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

by Jeff Mariotte

  “No furniture?” Aric asked. The downstairs had been crammed full of tables and chairs and benches and beds.

  “Nothing.”

  “All right. Let’s keep going.”

  In truth, he was beginning to lose interest in these explorations. The only thing spurring him on was the knowledge that there was nothing better to do back at camp, and always the possibility that he and Ruhm would be put to work if they went back there. At the rate they were going, the hauling and loading would take at least another two or three days before the argosies were full.

  As they emerged from that house’s doorway, its door long since crumbled to dust, they heard a distinct intake of breath, the kind of sound someone makes when they’re caught off guard. Aric and Ruhm glanced at each other. Aric drew his new antique broadsword from the makeshift scabbard he had cobbled together. Ruhm, as always, had his club in hand.

  Aric looked an unvoiced question at Ruhm. The half-giant shrugged. Ruhm had both been stepping out the door, Aric right behind him, and neither knew precisely where the sound had come from.

  Aric breathed quietly, through his mouth. His muscles were coiled, prepared to react to any threat. Ruhm’s posture was more casual but he was always ready for a fight. Aric almost hoped for one, because he wanted to see what he could do with this huge steel sword.

  “It’s you!” a female voice cried. Then the speaker emerged from around a curve in the road. A little younger than Aric, he guessed, she was lovely, with night-black hair and a fresh, open face. She walked with a limp and carried a staff. Beside her was a battle-scarred veteran holding two bone swords in a way that gave the impression he was good with both. Suddenly Aric didn’t hope for a fight, after all.

  “It’s who?” Aric replied. “Who are you?”

  “Myrana Ligurto,” the young woman said. “Of House Ligurto?”

  “Never heard of it,” Aric said. “I have,” Ruhm said.

  “I am Sellis,” the swordsman said. “Employed by House Ligurto to defend and protect the girl.”

  “My name is Aric.” He nodded his head toward Ruhm. “And my companion is Ruhm. Both of Nibenay.”

  The young woman came forward, the end of her staff touching the ground with each step. “What did you mean by that?” Aric demanded, halting her progress. “You said, ‘It’s you.’ ”

  Sellis remained alert, every bit as tense as Aric was. But Myrana appeared relaxed, even comfortable in their presence. It was a wonder she wasn’t dead yet, if this was her typical way of greeting strangers.

  “It’s just—I saw you, in dreams. As soon as I spotted you in that doorway, I recognized you.”

  “You saw me in dreams?”

  “Yes. My dreams … they’re more than simple sleep stories. They mean something. Recently a series of them led us across the desert to this place. And for these past several nights, you’ve been part of them.”

  Aric wasn’t sure how to take that. On the one hand, he was intrigued. She had dreamed about him—or more likely, dreamed about someone whom he resembled enough for her to think they were the same man. On the other, showing up in a stranger’s dreams was a little disturbing, as if he couldn’t keep track of himself after he went to sleep, and wandered about the world at will.

  Plus, she hadn’t said what kind of dreams these were, or what his role in them had been. Were they romantic? Was he a villain? She had given no indication.

  “You came here because of dreams?” he asked. “From far away?”

  “Far enough,” Sellis answered. “Eleven days in the desert.”

  Aric was shocked. “Just the two of you?”

  “We were three.” Myrana looked at the road, and he could read sadness in her stance. “Now two.”

  “I see. Did you see anything else in these dreams? What made you decide to follow them?”

  “Nothing specific,” Myrana said. “Except you. You’re half-elf—I didn’t realize that until last night.”

  “I am.” Dreams or no, anybody could reach that conclusion, looking at him.

  “Your father was human, and your mother died when you were very young.”

  “That … that’s true.”

  “I know. As I said, my dreams are somewhat more meaningful than many people’s.”

  “But what did you expect to find here?”

  “That I never knew. Only that I would discover the purpose after I arrived.” Her skin, darkened from exposure to Athas’s sun, reddened slightly. “I thought that perhaps you were the only purpose. Meeting you. But I knew there must be more to it than that.”

