Everybody knew templars used magic, of course. But knowing it and seeing it were two different things, and Kadya thought that for the good of the expedition, she was better off keeping it discreet.
Still, she tried to keep an eye on the half-elf. Letting him die before the metal was located would infuriate Siemhouk as well as Nibenay. Nibenay could kill her in an instant, but it was Siemhouk’s vengeance she feared. She could make Kadya’s life long and miserable. And she wouldn’t hesitate to do so if Kadya crossed her in any way.
Which made crossing her a dangerous game.
But Kadya hadn’t wanted to come on this trip just to serve her young mistress. To the extent that serving Siemhouk also worked toward her own goal, she was glad to do it. In the long run, what she wanted was to take Djena’s spot—and from there, just perhaps, restore the position of Templar of the King’s Law to the dominant position it was meant to have. That would require Siemhouk either dying or losing favor with her father, of course. But Kadya had seen his moods swing from one extreme to another, and his love for Siemhouk, even though she was his own kin, could change in time.
Kadya was sure Siemhouk had her own hidden objectives for this expedition. Such was life inside the Naggaramakam, a constant struggle for position, the never-ending play of strategies and counter-strategies.
So she planned to keep Aric safe, at least until the metal had been retrieved. But if he made it necessary, he might find himself riding the rest of the way, bound and gagged inside her private argosy. She had smiled and wished him well, when he declined her offer of assistance. She just hoped, for his sake, that he didn’t mistake her protection for friendship.
Aric was simply another tool, like the shovels and picks and hammers brought along for the slaves to use once they got there. And once a tool’s usefulness was at an end, it could be discarded without a second glance.
6
They had spotted the oasis hours before, from a cleft in the rocky ridge they were crossing. Myrana was trying to keep them on the path her dreams had set out for her, but the dream route occasionally lacked specifics, and each night she had to plumb those dreams for clues as to the next day’s travels.
They had departed the caravan with only one soldier kank, as that had been all that Welton could spare. Although Myrana tried to argue the point, Sellis and Koyt would not ride the creature, insisting it was meant for Myrana alone. She had relented, secretly thankful. She wanted to be fair, but walking all day made her legs ache, and since she didn’t know what they were headed toward, she wanted to save her strength.
On the fifth night of the journey, they had lost the kank.
Koyt had been standing watch while the others slept, Myrana hoping desperately for a dream that would chart the next day’s course. Koyt sat near the fire, longbow across his lap. The kank, four feet tall and eight long, was asleep just outside the firelight. Koyt claimed later that he heard nothing until the first dagorran used its concussive blast attack on the kank. The kank lurched upright, letting out a squeal of pain that woke Myrana and Sellis. Koyt quickly nocked an arrow and scanned for a target. When he saw the dagorran charging the kank, he led it slightly and let fly.
The shaft darted into the dagorran’s open maw, driving through so that the point jutted from between its bulging eyes. The crystals on its back, which people said powered their psionic abilities, dimmed from a dull glow to none at all as it dropped to the ground just inches shy of the kank.
But there had been more than one dagorran, and they attacked from several directions at once. The second hit the kank with another concussive blast. With what was left of its strength, the kank caught that one in its pincers. Koyt hit another with an arrow, and Sellis moved in, a sword in each hand, and dispatched the one the kank held.
One more dagorran’s psionic attack, however, was all the kank could bear. The huge insect dropped to the dirt, twitched a few times, and then lay still. Sellis and Koyt slaughtered the other two dagorrans trying to move in to feed on Myrana’s mount, but it was too late for the kank. No one slept well for the rest of that night, and by morning the dead kank’s stench was so foul they couldn’t wait to travel, even though Myrana’s dreams had been interrupted so she didn’t know for sure which way to go.
They had briefly debated returning to the caravan, but decided against it. The caravan had no doubt continued on its way, the opposite of the general northwesterly direction they had headed, so five days gone meant ten days’ travel to catch them. For all they knew, their own destination was far closer.
