The hot, dry breezes blew him past other coastal villages, then he turned east into deeper silt, crossing to the hazy highlands of the Dragon’s Palate, where he hoped to live off the land.
After he beached the silt skimmer at sunset, Koram set up camp in the trees; he slept little, with his back against a sturdy trunk, as he listened to creatures stalking the night. He had no plan, no goal—and it felt liberating. Before, he had lived for his family, for his city, to make a better existence for all the citizens of Balic. He had worked hard and dedicated himself for people he cared about. And after his disgrace, he had been forced to fight and kill for people he hated.
Now all that was gone, the good and the bad. He owed nothing to anyone. He would heal, he would survive, and one day, perhaps he would find something else to believe in.
Next day, he continued to explore the island, finding the ruins of a Balic fort whose inhabitants had been slaughtered, probably by Skull Wearer’s giants. He picked through the wreckage and took what he needed, but he did not want to stay at the site of a recent massacre.
Continuing his explorations, he encountered a commotion up ahead, shouts and snapping branches. He heard a halfling warrior party crashing through the forest long before he saw them. He decided they must be bad warriors to be so noisy and obvious … and then he realized they were chasing someone.
A young woman burst out of the trees, running wildly; her long brown hair streamed behind her. She looked battered and exhausted. When the woman saw Koram, they both froze. He had not intended to save anyone, and she looked just as reluctant to accept his help, but the yips, howls, and high-pitched curses of the pursuers drove her toward him.
“Halflings,” she said, heaving great breaths. “I used my magic to escape … not much left now. And no time.”
“Magic?” Koram tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword. “I have no love for defilers.”
“I don’t defile. I’m a survivor—so far. You’ll come with me if you hope to survive.”
Bounding forward with a speed and agility that belied his stocky body, the halfling leader raced out of the trees, waving his bone sword. He skidded to a halt, his eyes bugging out as he saw the armored gladiator, then he yelled back to the trees. “Hey, hurry up! I’ve caught another one!”
Brazen with confidence, the woman whirled to face the halfling. “Leave us, Borodro—and maybe we won’t kill you.”
Borodro laughed. “I have fifty followers right behind me!”
“I counted forty-five,” she said.
He paused to tally them again in his mind. “More than enough.”
Since he had done nothing to provoke the halfling hunter, had made no sign of even choosing sides in the dispute, Koram was taken off guard as Borodro threw himself forward like a rabid animal. With fierce and unhindered sword work, the feral halfling landed the first blow and chipped one of Koram’s petrified-wood armor plates.
As a gladiator, Koram had fought many different opponents, so he adjusted his combat technique accordingly. His arena fighting skills took over, automatic and without mercy. He had not meant to fight again, did not want to get involved in this squabble … but he could not simply ignore this woman. If he had fought back earlier, if he had defended his family against the guards who came to take him, maybe he could have saved his wife and son. Koram parried the halfling’s sharpened-femur sword with his own bronze edge, hammering so hard he splintered the giant bone. Borodro hesitated in surprise at the ferocity of the blow.
With a curled fist, Koram smashed the halfling leader in the nose, drawing forth a surprised yowl and a burst of blood. As the enrgaged Borodro threw himself against the gladiator again, Koram impaled him on his sword. The halfling collapsed, wailing as his blood poured out.
In the dense trees nearby, the remaining forty-five halfling pursuers heard their leader’s death scream, then raised their own voices.
Koram held his sword and stood his ground; he did not even know who this woman was, but he was certain he could never defeat so many halfling cannibals.
The woman yanked a small pouch from her breeches and unwrapped it to reveal a rough shard of crystal. She looked up at Koram, wild-eyed. “No way around it now. I can use Borodro’s life force before he dies, and I’ll probably have to drain a dozen trees, too. But it’s either defiling magic, or we both die.”
Anger flared inside him. “I refuse to be part of defilement.”
