City Under the Sand: A Dark Sun Novel (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun)

by Jeff Mariotte

  Siemhouk hadn’t spoken, either, but the look on her face could not, under any circumstances, be confused for a sympathetic one. She looked like she might order the merchant put to death for boring her.

  It had happened before.

  “I … perhaps I’ll just talk to the baker again,” Rahede said. “Try to work things out. And if we can’t, then … then I’ll move. Someplace.”

  “That would be best,” Rejan said. “I know that baker. If a worthy sacrifice were to be made at the Temple of Trade, I might even find time to have a word with him myself.”

  “That would … I will make sure such a sacrifice is offered,” Rahede said. He backed out of the room on hands and knees, thanking the high consorts profusely as he went. That was not only unnecessary, but a more confident approach probably would have better served his case. He couldn’t know that, though. Kadya guessed he would either make a spectacular offering at the Temple of Trade, or morning would find him dead or enslaved.

  “Will there be any more appeals today?” Djena asked. Hers was the position Kadya wanted. She had been placing herself before Nibenay more and more, allowing him to see that she was intelligent and capable. Her current position was under Siemhouk, helping to organize the city-state’s schools and the special training for templars and other agents of the king.

  “No more for today,” Saulindas said. She was a young templar, muscular and high-breasted, wearing a bright blue sarong and leather sandals. She started to close the door to the Council chamber, but then stopped with a gasp.

  “One more,” a gravelly voice from outside declared. “The Shadow King will see me.”

  2

  Every eye in the room was fixed on the doorway when he came through. He was covered in sand and dust and filth, as if he had just rolled to Nibenay all the way from Urik. His head flopped around his right shoulder as he limped into the chamber. Something had chewed on his legs during whatever journey he had made; bone showed through the holes there as well as the gap where his neck should have been. He had the look of a soldier about him, with a hard, worn muscularity, his limbs and torso crisscrossed with scars old and new—but he was obviously undead, and just as obviously had been so for some time.

  “And who might you be?” Nibenay demanded.

  “My name is Shen’ti,” the dead man said. “Not that it matters. I was, of late, a mercenary in the employ of House Faylon. It was in this service that I made the discovery I’ve come all this way to reveal to you now.”

  “What discovery is that?” the Shadow King asked.

  “A city, buried under the desert sand for years beyond measure. This city is called Akrankhot.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Rejan uttered. Then, at a sharp glance from both Nibenay and Siemhouk, she covered her mouth with her fist and looked at the floor.

  “This city,” the mercenary repeated, “is called Akrankhot. It was, I believe, a place of considerable importance during Athas’s past. It was uncovered by a violent storm, and my companions and I, separated by that storm from our caravan, happened upon it.”

  “And why do you think this would be of interest to me?” Nibenay wanted to know.

  “Because beneath Akrankhot, your eminence, is a trove of metals that I believe to be greater than all the metals currently known to exist on all of Athas.”

  “You know this because?”

  “I saw it.”

  “I mean, how much metal is known to exist on Athas.”

  If a dead man with his head mostly detached could be said to look sheepish, this one did. Kadya noted that Siemhouk was sitting forward in her chair, her eyes narrowed, hands gripping her dimpled kneecaps. Kadya recognized the look—the young princess was the Way to psionically probe the dead man’s mind.

  “Speculation, my lord, that’s all.”

  “It’s a big city, this Akrankhot?”

  “Huge. Not the equal of Nibenay, of course, in beauty. But expansive.”

  Siemhouk leaned forward a little more. She was a beautiful girl with bright, alert blue eyes, straight and lush black hair, and a complexion much darker than most Nibenese. Her slim figure was just beginning to blossom with the curves of the woman she would become.

  Whatever she was seeing in the mercenary, it fascinated her. Kadya would have to try to find out more, later on.

  “The point is, you’re saying, there’s a lot of metal in this city.”

