The Parched sea h-1

by Troy Denning

  In contrast to those around her, Ruha felt eerily calm. She had no idea whether she or any of the Bedine would live to see dusk. Still, she was not afraid and felt no apprehension about what lay ahead. It seemed as if someone else were riding the Harper's mount, preparing to join the charge that would result in a thousand deaths.

  Yatagan leaned toward Ruha, then motioned at an empty camel behind her. "Unless the witch sees some reason to wait, I will signal the others to start the attack."

  Yatagan did not really believe that Ruha was sitting invisible on the empty mount. Like the other sheikhs, he knew that the witch had taken Lander's face in order to keep the men from learning of the Harper's death. He was simply playing out his part of a little charade Utaiba had proposed.

  Realizing that the warriors would wonder where the witch was, the wiry sheikh had suggested that Ruha lead an empty camel behind hers. Yatagan would pretend that the widow was invisible, and Ruha-Lander would explain that the witch's beast had to be led so she could have both hands free to work her magic during the battle. Once Ruha began using her magic, Utaiba also hoped that the warriors would assume that it was the invisible witch who was casting spells, instead of "Lander."

  It was a complicated scheme, but so far it was working. The warriors knew nothing about magic, so they were perfectly willing to believe that the witch had turned herself invisible. Ruha had suggested it might simplify things for her to assume her own identity and claim that Lander was invisible, but the sheikhs had all feared that the men would find it much easier to believe that a witch had turned herself invisible rather than someone else.

  Realizing that Yatagan was still waiting for her response, Ruha nodded and said, "We're both ready, Yatagan. Victory or death!" The sound of Lander's voice issuing from her throat made the young widow feel even more distant from the events that were about to occur.

  The wizened sheikh lifted his amarat and sounded a long, piercing tone. An apprehensive flurry rustled the Shremala warriors as they stretched their cold-stiffened arms and shifted their quivers into more accessible positions. Nine distant amarats trumpeted an answer to Yatagan, and Ruha knew the other khowwans were ready.

  Yatagan raised his horn to his lips again and blasted a long, trilling note. The sheikh's mount danced in anticipation, then Yatagan lowered his horn and led his khowwan down the hill into battle.

  A short time later, black slivers began to fly back and forth between the Shremala and the defenders lurking behind the fortifications on the wall. The other tribes were too distant for Ruha to tell if they were also coming under fire, but she assumed that they were. Fortunately, though a man fell from his camel every now and then, the Zhentarim arrows were having little effect on the charge.

  The Shremala continued forward beneath the black rain, driving strait for a ten-foot breach in Orofin's fortifications. When the tribe closed to within fifty yards of the wall, silver gleams began to flash from the front of the charge, and Ruha knew the first ranks had drawn their scimitars in anticipation of hand-to-hand fighting.

  As the Shremala approached the breach, a half-dozen tiny, black-robed figures rose from behind the wall's crenelations. At first Ruha could not tell what they were doing, but then they heaved several bundles onto the top of the wall and emptied the contents over the side. Just as the first Bedine warriors reached the breach, dozens of melon-sized rocks poured out of the bundles and clattered down on them. A muffled crash rolled across the empty ground between Orofin and the hill upon which Ruha and Utaiba waited.

  The hail of rubble stopped the attack, knocking more than two dozen warriors from their saddles and littering the ground in front of the breach with bodies. The rear ranks of the charge pulled up short, spraying the top of the fortifications with arrows while a half-dozen of their unmounted companions rushed back to their ranks.

  One of the figures stopped a few paces in front of the others, then waved his scimitar toward the gap. Two dozen men immediately slipped off their camel's backs and followed him toward the breach, drawing their own blades. The rest of the tribe remained in place, firing arrows at the top of the wall or into the fortress itself.

  When the running figures began to pick their way through the rubble in front of the breach, a flurry of arrows streaked from the gap. The men on foot fell in their tracks, then a handful of Zhentarim filled the breach and began firing arrows at the warriors who were still mounted. Soon, more Black Robes appeared along the top of the wall, and the Shremala had to fall back and trade arrows with the Zhentarim from longer range.

