City Under the Sand

by Jeff Mariotte

  He waved her off with his hands, as if she were an annoying insect. “That’s … that’s not possible.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “How? If you had done magic, I would have known.”

  “Where do you think the burnflower came from, when that hermit was attacking us? How do you suppose I bested the cistern fiend? Or the rain paraelemental? I’ve used it several times.”

  He still didn’t believe her; everything about his posture and voice dismissed her claims. “What kind of magic?”

  “Magic when done right doesn’t have to defile the land.”

  “I … I don’t know what to say, Myrana. It’s like you’ve been lying to me this whole time.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Myrana said. “Those of us who use magic are taught early on not to reveal it. I shouldn’t be telling you now, but if we decide to act on Aric’s plan, you need to know.”

  “Still …

  “He’s right,” Amoni said.

  “Amoni?” Aric asked, aware that he gawped at her. “You too?”

  “No,” she said. “But I have known those who use magic without defiling the land.” Her cheeks went red and she held her palms to the fire, then rubbed them together. “And I lied, just now. I do know of a contact for the Veiled Alliance in Nibenay, a vendor on the Palm Court.”

  “Magic is not bad, in and of itself,” Myrana said. “Not as destructive as people claim. It’s all in how it’s used.”

  “And to what ends,” Amoni added. “Magic can be used for good, in good ways. Healing ways.”

  Aric knew some believed that. But one couldn’t stand anywhere on Athas’s surface, during the scorching heat of day or the cruel cold of night, and not see the fruits of magic. So went the stories, anyway.

  “I’ll have to think about this more,” Aric said. “I don’t want to rush back, join forces with the Veiled Alliance, and have things go bad. This is too important for that.”

  “Think, then,” Sellis said. “But do it quickly. We’re running out of time, Aric.”

  “I know. Believe me.”

  “Good, then.”

  “Good,” Mazzax said. He and Ruhm had kept quiet through the whole discussion. Aric already knew how Ruhm felt about magic—he liked to pretend it didn’t exist. And Aric couldn’t read the dwarf, who had been sitting there the whole time but acted as if had just joined the conversation at its very end.

  Later, when everyone else was sleeping, he sat up on guard duty and kept turning over the day’s revelations in his mind. He longed for a simple answer, but there were none to be had.

  He had his own doubts about magic, and he wasn’t sure it would defeat Tallik anyway. But he wasn’t sure anything else would.

  If only he could talk to Rieve again.

  Thinking of her, he felt for the pebble in his purse, and took up a bladder of water and a shallow clay bowl. Beside the fire, he poured some water into the bowl, then dropped the pebble into it. He tried to clear other thoughts from his mind. “Show me Rieve,” he said softly. “Where is Rieve?”

  The pebble sat at the bottom of the bowl. Had he used too much water? Too shallow a bowl? She hadn’t been specific about that. He had never tried to do magic, but for all he knew those sorts of things had to be very precise.

  He stared at the pebble, bringing an image of Rieve to the forefront of his mind—not hard to do, since he had thought of almost nothing else all day. As he did, the pebble skittered across the bottom of the bowl. Aric peered through the water and saw that the pebble’s surface had grown cloudy.

  He plucked it from the water and held it close to his eye. At first he could see nothing, but as he turned it in his fingers, he moved it so the fire’s light shone through from behind it. Then, as surely as if Rieve herself was inside it, he saw her. He almost dropped it, but managed to hang on.

  Bringing it close to his eye again, with the fire behind it, he saw Rieve once more.

  He didn’t like what he saw.

  Her hair was bedraggled. There was a large red mark on her face. Worse, blood trickled from her nose and mouth. Still worse, when he shifted the pebble’s position, the angle changed and he could see a rope tied around her neck. Firelight danced on her face, but Aric couldn’t tell if it was real, or caused by the fire glowing through the stone.

  Rieve was in danger.

  And in an instant, Aric’s priorities had changed. He put the pebble back into the water, and again it moved at once to the far side of the bowl. To the northwest, the direction they had just come from.

  That had to be its way of showing in which direction to look for Rieve.

  They could do nothing until morning. Even if he woke the others, convinced them, traveling at night was too dangerous.

  But when the sun rose, he would have some persuading to do.

  5

  Rieve had passed on Aric’s warning about the raiders to the rest of her family and their guards.

  In the end, it hadn’t helped.

  The first thing that happened was that Corlan caught up to them. They saw someone behind them, riding hard. Three of the guards dropped back, ready to deal with whatever threat pursued them. Fortunately, Rieve recognized him before anybody skewered him. His apology was so abject and heartfelt she had no choice but to forgive him. Once he was allowed to join the family, he apologized to Pietrus, and to the rest of them. Pietrus still wasn’t sure what the purpose of the whole voyage was; to him it was just an adventure, and the others were content to let him think that.

  Once the reunion was accomplished, they continued on toward whatever Grandfather’s destination was. Perhaps the distraction of Corlan’s appearance caused the soldiers to let down their guard. Or perhaps they never had a chance.