  Aric decided to trust her. As long as he had Ruhm by his side, ready to act if that decision proved ill advised. He shoved the big sword into its scabbard. Sellis did the same with his. Ruhm couldn’t put his club away, but he rested the heavy end on the ground.

  “That’s all?” Aric asked. “Now that you’re here, do you have any other idea as to the purpose?”

  Myrana brushed long, black hair off her cheek. “Last night, the dream changed again,” she said. “I know it’s strange, telling you these things so soon after meeting you, but … I feel I must. Do you understand?”

  “Not really,” Aric said. “I’ve never had such dreams. But I suppose I’d had strange things happen to me from time to time, and heard about more. So go ahead. Tell us, and we’ll try to believe you.”

  “It was about this place,” she began. “Does it have a name?”

  “Akrankhot.”

  “Yes! I knew that, in the dream, and then forgot it upon waking. Akrankhot. There is something foul here. Something evil, and terribly powerful. It’s buried beneath the city, and protected by a magical structure of some kind, like a huge cage.”

  Aric turned as cold as if day had suddenly become night. The pile of metal, that force he had felt, trying to get into his head. The way Damaric had attacked them.

  Myrana’s brow furrowed, and she limped right up to Aric and rested a hand gently against his cheek. “You’ve seen it,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

  Aric swallowed and gestured toward Ruhm. “We found it.”

  She left her hand where it was a few moments longer. Aric wouldn’t have minded if she had left it there all day, and into the night. Standing this close to her, he could smell her and gaze into her huge brown eyes, the color of distant mountains in the full light of morning sun. She was slender and muscular, with womanly curves that moved under her simple shift. He realized he was staring. As long as that hand stayed on his cheek, he was powerless to stop.

  She removed it, as if she had seen the thoughts its presence stirred within him. She didn’t look away, though. “Did you tell anyone else about it?” Myrana continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it hadn’t. Probably for her, the touch had been just that, a touch, not signifying any stronger emotion. He tried to pay attention to what she was asking.

  “Yes,” Ruhm said, saving Aric having to answer.

  “It’s why we came here,” Aric explained, finding his voice again. “We were sent by the the Shadow King himself to find the metal buried beneath Akrankhot. I was tasked specifically with locating it, because I have a … a psionic connection to all sorts of metals.”

  “Interesting,” Myrana said, in a way that made Aric think it wasn’t really.

  “Anyway, after we found it, we reported it to the templar in charge of the expedition. It’s being loaded onto wagons now.”

  “In my dreams, I saw runes around the cage.” She knelt and etched some in the sand. “Like these.”

  “Those were on the door,” Aric said. “And on the stairs, leading down toward the steel. You’re saying that it’s the cage? That whatever is underneath is kept in check only by that?”

  “So my dreams led me to believe.”

  “And the fact that it’s being taken apart and moved? What does that mean, then?”

  Myrana rose again, an effort that made her bite her lower lip. When she was upright, she rested some of her weight on her sta
ff. “Then, I’m afraid, we’re all doomed. Anyone within this city. After that, who knows? Whatever is imprisoned there is powerful indeed, and whether it can be stopped again, I have no idea. All I know is that it was imprisoned in the first place for a reason.”

  “We must warn Kadya,” Aric said. “Perhaps it’s not too late. They’ve moved a good amount of steel, but there’s still some left. If it’s still caged, then—”

  “We can warn her,” Myrana agreed. “I fear, though, that if much has been taken away, then we’re probably too late. And when that evil force, or being, gets loose, it’s going to be seeking vengeance. Let’s make haste, while we yet live!”

  7

  When they reached the wagons, after a hurried run across the city, Kadya was overseeing the loading. The argosies had been taken into town, as close to the stairways as possible. A procession of slaves marched to and fro, each carrying either a chunk of metal or helping tote pieces too large for a single one to lift. At the argosies, they handed their burdens to other slaves who stacked it neatly inside. The mekillots had had an easy time of it coming to Akrankhot—on the return trip they would earn their feed, and then some.