  Ruha scanned the other breaches at which Bedine were attacking and saw a similar situation at each of them. "Idiots!" the widow cursed, slapping her thigh.

  "Not at all," Utaiba objected, scowling. "Our warriors are dying bravely."

  "Not them!" the witch snapped, looking toward the sheikh. "Us. We should have expected this! If La-" She stopped herself from saying the Harper's name in midsentence and finished instead by saying, "I should have known they'd have more than one way to defend the walls."

  Utaiba nodded sadly, his eyes betraying his own regret. "We can't blame ourselves," he whispered. "When have any of us ever stormed a fort? The important thing to do now is deal with this tactic."

  Ruha nodded, but did not answer. She was trying to think of a way to protect the warriors from the rubble showers. An overhead shelter would protect the Bedine warriors, allowing them to mass in front of the breaches and match the Zhentarim's firepower. Unfortunately, they had neither the materials nor the time to build such shelters. Yet, she knew that if the sheikh's plan was to succeed, the Bedine had to maintain the attacks on the breaches.

  After a few moments of studying Orofin's walls, Ruha's good eye settled on a three hundred-foot section of unbroken wall. Apparently the Zhentarim were not concerned about defending that section, for there were only four men along the entire stretch. The thing the widow liked best about this particular length of wall, however, was that there was a small sand dune standing ten yards in front of it.

  Ruha turned to Utaiba. "Our warriors must stop wasting their arrows by firing blindly into the fortress. Instead, each tribe should put its twenty best archers in front of the breach. Everybody else must give their quivers to the archers, who are to fire at anybody moving along the rampart, but only if they have a good target."

  "That is madness," Utaiba answered, shaking his head. "With so few archers, the enemy will mass his own bowmen on the walls and pick us off like gazelles."

  "No they won't," Ruha countered. "Not if they're too busy defending the breaches against the others. The rest of the warriors are to draw their scimitars and rush the breaches, but they mustn't mass together. Tell them to spread out along the base of the wall, at least three feet apart. They should slip into the gaps one at a time, and they must die rather than retreat."

  Utaiba frowned. "What will this accomplish?"

  "By not massing together, the warriors will prevent the Zhentarim from dumping rubble on them-or at least keep that tactic from being very effective when they use it. Our archers will keep some of the Zhentarim occupied and pinned behind their fortifications, preventing them from leaning over the top of the wall to shoot at our men along the base."

  "And the attacks against the breaches? Do you think this will prove more successful than what we're already doing?"

  Ruha shrugged. "I don't think it will be any less successful, but the main purpose of those attacks is to keep the Zhentarim inside the fort busy. When you and I lead the Raz'hadi into Orofin, we'll want to have as many of the Black Robes as possible thinking about other things."

  Utaiba raised his eyebrow, interested but still puzzled. "And how is my tribe going to get through a breach when no one else can do it?"

  The widow turned Lander's manly lips into a confident smile, then gestured toward the empty camel at her side. "Ruha is going to make a new breach for us-one the Zhentarim won't be able to defend."

  Utaiba looked doubtful. "I don't remember Ruha
describing any spell that could knock a hole in Orofin's walls."

  "She has thought of a new way to use her magic," Ruha replied, pointing to the stretch of unbroken wall she had selected for her plan. "That part of the fort is manned by only four sentries. Ruha can use her magic to punch a hole through it. If the Raz'hadi move quickly, they will be into Orofin before the Zhentarim realize what has happened."

  A careful smile creased the wiry sheikh's lips. "The witch is sure she can open a gap in that wall?"

  "There is some risk, but she thinks her spell will have the power. It's certainly worth a try. If it doesn't work, all we have to do is turn around and ride away."

  Utaiba nodded. "If I understood magic better, I would ask for more of an explanation. For now, however, I will have to trust that the gods knew what they were doing when they sent the witch to us."

  The sheikh summoned ten messengers, then sent them to the other sheikhs with Ruha's suggestion. After the riders were gone, Utaiba turned his camel toward his men, calling, "It is time for the Raz'hadi to mount!" he commanded. "We ride to glory!"