But with three of them on foot, one of them half-crippled, their progress was quite a bit slower. By the time they sighted the oasis, the water bladders were growing perilously light. Regardless of where Myrana’s dreams might have wanted them to go, they all agreed that detouring to the oasis was the best idea.
They approached it at late afternoon, after it had hovered there in the distance all day, taunting them with promises of shade and fresh water. When they were still almost a quarter of a league away, Sellis halted the group.
“Oases can harbor all sorts of dangers,” he said.
“Sellis, I’ve been living in the desert my whole life. You think I don’t know that?”
He folded his arms across his chest, his muscles bunched and round, forearms veined, tracked by scars. He was almost thirty, and was in many ways the most capable, experienced man she had ever known. His pale blue eyes missed nothing. He was quick to laugh, and when he did, head thrown back and mouth open, it was all she could do not to join right in. But when he was serious, those eyes narrowed and a deep gash appeared between them, as though a tiny hatchet had split his brow, and his usually smiling mouth turned into a thin, grim line. Jutting over his shoulders were the hilts of his twin swords, worn crossing each other on his back.
“I’m not saying it to educate you, Myrana. I’m only explaining why I’m going ahead alone.”
“What, so you can drink first?”
“Myrana!” That was Koyt, shorter and leaner, but just as deadly with his bow as Sellis with his twin swords. His face was round, with liquid brown eyes, and she might have thought him soft if she didn’t know him. He mopped sweat from his eyes. “You know that’s not what he means.”
“I was teasing, Koyt.”
“Koyt will cover me from here,” Sellis continued. “If it’s clear, I’ll wave you in.”
“It had better be,” Myrana said. “We need to stock up on water.”
Sellis flashed her a quick grin, dimples carving his cheeks. “Now who’s telling us what we already know?”
Without another word, he trudged toward the oasis. Koyt drew an arrow from the quiver he kept on his back, right between his shoulder blades, and fitted it onto his bowstring.
“Can you really hit something from this distance?” Myrana asked. She knew he was a skilled archer, but this seemed impossibly long.
“Let’s hope Sellis doesn’t have to find out.”
The oasis appeared calm from this distance. A light but steady breeze ruffled the fronds of tall palms, so they flashed light and dark in the afternoon sun. Beneath them was thick shadow, and somewhere in that shadow, Myrana knew, was water.
So close. She slipped the bladder off her shoulder and took a drink.
“Easy,” Koyt said, his voice calm but firm. “Save it.”
“But there’s bound to be plenty there.”
“If we can get to it.”
As she had said, Myrana had lived on the road, cutting across one desert or another, since the day of her birth. She was fully aware of the dangers an oasis could conceal. She just wanted this one to be different, to be safe, so they could drink their fill, get out of the sun, and make camp in a grove of trees that would offer shelter from the night winds.
Sellis walked right up to its edge and paused. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and Myrana guessed he was trying to peer into the shadows. Apparently satisfied, he stepped into the shade of the palms, and an instant later he was g
one.
“Now what?” Myrana asked. “How can you shoot something you can’t see?”
“Let’s go a little closer,” Koyt said. He kept his tone even, but she could tell he was worried, too. If he hadn’t been he wouldn’t have so quickly disobeyed Sellis’s instructions.
They started forward. After they’d been walking for a couple of minutes, Sellis reappeared on the fringes of shadow and waved them in. “Looks fine to me!” he shouted.
Koyt offered a relieved sigh and slipped his arrow back into its quiver. He and Myrana picked up their pace, Myrana’s staff digging into the earth with every step. It seemed forever, but then the cooling shade cut the day’s heat and she could smell water, see its reflection casting shimmering light onto the undersides of the palms.
“Everything seems clear,” Sellis said as they approached. “Drink up, and fill those skins.”
“Can we camp here tonight?” Myrana asked.
