The Outworlder

by S. K. Valenzuela

  Rafe, still watching him with unwavering attention, said softly, “I’m sure we’ll be in time.”

  Jared glanced up at him, but could find no words to say in reply.

  Chapter 22

  It was the deep of night when they finally reached the Great City. Jared inhaled deeply, feeling for the first time in his life the cool brushings of the night wind without the violent lashings of sand and frenzied gales. As the boat slipped down the last few meters of the river, Jared saw wild fields—the remnants of cultivated farmlands—spread out on either side, fuzzy with vegetation in the hazy moonlight.

  “It’s beautiful,” he murmured, turning his eyes up to the heavens.

  Stars lay scattered over the fabric of the sky like precious but tiny diamonds, obscured vaguely here and there by wisps of cloud. Rafe, like Jared, gaped up in awe at the glory of it, but Brytnoth, after only a brief glance, lowered his eyes earthward once more.

  “When you’ve lived out there for years,” he muttered, “it doesn’t look so beautiful.”

  “What?” Jared asked.

  “I said it only looks beautiful from here. Out there…out in space, I mean, it’s just emptiness filled with empty worlds. Cold and harsh and deadly.”

  Rafe and Jared exchanged glances, but neither said anything in reply.

  Brytnoth directed the boat into the shore just next to the outer wall of the city. A water gate, massive and interlaced with metal grillwork, towered over them, but it was fast shut.

  “We’ll have to go around,” Jared said quietly.

  They secured the boat and clambered up the sloping bank. A flight of stone steps met them, running up to the top of the water gate. The wall arched away to the west, and there was no sign of another way inside the city.

  “Let’s go,” said Brytnoth, jerking his head toward the steps.

  When they at last stood panting on the summit of the gate, the entire city lay spread out below them. Crumbling walls and towers of white stone glowed with ethereal beauty in the moonlight, and smaller structures, charred and ruined, crouched beside them. The streets wound in labyrinthine paths through the remnants of the buildings, here and there blocked by piles of rubble or gouged by deep pits.

  “Where do we go from here?” Brytnoth asked in a hushed voice.

  “Look there.” Jared pointed to a tall building rising from a hill in the center of the city. “That’s it. The Temple.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Rafe agreed.

  “Follow me,” Jared said.

  He set off down the steps leading into the city, and Rafe and Brytnoth had to jog to keep pace with him.

  “What happened, do you think?” asked Brytnoth, waving a hand at a jumbled mass of charred and broken stone as they trotted past.

  “The Dragon-Lords, of course,” answered Rafe. “It’s just as we always feared.” He shook his head. “Not a soul left alive. Gives me the creeps.”

  They continued on for another half-hour in silence. Jared led them in serpentine fashion through the streets, pausing briefly now and again to check his direction. His eyes were alert, snapping from side to side as he scanned the shadows for any sign of movement.

  As they turned down yet another avenue, a massive pile of rubble blocking their path brought them to a sudden halt. Jared swore under his breath and glanced back the way they had come.

  Brytnoth sat down on a stone, breathing hard, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “You drive a hard pace, Jared!” he said.

  “Not hard enough,” Jared snapped, frowning terribly.

  “We’re making good time,” Rafe noted. “We were bound to hit something like this sooner or later.”

  “No. I made a mistake.” Jared swore again. “We’ve got to go back to the last turning.” He set off down the street at a jog. “Get up, Brytnoth!” he called over his shoulder. “Move it!”

  Rafe looked at Brytnoth, grinned, and shrugged. “You heard the general!” he said, following Jared into the shadows.

  Jared found the missed turning and soon had them heading in the right direction once again. It wasn’t long before they began to feel the ground rising beneath their feet. Jared glanced back at his friends, smiling for the first time since they had entered the city.

  Another twenty minutes brought them at last to the ruins of the Great Temple. Brytnoth fairly collapsed on the doorstep and groped for his water skin.

  “My God!” he gasped. “I haven’t run so much since I was a kid!”

