City Under the Sand: A Dark Sun Novel (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun)

by Jeff Mariotte

  Aric couldn’t help glancing about to make sure they were unobserved, even though he knew Ruhm stood guard outside. “Something to read,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. He hoped his hands weren’t visibly shaking. “Adventurer accounts, of the wastelands?”

  “Adventurers, eh?” the man said. He scratched his voluminous beak of a nose. “I might have something like that.” He ticked his head toward the doorway through which he had just emerged. “Come in.”

  He turned with smooth, practiced grace and flowed back through the door. Aric followed. A lantern hung on one of the walls of the windowless room, where the bedraggled man stood between tables and shelves of books, pamphlets, tabloids and scrolls. Aric had never seen so many words in one place in his life. Some were clearly handwritten but others were not—some of the works were present in multiple copies, each identical to the last in every way. “These are printed,” he said, struck with awe.

  “That’s right. I know a man in Tyr with a press. Printed right under old Kalak’s nose, in fact, and smuggled out with caravans. Now, of course, he can operate freely, and will until some other tyrant solidifies his position there. But for the moment.… it’s a different world.”

  “But not here in Nibenay.”

  “Oh, not here,” the man agreed. “Here the tyrant hangs on.”

  Aric didn’t like that sort of talk. Nibenay had a reputation as a tyrant, it was true. And it was his law that could punish Aric simply for knowing how to read. But the Shadow King had been pleasant with him, had invited him to share in an adventure that could even elevate Aric’s status in life, if all went well. He knew all the arguments—Nibenay maintained the barbaric practice of slavery, he ruled the city with a merciless hand, the rights of individuals were sacrificed to the whims of the state. And for the most part, he agreed with them. He just found it hard to reconcile them with his positive experience of the king himself, only the day before, and he didn’t want to be party to any treasonous discussion.

  “And the adventurer logs?” he asked, changing the subject.

  The man swept to the far wall. “Here,” he said, indicating a cabinet with a fluid gesture of his long-fingered hand. “What location interests you? Balic? The Ringing Mountains? Perhaps the Hinterlands?”

  “Surely no one has visited the Hinterlands and returned to write about it!”

  The man touched the side of his nose, nodding his agreement. “It could well be that this one is miscategorized,” he said. “It should, perhaps, be kept with stories and legends.”

  “I expect so.”

  “Still, you might be surprised. The yearning to adventure often seems to come with a desire to share the experience in writing.”

  “These must be exceptional people,” Aric said. He could read passingly well, but writing was far more difficult for him. Although he would embark on a long journey, mere days hence, he did not expect to have the ability or inclination to write about what he saw. He would save his tales for the Blade and Barrel, or else to entertain customers while they waited for his services.

  “Is there a particular place you want to read about?”

  “Actually, I’m not certain what my destination is. Have you anything about a place called Akrankhot?”

  The man’s smile faded. It was only an illusion, surely, but it almost seemed like the flame in the lantern dimmed, giving the room a more somber aspect. “I’ve only ever seen one reference to it in writing,” he said. “And that the journal of a man looking for it. The journal was acquired posthumously—do you know what that means? After his death. I knew a noble who was interested, and paid plenty of gold pieces for it. Not from me—I saw it once, held it in my hands, read a few passages, but never owned it.”

  “Pity,” Aric said. “That might have been just what I’m looking for. I suppose anything about journeying through the wastelands would do, since I don’t even know which direction we’ll be traveling in.”

  The man flashed a smile, but it was more forced than his earlier ones. “I have a few like that. Not much. A diary or two, one printed account from about fifteen years ago. Perhaps an annotated map somewhere.”

  Much of what he was saying passed over Aric’s head. “How about the printed account?” he asked. “Things couldn’t have changed that much in fifteen years. I’m only trying to get a sense of the things we might encounter, and to see how others survived them.”

  “This is what you want, then.” The man put his hands on a slender volume, bound in reddish sygra leather. “That’ll be a cp.”

  “An entire piece?” Aric asked, stunned. He could get a decent pair of boots for a ceramic piece, had expected a book to be more like three or four bits.

  The man started to put it back on the shelf. “If you don’t want it …”

  Aric’s purse was still heavy, however, from his sale to Tunsall. “No, I’ll take it!”

  “Very well.” The man handed it over. It was heavier than Aric expected. He took out a ceramic piece and gave it to the man, who eyed it for a moment before it disappeared into his palm and then into a hidden pocket someplace. “Will there be anything else?”

  2

  The following day, Aric sat inside his shop, trying to read the book he had purchased. There were many words he didn’t know, and letters he didn’t recognize even though the thing was written in common.

  Because he and Ruhm would both be gone on the expedition, he had hurried through the last bits of work he had promised, and had turned away more. This left him time to get through the book as best he could. As usual when Aric read, Ruhm removed himself from the scene, not wanting to be tarred with the “literate” brush if things went bad. He had once heard about a free commoner caught in the same room with a couple of books. Although the books didn’t belong to him and he claimed not to be able to read them, the templar who had found him there argued that even if he could read, he would pretend not to, so therefore he was guilty of the crime of literacy. According to the story, he was still alive, working as a menial slave in the Naggaramakam.