On the ground, Borodro coughed blood and wheezed out a death rattle. Wearing a grim expression, the woman knelt next to the dying halfling, working her hands around the crystal. “Normally I would use my own blood, my own strength, but this creature has already taken enough lives.” She spat in the halfling’s face to express her loathing, then she looked with greater sympathy at Koram. “You saved me. I’ll save you. I’ll take you to … a better place.”
As she summoned the power to activate the crystal, Borodro wailed and writhed, then shriveled to dust. The grasses and weeds on the ground withered as the circle of defiling magic spread, drinking life energy from anything it touched. Tall trees turned brown, creaking, splintering.
Koram yelled at her, “I do not want—”
Then the first members of the halfling hunting party charged forward out of the trees, waving their weapons. They all looked hungry.
The crystal in her palm glowed as she finished her spell.
The world shimmered—and they were both in a different place. Koram’s next breath tasted of moisture, life, flowers, and leaves. Nearby, a brook tumbled over mossy rocks on its way downhill. The shadowy monster-infested forest was now glittering with birdsong and gentle breezes. Even the sun in the sky was bright yellow, rather than a dull bloody red.
He stared in awe, then looked at the woman, demanding explanations. “Where have you taken me?”
The magic user shuddered in disgust at what she had done. The rough crystal in her bloodstained palm emitted a yellowish glow. “This is Athas … our world, before the sorcerer-kings and corrupt magic users wrung it dry.”
“How did we get here?” The gladiator looked around, worried that Borodro’s cannibal halflings had followed them through time. “How do we get back?” He had not intended to stay with this woman. The wounds and memories were still too fresh in his mind and heart, and he did not want to cast his lot with a stranger. It would not be fair to her, or to him.
The woman—who told him her name was Jisanne—looked down at the strange glassy shard she held. “Ancient sailors used this navigation crystal to take them home. This time period, this version of Athas, was the home of a powerful ship’s captain.” Though her skin was covered with bruises and she walked with obvious pain, Jisanne set off down the slope, following the stream. “I’ve brought us here. Look around you. Are you so anxious to be back in your harsh world?”
He found the fresh, green, living landscape remarkable … but its very strangeness was intimidating. “I have lost my family, and lost my interest. Little matters to me anymore. But I … will stay with you until I’m sure you are safe.”
She regarded him with a hard expression. “I have taken care of myself for a long time, and I don’t need a protector.” She drew a deep breath. “But you are here with me now. I prefer this time and place, when the world was young and healthy—but my magic isn’t strong enough to make it permanent. Come, we don’t have much time.”
Koram followed her down the slope to a wide blue river course—clear, swift-flowing water dotted with colorful sails of trading ships, oared dromonds from the city guard, even pleasure craft. He recognized it. “This is the estuary!”
“The way it once was.” Jisanne led him along the shore. “This is how Athas was meant to be.”
His heart felt leaden, wishing his wife and son could see this. “I suppose if we are trapped here … I would not complain.” He could make a new home here, a new life far from his memories.
“It won’t last.” Jisanne scanned the shore, looking for something. “I sto
le life energy for this spell. Defiling magic is the only way to activate the navigation crystal, and it will fade soon enough.”
He was uneasy with her casual use of the corrupting power, but he also knew that otherwise he would be dying just then, his body pierced with halfling arrows and blades. Jisanne had saved both of them. He owed her a debt of gratitude.
When he had turned his back on Balic, he had severed all ties, washing his hands of the evil government that had destroyed his family and the fickle people who had shown him no loyalty, no support. Though he had little to live for, once he’d left the arena, he did not want to die. Given time, perhaps Koram would find a reason that meant something—and someone who deserved it.
After they had rushed along through the peaceful forest, Jisanne let out a happy cry and hurried through the underbrush to a small rowboat tied to a drooping tree trunk. “Come, we must head south as fast as we can, while the spell lasts. Unless you’d rather travel across the silt?”
Though he didn’t know what she meant, her urgency was plain. Koram climbed into the boat, took the oars, then guided them out into the fast-flowing estuary. “Where are we going?”
