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 thick, 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, un
til 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. Something 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.
He decided to take a chance—to start in the direction that felt right, based on where the moons were rising—and hope for the best. Better than standing here waiting to be attacked.
With new determination, he took one step, then another. With each pace, he felt better, more sure of his decision. He kept the sword ready, scanned the way before him with every step, stopped occasionally to check behind and around. He was going the right way, and he started to breathe easier.
That certainty lasted until he had been walking for a while—longer than he had walked on the way out. Then it abandoned him all at once. He gave an anguished, wordless cry.
“Aric!” he heard in response.
“Ruhm?” Wind whisked his words from his lips.
“Aric!”
The voice seemed to come from off to his left. He adjusted his course and started toward it, calling out every few moments.
Finally, he saw torches, borne aloft by Ruhm, Amoni, and some others. He ran to them, rushing gratefully into the overlapping circles of light. “There—there’s something out there.”
“Course,” Ruhm said.
“There are no doubt many somethings out there,” Amoni said. “Ruhm said you wanted to see what it was like in the darkness.”
Aric was shivering. The cold, he told himself, but not convincingly.
“I d-did.”
“Like it?” Ruhm asked.
“Not a bit.” That wasn’t precisely true. At first, he had. He had liked the novelty of it, had liked the solitude, the sensation that he was alone in the world instead of hemmed in by a city full of greed and strife and anger. But that hadn’t lasted long, and the parts he hadn’t liked had taken over.
Ruhm clapped him on the shoulder with one big hand, and led him back toward camp. Because he was a goliath, stern and sullen much of the time, not given to excessive conversation, he didn’t say “I told you so.”
But Aric knew he was thinking it, just the same.
4
On the sixth day out from Nibenay, they left the trade road. Each day they had passed at least one caravan, bound for Nibenay or Raam, usually glad to see a large armed force. The Gith Horde, people said, had been leaving their ancestral homes in the Blackspine Mountains to raid travelers, and although fifty soldiers might not be much of a deterrent, it was better than nothing.
But after they struck out north from the road, they stopped seeing anyone. These wastelands weren’t entirely deserted. The group saw the domed roofs of a wezer colony, and a couple of the giant insects even buzzed the expedition. Probably put off by its numbers, they apparently decided not to try to abduct any of its members and hurried back to their own colony. At one promising oasis, they saw a sand bride who took on the appearance of the most beautiful woman Aric had ever seen. On his own, he would certainly have gone to her, and would just as certainly have perished in her embrace. But the expedition had enough experienced hands along that they recognized the oasis for the trap it was.
After these dangers were spotted, along with numerous less-lethal creatures, word was spread to encourage everyone to ride inside the argosies rather than walking. As Ruhm had predicted, when the heavy wagons were hot and crowded, the smell grew worse and the unceasing rocking and swaying made Aric think his spine would splinter before journey’s end.
For the first couple of days, he had been enjoying the novelty of the trip. That had not lasted long, however. Now he just wanted it to be over. He had been coerced into coming in the first place, and although no one had died yet, everyone swore it was only a matter of time.
The ninth day, Aric was outside the argosy for a short while, just wanting to breathe fresh air and stretch his legs. On earlier days there would have been plenty of company outside, but there was little now, and while he tried to watch the horizons for attacks of any kind, he kept stumbling over the dips and rises of the sand beneath his feet.
“Aric, is
n’t it?” a woman’s voice asked.
He looked up and to his right. Kadya leaned out the window of the lead argosy.
“Yes.”
“Have a care out there, Aric, we don’t want anything happening to you.”
“Thank you. I don’t think we want anything happening to anyone, do we?”
“Of course not. But you especially.”
He didn’t ask why. Ruhm had said it early on—he was the only psionic they had with an ability that could help find hidden stores of metals. Without him the whole expedition might fail.
“I just needed some air,” he said. “I’ll get back inside soon.”
“See that you do. And if you want to walk outside, take a couple soldiers with you. I can let them know they’re to obey your commands.”
A sensation of power welled up in Aric, but he pushed it back down. He knew he was important to the trip, but he didn’t want that importance going to his head. That would only make it harder to live his half-elf’s life once they got back to Nibenay, and would make his traveling companions resent him. On the road, as in the city, he believed his best hope for a peaceful life lay in keeping his profile low. “Thanks,” he told her. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
5
Kadya was annoyed with Aric. Nibenay, her husband and king, had specifically instructed her to keep the young man out of harm’s way. If he wouldn’t take the simplest steps to protect himself, though, what could she do for him?
Well, quite a lot, actually. But she didn’t want to waste any of her magic on him if she could help it. Arcane magic required the use of life forces to power it, and in this environment there wasn’t much life force around, except that belonging to those in her own expedition. She had already had to use magic a couple of times. The first time had been to destroy a gold scorpion that had approached her personal maidservant, their first day off the caravan road. That night at an oasis, another of the slaves in her retinue had been seized by some sort of road sickness, and started convulsing, pink froth showing at the edges of her mouth. Many thought the sickness was a result of Kadya’s magic, as if the life force of the slave had been tapped for earlier spells.
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