  The warriors cheered in enthusiasm, then did as their sheikh ordered. Ruha led Utaiba and his warriors a quarter-mile to the west, stopping in front of the unbroken stretch of wall. They were still over two hundred yards from Orofin, so the widow could not see if the Raz'hadi's shift of position concerned the four Zhentarim guards. It was a good sign, however, that no additional Black Robes were appearing atop the wall. Apparently the enemy still believed this section of the fort was secure.

  "Now what?" asked Utaiba. "Do we fly over the wall?"

  "No," Ruha answered, laying her reins across her lap. "We ride through it."

  "Ride through it?" he said.

  Ruha nodded, then pointed at the dune standing between them and the wall. "There."

  "Over the dune?" Utaiba asked.

  "The dune will be gone when we get there," Ruha answered. "Tell your men that the witch is casting a spell. They are to follow us-no matter what."

  As Utaiba passed on the order, the witch prepared her spell. Keeping her back to the warriors, she took a small pouch from her robes, then withdrew a pinch of glittering white sand and packed it between her lower lip and teeth. It had a bitter, acrid taste that made her want to spit.

  When the sheikh finished his orders and looked back to Ruha, she asked, "Are you ready?"

  He drew his scimitar. "Through the wall?"

  Ruha nodded. "Like the wind," she mumbled.

  After whispering her incantation, the witch spit out the sand. Instead of falling to the ground, it streaked toward the wall with gathering momentum. As it picked up speed, the small torrent of sand gathered more particles. After flying twenty yards, the stream had become a raging river of tiny granules.

  "What are you waiting for?" Ruha cried, pointing at the spell. "Follow it!"

  His mouth hanging agape, Utaiba turned his mount toward the wall and urged it into a full gallop. Ruha did likewise, and then she heard the Raz'hadi voicing their war cries as the rest of the tribe joined the charge.

  As they raced forward, Ruha watched the four sentries scurry back and forth along the wall, trying to summon help. They were too late. By the time the Zhentarim could organize a response, the Raz'hadi would be inside Orofin.

  The stream of sand crossed the dune in front of the unbroken stretch of wall. The mound exploded with a ferocity that surprised even Ruha, causing a howl that echoed across the desert like the cry of Kozah himself. In an instant, the spell sucked up the entire dune and hurled it against the fortress, blasting a hole ten feet in diameter through the wall's glazed mudbricks. The four sentries abandoned their posts and fled along the ramparts.

  As Utaiba passed the place where the sand dune had been, he looked over his shoulder with a triumphant grin, screaming wildly as a cloud of brick dust and sand billowed out of the newly opened breach to engulf him. The witch rode into the gray boil an instant after Utaiba. It was only then that she realized there had been a flaw in her plan.

  The silt filled her nose and throat so thickly that she felt like she had ridded into a bed of quicksand. The sand grains stung her eyes and forced her to close them, not that it mattered. Even if she had possessed the long thick eyelashes that enabled camels to see in sandstorms, she could not have seen past her mount's head, much less guided it through the breach. Instead, the widow simply folded herself flat against her mount's back and trusted the beast to find its own way, hoping that the riderless camel still tethered behind her would follow.

  Despite the certainty of facing combat if she made it successfully into Orofin, Ruha did not bother drawing Lander's saber. She wore the Harper's face, but that did not mean she possessed his skill with the sword. The long blade would only get her into trouble. Instead she placed a hand on the hilt of her jambiya, ready to draw it if need be, but equally prepared to cast a spell.

  The sand stopped stinging Ruha's face, and muffled shouts of alarm drifted to her from directly ahead. Realizing that her camel had found the breach, she opened her eyes. Utaiba's mount was directly in front of her, charging out of the other end of the hole, a full fifteen feet ahead. As she watched, the beast bowled over a Zhentarim and bolted into the courtyard beyond.

  The widow reached the end of the little tunnel a second later. A pair of Zhentarim lay directly in front of the breach, the skin stripped off their bodies by the final blast of her magical sand stream. Ruha's mount and the riderless beast behind it jumped the corpses, then the witch guided them a few paces to the right and reined them to a halt out of the way of the warriors that she hoped would soon be pouring into the fort.

