Myrana had managed to catch a breath on the way into the water, but not much of one. She felt her lungs would burst as the thing held her beneath the pond’s surface. Her body was quickly going numb, her muscles refusing to obey her mental commands.
But in the water, her legs were both equally useful, the crooked as strong as the straight. She told herself not to panic—listening to herself was another story, especially as her lungs ached to draw breath—and she forced her bad leg to kick at the tentacle where it gripped the other. At the same time she moved the dagger—she hadn’t the strength left to slash through the water—to the one holding her wrist, and she began sawing at that one. When its blood flowed beneath the surface, its heat warmed her skin.
She had to have air. The tentacle around her wrist released when she cut deeply, but the one gripping her waist kept tightening. Her mouth burst open and bubbles of air escaped, and she managed, only just, to clamp it shut again as it filled with water. She gave one more mighty kick with her bad leg, and the tentacle clutching her ankle gave way.
One remained. The fiend kept jerking and thrashing about, so she knew Sellis and Koyt still battled it on the surface. But she couldn’t count on them to kill it in time to save her. She held the dagger out as far from her body as she could manage, and drove it right toward herself. The point stabbed into the tentacle. It tightened more in response, and the world started to go black. She pushed harder. Hot blood mixed with churning water. She kept pushing until she felt the tip of her blade emerge and poke into her own belly.
Only then did she draw the blade out. The tentacle let go, and Myrana pulled for the surface with every muscle that still functioned.
Koyt’s strong arms were around her, tugging her from the water. Sellis stood hip deep in it, crisscrossing the air with both swords, cutting the fiend into bloody chunks that splashed into the water like thrown rocks. Koyt dragged her onto shore, several feet from the water’s edge, laying her down on her back.
“Are you …?”
“I’m alive,” she said. “That’s as much as I can say.”
“Good.” He turned his attention back toward the fight, nocking and loosing another arrow before dropping the bow and pulling a dagger. He dashed into the water. Myrana wanted to raise her head to watch, but she couldn’t. The thing’s poison had spread through her, and her muscles were no longer her own to control.
It didn’t last long. Scant minutes had passed before Koyt and Sellis both stood over her, soaked and bedraggled, coated in the dark green slime that was the fiend’s life’s blood.
“Myrana,” Sellis said. “You’re well?”
She tried to answer, but now not even her voice worked. She couldn’t so much as blink.
“She spoke moments ago,” Koyt said. “Before I joined you in the pond.”
“Paralysis, then,” Sellis guessed. “It will wear off, Myrana. The damned thing is dead now, so we’ll make camp here tonight and you should be better by morning.”
Koyt broke out in laughter. Sellis stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What?” he asked.
“That’s what she wanted all along,” Koyt said. “To camp here in the oasis, under the shade of the palms.”
A smile creased Sellis’s face, and that contagious laugh burst from him. “Ha! So she did. I had no idea of the measures she’d take to ensure that we did. Good job, Myrana.” He went to one knee beside her, resting his hand comfortingly on her shoulder. “And good job fighting that thing—if not for you, we’d never have bested it.”
Myrana wanted to smile, to thank him, and most of all, to laugh at how she had gotten her way. She had to settle for laughing on the inside.
7
The mood in camp was tense.
Aric had stopped counting days and nights—there were too many of them, and they ran together in his mind, long hot days of walking himself to exhaustion or riding inside a steaming, stinking, rattling, rocking argosy full of soldiers, and cold, uncomfortable nights during which he tossed in his sleep, dreamed frightening, fitful dreams.
And that was before people started to die.
The first was the night after he had gone off by himself and found himself lost in the desert. A soldier had wandered away from camp, to empty his bladder, he told one of his fellows. He had barely disappeared into the darkness beyond the firelight when everyone in camp heard a cry of sheer terror. A search party, hastily thrown together, carried torches into the darkness and found his bloody remains. Damaric was part of this party. He told Aric and Ruhm that they had located the soldier’s head some twenty or thirty long paces from the body. They never did, Damaric swore, find his heart.
Since then, they had gone at a rate of one or two a night, with only occasional nights of peace. Some were never found, others not located until morning’s light made searching the desert’s vastness easier. Trails of blood often led to the bodies, or what was left of them.
Several times, Aric volunteered to accompany the search parties, but Kadya would have none of it. “Not you,” she told him privately, standing in the shade of an argosy one morning. On the journey, she wore a leather leggings and a loose top, and she kept her brown hair piled up on her head. Behind her, the mekillots belched and fidgeted, ready to get going. “You are too valuable to this expedition. Stay in your wagon and take no foolish chances.”
“But some of these people have become my friends,” he protested.
“I don’t care if they’re your brothers and sisters,” she said. The expression on her face was one of barely controlled rage. “You don’t go out there. Nibenay wants me to keep you safe. I can’t do it if you’re away from the caravan.”
“Very well,” Aric said. He would get his chance, he decided—if the slaughter continued—sometime when she was otherwise occupied. He would just go out with one of the search parties, and deal with her anger when he returned.
