Today, though, would be a busy one. She had to pack, had to say her goodbyes, and had to set off early enough to put some distance between herself and the caravan by nightfall. Sellis and Koyt were not family but they were loyal, and they would go where she led them, without complaint. They would die to keep her safe, if need be.
She honestly hoped it would not come to that. But since she didn’t know her destination, or what would be expected of her once she found it, she knew it was a possibility. They might all die.
That and the heat of the sun were two of the surest constants on all of Athas—on any day, anyone might die.
She hurried back to her tent, anxious to tell her sister and cousins before they heard the news from someone else. They would fuss, but they would not dissuade her. Myrana had made up her mind, and once she did that, as even Welton would admit, changing her course was no simple task.
She couldn’t help wondering where that course might take her this time.
VII
INTO THE WASTELANDS
1
They gathered at Sage’s Square, one of the few spots in the city with room for them all, and left through the Mekillot Gate. An expedition of such size couldn’t be kept a secret, and people had climbed the fifty-plus dense, blue-trunked agafari trees of Sage’s Square for a better view. Others lined the wide stone thoroughfare running from there to the gate to watch them go. Some cheered the procession, others shouted taunts or insults, though none knew the expedition’s purpose.
There were twelve argosies in the expedition, with four axles and many wheels, each of them pulled by a pair of mekillots. These armored wagons were largely empty at the journey’s start; people would ride inside them, and they carried water and supplies for the trip, but primarily they were meant to carry the metal from Akrankhot back to Nibenay. As the journey progressed, food and water would be consumed, making space for the return cargo.
Fifty goliath soldiers of Nibenay accompanied the argosies, along with an assortment of slaves, many of them muls, to do the hard work of lifting and loading. For now, the templar Kadya walked at the head of the expedition, although Aric suspected she would be riding within minutes of passing through the gate. He and Ruhm had chosen to leave the city inside a wagon. Although the expedition itself was common knowledge, being too large to hide, its goal was not, and Kadya had instructed them not to talk about it, even with friends. They had decided that staying out of sight would make it easier to avoid anyone who might want to ask questions.
Even so, they could hear the shouts of onlookers, and as they approached the gate, they shifted their shoulders and tapped their feet to the musicians playing from balconies suspended above it. Aric watched out a side window, better to watch the half-giant soldiers try to maintain their military bearing while swaying and strutting to the hypnotic melodies of the gate’s musicians.
The lumbering beasts, some thirty feet long, pulled the armored wagons at a steady, stately pace. People could have walked faster, but the strength of the animals would be needed to haul the steel back to the city. Aric tried to prepare himself for a long, uncomfortable journey.
Ruhm stayed in his seat, swaying gently with the rocking motion of the wagon. In front, beneath the seats occupied by the drivers, was space for storage. The main section had rows of sturdy wooden benches, with legroom between—although not much, considering most of the soldiers on the trip were half-giants. Because there were so many argosies and so few riders, some of them were filled stem to stern with supplies. “Will it be like this all the way?” Aric asked. He rocked back and forth, exaggerating the effect. “I think I’ll get sick if it is.”
“Oh, no,” Ruhm assured him. “It’ll be far bumpier out there, once we’re off the cobbled roads of Nibenay and the caravan road beyond the gate.”
“You’re joking!”
“You can walk any time,” Ruhm reminded him. He had traveled more than Aric, to Raam and Draj and even Gulg once. “Just don’t get too far ahead or stray into wilderness. Nibenay only sent one of you. What will the rest of us do, we can’t find metal under the city?”
“I definitely will walk as much as I can,” Aric said. “Better than being stuck in here.” He sniffed the air. “It already smells bad in here, worse than my rooms in Nibenay.”
“Worse when ten or fifteen soldiers in here trying to stay out of the sun. Stifling hot in these. Outside at least some hope of a breeze.”
“This is going to be a long trip, isn’t it?”
“Always are.”
Aric kept shifting from his seat to the window to watch their progress. Once through the gate, they passed between four giant statues of Nibenay, collectively called the Omnipotent Receivers. Each was sculpted in a different style, and from Aric’s recent experience meeting the Shadow King he knew the representations of him were more than a little idealized. Beyond those statues, the road sliced through the sparse farmlands of the sorcerer-king, then fields of sandgrass interrupted at irregular intervals by small tenant farms and clutches of adobe buildings.
Sure enough, within the first hour of travel, Aric had had enough of the stuffy air inside the argosy, which windows on the sides and the opening in front used by the mekillot drivers barely alleviated. He and Ruhm got out and walked alongside the wagons, enjoying the slight breezes and the changing scenery. Soldiers cursed and complained, slaves hiked on in stoic silence, occasionally breaking out into song but stopping when their overseers grumbled.
The caravan road they traveled would take them through the Blackspine Pass, between the Windbreak Mountains that shielded Nibenay from the worst of the northern winds, and the Blackspine Mountains. If they stayed on it, they would end up in Raam, but they had been told that they’d veer off the road long before that, and journey overland to Akrankhot.
Before the end of the first day, Aric could already see swaths of green coating the sides of the Blackspines. “They’re so lush!” he told Ruhm.