  The interior of Orofin was anything but the mass of confusion Ruha had expected. The fortress was about fifty yards across, with the ruins of buildings hugging the walls. Orofin's artesian well sat in the center of the courtyard, it's bubbling waters filling a square basin. On each of the basin's four sides, a small spout emptied into a water duct. Protected by a rusty steel grating, these ducts ran to the edges of the fort, each emptying into a shallow pool that fed the canals outside the fort.

  Next to each pool rose a staircase that led to the ramparts. At the top of these staircases, the Zhentarim had made huge stacks of rubble, and a steady stream of black-robed men were carrying the deadly packages to locations above the breaches that the Bedine were attacking. There they passed the bundles to men standing over the breach, who would in turn drop them onto the warriors below. To both sides of these men stood archers, who were returning the fire of the Bedine bowmen. Ruha guessed that about half of the Zhentarim force, between four and five hundred men, were engaged along the walls.

  At the bottom of the wall, in each of the ten breaches that the sheikhs had selected for the attack, half-a-dozen Zhentarim armed with swords, daggers, and spears were fighting Bedine warriors. Behind them stood two dozen reinforcements, ready to take the place of any black-robed fighter who fell. Another ten to fifteen men waited in the ruins to either side of the various melees just in case any Bedine did manage to break through.

  Utaiba had already ridden his camel into the midst of one of these Zhentarim companies and dropped his reins. The sheikh was slashing at crossbowmen while his mount kicked and bit at the astonished reinforcements. Ruha caught a glimpse of the animal's eyes, and it seemed to her the beast was enjoying the fight as much as his rider. She searched her mind briefly for a way to aid the sheikh, then realized that any spell she cast into the melee stood as much chance of killing Utaiba as the enemy. Besides, from the looks of things, it appeared the wiry sheikh and his camel were a fine match for the shocked Black Robes.

  The widow continued her survey without seeing any sign of the Zhentarim she wanted to find most: Yhekal. As the invaders' leader, Ruha felt certain that the white-haired man had sent Bhadla to kill Lander, as well as the assassin that had tracked them to the Sister of Rains and killed Kadumi. If the Bedine accomplished nothing else by storming Orofin, she was determined to see him die.

/>   Vengeance was not her only reason for looking for Yhekal. Ruha knew that the Zhentarim leader had used magic to enthrall her father, and she had no doubt that he could use it for other purposes as well. The sooner she eliminated him, the more likely a final Bedine victory became.

  As her one uncovered eye searched for Yhekal, Ruha was surprised at how quiet the interior of Orofin seemed. Upon breaking through the fortifications, she had expected to meet a wall of arrows and a host of flashing blades. Instead, with the Zhentarim busy at the breaches the Bedine had originally attacked, the courtyard was empty, and no one came to defend the newly opened breach.

  The widow doubted that the calm would last for long. Even now, the sentries who had been guarding this section of wall were probably alerting their superiors to the breakthrough. Regardless of where Yhekal was hiding, Ruha had to take advantage of the Zhentarim's temporary shock and open the way for more Bedine to enter Orofin.

  She pulled a yellow ball of gum from her pocket and summoned an incantation to mind. She was no longer concerned about being observed using magic. In the heat of the battle, she did not think any warriors would see her casting a spell. Even if a few of them did, they would be too busy fighting to gossip with their fellows or wonder why Lander was acting so strangely.

  The witch threw the sticky glob at the nearest company of Zhentarim. A sphere of orange flame erupted in the ruins and spewed into the breach the Black Robes had been defending. A few agonized cries rang from the hole, but most of the men simply turned to ash without a sound.

  Ruha watched the smoking gap for what seemed like ages. A few charred Zhentarim staggered out of the ruins, moaning in agony and stumbling a few steps into the courtyard before they died. No Bedine warriors followed them from the blackened hole.

  "What now, Lander?"

  The voice startled Ruha. Drawing her jambiya, she whirled around to see a Raz'hadi warrior at her side. Behind him were two dozen more.