Kingmaker

by Eric Zawadzki

CHAPTER 26

  The next day, the wind picked up, blowing sand into their faces as they traveled. They rode with pryuds wrapped around their heads, leaving tiny slits for their eyes. Blay stopped them before too long to tie all the camels together with a rope. Tirud cursed and shouted at him about sandstorms and shelter, but the corporal ordered them to move on.

  They hadn’t gone much farther before they could barely see the camel in front of them, and Blay ordered another halt.

  He appeared at Butu’s shoulder. “Move up to the lead, next to Tirud,” he ordered. “Listen to what he says, and lead us. You’re the only one who can see in this mess.”

  “Sir, shouldn’t we get some shelter?” Butu asked. “Will this get worse?”

  “No and no, sordenu. Move to the front. That’s an order.”

  Butu did so, urging his reluctant camel forward until he was next to Tirud.

  “We’ll keep to valleys,” the red-skinned sordenu shouted at him. “If the corp’s going mad, he’s picked a fine time to do it. Shanubu.”

  Butu agreed, but led them anyway. Blay had made it an order. They stopped again when Nolen shouted he had found water, and Tirud barked a laugh. Only Butu was close enough to hear him mutter, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  They circled the camels while Blay checked Nolen’s find, then he ordered them to ride again.

  “We should wait for the storm to die down,” Tirud said, and everyone held their breath.

  “We’ll ride on,” Blay said. “This isn’t much of a storm.”

  There were grumbles barely louder than the howling wind. They could barely breathe in this, even with cloths over their mouths. Their eyes watered too much to bother opening them anymore.

  “Yeah. A real shanjin sandstorm would’ve ripped the flesh off our bones in minutes,” Nolen said with a nervous laugh.

  “And we don’t have a lot of time to get where we’re going,” Blay added without acknowledging Nolen.

  Butu made a dismissive noise. “At least we’re just suffocating. It’s not like it’s simam. One minute you’ll be in a light breeze, the next, you’ll have baked in your own clothes. If the heat doesn’t kill you in an instant, the dust will, because right behind the broiling front is a wall of the finest sand there is, and you’re bound to breathe it. Even shelter won’t save you.”

  “Nevertheless,” Blay started, trying to regain control, but Lujo picked up the thread.

  “The reason it’s so rare is because it’s not an ordinary storm,” Lujo confided. “It’s a golem created by the curse of the first-cyclers King Dinal pi’Kanjea ordered killed. It chased down his entire army and killed a thousand of them without the soldiers realizing they were dead.”

  “Shut up!” Blay roared. The camels started braying.

  “Corporal!” Tirud shouted, as the wind grew stronger. “If we keep going, we will get lost, and that’s a death sentence in the shanjin. We have a mission, corporal!”

  Blay froze, eyes locked somewhere above Butu’s head. His eyes were shut, and his fingers curled and uncurled at his sides. Finally, he crossed his arms, gripping his biceps.

  “We have to move on,” he said, firmly. Tirud seemed ready to leap on him, but Blay forged ahead. “We don’t have to stay in this storm.”

  Butu shared a look with Nolen. He hadn’t thought of that. If we could find a way out of the storm ... Tirud held the pommel of his sword as if one less madman in the desert would make up for killing his corporal. Blay was just as tense, leaning forward slightly in the wind.

  “I have an idea,” he said at the same time as Nolen, and everyone looked at them, even the camels. Nolen waved for Butu to go.

  “I can see through this mess,” Butu said. “And Nolen’s the fastest. If we can move sideways against the storm, we might find a way out sooner. It might be off the route, but it makes more sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Tirud said hotly, but Butu only watched Blay, who still hadn’t moved. “Split us up in this? Corporal, we need shelter.”

  “There isn’t any,” Butu said as calmly as he could. “We’d have found it by now! This is the fastest way out. We don’t lose any time.”

  “We lose time,” Tirud’s voice was hoarse with shouting, “looking for his sorry ass after the storm dies down. If we’re still alive, waiting here for him!”

  “Do it,” Blay said, into the enraged silence.

  “What?” Tirud’s disbelief cut the wind.

  “Nolen, go, find the closest way out that isn’t back the way we came,” Blay said, sounding more sure of himself. “It came from the west, so that’s your best bet.”

  “Good idea,” Nolen shouted, dismounting and handing his camel’s rains to Phedam. “Wish me luck.”

  He vanished into the cloud of sand, though Butu could still feel him getting farther and farther away, hastened by magic. Butu adjusted their route to follow him, though the camels were much slower than Nolen. Tirud rode near him, grumbling.

  Only a few minutes passed before Nolen stopped running. Butu could sense him only half a mile ahead of them. He yelled the news to the rest of the squad.

  “We must be at the edge of the front,” Blay said, sounding more and more confident. Tirud’s grumbling grew louder, especially when the trail led them up the side of a dune.

  They traveled in silence for a quarter of an hour, and yet the wind and blowing sand didn’t die down. Butu felt Nolen at the bottom of the dune as they reached its peak. He called for a halt, and the rest bunched up behind him. He told them what he felt, with the wind whirling around them.

  “Something happened,” Jani said. She cried out over the howling of the approaching storm. “Nolen! Where are you?”

  Tirud groaned. “We need to get out of here!”

  Butu checked the rope holding his camel to the rest, and prodded the irritated beast down the steep slope, knowing he could find Nolen.

  “Butu, wait!” Blay shouted. “Shanubu! Tirud, loosen his rope!”

  It was too late. The side of the dune shifted, and he slid faster and faster toward Nolen. The rope jerked on the camel, which fell, screaming, and Butu barely leapt off its back before it rolled over him.

  Suddenly, he danced on a wave of falling sand, riding it as it carried him down to the valley below. Then he sensed Nolen, buried to his chest in sand. Butu knew this second wave of sand would finish burying him, so he concentrated on getting to him first.

  “Raise your hands!” Butu shouted as he ran closer.

  They grabbed arms, hands touching elbows, and Butu heaved, making what use he could of his momentum. Nolen didn’t come completely out of the sand, but when the wave of sand swept over him and pushed Butu back several yards across the valley floor, he was no worse off than he had been a moment before.

  “Butu!” Nolen shouted.

  “I’m here! I’ll be there soon.”

  Butu came to him. After some grunting and straining, he extricated Nolen from the sand. They huddled against each other in the driving wind, sand piling up against their backs.

  “Tirud was right,” Nolen muttered begrudgingly.

  Butu snorted. “We should get back to the squad. They can’t find us in this weather.”

  Nolen shook his head. “The dune is too unstable to climb. We need to find shelter and hope they listen to that ku and do the same. Can you run?”

  Butu didn’t like the situation. Leaving the squad felt like desertion, but going back for them was suicidal. “Even faster than you can, if I want. And I don’t even fall down dunes.”

  “Oh yeah? Let’s see you keep up with me.”

  They ran across the rest of the valley and up another dune before Butu realized it was getting lighter.

  “The wind’s not blowing as hard over here.”

  Nolen said nothing, but half a mile later, they emerged from the cloud of powdery sand that had obscured their vision all morning long. It was much hotter here.

  As they reached the top of another dune, Nolen pointed. “Look!
I’m glad we didn’t decide to go back into that.”

  From their vantage point, they could see a great, swirling brown mass of sand roiling half a mile behind them. Butu tried to sense the rest of his squad, but he felt nothing in the storm.

  They might just be too far away for me to sense, he thought hopefully.