“We’d do well to stay alert,” Damaric said. “I obey my captain, and she obeys Kadya. If that changes …”
Aric felt the full weight of Amoni’s gaze pressing down on him. “I won’t say anything,” he said, catching her meaning. “I mean … I guess I owe something to Nibenay, for choosing me for this expedition—although at the moment I’m not sure that’s so much an honor as a possible death sentence. But I don’t trust Kadya, and my loyalties, such as they are, are to the Shadow King, not to some templar along for the ride.”
“It’s only talk, anyway,” Amoni said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Soldiers will always grumble and moan,” Damaric added.
Are they dropping the subject because of me? Aric wondered. He wanted to be trusted. But elves weren’t trustworthy, everyone knew that. Tell an elf a secret and he’ll be selling it five minutes later.
He had thought he was past that with Amoni and Damaric. He had believed they had struck up a true friendship, one that overlooked all their backgrounds—the fact that he was a half-elf, that Amoni was a mul, Damaric a slave with barbarian parents, Ruhm a goliath with the bad taste to work for a half-elf instead of as a soldier.
If not? If he’d been wrong?
He guessed he was on his own, then. Or he and Ruhm, as always.
Once they got to Akrankhot and his worth to the expedition was over, he would have to stay vigilant. There would be no one to depend on to keep him alive then, except himself.
5
By the time the caravan emerged from the hills into open desert, a ferocious wind had sprung up. Rather than providing relief from the day’s heat, the wind aggravated it. It felt to Aric like those times he had to reach inside his forge—carefully, with tongs—his face near the fire to see what he was doing.
And the wind picked up desert sand, blowing it against them like fine scouring dust. Kadya had said the city should be visible when they cleared the hills, but it wasn’t. The olive sky was barely visible through clouds of sand.
Aric and Ruhm walked, Aric’s guards apparently having decided that since he had survived his encounter with the earth drake, he was on his own. Ruhm nodded toward the argosy they usually rode in. “Inside’s better.”
“You’re right,” Aric said. “I wanted to see this Akrankhot, but I can’t see anything if I’m blind.”
They returned to the argosy. Others had also wanted to get out of the stinging sand, so it was nearly full, but people shoved over and made space for them.
Tension inside was every bit as bad as out, the air as brittle as frozen drake. Nobody talked much. Aric heard no laughter, no games or teasing. They might have been a wagonload of murderers on their way to the gladiatorial pit.
He wished he didn’t feel the same way.
The mekillots surged forward against wind and sand. The drivers shielding their faces with arms, straining to see the argosy in front of theirs, not caring about the route except to hope the one at the front of the train knew the way.
The wagon picked up speed. The bumping and bouncing grew progressively worse. Mekillots were never truly fast, but they could move slowly or they could move somewhat less slowly, and the drivers urged them to push the limits of that second pace.
“What’s the rush?” a soldier demanded. “You can’t even see where you’re going!”
“Kadya’s worried that the sands will cover up the city before we reach it!” one of the drivers shouted. In his left hand he worked a long whip, spurring the mekillots on. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life digging through sand!”
“Maybe not,” Aric said. “But I don’t want my life to end because we’re racing ahead blindly.”
“Racing?” Ruhm asked.
“All right. Hurrying, then.”
Another bump knocked him into the air, and he came down with a painful thump.
With sand stealing in through the windows and the constant thrashing about, Aric wondered why they needed the argosy at all. They could have saved the weight and simply dragged everybody along behind the mekillots.
Finally, a cheerful cry sounded from the front wagon. The others spread out enough for their passengers to see through the forward windows. Sure enough, there, through the curtain of sand, was a ruined city, half submerged.
At last, they had reached Akrankhot.
6
The caravan stopped at what had once been the city’s outer wall. In punishing wind and sand, everyone climbed from the argosies and faced the ruins of what must have been a great city. A wide avenue led between the remains of buildings of fabulous size and grandeur.
As opposed to the buildings Aric was accustomed to, the ornately carved facades of Nibenay, these were more plain, and elegant in that plainness. Stately columns fronted some, most at the top of wide staircases. Some columns had collapsed and lay in pieces at the base of the stairs, like felled trees in the Crescent Forest. Other buildings had roofs that had fallen in. A few were nothing but rubble. Everywhere, for what appeared to be several leagues, were the remnants of turrets and towers that once might have pierced the sky. The sun was sinking behind the city, but from this angle it looked as if it might be lowering into the very center of Akrankhot.
Everywhere, there was wood. Aric had never imagined that so much wood could be used in the construction of a city. This place must have been surrounded by forests once, with enough water around to feed all that life. He could barely conceive of it.
Looking at it, Aric could imagine what the street must have been like in the city’s prime. Grand processions would have been held here, citizens flanking the walkways between the avenue and the fronts of the buildings, while the city’s nobility and military paraded down the center. Akrankhot must have been a great center of civilization.
And now it was empty, its streets and avenues lifeless, its broken-walled buildings housing nothing but wind and sand. The shouts and cheers that must have echoed down canyons of stone and wood and mud had long been silenced. Perhaps the ghosts of the dead haunted these ramparts. Could a civilization able to build a city on such a scale ever truly die?
