. When Javin was gone, there would be no one else to take up the search, no one, at least, who believed that the Beast of the Hours-supposedly a hideous, angry cockatrice, a creature even the Collector had not known how to fight-was what really awaited any who found and opened the Clock. The Ninnites had done a convincing job on the locals as well. Any Sumifan would scoff at the idea that anything but the treasure of the famous Collector was hidden with the Armageddon Clock.
And then there was the matter of Cheyne.)avin knew that if the dark prince, the Raptor, as the scrolls had called him, ever found the young man, Cheyne would be as dead as this corpse in the ruin.
He hunched down to inspect the body Muni's men had brought up. Plainly, the man had been murdered. Not a neat job: the corpse's throat had been cut, the jugular vein slashed with three parallel gashes, almost like claw marks. Almost like the favorite method of the Ninnites.
Javin bent to look at the back of the unfortunate man's head, brushing away a lock of dark hair from just behind his left ear. No mark of the double crescent. The man had not been part of the Ninnites, so this was not an example of the order's extreme discipline. But then why would the two-thousand-year-old renegade cult murder a modern-day Sumifan citizen? If he had been a common thief, Javin thought, there appeared to be nothing of value in the little room, and the man looked to have had no time to steal. Clutched in the corpse's stiff, whitened hand, Javin found only an ancient Sumifan family totem, like the hundreds they had already unearthed around the site: ganzite, inscribed with symbols from an Almaazan tongue older even than the ancient city. Hardly worth dying for.
Or killing for, he puzzled, laying it aside. Javin covered the body again, knowing little more now about the man than before.
Muni shook his head, anticipating Javin's unspoken thought. "He looks familiar, but I do not know him." The other crewmen repeated the same answer one by one as Javin questioned them.
The unknown man displayed the features of the majority of native Sumifans: dark curly hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and a strong, lean jaw. He appeared to have been about sixty, but if he had been a shepherd and spent much time in the weather, he could have been much younger. They called this place the anvil of the sun, and for good reason. One crewman suggested he might be part of the nearest nomadic tribe, but Javin dismissed that possibility immediately.
"He must have come from the city. Look at his clothes." Javin pointed to the man's flimsy shoes and thin shopkeeper's robes. "He wasn't ready to spend any time out here in those."
Muni squatted, crossing his hands in front of him like a big cat. "Javin, your son approaches."
Javin glanced up sharply to see Cheyne striding as quickly as he could manage through the deep sand, a look of alarm upon his face.
"Shall I greet him below?" asked Muni.
"No. Let him come on up. I want him to chart the room under the slab right away, while we are both here. He's more than twenty now, and he can take care of himself, but…"
"But you are still his father," said Muni, almost smiling, his dark eyes half closed against the hard desert light.
Javin nodded, a little undone. Muni had a way of disarming all pretense.
Cheyne cleared the last step, panting from the effort in the blazing noon heat. His face was dry despite the exertion-perspiration evaporated as quickly as it formed here. He gratefully accepted the water jug, threw it back native style across his shoulder, and took a long pull on it.
"Zu said you wanted roe up here fast, Javin. What's going on? Did you find the Collector?" Cheyne gasped before he was quite through with the last swallow. He flashed a brilliant smile as the cooling water trickled down his neck, finding a quicker path along a leather thong at his throat.
Javin gestured to the dead man.
"Oh. I suppose not." Cheyne frowned, instantly comprehending the ramifications. "Not one of the crew," he breathed in relief. "But… who?"
"We don't know. Muni found him under this slab, in what looks like part of a house. As you can plainly see, he has been murdered. We have no idea who killed him or why. But we must keep this quiet, or we won't have a job by the afternoon bells. And watch out for yourself. The body can't be more than a few hours dead. Whoever did this is in sharp habit, from the looks of his method. The murderer could still be close," said Javin.
Cheyne lifted his bro
ad-rimmed hat and ran his fingers through a thatch of dark blond hair, resettling the hat in exactly the same place. He stooped to examine the piece of marble that had been the dead man's crypt cover. "No scraping or pry marks around the slab-"
"We know." Javin slid his eyes over to the crew in warning.
Cheyne nodded and took out his bound tablet and a bit of charcoal. "Have you been down?" he asked Javin.
"No. But the Collector isn't there." The disappointment was written plainly on Javin's face. "I want you to go in and draw before anything else is disturbed. One of us needs to remain up here with the ropes," Javin replied.
He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the last of the workers leave the site. "You know what to do, and I'll be right here. Muni will go in with you to hold the torch. Be careful. That body got in there somehow, and likely not by magic." / hope, he added silently.
"What about you up here alone?" Cheyne glanced around at the suddenly vacant site.
"I'll be fine. Just do your job and get back up here fast," said Javin.
Cheyne signaled for Javin to lower him and Muni with the plaited fiber ropes, which always looked too flimsy to take any weight, but had, for centuries, helped move the entire Sumifan civilization.
Inside the room, it was much cooler than on the sand, but the air was stale and thick and smelled of limerock. A fine layer of dust covered the several inches of sand on the floor, except for the wide stain of dark, fresh, dried blood. Cheyne carefully examined the sand around the stain, but found no disturbance. Muni stood exactly where he had first touched down, holding a lantern as Cheyne went over the room. Following the dim glow of the lamp, Cheyne sketched a window and a wide doorway, but they were packed with sand. The whole room, thought Cheyne, had likely been filled with it. A dark scar ran along the walls about head level, where the wooden frame of a roof had been. That structure had perhaps fallen into this story, a possibility that would explain the several roof tiles scattered on the floor. Dust became visible in the air as Muni moved the lantern around, swirling in thick currents and eddies with Cheyne's movements, but otherwise the place looked completely undisturbed.