Sellis eyed the horizon. “We still have almost an hour of daylight.”
“But we’re not even sure we’re going the right way, Sellis. Let’s stay here tonight, and I’ll dream tomorrow’s route.”
Koyt had outpaced her and dropped to his knees beside the shimmering green pool, shoving knife-edged blades of grass out of his way. “I agree with her,” he said. “Camp here, push on tomorrow.”
He lowered his face toward the water, cupped his hands, and drank. Myrana had almost reached the stiff, broad-bladed grass. Sellis stood watching, a sword in each hand, as the water began to churn and roil before tentacles burst from beneath the surface.
“Water worm!” Sellis cried.
Myrana let out a shriek, dropped her staff and yanked the dagger she wore from its sheath on her belt.
Water rolled off the creature in sheets as it shot up from under the surface. The thing was a translucent green, invisible inside the water. As it rose into the air, it revealed a thick cylindrical body, like a massive snake, with squirming rose tentacles encircling it.
Koyt scrambled back from the pond’s edge and snatched up his bow. A tentacle darted at Myrana and she dodged it, slashing at it with her dagger. Thick green blood spurted where she cut it, and a foul, rotten stench filled the air. Sellis hacked at it, too, slicing a tentacle and being drenched in awful blood for his trouble.
Koyt’s bowstring twanged and an arrow flew into the creature’s side.
Myrana’s blade cut into a tentacle, but then another wrapped around her ankle. It released before she was able to swing at it, but where it had touched her, the flesh burned. She took a step backward, then another, and the leg the creature had caught—her right leg, the good one—almost gave out beneath her.
She remembered what she had heard about water worms, also called cistern fiends. Their tentacles contained a paralyzing poison, which they used to bring down their pretty. Once they were subdued, the fiend would suck out their bodily fluids, feeding the nutrients and eliminating the rest as pure water into the well or pond they inhabited.
“Don’t let those tentacles touch you!” she called. She slashed at another one coming toward her.
The thing had twenty feet or so of its length out of the water by this point, thrashing around madly. Koyt sank two more arrows into it. Sellis lopped off another tentacle. Myrana dodged one, but her good leg was already partly paralyzed, and she slipped on the damp grass by the pond’s edge. She went down on her knees, and a tentacle snaked around her waist. Even through her clothing she could feel the fiery sensation of its touch.
She raised her dagger to chop at it. Before she could, yet another arrow slammed into it. The cistern fiend jerked back, its tentacle pulling taut, and Myrana was hauled into the water.
She hit with a splash, but the surface was so roiled from the creature’s writhing that it was barely noticeable. She pawed at the surface, but the tentacle circling her waist dragged her under. Another caught her right leg, just above the knee, and then one twined around her right wrist.
Myrana had managed to catch a breath on the way into the water, but not much of one. She felt her lungs would burst as the thing held her beneath the pond’s surface. Her body was quickly going numb, her muscles refusing to obey her mental commands.
But in the water, her legs were both equally useful, the crooked as strong as the straight. She told herself not to panic—listening to herself was another story, especially as her lungs ached to draw breath—and she forced her bad leg to kick at the tentacle where it gripped the other. At the same time she moved the dagger—she hadn’t the strength left to slash through the water—to the one holding her wrist, and she began sawing at that one. When its blood flowed beneath the surface, its heat warmed her skin.
She had to have air. The tentacle around her wrist released when she cut deeply, but the one gripping her waist kept tightening. Her mouth burst open and bubbles of air escaped, and she managed, only just, to clamp it shut again as it filled with water. She gave one more mighty kick with her bad leg, and the tentacle clutching her ankle gave way.
One remained. The fiend kept jerking and thrashing about, so she knew Sellis and Koyt still battled it on the surface. But she couldn’t count on them to kill it in time to save her. She held the dagger out as far from her body as she could manage, and drove it right toward herself. The point stabbed into the tentacle. It tightened more in response, and the world started to go black. She pushed harder. Hot blood mixed with churning water. She kept pushing until she felt the tip of her blade emerge and poke into her own belly.