  Aric pointed to eight wagons with closed doors. “Those are already full,” he said. “Which means they’re nearly done, at least with this trip.”

  Myrana turned to the swordsman who had accompanied her. “If I hadn’t been paralyzed by that cistern fiend, we might have arrived in time!” she said. “Those days we lost … I fear we’re too late.”

  “Perhaps not,” Sellis said. “We’ll just have to see.”

  “I’ll talk to the templar,” Aric volunteered. “She doesn’t like me, but I have the king’s approval so she might listen to me.”

  Kadya sat on a small mound of iron bars too long to fit into the argosies. They would have to be cut down, or strapped to the tops of the wagons. In the meantime they had been stacked nearby. Aric hurried to her side. He had a stitch in his side from the run. His face was flushed, and he had not entirely caught his breath. “Templar,” he began. “We must stop removing metal from the cavern at once!”

  “Whatever for?” Kadya asked. “Who are those strangers?”

  “They’re Myrana and Sellis, of House Ligurto. Myrana has dreams in which truths are revealed. She knew all about me before she met me. And she says there’s something—she knows not what—inside that cavern. Imprisoned there, caged by the metal. Releasing it … well, she says it’s indescribably evil, and tremendously powerful. We can’t know what the result of freeing it would be. But it won’t be good.”

  He had managed to get his words out, but the stitch flared up, like a dagger between his ribs. He bent forward, bracing himself with a hand against the iron bars that Kadya sat on. Her left hand rested on the same bar that he touched.

  And once again, images swam into his head, blotting out the world around him and replacing it with another. Once again, he saw what he had before, on the stairs leading down to the cavern, when he touched the ancient sword he still carried.

  The creature he had glimpsed, all limbs and tentacles and teeth—a demon, Aric knew, although he couldn’t say how—was carried, struggling the whole time, down an almost unending flight of stairs marked with runic symbols. Mystical bonds contained the demon’s form, but not his fury. He was a horrible sight, with thick stubby horns above angry eyes that shone with a sickly yellow-green fury. His gray-green skin appeared mottled with lichen or mold and thick with oozing pustules, not a smooth patch anywhere. His fanged mouth snapped at everything, two long, narrow tongues lapping at the world, and tusks on either side of his long nose were crusted with dried blood. The bonds held his many limbs and tentacles fast, kept his claws from doing damage, prevented him from using his muscular, many-pronged tail, but more important still, they dampened the powers of his mind.

  His name was Tallik.

  An early Athasian sorcerer had summoned him here from—somewhere else, the words made no sense to Aric even in the context of the vision—but Tallik had proved too difficult for the sorcerer to control. Finally, that sorcerer—working with other, more powerful beings—had been able to capture and imprison the demon beneath Akrankhot, in a cage made of all the metal that could be gathered, because only massive amounts of enchanted metal could hold Tallik fast.

  And there he had waited.

  Waited for someone to come along, so that he could reach out, take over that one’s mind, use that one to find others, any who could muster the necessary effort to dismantle Tallik’s prison and let him loose.

  Aric shook his head, trying to clear it of images from the past and pay attention to what was going on around him. His skin crawled from the briefest contact with Tallik. He wanted to scour himself with gritty sand, to scrub off any traces of the evil he had touched, the vicious nature of the demon coming through Kadya and into him. Tallik feasted on fear and hatred and death. Life and happiness were as repugnant to him as the demon was to Aric. But Kadya was saying something. Aric made himself listen.

  “… will look into your concerns, of course, Aric. After all, we have you to thank for finding the metal in the first place. But I don’t believe we have anything to fear. The young lady was probably confused. Not all dreams, after all, mean anything. Even for such a one as her.”

  “Good,” Aric said, “that’s good.” But he hadn’t removed his hand from the iron bar, and neither had she. Another thought flashed into his mind—not an image this time, just words ringing in his head with utter clarity. There was no mistaking their source.