  “More than I could have dreamed,” the mercenary said. “This is why I had to come, to tell you of our discovery, no matter the cost.”

  “It appears,” Nibenay said with a grim, throaty chuckle, “that the cost was great indeed.”

  The dead man took a scroll from his belt. “I brought a map,” he said.

  Siemhouk jerked back in her chair as if she’d been slapped. Her eyes were wide, her full lips parted, and she was breathing heavily. “I’ll take it,” she said. She rose from the chair, Kadya believed to disguise her reaction to whatever she had found in the dead man’s mind. Ordinarily Siemhouk would have made a visitor walk to her to place something in her hand, or directed one of her retinue—Kadya, perhaps—to fetch it for her. The fact that she went to the mercenary was almost as curious as her startled reaction had been.

  When she had the scroll clutched in her hand, Siemhouk turned away from Shen’ti. He made a rasping noise, took a half step after her, and then collapsed onto the tiles. Siemhouk whirled around, then jumped away from his grasping, clawing hands. The mercenary rattled and kicked and seemed to shrink, and then Kadya realized he was shrinking, literally, his flesh tightening on his bones, drying out, decomposing right there before them. White showed through skin that turned to flakes, then powder, with a crinkling noise. A stink filled the chamber, reminding Kadya of the time she had gone into a small house in the Hill district where seven people had been murdered, their bodies undisturbed for most of a month.

  Whatever magic had been keeping the man upright and mobile during the time since he had left Akrankhot on this mission had fled him when he delivered the map to Siemhouk. That time—weeks, perhaps—had caught up to him.

  Templars were crying out, one or two weeping openly, and others laughing at the spectacle. Siemhouk turned her back on the dead man, carried the scroll to Nibenay and put it in his pudgy, thick-fingered hand. Then she sat down again, as if waiting for some other supplicant to come before the high consorts, while Shen’ti’s body finished its rapid deterioration not five paces away.

  What, Kadya wondered, did she see in his head? And what was it that made her pull out so abruptly?

  Trying to pry loose information Siemhouk didn’t want to share could be a difficult and dangerous task. But Kadya was afraid curiosity itself would kill her if she didn’t at least make an attempt.

  “If what our friend Shen’ti said is true—” Nibenay began.

  Siemhouk cut him off. “It’s true.”

  “—then it’s imperative that we launch an expedition to this place, Akrankhot, immediately. We need to find that trove before anyone else does. That much metal could be employed in the construction of weaponry and armor that would make our already formidable army into the strongest our world has ever known. We would be unbeatable.”

  “I agree, Father,” Siemhouk said. She rarely called him that—only when she’s after something, Kadya thought. What is it this time?

  Nibenay ignored his daughter. “And if he’s right about the city’s size, then whatever he saw might have only been a small part of what is really there.”

  “But how do we ascertain that, my liege?” Kahalya asked. “Tear up every building in the ruin? Dig up the very earth beneath them? It could take years to find it all.”

  “It could,” Nibenay admitted. He considered the problem for several minutes, during which nobody spoke. “But if we could send someone on this expedition who could dowse the location of the metal, much like a water witch would find a well, then that person might be able to easily locate what it would take an army years to u
nearth.”

  “Do we know someone like that?”

  “I know of someone,” the Shadow King said. His yellow eyes had taken on a peculiar orange cast. “I do indeed …”

  3

  After the Council session ended, Kadya accompanied Siemhouk and her sister templars back to the Temple of Thought. Crowds parted for them on the street, most looking away from the nude girl and the nearly naked women accompanying her, all of them recognizing the Shadow King’s templar wives.

  At the temple, Siemhouk didn’t dismiss them, but instead took them into a private chamber where she performed the business of state. The floor was covered with silken pillows, some piled up in corners. The walls were draped with silks in bright colors, interlaced with golden threads. Candles in hanging, windowed holders were kept lit, imparting the room with soft light and the smell of burning spices.