Kadya, satisfied that she had won the argument, was walking away from Aric when this morning’s party returned. They bore the remains of yet another goliath soldier in their arms. The day’s travel would be delayed long enough to dig her a shallow grave.
One of the soldiers, a human, broke off from the other searchers and strode up to Kadya. He stopped before her with clenched fists resting against his hips, chin thrust toward her. “Templar,” he began. “There’s been enough death. Let’s return to Nibenay while there are enough of us left alive to make the journey.”
“I’m sorry,” Kadya said, barely restraining a laugh. “Did my husband put you in command of this expedition without telling me? How unusual.”
“You know he did not,” the soldier said. He stood his ground, but Aric detected a falter in his voice. “But we’re losing people every night now. How long can this go on?”
“Until we’ve found Akrankhot and retrieved what Nibenay wants from there,” Kadya said.
“It had better be small, lady, because there won’t be many left to carry it.”
Others had gathered to observe the confrontation. Even those who held their mutilated comrade stared with rapt attention. Nobody stood up to a templar in this way—not if he expected to survive the encounter.
At the same time, Aric was glad someone had found the courage. He suspected the same was true of most of the people making the journey. Kadya had used magic on several occasions already. Between that and the ongoing, almost nightly deaths, people were ready to rise up against her leadership. But they all knew it was suicide to try, and that had held them back.
“I don’t know what you’re so upset about, soldier. Yes, there have been some killings—people caught by sand cactus, that one who strayed too close to a hungry mekillot. Whose fault were those deaths? Surely not mine. You’re soldiers, killing and being killed is what you do. So stop arguing and do it before I lose patience with you.”
Aric felt a presence at his shoulder. Ruhm loomed over him, bending toward his ear. “Only reason she hasn’t struck him down, she knows we’ll need every sword arm we got.”
“You might be right,” Aric said. He wished he knew what to think of her. She showed precious little concern for the dead. But she had, for the most part, been decent to him. And her husband Nibenay had sent him on this trip, promising rewards. For all he knew, Nibenay really was the one who had watched over him for most of his life—he couldn’t truly believe that, but he couldn’t make himself completely discount it, either. Anything was possible, and who knew the secret heart of the Shadow King?
The two friends walked away from the ongoing confrontation. Aric didn’t want to see what she might do to a soldier who dared argue with her in front of others. “She’s been protective of me,” he told Ruhm. “But it’s true, if we keep losing people to whatever is stalking us—if that’s indeed what’s happening—we’re all in more danger every day.”
“Dune freak, I heard.”
“Really?”
Ruhm shrugged. “Could be.”
Aric tried to picture an anakore—a dune freak—erupting from underground in a burst of sand, all claws and fangs, grabbing someone and dragging him back down with it. Ferocious predators, they lived in colonies beneath the sand, and they could sense the vibrations of people moving about on the surface.
“There are so many dangers in the world, Ruhm. Ones I never even considered, living in the relative safety of Nibenay.”
Ruhm didn’t answer. The goliath might have talked himself out. But Aric still had something to say, something that had been wearing on him day and night, and this seemed his best opportunity. He looked away from Ruhm, out across the trackless waste surrounding them. “I don’t think I’ll make it back there alive. I’ve had this feeling, since before we left, that I was saying goodbye to the city for good.”
“You’ll make it,” Ruhm said. “They need you.”
“Until we’ve reached Akrankhot and found all the metal. If it’s even there. After that—what good am I? Nibenay offered to share the wealth with me, so he might want me killed before the expedition gets home. Anyway, if Akrankhot is even real—and I’m starting to have doubts, it’s taking so long to find it—who knows what sorts of creatures might be hiding in there? Something’s killing good soldiers out here along the way, but when we’re in there, confined in a city …” Aric shuddered. “I hate to think what could happen.”
Aric knew he sounded like a coward, but at the moment he didn’t feel particularly brave. He had never claimed to be any kind of hero. People noticed heroes.
“You’ll be good,” Ruhm said simply. He clapped one of those huge hands on Aric’s shoulder and gave it a crushing squeeze, then wandered off. Aric supposed it was meant to reassure him.
It didn’t work.
8
After dinner, around the fire, everyone determinedly avoided the subject of the deaths, or the fate of the soldier who had stood up to Kadya. No one had seen him since the confrontation. Any number of things could have befallen him, but some claimed Kadya had turned him to sand and scattered him on the breeze. Aric and Ruhm sat with Damaric and Amoni, the mul, all of them huddled under furs against the night’s bitter chill. Instead of talking about the killings or what tomorrow might bring, Amoni had delved into her past.
“I was bred to be a gladiator,” she said. “And I was a good one, too.”
“You’re still here,” Damaric said. Frost rimed his thick mustache. “That’s something.”
“Twenty-seven bouts. Not without a scratch, but without any life-threatening injuries. It was the twenty-eighth that was a bitch.” She gave them a smile and took a healthy swig of the ale that Kadya had so thoughtfully arranged to be brought on the journey, and distributed in rationed measures. “The worst part is, I was up against a brohg warrior. Nothing I hadn’t beat easily before.”
“What happened, Amoni?” Aric asked.