  “You haven’t been with Jared on his desert runs,” Rafe said. “And I mean ‘runs’ literally. This is nothing.” He sat down next to Brytnoth, taking the water skin he proffered.

  Jared ignored them both. He was pacing up and down the front of the edifice like a caged wolf, pausing every now and again to feel the stones.

  What are you doing?

  Jared stopped in his tracks as if he had been punched in the stomach. He waited breathlessly for a moment, staring fixedly at the air in front of him.

  Rafe and Brytnoth rose slowly. They could tell something had happened to Jared, but they didn’t dare ask him what it was.

  What are you doing? Jared?

  Jared’s vision clouded for a moment and then cleared, and he saw her. Black stone walls surrounded her, and she was huddled on the floor in a corner. Her cheek was black and blue, and her upper arm was gashed and crusted with dried blood.

  God, Sahara, he breathed. What have they done to you?

  My fault. Shouldn’t have challenged them. She smiled weakly, and Jared wanted to fall to his knees in front of her.

  My brave girl, he said. We’re coming for you. We’re coming.

  Not like that you’re not. What are you doing?

  Looking for the way in!

  A smile blossomed across her face, and tears glimmered in her eyes. Stone by stone, Jared, she whispered. Stone by stone.

  And she was gone.

  Jared came back to himself with a gasp and staggered forward. Rafe and Brytnoth caught him under the arms and helped him to sit down, his back against the temple wall.

  “What did she say?” asked Rafe.

  Jared turned surprised eyes on his friend, but answered with a short laugh, “She reminded me to have patience. It was a lesson I tried tirelessly to teach her, and now it seems the pupil has become the mistress.” His laugh caught in his throat, and his eyes misted with anguish. “They’ve hurt her,” he said. “They’ve beaten her.”

  Brytnoth and Rafe exchanged glances and Rafe gripped Jared’s shoulder. “She’s strong, Jared. She’ll make it.”

  A sudden rush of fury drowned Jared’s grief. “Then let’s finish it!” he gritted, jumping to his feet. “Help me find the stone!”

  In a moment, the three of them were positioned at intervals along the stone face of the temple, feeling each stone in turn. It was painstaking work, and Brytnoth felt his own patience wearing thin. The dust lay thick on the ancient bricks, and there were more of them than he could count. It seemed a cruel turn of fortune’s wheel that all their efforts should meet such a dead end.

  A particularly obnoxious cloud of dust spurted into Brytnoth’s face as he ran his hand over a slightly protruding stone. His eyes welled with tears and he leaned against the wall, preparing for a massive sneeze.

  With a reluctant snapping and creaking, the stones to his left began to shift. Brytnoth forgot about his sneeze and reeled away from the moving wall in surprise.

  “He found it!” Jared cried, rushing forward.

  They stood for a moment in front of the musty opening, staring into the black. Jared laid a hand on Brytnoth’s shoulder, squeezing it in gratitude, and then he reached into the back pocket of his pants and pulled out what looked like a small stick. He cracked it in his fist and a pale, cold light emanated from his hand.

  “Let’s go.”

  Rafe and Brytnoth followed him inside, hands on sword hilts. The light from Jared’s stick did not penetrate far into the blackness, but what they could see did not ma
ke them confident that they would meet with success. Their feet stumbled over shattered stones, and many of the pillars holding up the massive roof were damaged. A smell of mildew and rotting wood hung thick in the air, nearly choking them.

  “If I remember right,” said Rafe, his voice sounding loud and unnatural in that moldering place, “the stairs down into the crypt were in the very center of the temple, underneath the great altar.”

  Jared nodded brusquely. He moved ahead more rapidly, directing his steps toward what he thought was the middle of the room. When the weak light in his hand illuminated a stone wall not five paces in front of him, he swore savagely under his breath.

  “Don’t you have any more of those stick things?” Brytnoth asked. “Light some more and throw them.”