“This end,” Ruhm said. “Get rain here. Follow range to the east, there’s less and less.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Aric said. “It’s beautiful.”
“It is,” Ruhm agreed. “You been sheltered. Good thing you go on this journey, learn about the world.”
“I know a thing or two,” Aric countered. Having been on his own since his tenth year, he didn’t consider himself sheltered, but worldly wise. He had to admit, though, that his wisdom largely ended at Nibenay’s massive stone walls.
“Two is pretty small number,” Ruhm said. Aric couldn’t argue with that, so he shut his mouth and kept walking.
2
Here’s the way I heard it,” the soldier said. His name was Damaric, and he was a slave, pressed into military service. Aric hadn’t heard the details of his life, just the broad strokes. They were sitting around one of the expedition’s many campfires, after a dinner of biscuits sweetened with tiny dabs of kank honey on the second night, and already he and Ruhm were starting to become acquainted with some of the other travelers. A night wind whipped into the fire pit, sending sparks heavenward to meet the stars glittering above. The argosies had been drawn into a circle, both stoves inside each one lit, and fires built inside the circle to keep night’s cold at bay.
“Heard where?” another soldier challenged. This was a goliath whose name Aric but couldn’t remember. “Some drunk in a tavern?”
“I can’t say where I heard it,” Damaric said. “Because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”
“Let him talk,” Amoni said. She was a mul, also a slave, but not a soldier. She was along to perform manual labor. “I want to hear what we’re doing here.”
Damaric took a big swig from a bladder of wine. He was a tight, compact man with a powerful build, deep-chested, bull-necked and broad shouldered, but two full heads shorter than Aric. His brown hair was cropped short. He wore a thick mustache that obscured his upper lip, and he hadn’t shaved since leaving Nibenay so stubble roughened his cheeks and chin. A th
ick, knotted scar wormed across his throat, a wound he had been lucky to survive, and perhaps as a result his voice always sounded hoarse and strained. “I heard—from someone who was there, mind you—that an undead man came into the Council chamber while Nibenay was there.”
“Undead?” Aric asked.
“And smelling like it, they say,” Damaric replied. “Anyway, he stormed in, interrupting the Council’s session, and demanded to speak to the Shadow King. Since he was undead, no one saw the point of trying to execute him on the spot. Besides, his entrance made Nibenay curious. He bade the undead man—a mercenary, I’m told—tell his tale. This undead man told about the treasure he had discovered beneath Akrankhot, and then he keeled over, finally really dead.”
“What’s the treasure?” another slave asked. “I’d like to know what we’re to break our backs hauling.”
“Nobody knows.”
Aric almost spoke up, then decided not to. He didn’t know who was to be trusted, or if there was any reason that the expedition’s goal should remain a secret now that they were so far from the city-state. But he had been told not to talk about it, and he decided to continue that policy, at least for a while longer.
“That’s not what I heard,” another human soldier said. He sat directly across the fire from Aric, and the flickering flames gave his face an odd, uneven cast. “I heard someone sent a guardian to Nibenay, interrupting him as he lay with one of his templar wives. He was furious enough to have the thing destroyed, but before he did, it told him about the city under the sand. And I heard that the treasure is jewels of every description, piled so high it would take a day to climb to the top.”
“That’s nonsense,” Damaric said. “Who sent the guardian?”
“Nobody knows,” the other soldier replied.
A guardian was a floating obsidian orb, the mind of a powerful psion from an age gone by, but removed from its body. Guardians were said to have no will of their own, but simply to follow the orders of their masters, which made Damaric’s question a pertinent one—no guardian would have come before Nibenay unless someone had sent it.
“I was told that the word came by a number of messengers,” Amoni offered. “A hermit found the city, and he told a passing traveler, who told another, and so on, until eventually word filtered back to Nibenay. Each time the story was told, of course, the treasure grew and grew. At the gates, this last traveler told the guards about an abandoned city in which every building was made of gold.”
“I hope it’s a small city,” a goliath solder said. “Or we need more argosies.”
“What about you, Aric?” Amoni asked him. Her hairless, copper skin gleamed in the firelight. She was fully as tall as Aric, big and strong, with long, muscular legs. But she had a ready smile, a gentle manner, and brown eyes that were surprisingly sympathetic. “Surely you heard a story too—it seems everybody has.”
“I guess I wasn’t listening, then,” Aric said. “I don’t know how word of Akrankhot made it to Nibenay’s ears.”
“What do you think we’ll find there?”
Aric hesitated, not ready to give away what he knew.
Ruhm stepped in for him. “Sand.”
“No doubt,” Amoni said, and they all laughed.
It was only the second night, and laughter still came easily.
3
This was real darkness.
On the expedition’s third night on the road, they could still see the lights of Nibenay on the horizon, a glowing smudge. Finding absolute darkness in the city was almost impossible, unless closed up in a box or a windowless interior room. At night, lamps and lanterns and fires burned everywhere. The vast emporiums flanking Sage’s Square were open all night, and even in the densest thicket of the square’s agafari trees, lights from those were visible. So bright were the lights of Athas that on some nights, the stars and moons could barely be seen from inside the city.