“Well, Kadya,” someone said. “What’s the plan?”
The templar checked the position of the sun. “Soon it’ll be dark. We’ll make camp, dine, sleep. In the morning, exploration will begin.”
Her gaze, pointedly, fell on Aric as she spoke that last.
He knew what was expected of him, and he hoped he could fulfill those expectations. Standing here at the city’s edge, he felt no pull from metals of any kind. He touched his coin medallion, taking comfort in its familiar smoothness, but even it had long since stopped speaking to him; the only essence contained within it after all these years was his own.
Since no one wanted to be the first into those buildings—not with night falling—the argosies were drawn into a circle before what remained of the city wall. Fires were built, mekillots fed and watered. It all resembled any night’s camp since leaving Nibenay.
Except that on the other side of that low, crumbling wall was a vast, unknown city. And although it appeared empty, no one knew if that was truly the case.
With the setting of the sun, the sky darkened, and soon a chill settled over the land. Aric took furs and leathers from the argosy and settled before a fire. As usual, Ruhm, Amoni and Damaric joined him there. The tension of earlier seemed to have vanished, at least among the others. For his part, Aric felt guarded, as if having had his trustworthiness questioned, he could not completely trust them.
“What do you think?” Damaric asked when he settled in with a plate and a mug. “It’s bigger than I expected.”
“The city?” Amoni replied. “It’s big, yes. It appears to have been prosperous, in its day.”
“Aye,” Damaric said. “Some big buildings there. And so close to the city wall. Inside, they may be larger still.”
“I keep thinking of how it must have been,” Aric said. “So many people. Were they happy? Did they live in freedom or bo
ndage? Was joy part of their daily lives, or fear?”
“Always either or?” Ruhm asked. “Both at once, perhaps.”
“Sure,” Aric said. “Both at once. Like people everywhere, probably.”
“Freedom and bondage?” Damaric asked. “How does that work?”
“There are degrees, I mean,” Aric said. He knew his intent would he hard to explain to someone who had lived every day of his life a slave—and in truth, he had no idea how that must feel. “Take me, for example. I’m not saying I’m a slave in the same way you are. But I run my own business. I have debts and I have debtors. I have to keep working, day in and day out, to make sure I can pay my creditors, and at the same time I have to keep after those who owe me. If I hadn’t been ordered by the Shadow King to accompany this expedition, I would be there still, and with those same concerns. It never ends.”
“But tomorrow you could walk away from Nibenay, away from your debts,” Damaric said.
“And so could you. You would be hunted down wherever you went, and so would I. Do you think those who lend don’t have ways to track someone?”
“I suppose,” Damaric admitted.
“I said it was different. But an obligation is a form of bondage, and the more of them one has the stricter that bondage becomes. I could, if I chose, stop working and spend my days in the Hill District, spending what remained of my coin on pleasures of the flesh. But I would be picked up as a vagrant, soon enough, and forced into slavery myself. So the lines can be blurred.”
“I never thought of it that way, Aric,” Amoni said. “That’s an interesting viewpoint.”
“Don’t forget most important obligation,” Ruhm said.
“What’s that?”
“Paying me!”
Aric laughed, his mood suddenly lightened.
He hoped for an easy day tomorrow, full of fascinating exploration and free of danger. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe that would be the case.
7
Damaric had drawn guard duty. He was allowed a couple hours to sleep, but he was restless, and had finally only fallen into a deep sleep shortly before he was awakened. His head felt thick, his eyes gummy. He might have been walking through a thick fog.
But he took up the station his captain ordered, where the argosies came nearest to Akrankhot’s wall. The wind had finally died. In the still air, the only sounds were the crackling of the fires, snoring from the wagons and the occasional rustle as someone inside shifted positions.
After a few minutes in the cold air, Damaric was more awake. He walked to keep his blood moving, a few steps this way, a turn, a few back. On one occasion when he was facing toward the city, having given up on the idea that any kind of threat would arise during the night, and his primary hardship would be not falling asleep and freezing to death, he saw something move on one of the narrow roads that ran parallel to the grand avenue.
He stood still, watching. Both moons were high, casting light onto the roadway, but he saw no one. He couldn’t begin to identify that flash of motion, but he was convinced he had seen something. He took a dozen steps that way, past the wall that here was nothing but a nub of stone jutting through sand. His skin crawled, the small hairs on his arms and neck standing up. In a dead city, anything alive was not to be trusted.
Anything alive and hiding was all the more suspicious.
Rather than continuing toward the city, he returned to the caravan, walking backward and checking his footing a couple of times but otherwise not taking his gaze off the city. He decided not to alert the others. Yet. If it had only been a shadow, a trick of the eye, there was no sense stirring things up, waking workers who would need their strength during the day to come.
But if there were something out there, he would see it when it showed itself again. Because he was wide awake now, and didn’t plan to look away from that city under the sand until the sun was high in the sky.