  Jared dug in his side pockets and produced four more sticks. “These are all I have. Let’s keep one in case we need it later.”

  Brytnoth snapped the remaining three. When the light was as strong as it could get, he tossed each one in a different direction. The first, which he threw in the direction from which they had come, showed only marred columns and broken floor. The second revealed the same landscape. The third, which he launched with considerable force, bounced two or three times and then tumbled down into some kind of aperture in the floor.

  Jared’s face lit up with a smile. “Nice!”

  They made for the feeble glow and were soon peering down crumbling steps into a deeper blackness than the gloom that obscured their sight in the upper temple. The three exchanged glances, and then Jared took a deep breath.

  “I have no idea how expansive this crypt is. It lies beneath the temple, but the catacombs could stretch far beyond the footprint of the temple itself. These light sticks will last three hours at the most.”

  “So I guess we’ve got a bit less than six hours to find what we need and get out,” Rafe said. “Let’s not waste time talking.”

  “I know, but what I mean to say is…I know that you’re both taking a terrible risk. This adventure might cost any one of us—or even all of us—our lives. I don’t ask you to follow me down here. I have to go, you see. But you could stay here and wait. There’s no need—”

  “Shut up and get moving,” said Rafe. “Of course we’re coming with you! You don’t think we’d let you go into that hole by yourself, do you? And what are we supposed to do up here while you’re poking around among the dead and decaying, anyway? Twiddle our thumbs?”

  Jared studied him wordlessly, his eyes full of the thanks he couldn’t find voice to speak.

  They descended the crumbling steps carefully, picking their way over piles of rubble. Except for the sound of their boots crunching on loose stones, silence enveloped them. It was farther to the bottom of the stairs than any of them had expected, and the air was considerably warmer when they at last reached the level ground again.

  Jared held the light stick aloft, attempting to illuminate the dense darkness around them. A faint sweet-spicy smell, like the incense burned before the altars of the One God, hung in the air, masking the scents of burnt and moldy wood and damp stone that had been so striking in the upper church.

  Rafe quickly scanned what they could see of their surroundings. It took a moment for him to understand what he was seeing, but when it finally registered, he drew in his breath sharply.

  “By God,” he murmured, “it’s like another city!”

  Brytnoth, who had also been looking around, went quickly to the wall on their right. He pulled three small objects from holders mounted to the wall and struck each against the stone. One by one, they flickered and then glowed with white light.

  “These should be more useful than that stick,” he said, distributing them to his friends.

  They flashed their lights around, and Jared and Brytnoth now understood what Rafe had meant about this subterranean burial ground. A wide path ran away from them into the darkness, bordered on each side by low huts of stone. Their torches were not enough to illuminate the far end of the path, leaving them to wonder if it had an end at all.

  “How do we know which of these is the right one?” Brytnoth murmured, fearing to speak aloud in the stillness that held that ancient and sacred place.

  Jared took a breath and went forward down the path. He made it several paces before his foot slipped into some kind of rut and he twisted his ankle. A series of barking curses dropped from his lips, shattering the silence that hung heavy around them.

  “Looks like this was a road once,” Rafe said as he joined Jared and helped him to stand straight again. “Those are the ruts of wagons and carriages.”

  “Well, they don’t do us any damn good, do they?” snapped Jared. “And how the hell are we supposed to find the right tomb before the torches go out? This place is probably larger than the upper city itself!”

  Brytnoth was about to speak, but he checked himself suddenly. “Listen!”

  There were voices echoing down the corridor to their right. Harsh, guttural voices.

  “Scouts!” Jared whispered. “Quick! In here.”

  They darted inside the closest burial hut and flattened themselves against the wall.

  “Won’t they see the torches?” Rafe said.

  “And if we put them out, do you suppose we’ll ever find a way to light them again?” Jared responded, his voice harsher than he meant it to be.

  “Maybe they aren’t coming,” Brytnoth suggested. “The voices didn’t sound like they were approaching us.”