  It’s past time to have some soldiers kill Aric and his friends—especially these new friends. He’s served his purpose, and now he’s just getting in the way.

  The “voice” he heard in his head was Kadya’s. But behind it was something else—something he recognized as the presence of Tallik.

  The demon had already possessed the templar. He controlled her now. She was having his cage torn apart as quickly as she could, in order to completely free him.

  And all of this due to Aric’s own efforts. Could he ever be forgiven? Could he ever forgive himself? He should kill her right now. He almost reached for his sword, then stopped. He didn’t know enough about this sort of thing, but he didn’t believe that killing Tallik’s host would mean killing Tallik. It would likely just move into someone else.

  Once more, he was faced with the reality that one person couldn’t change anything on Athas; his action, or Kadya’s death—neither would accomplish anything. Her soldiers would kill him on the spot, and the demon would survive.

  Uneasily, he drew his hand away from the iron bars. “Th-thank you, Kadya. I-I’ll go now.”

  He barely made it through those simple statements, and he turned away before she had dismissed him, hurrying back to Ruhm, Myrana and Sellis. Instead of speaking, he beckoned, and they hurried back into the city. Finding a secure place inside one of the large buildings on the grand avenue, he told them what he had seen.

  “You have to put your trust in dreams, Myrana,” he said at the conclusion. “I put mine in steel. If I touch steel, I can often learn things about whoever last handled it. And if I touch it while someone else is, I get a peek inside that person’s mind. In Kadya’s, there’s a terrible darkness, and there’s Tallik, the demon. I could hardly sense Kadya in there at all.”

  Myrana sat on the large room’s tile floor, her back against a whitewashed wall that had only browned slightly over the years. “Then we are too late!” She buried her face in her hands. “And now she wants to kill you, because you know!”

  “She wants to kill us all,” Aric corrected. “Not just me. Even our friend Amoni, a mul slave who’s helping to bring the metal up from below.”

  “Her soldiers will have to kill me first,” Sellis said. “And they’ll find that’s no simple task. Come on, Myrana, we’ve done what we came here for. Let’s get away from this forsaken city.”

  Myrana dropped her hands and stared at Sellis in surprise. “Leave now? We
didn’t come just to give warning, Sellis. At least, that’s not what I believe. We came to help if we were able.”

  “But if it’s too late to help—”

  “We don’t know that. If there’s any way to stop this demon, this Tallik, we have to try.”

  “I don’t think we can stop him, Myrana,” Aric admitted. “Even if Kadya wasn’t against us. I think he has too great a foothold for that. Too much of his cage has been destroyed, and none of us are sorcerer enough to put it back together.”

  “Then all is lost?”

  “Not necessarily, although time is short. We need to leave here, race back to Nibenay, and warn the Shadow King.”

  “Him?” Ruhm asked. He snorted. “Probably already knows. That’s why he sent us.”

  Aric couldn’t allow himself to believe that. “When I saw him, spoke to him, I didn’t have that impression, Ruhm. I think he sincerely wanted the steel, for its own sake. I’m not saying others in his court didn’t know, but I don’t think he did. I don’t even think Kadya did, until we were here.”

  “What can he do?” Myrana asked. “If he is willing to help?”

  “He’s the most powerful sorcerer in the Ivory Triangle,” Aric said, hoping it was true. “If it takes sorcery to re-imprison Tallik, he’s the one who can do it.”

  “Do you know what kind of damage such sorcery would cause?” Sellis asked. “The whole of the Crescent Forest might be destroyed.”

  “But if the other choice is a demon as fearsome and powerful as Tallik seems to be, then that’s no choice at all,” Aric countered. “We lose a forest, but we save the world?”

  “I doubt the choice is that stark,” Sellis said.

  “You haven’t seen Tallik, or … felt him. I think Myrana’s right. He’s unbridled evil, and as strong as any force I’ve ever heard of. If I’m wrong about Nibenay, if he refuses to help—or can’t—then we … I don’t know. We find a Veiled Alliance chapter, and see if they can summon the necessary magics to defeat Tallik.”