There was a transient beauty to the daytime desert that Aric had never expected to find there. The landscape was a muted palette of brown, ocher, umber and buff, cracked and crusted and warped like old leather, dried out from use. In midday, with the merciless sun shining overhead, it flattened out and sunlight stabbed the eye from every surface, so that you had to walk with eyes narrowed to keep from going blind. But toward evening, the hills in the distance—and there were always hills in the distance, out here—turned blue and brown and purple as the vast bowl of sky went gray-black at one edge, then to the dark green of moss on the inside of a well to the lighter green of new spring leaves, finally shattering into brilliant shards around the setting vermillion sun. And in the morning, other hills reached up as if trying to catch the first rays of light as the sun burst over the horizon. Aric came to love the mornings and the dusks, the temperature neither too hot or cold and the light changing the landscape minute by minute, so that no day was like the one before it.
Four nights out, with Nibenay finally gone, Aric wrapped himself up in heavy clothing and a leather cloak, carried the agafari-wood sword issued to him at the journey’s start, and walked alone into the wilderness. He had no particular destination, he just wanted to see what he could see.
The moons were not yet risen, although green-tinged Ral would break the horizon before he made it back to camp. The expedition’s fires glowed until he put some dunes between himself and them. He stopped when he realized he could no longer see anything more than outlines against the stars. An icy wind bit at his cheeks, sending sand skittering down the dune flanks.
Never before had Aric known the sensation of being outdoors with no light but the stars to show his way. Because they were the only thing to see, he tilted his head back and stared into the sky, turning his body to make the stars spin. When he stopped, he was dizzy. He bent forward, hands on his knees, until the feeling passed.
Which was when panic set in.
Had he turned himself completely around? With no visible landmarks, he wasn’t sure which direction camp was. All he could hear was the wind, already hurting his ears. He shouted, but the wind whipped the words away so fast he could barely hear himself.
Someone could die out here in no time, cut off from shelter and warmth. The expedition carried much of its own firewood; there was precious little to be collected out here in the sandy wastes. How much time would it take to freeze to death? An hour? Less?
Stop, he told himself. Take a deep breath and think.
He took several. His thoughts were jumbled, piling up on each other in a way that he believed meant panic was returning. He knew that if he let it have its head, he would wind up running in one direction after another, wearing himself out. There was a chance of coming into sight of the caravan, especially if he climbed a high dune. But the chances were far better that he would wind up running in circles, never getting anywhere near his comrades, until he fell and couldn’t get back up.
Footprints, Aric thought. The sand was soft enough here to leave deep prints when he walked. He could simply follow those back, if he could find them in the first place. He looked toward the horizon, saw the first glimmerings of Ral there. Guthay would not be far behind.
He dropped to hands and knees, looking for his tracks. Where he had stood and turned in a circle—that stupid circle!—there were plenty.
Beyond that, nothing. The wind had already erased them.
He couldn’t just stay here. Soon Ruhm, who had objected to him going out in the first place, would go looking for him. Maybe with others. If they all got lost, it would be that much worse.
He decided to climb the nearest dune, to see if he could spot the sparks streaming up from the campfires.
He was on the steep side, but he leaned into it, planting his feet carefully, sidestepping for traction.
He was halfway up when the wind died momentarily and he thought he heard something break the silence. A shout from camp? No, something harsher, shorter. A chuff of breath, he thought, and close by.
He looked up to see how far from the top he was. Some
thing blocked the stars for an instant, as if hunching at the rim, looking down. He barely registered it and then it was gone.
And that was the other reason he never should have done this. “Weather don’t get you,” Ruhm had said, “beasts will.”
“I’ll have a sword,” Aric had countered. “And I won’t be far from camp, just far enough to see what it’s like out here at night.”
“Don’t want to know.”
“That’s easy for you, Ruhm. You’ve experienced these things. I’ve heard stories, read a few, but my knowledge all comes from somebody else. I want to see for myself.”
“Crazy,” Ruhm had said. “Stupid.”
Aric hated it when Ruhm was right.
He leapt from the dune’s face, landing on the harder ground below. Right where he had started from, before deciding to climb. He still had his sword, and he raised it in case whatever was up on that dune sprang at him. It wasn’t steel, but it was sanded to a keen edge, and agafari wood was nearly as hard.
Now he was back in the same spot, unable to see the camp, and not sure in which direction it lay. Only one thing had changed—now he was being hunted.
Despite the extreme cold, sweat tickled Aric’s ribs.
Could whatever was up there see well in the dark? He guessed it probably could, if this was its typical hunting ground. But was it even still there? Or had it circled around, climbing down the gentler slope, so that even now it crept up behind him?
He spun around, half-expecting to see yellow, feral eyes glowing in the blackness. But he saw nothing there, only dark emptiness. He felt only wind and terror.
It took almost a minute to realize that he could see better, however, than just a short while earlier. He didn’t know if it was his eyes adapting to the darkness or the fact that Ral had climbed above the horizon, and now distant, golden Guthay was edging above it.
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