X
DEATH IN THE DESERT
1
These last few nights, Myrana’s dreams had changed. Instead of focusing on the route she needed to take, she kept seeing images of a tall, muscular young man with long dirty blond hair. She had the basic route mapped in her mind, and they followed it as closely as possible.
She believed they were close to their destination. The appearance of the young man in the dreams caused her to think he was part of whatever this was all about, part of what they would find when they got where they were going.
On this particular morning, she awoke from those dreams with an odd, profound sense of loss, as if she had been close to the man, or at least close to answers about what this all meant, and they’d been snatched away at the last minute. Koyt tended to the fire, making a morning meal of a jankx he had killed the night before. The creature’s pelt was barely large enough to use, but it had been cleaned and set aside, and the meat’s aroma set Myrana’s stomach growling. Myrana didn’t see Sellis at first, but then he came around a dune, walking toward camp with a thoughtful expression. The sadness from the dream stayed with her, making her wonder if it was really all about the dream, or if she simply missed her family and friends.
“Morning, Myrana,” Koyt said.
“That smells wonderful, Koyt.”
“It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m famished, suddenly.”
“I hope you’re not too hungry,” Sellis said. “We only saw the one jankx, remember, and they’re small.”
“I won’t eat your share, Sellis, don’t worry.” She waited until he reached camp and sat down. “Where were you?”
“I thought I heard something, just as the sun was coming up. But I don’t see anything, or any tracks in the sand.”
“What do you think it was?”
“Some animal, I suppose. Maybe another jankx. Something larger would be good, though.”
Myrana dressed quickly and took a long drink from one of the water skins while she waited for breakfast. It was, as Koyt had promised, ready shortly, and they dug into their portions with enthusiasm. They were almost done when Koyt looked out across the sands. He froze for a moment, then set his jankx bones down and picked up his bow.
“What is it?” Sellis asked.
Koyt inclined his head toward the western horizon. A figure walked toward them, very tall, with a huge head. “We have a visitor.”
“Desert giant?” Sellis asked.
“That’s what it looks like,” Myrana said. “But look at the way he’s walking. Something’s wrong with him.”
The giant’s gait was uneven, sometimes veering off course by as many as six or seven steps, then correcting, other times stumbling, catching himself on massive knuckles. Everything about him was gargantuan. He was powerfully muscled, as tall as five or six of Myrana. His facial features were exaggerated, with a pronounced ridge above his brow, a large, flat nose, ears like wings flapping at the sides of his head. He wore a breechcloth but was otherwise naked, his skin deeply tanned and leathery.
“You’re right, he doesn’t look normal,” Sellis said. He drew both swords and held them across his lap.
“Is he hostile, do you think?” Myrana asked.
“We’ll know soon enough, if he starts picking up boulders and hurling them at us.”
Koyt fitted an arrow onto his bowstring. “I’ve heard of giants who aren’t. But not many.”
“Maybe he smelled your jankx,” Sellis said with a grin.
“He’ll be disappointed, then,” Myrana said. “He can suck the marrow out of the bones, but I haven’t left any meat for him.”
The desert giant stumbled again, and as he regained his footing, he elevated off the ground, high enough that Myrana cold have passed beneath his feet. When he came down again, a few feet closer, it was in a cloud of sand.
“What was—”
“We’ve got trouble,” Sellis said.
“What?”
“He flew.”
“So it appeared.”
&nb
sp; “Giants don’t fly,” Koyt observed.
“Not ordinarily. But creatures tainted by the pakubrazi often grow wings, and limited flying ability.”
“Wings?” Myrana asked. She knew the huge insectlike pakubrazi could curse other creatures, causing terrible mutations in their bodies and corresponding changes to their minds. But she hadn’t remembered all the details. She’d never encountered anyone with the taint, and although she had seen a few pakubrazi, they were usually dead.
“He hasn’t shown us his back yet, so I can’t be sure,” Sellis said. “But flying is a powerful clue.”
“If he’s pakubrazi tainted,” Koyt said, “then he’s sure to be hostile, perhaps even crazed.”
“Which might explain that awkward walk,” Myrana offered.
“Aye.” Koyt started to raise the bow. “Perhaps it’s best to just strike first, in this case.”
“But.… what if he doesn’t mean to hurt us?”
“If he’s pakubrazi tainted,” Sellis argued, “he might not mean to now, but he could go berserk at any moment. Go ahead, Koyt.”
Koyt got to his feet, drew the bowstring and arrow fletching back to his cheek, sighted down the arrow, and released. The arrow made a thwipping noise as it split the air.
The giant stumbled again, and the arrow struck him just beneath his left shoulder. He let out a ferocious roar and yanked it from his flesh. Streamers of blood trailed down his dark flesh.
Before he had seemed almost distractedly headed in their direction, drawn perhaps, as Sellis had half-jokingly suggested, by the smell of Koyt’s cooking. But now he focused on them, his head tilted toward his left side, glare fixed. He broke into a sprint, huge feet thundering against the sands, coming faster than she’d imagined something so large could move. The jankx sat heavily on her uneasy stomach.
City Under the Sand: A Dark Sun Novel (Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun) Page 17