“After several kills, I started to accumulate somewhat of a following,” she said. Aric had noticed before that the mul tended to keep to herself—she was happy to share food, drink and conversation, but even then she sat off by herself even while others huddled for warmth. And she glanced about often, as if making sure no one was sneaking up on her. “People came just to see me, to cheer me on. It swells your head, hearing your name ringing from wall to wall. Fortunately, my fellow gladiators mostly liked me, except those I fought. Still, there were rivalries, petty feuds. Like in any group of people, I guess. There was a goliath I had been … let’s say, friendly with—a slave whose master fought him in the pit instead of working him or allowing him to be used in the military. I won’t go into the whole thing, but there was another female gladiator who was envious of me, and another male who was after her, and things got ugly.
“At any rate, there I was, battling this brohg. Ugly bastard,” she shuddered, “all those arms. You know how they love their spears. This one was using a triple attack, a spear in each of three hands and a rock in the fourth. I had suffered a few cuts, nothing terrible, and succeeded in wrenching two of the spears from its hands. I was about to run it through when that gladiator I mentioned, the male—a mul he was, too, of all things—struck. He had arranged for an accomplice, a powerful psionic, to sit in the front row, right there among my cheering fans. As I was about to deliver the killing blow, I glanced over at them, and that’s when the accomplice struck. He used the Way to cloud my head. I was there, and suddenly I didn’t know where I was, who I was, what I was doing.
“That’s all the brohg needed. He threw the other spear away, picked me up in his four hands, bent one knee, and brought me down hard, smashing my back against his knee.
“I guess it was obvious to everyone that there had been some cheating going on, although not the brohg’s doing. Anyway, because of my popularity—my fans would have torn the place down, or tried to, had the brohg been allowed to finish me off—the match was halted. My spine was broken in four places. I was out of the gladiatorial business, needless to say.”
“That must have been painful,” Aric said, aware how much his words understated what she had endured.
“Yes,” she replied, wincing at the memory. She set her mug down on the dirt and arched her back, hands on her hips. “Pain like I hope you never have to imagine. I haven’t been allowed back into the pit, but I was trained for game hunting in the Crescent Forest, and have brought down my share of wild beasts these past few years. And of course, what use am I if I can’t fight? I’m lucky they conscripted me to do manual labor. So here I am.”
“Sounds great,” Damaric said. “Not the manual labor part. Or the back. But the freedom. For the most part, you’ve been able to do what you want, whether it’s fighting or hunting.”
“Have you always been a slave, Damaric?” Aric asked. Ruhm was sitting with his back against a boulder, sipping his ration of ale and keeping quiet. But he was taking it all in. When Ruhm was quiet, it was a safe bet he was listening intently. Or sleeping, but his mouth would have been open had that been the case.
“Born and raised,” Damaric said. “My mother was carrying me when she and my father crossed into Nibenese territory. They were barbarians, you might say. Not citizens of any state, living off the land, stealing when they had to, working when they could. My father had been employed from time to time as a mercenary. But then they were caught on Nibenese land. My father mouthed off to some templar, and they were both consigned to slavery. My father didn’t take to it. He was killed on his ninth or tenth escape attempt. But my mother was tired of fighting, and she had a baby on the way. So she submitted, and I was born a slave’s child. Trained in military ways since I could walk, or so they tell me. Never known a day’s freedom.”
“You look like you’ve taken to it,” Amoni said.
“I’m hale enough, if that’s what you mean. But freedom? Some days it’s like I can almost taste it. Then others, it’s as far away as the clouds. When I heard about Tyr …” He shook his head. “I’m not educated. I hear about things like Kalak’s death, and the uprising in Tyr, and I don’t have any historical basis to unders
tand it. But it sounds like someone just rang a bell and set thousands of people free.” He gave a low whistle. “What that must be like.”
Amoni looked like she was going to say something. Instead, she shot a look over her left shoulder, snatched up her cahulaks, and sprang to her feet. The motion tipped over her mug, and precious ale soaked the ground.
“What is it?” Ruhm asked.
She stared intently into the darkness beyond the fire’s glow. “Probably nothing,” she said. “I’m just a nervous type, right?”
Aric combed through his memory of the seconds before Amoni rose. Damaric had been saying something. Had there been a sound from out in the wastes? The scrape of bare feet on sand?
The mekillots grumbled and snorted, making Aric nervous. A couple of other soldiers emerged from wagons. They stood close to Amoni, joining her in scanning the night. “You heard it too?” one asked.
“I heard something. So do the beasts.”
The other soldier took a step away from the fire, toward the pitch-black desert.
It was his last step.
9
A chatkcha arced out of the night.
It caught the unsuspecting soldier at the top of his nose, cutting across both eyes. The man had started to move his head, hearing the whistling sound as it approached, but he didn’t move it enough. The weapon made a slicing sound as it hit him, then kept going, spinning back to its thrower’s hand.
Up and down the caravan, soldiers spilled from the argosies or lurched up from around the fires. Some were half-dressed, others fully armored with weapons at the ready. They all dashed to the caravan’s east side, where the first attack had come from.
City Under the Sand: A Dark Sun Novel (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun) Page 13