  Siemhouk flopped down on her usual mound of pillows. For just an instant, she looked like the young girl she was rather than the jaded, experienced woman she presented herself as. That impression was fleeting, though, and in a moment her youthful face was overtaken by a bored expression. She appeared older, but less alive.

  “We need to take advantage of this,” Siemhouk began.

  Kadya had been thinking the same thing. Not for Siemhouk’s sake, though, but for her own.

  “Why?” The questioner was the young templar named Saulindas, barely three years older than Siemhouk. Kadya’s responsibilities included overseeing the facilities of the various state schools, making sure the buildings were properly equipped, cleaned, and staffed. Saulindas reported to her, and so far the only thing Kadya had entrusted her with was managing the slaves who swept floors and dusted for cobwebs.

  “Because that much metal, as my father said, could make a huge difference in our defenses,” Siemhouk explained. “Such an expedition will be a complex undertaking, requiring careful planning and organization. Whoever is put in charge of this expedition—and brings back the metal—will have a say in how it’s used. The wealth and power that metal represents will play to the advantage of that person.”

  “I see,” Saulindas said, in a way that made clear that she didn’t.

  “And I intend to be that person,” Siemhouk added.

  “As you should be, High Consort,” Kadya said. The Naggaramakam, and the city’s various temples, were a continuous hotbed of intrigue, every seasoned templar vying for advantage over the others. The one Kadya had her eye on was Djena. Siemhouk didn’t have to answer to the High Consort of the King’s Law, but everyone else did. And Siemhouk had almost unlimited power because she had her father’s ear, and his trust. But if Siemhouk and one of her chief allies controlled the Temples of the King’s Law and of Thought, then Siemhouk’s sway over Nibenese events would be almost total.

  And Kadya, of course, would no longer live in Siemhouk’s shadow. She would have all the power and authority of a high consort—the templar who, according to Nibenay’s plan, was meant to be the ultimate authority, and would be again if anything ever happened to Siemhouk.

  Not that Kadya wanted to see that happen, of course.

  But Siemhouk was right. This discovery, if it was as the dead man had described, could change the course of history.

  Whoever controlled the metal, and brought it to Nibenay, would be a most important individual in the coming days and years and centuries of the Shadow King’s rule.

  Siemhouk graced Kadya with an entirely inauthentic smile. Kadya returned the empty gesture. Kadya was skilled at defending her own mind, and she would know if Siemhouk tried to get inside her. She would have time to blank it out, to think about her genuine love for her young sister-wife.

  Until that happened, she intended to keep scheming.

  IV

  NIGHT TERRORS

  1

  The moons flowed across starry skies like twin sails cutting through a dark night sea. On a desert plain, windswept and barren, the tents of a trader’s caravan flapped like those same sails might have, had there been a body of water anywhere in the Athasian Tablelands large and deep enough to merit the effort of launching a sailing fleet. Around the tents, fires burned, fueled with mekillot dung—conveniently in ready supply any time the huge beasts were used to haul the massive, heavily laden wagons that hauled goods from place to place.

  This was a caravan of House Ligurto, a merchant trading family from Tyr, but with outposts in several cities and towns. The Ligurto family was a large one, with generations of sons and daughters, cousins and in-laws overseeing the family’s interests around the region. Many of them had never spent more than a few nights at a time in any one spot.

  Myrana had been born on the road seventeen years before, and had grown up in that life. The trading caravans never paused for long, but traveled from place to place, always bringing new goods to House Ligurto’s emporiums in Tyr, Draj, Urik and smaller markets in several villages. To Myrana, the rhythms of life were change, the squeak of wheels, the plodding of beasts of burden. The clouds overhead changed, the stars spun every night, but life was an unbroken routine of travel, dealing, loading, unloading, more dealing. She was more familiar with the smell of mekillots and kanks than of city streets, and she could tell where on Athas she was by the composition of the soil beneath her feet. She counted among her acquaintances all the caravan’s animals, as well as the birds, lizards, insects and other creatures encountered along the way. Unlike most of the so-called intelligent beings they met, these creatures were trying simply to survive, in harmony with a hard world. The intelligent ones were always trying to play some angle, to get the better of someone else in a deal, or simply to steal what they couldn’t earn. Myrana had a deep distrust of most people outside her family, and the family encouraged that attitude.