  Jared swung around to face him, stared at him for a moment, and then grinned suddenly. “And what would they be doing down here, do you think?”

  Brytnoth raised an eyebrow. “Waiting for people like us?”

  “And what are people like us doing down here?”

  “Looking for the weapons, of course!” Rafe clapped Brytnoth on the back. “If we find them, we find the right tomb!”

  “We just have to dispose of them before they figure out we’re here,” Jared said. “These torches have to go.”

  As if he suddenly remembered something, Brytnoth wordlessly unslung his pack from his shoulder and started rummaging through it. A moment later, he pulled something out and held it up in triumph.

  “You didn’t!” Rafe exclaimed with a huge grin. “The night vision adapter for our goggles! Genius, pure genius!”

  In a few minutes’ time, they were all equipped and ready to go. They extinguished their torches and stacked them in the corner of the hut.

  “Remember the plan,” Jared whispered. “No more talking once we leave this room—hand signals only.”

  The other two nodded, and they slunk out of the tomb.

  Chapter 23

  It was over in a few moments. Using the element of surprise, Jared, Rafe and Brytnoth were able to overpower the scouts before they had a chance to cry out or defend themselves.

  As Brytnoth and Rafe dragged the bodies to the other side of the burial chamber, Jared began examining the huge sarcophagus in the center of the room. The stone felt smooth as glass beneath his eager fingertips, and no markings or indentations offered him a clue as to its contents. A frown appeared between his brows as he crouched down and felt over its entire front and both sides.

  “There should be something…some indication…of something…” he muttered to himself.

  “What’s the problem?” Rafe asked as he and Brytnoth joined their friend in front of the tomb.

  “There’s nothing here. Nothing. No indicator markings at all.”

  After a brief silence, Brytnoth asked, “Well, isn’t that in itself an indication?” When Jared scowled at him and Rafe stifled a laugh, he continued earnestly, “No, look! If there were really someone buried here, there should be some kind of decoration celebrating his life, or at least some marker for remembrance. Doesn’t the absence of any memory marker tell us beyond a doubt that whatever is in here was meant to be forgotten?”

  Rafe nodded slowly. “That’s quite profound,” he remarked, his mouth quirking into a smile.<
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  Jared seemed to breathe again. “It is, and I think you’re right.” He turned back to the tomb, shaking his head and muttering, “Hell of a way to send someone a message…like invisible ink without the reagent.” He got to his feet and placed the heels of his hands against the edge of the lid. When neither of the others moved, Jared glanced at them over his shoulder. “Can I get some kind of help here?”

  “I was just thinking,” said Rafe, hesitating for a moment. “What if Brytnoth’s wrong? I just don’t know if I want to be the guy that opens some poor stiff’s coffin after God knows how many centuries. If we’ve got to be grave robbers, I’d rather let you take that responsibility all by yourself.”

  Jared laughed aloud, and the sound echoed through that dusty, deathly place like the rush of water over desiccated ground. “Get over here!” he said, still laughing. “Good God!”

  Together, the three braced against the lid and pushed with all their strength. For one agonizing moment, nothing happened.

  “Harder!” Jared gritted.

  With a guttural groaning, they strained against the ancient stone. Slowly, slowly, and with grinding protestations, the stone began to slide away. With a final heave, it fell with a shattering crash on the other side of the tomb.

  “Well, if that’s not enough noise to wake the dead, I don’t know what is!” Rafe gasped, wiping his brow on his sleeve.

  “Look!” breathed Brytnoth.

  A strange, gently glowing light seeped from the open tomb. Jared pulled off his night vision goggles and drew in his breath sharply. The light was bright enough to illuminate the rest of the burial chamber, and it seemed both to flow toward and out of a strange device carved on the ceiling directly above the tomb: a sword partially driven into the earth with a dragon twined about it. Whether the dragon had been transfixed by the sword or whether it held the sword in its lithe body was ambiguous.

  “What’s that?” Rafe asked, gesturing up at the roof.