“South—to Arkhold. To my home.”
After a lifetime of considering desolation to be the normal state of the world, he marveled at the bounty of water, the moisture in the air, the fractured-gold flashes of sunlight on the river’s ripples. As he rowed vigorously, water splashed on the caked dust and blood on his skin; it felt cool and strange as the fresh breezes dried it quickly. A strange stirring occurred in his chest, and the weight on his shoulders seemed less heavy. Koram began to feel alive again.
As they made good time along the current, Jisanne told him her story, and he shared his own. She didn’t seem at all astonished to hear of Praetor Yvoluk’s cruelty or how the fickle people of Balic had so easily turned on him. They had done the same to her. Jisanne explained how ancient sorcerer-kings had abused dark powers, draining the world year after year, spell after spell, war after war.
“Defiling magic did this to Athas—and now I have used it to bring us back to a time before the world was destroyed.” She shook her head in disgust at herself. “Ironic, isn’t it? In order to visit an Athas untainted by the parasitical magic, I need to drain more life force from the land.”
“Either way, we are here.” Koram rowed as hard as he could, carrying them far down the watercourse. They traveled for many leagues before the magic weakened. As Jisanne felt it fade, she urged him to pull the boat to the shallows.
With a wrenching disappointment, they watched the green shore and blue current curl and evaporate, changing from a verdant paradise to a barren brown wasteland. The Athas Koram was used to seeing. He felt suddenly hollow and lost, and he had to bite back a bitter cry.
The small boat ground ashore and fell apart with the sudden weight of age, disintegrating into dry and ancient splinters. The two found themselves in the rocks on the edge of a bone-dry canyon. “We’ll have to walk from here. Arkhold isn’t far,” Jisanne said.
He hesitated, looking around at the stark rocks and dry desert. “I did not intend to stay.”
She looked uncertain. “You saved my life. I prefer being alone, and I never said I wanted company.… But stay and rest. You can find your own path tomorrow.”
Together, they trudged back to her skeletal ship, the dry docks, and the silt-buried old harbor city. He gave a gruff answer. “No place else to be.”
Dust-shrouded Arkhold was dead, empty … and peaceful. When she and Koram reached her makeshift home aboard Horizon Finder, Jisanne fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. It took days for her to recover from the magic she had used, and so Koram did not leave. He tended her, brought her food and water, and kept watch against the ever-present dangers of the desert.
She could not shake the disheartened realization of how willingly she had turned to defiling magic to summon the past centuries of Athas. When possible, she would use her own blood to work the spell, drawing upon willingly surrendered life energy to trigger the crystal. A spell could be more permanent if not forced and stolen—but she had to use what she could. Jisanne knew she would do it again. Every moment she experienced in that long-lost period was worth the sacrifice, even if she had to steal the energy from other living creatures. It could rapidly become too easy.…
The gladiator from Balic wanted nothing from her, put no obligations on her, posed no threat. She had come to this place intentionally, hiding from her past; the other strangers she had encountered here were greedy, driven, dangerous. Koram, though, had cut himself off from the strings that bound him to his city and he had let the hot winds of circumstance blow him wherever they wished. And they had brought him to her.
While she continued to recover, Koram trudged off into the rugged land nearby. He returned a day later with three large iguanas he had caught, a pouch of leathery-shelled turtle eggs, and several wrinkled gourds that held water. If not for him, Jisanne doubted she could have survived.
For his own part, he also seemed to be healing just by staying with her in the empty quiet. The two kept their distance from each other, kept their silence, but eventually they talked more, surprised to find how much they were alike. Though the man carried no happiness within him, at least he seemed to find an inner contentment being there. In the evenings he would sit with her, and gradually opened up, talking more and more.
“I had to shut out all of my pain and anger just to survive in the arena. But I don’t like to be so empty. When you showed me the past, you made me see how healthy this world once was … and could be again. Maybe my life can become whole again, as well.” He hung his head. The bristles of hair had begun to regrow from his shaved scalp. “I will hold onto that hope.”