  They rode through an area thick with dark, jagged boulders, piled one on the other as if from some cataclysmic event. From the cover of those rocks, arrows flew, each one finding its target. Four of the six soldiers fell at once. The other two filled their hands with steel, but when a force of raiders rode out from a hidden canyon, the battle was brief and bloody. Corlan tried to fight, and the raiders mistook him for a member of the family and refused to engage him. They simply rode circles around him, isolating him from the rest of the family, then held steel to Mother’s throat and forced him to disarm.

  When the bloodshed was over, a mul raider, copper-skinned and hairless, his naked torso plastered with tattoos, rode up to Rieve’s grandparents. “This is your family?” he asked. He regarded the others with a sneer on his face. “They look soft.” He took Grandfather’s hand and turned it over, touching the man’s palm. “Soft hands. Nobility.”

  “You can do anything you want to me,” Grandfather said. “But let the women go.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “To prove that you’re not completely heartless beasts!”

  The mul laughed. “Oh, but we are.”

  Other raiders rode around the family, examining their belongings. There were no pack animals or wagons, everyone carried what little they had brought.

  “They’ve got nothing,” one reported.

  “A noble family, traveling off the main roads, with only six guards and few possessions?” the mul asked. “Now you’ve got me curious. Where’s your treasure?”

  “We have no treasure,” Grandfather said. “As your man said, we have nothing. So you might as well leave us alone.”

  The mul sat back on his mount, gazing skyward, as if giving the idea serious consideration. “You know what I think? I think there are two possibilities here. We can hold you, and send a message back to wherever you come from—Nibenay, from the looks of you—instructing whoever controls your fortune that they need to send a large portion of it here to secure your safe release. On the other hand, you appear to be on the run from something—you packed quickly and left home with very few belongings. So I can hold you, and unless you arrange to have a ransom sent to me, I’ll report your whereabouts to the Nibenese authorities. Either way, the r
esult’s the same for me. I have to feed you for a while, and then you pay me.”

  “That will never happen,” Grandfather said.

  “There is one more possibility, old man. I can start killing you one by one, beginning with little red there.” He indicated Rieve. “And keep killing you until you agree to pay me. Once again, same result, but this time I have fewer to feed.”

  “You’re a monster!” Rieve shouted. “We’d never give you a thing.”

  The mul calmly walked over to her, his eyes fixed on her as if trying to bore a hole through her. He reached up and slapped her across the face. The blow nearly knocked her off her kank, but she managed to hang on. She spat blood at the mul, who simply chuckled and wiped it off.

  “Give me back my weapon,” Corlan insisted, “and I’ll make you regret you ever saw us!”

  “On second thought,” the mul said, “maybe I’ll start with that one. He’s trouble, he is.”

  “We’ve got to go home with something, Shen’ris,” another raider said. “It’s been a rough few days.”

  “Indeed it has,” the mul said. “We’ve suffered major losses in battle,” he explained. “And with no treasure to show for it. I think, though, that when we ride back to the fort with you, noble friends, we’ll be greeted with enthusiasm.”

  “There … there is a certain amount of wealth, back in Nibenay,” Grandfather allowed. “Harm a single one of us, and you’ll never see the first bit of it. But if we’re treated well, with respect and dignity, then we might be able to work out some sort of accommodation.”

  “Tunsall, no!” Grandmother cried.

  “We have no choice, Sheridia,” Grandfather said. “These people will kill us all if we don’t cooperate.”

  “Now you’re making sense,” Shen’ris said. He scratched his chest with a big, blunt-fingered hand. “Come, let’s get away from these corpses. After we help ourselves to their weapons and armor, of course. We won’t make the fort tonight, I’m afraid, but we’ll be there tomorrow, and then we can see about getting that message composed to send back to Nibenay.”

  A few hours later, they were camped around a roaring fire. Each of the captives had a length of stout rope looped around their necks, and they were all connected in a line. Their hands had been tied, their weapons confiscated. Rieve couldn’t sleep this way, so she sat up as well as she could, letting the fire ward off the night, and wishing there was something she could do.

  So far, wishing had not brought tangible results.

  XIX

  THE FORT

  1

  Advance riders had reached Nibenay with news about the caravan’s approach. So much metal filled the wagons that even the huge mekillots had a hard time hauling it, and several times the caravan had stopped to repair or replace wheels and axles.

  Word spread quickly. Even though everyone knew the trove belonged to the sorcerer-king, who would use it for his own ends—outfitting the standing army of goliaths and slaves was the most common guess—there was still a general sense of excitement. No one, or so the rumors had it, had ever seen so much metal. Everybody wanted a glimpse, even though they would never own it.

  Among Nibenay’s templars, the mood was even more agitated. The excitement was high, but so was the tension, as sister templars tried to outmaneuver one another, seeking some advantage. Kadya’s allies were smug, certain that their loyalty would be repaid. Others, especially those on the outs with Kadya or Siemhouk or both, struggled to find a way back into their good graces. Because Siemhouk was already so well placed, nobody expected a power shift so much as a settling of power, a further entrenchment of the existing structure.