  So Aric sat on the floor beside his workbench, where passers-by couldn’t see him from the doorway or the window, and struggled. He was so immersed in the effort that he didn’t hear soft footsteps on the floor, didn’t know he was observed until a sudden, startled “Oh!” alerted him.

  “Who’s there?” Aric demanded, closing the book and shoving it into a cubby in the workbench. “What?” He grabbed the bench’s upper surface and hauled himself to his feet.

  Rieve stood there, hands covering her mouth. A pink flush graced her fair cheeks. “I’m sorry, Aric,” she said.

  “You—you won’t tell anyone, will you?” he pleaded. He was glad it had been her and not a templar, but he didn’t know her well enough to trust her. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I wasn’t certain you were even here. I saw the door open, so I came in, and then I thought I heard you breathing. She touched his arm, just a light, glancing brush. “You were so intent, it was cute. But I was surprised to see you there and couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”

  Cute? As in attractive? he wondered. Or the way a baby animal or an infant is cute when it tries to do something obviously beyond its abilities?

  “Well, you surprised me in return,” he said. He fidgeted with his coin medallion.

  “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Aric. I know this is terribly bold of me, but I wanted to see you. I didn’t just happen to pass by. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “And I you.” He doubted she had been thinking along the same lines he had. But he would never know unless she told him.

  “Do you remember the other day, when my grandfather wanted you to teach me how to use my sword?”

  “Of course.”

  “Corlan has been trying. He’s quite skilled in it himself. But what he’s not so good at is imparting that skill to someone else. He thinks I should just be able to watch him do something and immediately master it. Perhaps that’s how he learned it, but i
t doesn’t work that way for me. Then he grows impatient, and we argue.”

  “If you’re to be wed, arguing seems bad,” Aric said.

  Rieve laughed. The pink had gone out of her cheeks, but her laughter brought it back. Aric envied the color, lying as easily upon her soft skin as sunlight on polished steel. She had always been lovely, but at that moment her beauty snatched his breath away. “My parents argue frequently,” she said. “You’d be surprised at the screaming. I believe some married people elevate arguing from a passing interest to an obsession. But I don’t like it. I have known Corlan since we were children, and been betrothed to him almost as long. He’s a dear friend. None of that makes it easier to be snapped or shouted at.”

  Aric couldn’t think of a diplomatic way to ask his next question. “Why tell me this?”

  Instead of answering directly, she wandered about the shop, scrutinizing his tools, his small store of metal, even peeking through the doorway into his bedroom. “You have no woman?”

  “There have been women,” he admitted. “None who mattered much.”

  “I’m surprised, you’re such a handsome fellow.”

  He noted that she hadn’t used the word man, which some refused to apply to anyone who wasn’t fully human. “Thank you.”

  She spun around to face him again, looking right into his eyes. “Would you teach me? Help me with the parts that Corlan can’t? No one ever has to know. I just want to learn enough that I can convince Corlan he’s actually teaching me something. I can pay you.”

  Aric considered this. It would mean spending time with Rieve, a certain amount of close physical contact. Both would be payment enough. “I don’t need your coins—” he began.

  She cut him off before he could finish. “When I happened upon you, before I startled you, it looked like you were having some difficulty reading. Your forehead was all wrinkled up like old clothes.”

  “I can read a bit,” he admitted. “But that book—parts of it I can’t make out at all.”

  “I could help you. You teach me the use of the sword, I teach you how to read better.”

  “That’s most generous,” he said. “And I would truly love to accept your offer. But I’m leaving the city shortly. A day, two, perhaps three, I don’t know yet. The journey will be a long one, and I don’t know when I’ll return.”

  Her eyes brightened and she put a hand on his arm again. He liked it when she did that. “Where are you going?”

  “I wish I knew. Nibenay has asked me to accompany an expedition he’s sending to a lost city somewhere, to look for a trove of metals that might be there.”

  “The Shadow King himself asked you?”

  “That’s right.” Aric couldn’t help letting pride swell his chest a little. “He said your grandfather told him about me.”

  “I am impressed.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “He has been generous with some of the noble houses, including ours.”

  “He was pleasant enough with me, and generous as well,” Aric said. “But since I’ll be leaving, I can’t promise to teach you.”

  “I understand.” Her voice sounded bright, but her expression was crestfallen. “I wish you well on your voyage.”

  “Thank you, Rieve.”

  She leaned forward, raising herself up on her toes, steadying herself with both hands on his arms. He wouldn’t have minded her staying in just that position for a very long time. Then she pressed her lips to her cheek. The kiss burned there, as if those lips had been made of fired steel. “For your courage,” she said. “And for luck.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to touch the spot she had kissed, but didn’t want her to think he was trying to rub away the trace of her lips.

  While he was still searching for some sort of meaningful response, she met his gaze, then turned and hurried from the shop without looking back.