With a wistful sigh, Jisanne thought of the glorious, vibrant past. “If we could return there, I would turn my back on all of Athas without a second’s regret … the way you turned away from Balic.”
Koram made a rumbling sound in his chest. “I would do it in a second.”
The peace could last only so long.
Just as the first flames of dawn scorched the Sea of Silt, a bellowing voice echoed through Arkhold. “Gladiator Koram, come out and meet your master—and your death! The smell of your treachery makes you easy to follow.”
Belowdecks in the petrified old sailing ship, Koram recognized the voice, a sound that had come from beyond the grave. He leaped off his pallet and grabbed his sword, but did not have time to strap on his armor. Koram said to Jisanne, “Hide here. He doesn’t want you.”
She sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. “Who is it? Who tracked you here?”
“Praetor Yvoluk. He survived somehow. I suppose a soul as twisted as his cannot be easily crushed.” He hefted his ivory-and-bronze sword. “If I kill him, I’ll be back.”
Jisanne took out the navigation crystal, drew a deep breath. “I am strong enough to use magic again. Let me help you fight him.”
“That would be a waste of your life. Yvoluk has already taken my wife and son. That is enough.” He stalked off and climbed the ladder out of the hold. He no longer felt empty and aimless. If he was going to face a hated enemy again, at least now he had a reason to fight.
He did not hear Jisanne whisper under her breath, “And I lost my sister and her whole family because I wasn’t there to protect them.”
Emerging onto the open deck, Koram saw a silt dromond bearing Balic’s flag. Powered by a psionic helm, the large ship hovered above the dust, separated by less than a meter from Horizon Finder’s starboard bow. In the fleet maneuvers of Dictator Andropinis, Koram had seen these fearsome ships glide across the desert like giant sharks in the sky.
Smug, Yvoluk stood on the dromond’s bow next to the thri-kreen tracker, the nihilist philosopher who had also fought in the Criterion; the chittering thri-kreen bobbed his rounded head, his faceted eyes gleaming in the bright daylight. “You see, Praetor—I told you I could track him.” In his segmented limbs, the thri-kreen held th
e rumpled sash of Andropinis that Koram had left behind in his cell. Five more Balic soldiers stood behind them, armed and ready to fight.
When the tracker saw Koram’s angry scowl at the betrayal, he shouted to the other ship. “It makes no difference. If we’d been pitted against each other, you would have killed me or I’d have killed you. It is nothing personal.”
The words were dry as they came out of Koram’s mouth. “I won’t hold any sympathy or any grudge against you. My grudge is with Yvoluk.”
The praetor’s laugh sounded like splintering wood. “And my grudge is with you, Koram. You cast me to my death, but magic cushioned my fall. Unluckily for the beast giants, they have a strong life force. Using it to power my magic was as easy as poking a hole in a wineskin. I was nearly buried among the corpses I had slain.” Behind him, the five warriors drew their blades and bows, ready to attack, but Yvoluk motioned them back. He seemed proud of what he had done.
“I crawled out of the zone of death just as Dictator Andropinis cast his own spell from the wall above. He unleashed such terrible magic that he felled dozens of giants, not to mention several hundred cowardly soldiers with a single spell. He called up a lava storm in the estuary, enough to send Skull Wearer and his minions fleeing. I barely scaled the wall myself.” The praetor shook his head like a disappointed parent. “But you had already run away, Koram. You gave us quite a chase.”
“Then I will save you further trouble. When you forced me to fight opponents in the Criterion, I had no reason to kill them. Now, though, I have all the reasons I need.” Koram bent his powerful legs and sprang across the gap from Horizon Finder to the levitating dromond.
Jisanne was already rallying her magic as she emerged onto the deck. She saw Koram land on the adjacent silt dromond to face his enemy, yelling, “Fight me, Yvoluk! I have waited long enough for this.”
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