Only then did she draw the blade out. The tentacle let go, and Myrana pulled for the surface with every muscle that still functioned.
Koyt’s strong arms were around her, tugging her from the water. Sellis stood hip deep in it, crisscrossing the air with both swords, cutting the fiend into bloody chunks that splashed into the water like thrown rocks. Koyt dragged her onto shore, several feet from the water’s edge, laying her down on her back.
“Are you …?”
“I’m alive,” she said. “That’s as much as I can say.”
“Good.” He turned his attention back toward the fight, nocking and loosing another arrow before dropping the bow and pulling a dagger. He dashed into the water. Myrana wanted to raise her head to watch, but she couldn’t. The thing’s poison had spread through her, and her muscles were no longer her own to control.
It didn’t last long. Scant minutes had passed before Koyt and Sellis both stood over her, soaked and bedraggled, coated in the dark green slime that was the fiend’s life’s blood.
“Myrana,” Sellis said. “You’re well?”
She tried to answer, but now not even her voice worked. She couldn’t so much as blink.
“She spoke moments ago,” Koyt said. “Before I joined you in the pond.”
“Paralysis, then,” Sellis guessed. “It will wear off, Myrana. The damned thing is dead now, so we’ll make camp here tonight and you should be better by morning.”
Koyt broke out in laughter. Sellis stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What?” he asked.
“That’s what she wanted all along,” Koyt said. “To camp here in the oasis, under the shade of the palms.”
A smile creased Sellis’s face, and that contagious laugh burst from him. “Ha! So she did. I had no idea of the measures she’d take to ensure that we did. Good job, Myrana.” He went to one knee beside her, resting his hand comfortingly on her shoulder. “And good job fighting that thing—if not for you, we’d never have bested it.”
Myrana wanted to smile, to thank him, and most of all, to laugh at how she had gotten her way. She had to settle for laughing on the inside.
7
The mood in camp was tense.
Aric had stopped counting days and nights—there were too many of them, and they ran together in his mind, long hot days of walking himself to exhaustion or riding inside a steaming, stinking, rattling, rocking argosy full of soldiers, and cold, uncomfortable nights during which he tossed in his sleep, drea
med frightening, fitful dreams.
And that was before people started to die.
The first was the night after he had gone off by himself and found himself lost in the desert. A soldier had wandered away from camp, to empty his bladder, he told one of his fellows. He had barely disappeared into the darkness beyond the firelight when everyone in camp heard a cry of sheer terror. A search party, hastily thrown together, carried torches into the darkness and found his bloody remains. Damaric was part of this party. He told Aric and Ruhm that they had located the soldier’s head some twenty or thirty long paces from the body. They never did, Damaric swore, find his heart.
Since then, they had gone at a rate of one or two a night, with only occasional nights of peace. Some were never found, others not located until morning’s light made searching the desert’s vastness easier. Trails of blood often led to the bodies, or what was left of them.
Several times, Aric volunteered to accompany the search parties, but Kadya would have none of it. “Not you,” she told him privately, standing in the shade of an argosy one morning. On the journey, she wore a leather leggings and a loose top, and she kept her brown hair piled up on her head. Behind her, the mekillots belched and fidgeted, ready to get going. “You are too valuable to this expedition. Stay in your wagon and take no foolish chances.”
“But some of these people have become my friends,” he protested.
“I don’t care if they’re your brothers and sisters,” she said. The expression on her face was one of barely controlled rage. “You don’t go out there. Nibenay wants me to keep you safe. I can’t do it if you’re away from the caravan.”
“Very well,” Aric said. He would get his chance, he decided—if the slaughter continued—sometime when she was otherwise occupied. He would just go out with one of the search parties, and deal with her anger when he returned.
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