  He had driven her away. She had taken the liberty of kissing him, and he had stood there like an absolute fool, saying and doing nothing. And she had realized her mistake and raced out of his presence.

  He couldn’t blame her.

  He stood looking at the empty doorway, knowing that the best thing that might ever have entered his life had just fled it again, because he had not known how to respond.

  Suddenly, he couldn’t wait to get out of Nibenay.

  3

  Ruhm went drinking with friends again that evening, but Aric couldn’t bring himself to join them. Instead he walked around the city—his city, the only one he had ever known. The one he would soon leave behind. Perhaps he would return, perhaps not. Every traveler told tales of the dangers waiting in the wide world, and the book Aric had tried to read described a landscape full of perils and plagues.

  Without the daytime sun blasting the city streets, they were more crowded than during the heat of afternoon. All around him were swindlers, thieves, thugs and killers; people did what they could to survive on Athas, and Aric knew that only a few lucky breaks had made the difference between him having a lawful career and joining Nibenay’s nighttime parade of criminality.

  Bundled against the cold, Aric threaded the city’s narrow streets, alleyways and courtyards, passing between pedestrians and kanks and merchant stalls, couriers carrying messages or goods, bands of musicians and dancers, drunks weaving unsteadily between one tavern and the next. Everywhere the eye landed there was something to see: brightly colored clothing, members of every intelligent race known to Athas. Stone walls and cobblestone roadways were intricately carved to display the glorious history of the Shadow King, or else the family histories of those who built the individual structures. Sometimes buildings themselves were the sculptures—here a family home carved in the shape of a face, where one entered through a gaping mouth and looked out upstairs windows shaped like eyes—the “skin” carved still further, with scenes from that family’s past—there an entire block built to represent a cloud ray, its surface carvings representing past defeats of those huge monsters.

  Above the streets, people stretched lines and hung clothing to dry, on those occasions when they had enough water to wash. Higher still, the buildings seemed to meet overhead, sometimes with other walkways far above the streets. There was layer upon layer of life in Nibenay; spires, minarets and turrets everywhere blotted out the stars. Sometimes Aric thought one could live a dozen lifetimes and never see it all.

  Music rang from many corners, people singing and playing for their own amusement, small bands and even orchestras and choirs gathered here and there in more organized performances. And Nibenay had its own smell, comprised of blood and sweat and urine, animal dung and ale, the smoke from cooking fires and the oil from lanterns. All of it combined into a single odor that told Aric at every step that he was home.

  Since he might never again see the place, he wanted to visit some spots that had been important to him over the years. He would stay far away from the elven market—that place had few pleasant associations, mostly memories of bitterness and strife.

  His mother, the half-elf Keyasune, had never left the city either, as far as he knew. She had, in fact, rarely left the area right around the elven market. Her parents had a stall there, selling bolts of fabric obtained from other cities, and her human mother, she said, made blankets and articles of clothing that they also sold. When they were killed, as was often the fate of elves and those who wed them, Keyasune took over the stall. It was there she had met Aric’s father, a human.

  “He came in one evening to buy some fine silk,” she told Aric once. He was nine years old, and had been pestering her with questions about his father. She had taken him on a walk, away from the Hill District, out the South Gate and into the desert beyond the city walls. “One of his family’s slaves was a fine seamstress, and his mother wanted silk to have some dresses made. I was alone in the stall, and your father saw my silks and had to have some. It was a wonderfully cool early evening, late in the season of Sun Descending. He tried to bargain the price down, but I held firm.
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  “While we bickered, though, we were also chatting. There was something about him—his face reminded me of the setting sun, and I smiled just to look at it. He seemed to like me as well. Even after he had paid me for the silk, he stayed and talked. Other merchants glared at us, of course—they are glad to see the coins of humans, but not so receptive to humans themselves.

  “When I tried to sleep that night, I kept thinking about him. I later learned he was having the same problem, tossing about his bed thinking of me.

  “The next evening, he came back. Same the evening after that. Soon, we were involved in a romance.”

  “Yuck,” Aric said. He picked up a rock and hurled it at the city wall, but it fell short of its mark.

  “I will spare you those details, Aric. The only reason I’m telling you this is so that you’ll know that once, your father was important to me. He wasn’t just some man I met, but someone I cared for deeply.

  “He seemed to like me as well. But it was strange—he liked me, but he hated elves. Never had a good word to say about them. When he was with me, he seemed to loathe himself for being there. If I had been exactly the same person, but not a half-elf, I had no doubt that we’d be wed. But whenever we were together, it had to be in secret, where no one would see us. He stopped coming to the elven market altogether, instead sending me messages when he wanted to see me, and making me meet him elsewhere in the city.

  “Then came the day that I had to tell him about you—that I was with child. I feared his reaction, but it was even more explosive than I expected. We had taken a room at an inn, so we could have privacy. But when I told him, he ranted and paced and threw things. Finally the innkeeper knocked on the door to see why so much noise was coming from the room, and your father took advantage of the distraction to storm away.

  “I never saw him again.”

  “Did you go to his house?” Aric asked.