  Just now, she was sleeping in the tent she shared with a sister and three cousins about the same age. Myrana had raven hair and fair skin that she tried to protect from Athas’s merciless sun. A mekillot incident when she was five had left her crippled, her left leg shorter than the right and bent slightly inward.

  But when she dreamed, both legs were lean and strong, and she could race up and down dunes almost as if she was flying. Myrana had more vivid dreams than most, everybody said so, and people had learned not to ignore her when she woke up and said her dreams had warned her of something.

  This night, her dreams turned frightening. She woke with a startled gasp, throwing aside the thin covering over her as if it were infested with biting insects.

  “Myrana, what’s wrong?” her sister Analiese asked. The younger girl’s voice was thick with sleep, and she watched Myrana with hooded eyes. She was on her side, curled up, with one hand under her cheek.

  “Bad dream, Liese,” Myrana said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “The bad kind of bad dream?” Analiese wondered. Myrana knew what she meant—was it one of those dreams that might foretell danger or heartbreak?

  “I don’t know. I was sitting at an oasis, leaning against a tree. The water was cool and fresh and there were fish in it, and birds singing in the trees.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “It was. But then I realized that the birds were not just singing, they were trying to tell me something. I could tell it was important, because birds wouldn’t try so hard to speak Common if it wasn’t. Trying to speak it was painful for them, and the harder they tried, the more it hurt them. Finally, they started to drop from the trees, dead, into the water, and that’s when I woke up.”

  “Echh, that’s awful,” Analiese said, biting back a yawn.

  “Just a dream,” Myrana assured her. “Go back to sleep now.”

  “I’ll try.” Analiese closed her eyes, and within seconds her mouth was open, her breathing deep and steady.

  “You too, Myrana,” one of her cousins said. She thought it was Lauriand, but the three cousins were close in age and in the dark, they all sounded very much alike. Myrana didn’t bother trying to sort it out, just pulled her covering back up and lay back,
trying to put the image of plummeting birds out of her head.

  2

  Nibenay’s elven market, in the city’s southwestern corner, had a long-standing reputation as a place where absolutely anything could be acquired, so long as one had the coins to spend. That reputation was not undeserved, and had been nourished by the elf traders themselves.

  The fact was that there were some things not even elves would deal in—but most of those could be had a few streets over, in the largely abandoned Hill District. There were plenty of other things one could buy from the elves that could also be found, sometimes at considerably lower prices, from the emporiums surrounding Sage’s Square or the smaller merchant stalls of Palm’s Cross or the Western District. Occasionally, though, bargains could be found, often on stolen goods.

  The elven market was open year-round, but was larger and busier when the bulk of the Sky Singers tribe was in the city. A recent murder of many Sky Singers elves had shaken the city—one or two murders a day was common, but sixteen at once was not. The market went on, however, elves from other tribes stepping in to take over the stalls and keep trading active.

  The bazaar tended to be quiet in the heat of day, most crowded early in the morning and late in the day as the sun began to set. During the early evening, before it grew too cold, customers of every race could be observed haggling with elves, carting around merchandise they had just purchased, or sometimes discreetly pocketing those purchases they didn’t want anyone to see. Stalls were packed close together, lit by oil lamps or flaming torches. Most of them were covered against the heat of day by canvas tarps lashed to poles, but some were no more than wooden boards supported by mud blocks, laden with merchandise. Wandering musicians strolled the area, singing and playing for a bit or two from appreciative listeners.