  And the Shadow King, for his part, waited with growing impatience for the caravan’s arrival. He knew better than to trust Kadya or Siemhouk. Or Dhojakt. Or any other of his wives, for that matter. Not completely. When a man had hundreds of wives and almost limitless power, he was surrounded by intrigue, double-dealing, backstabbing—sometimes literally—and naked ambition, every day of his long, long life. Nibenay knew that, and was no longer surprised when those things presented themselves. He wished for smooth, agreeable relations among his many wives, but he did not expect them. Nor was his son any more trustworthy—when Dhojakt told him to welcome Aric with open arms, Nibenay immediately put a price on the smith’s head.

  He wanted the steel. He wanted Kadya to return so he could see how much truth there was, if any, to his son’s warning. He was curious about what Siemhouk’s reaction might be.

  But during the long days and nights of waiting, he made plans. Whatever the future brought, he meant to be ready for it when it got here.

  2

  Sellis was a natural tracker, and following the trail the party from the House of Thrace had made was easy. Finding the bodies of the dead guards, stripped and left to rot in the son, had been worrying, but Aric already knew Rieve and her family were in trouble. It was clear what had happened—someone had captured them. Even without the visible trail, Aric would have known whom to blame.

  Those raiders from Fort Dunnat.

  They’d been humiliated, and many of their number killed, at Myrana’s false ambush site. Seeking revenge for that, they’d been turned away from the village of Yarri, again sustaining heavy losses. Following that battle, they had lingered about the area for several days, doubtless looking for another way to avenge their losses.

  Now, obviously having no knowledge of Rieve’s connection to Aric, they had come across a party of nobles. Profit, not revenge, had dictated that they take those nobles captive—in addition to having their forces devastated in two separate battles, they had wasted time that might otherwise have been spent raiding caravans or other, less fortified villages.

  Aric had to believe that Corlan had been taken as well, because Corlan’s trail and the families came together, before the point at which they found the soldiers’ bodies.

  Where the trail led across rocky patches, or wind had scoured it so clean that not only Sellis could find it, Aric had to rely on his pebble and bowl of water. That led unfailingly to where the trail again became clear, and showed him that, although she remained a captive, she yet lived.

  As long as she lived, Aric would rescue her.

  If she died, he would kill every raider in the fort, or die trying.

  The others were with him. In the first warm blush of morning, he had explained what the pebble had shown him the night before.

  “What are we waiting for?” Myrana asked.

  “It’ll take us out of our way,” Aric said. “Away from Nibenay. If Kadya reaches the city first—”

  “We’ve had plenty of delays,” Sellis said. “Do we know she’s not already there?”

  “She wasn’t when Corlan left it, but that’s the last we know.”

  “Then we might rush there for naught, while your friends suffer at the hands of those damnable raiders.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Even when we get to Nibenay,” Amoni added, “we might not be able to do anything.”

  “Also true,” Aric said.

  “And you said this woman, your friend’s grandmother, works preserving magic.”

  “That’s what Rieve said.”

  “Well, we’ll need sorcerers on our side, if we hope to best Kadya with magic, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Myrana saw where Amoni was leading, and picked up the thread. “So we help them first. Then we all go to Nibenay together and deal with this templar and her demon friend.”

  “I don’t know that they’ll want to go back to Nibenay,” Aric reminded them. “They were anxious to put distance between themselves and the city.”

  “If we rescue them, and we tell them what’s at stake?” Sellis asked. “Surely they’ll take the chance.”

  Not everyone’s a hero, Aric was about to say. But the words tangled on his tongue. If he spoke them, he would be calling himself and his friends heroes, and he didn’t think of them that way. He only thought they were trying to
do what needed to be done—that they really didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  Then again, perhaps that’s what all heroes thought.

  At any rate, he didn’t want to give the thought voice, for fear of sounding ridiculously self-important. “Let’s go, then. After my friends, even if the trail leads to the raiders’ fort itself.”

  3

  It did.

  The fort butted up against a rocky cliff, its walls built from the same dark rock, so they didn’t see it until they were almost upon it. Guards had been posted up on the cliff, and more on towers abutting the walls. The companions halted when they realized they’d found it, themselves ducking behind some good-sized rocks so they wouldn’t be seen.

  “How we going to get in there?” Mazzax asked. “Knock on gates?”

  “I think we’ll have to be sneakier than that,” Amoni said.

  “Sneaky is good,” Aric agreed. “But we don’t even know where inside that fort they’re holding Rieve and her family. There aren’t nearly enough of us to simply invade the fort and find them.”

  “But we’re us,” Ruhm said.

  “Yes, Ruhm, we are,” Aric said. “We’ve been lucky so far. Maybe more than just lucky, maybe we’re actually good at this sort of thing. But six against however many raiders are in there … the odds aren’t with us.”

  “Fewer now than there were before,” Myrana pointed out.

  “That’ll work in our favor.” Aric stole another glance at the fort, wishing he could see through its walls.

  But he could! In a way, at least. “Hold on, perhaps we can get a view of the inside after all.” He took pebble and bowl from his pouch, poured some water in, dropped the pebble into the water. By now it was routine. The pebble slid immediately across the bottom to a point nearest the fort. Aric waited until the pebble’s surface had grown cloudy, then he took it from the water and held it toward the sun.