City Under the Sand

by Jeff Mariotte

  Ruhm bled from a score of wounds, although certainly some of the blood soaking his huge form had surely come from the halflings mounded around him. Amoni swung her cahulaks with ferocious abandon, lips parted and teeth clenched, and the dead and wounded before her formed a wall that other halflings had to climb to get to her. Damaric’s singing stick had taken some punishing blows, but he seemed mostly unscathed so far. Other soldiers were dead and dying everywhere, some almost under Aric’s feet. The combined stink of halfling bodies, viscera, blood and death was everywhere, inescapable.

  Aric didn’t know how long any of them could go on. He had powerful arms and shoulders, a blacksmith’s strength, but there were so many halflings. Soon he would start to grow weary, and then what?

  “Kadya,” he heard someone say in a surprised tone. Others repeated her name. Aric parried three attacks and risked a hurried glance over his shoulder.

  The templar had climbed on top of one of the argosies. Halflings hurled stones at her but she ignored them and they sailed harmlessly past. Her lips were moving, though no one in the thick of battle could hear what she said, and her hands made fitful gestures. A stiff wind blew up from behind her, ruffling her clothing and tearing her hair from the pin holding it up. Around her, the air itself seemed to waver. Then she thrust her hands forward, toward the halfling force, and that rippling air spread out from her, past the Nibenese but striking the halflings with almost physical force.

  As the wave flowed past them, halflings dropped their weapons and staggered about, dazed. Blood flowed from noses, ears, and open mouths. Some fell down clutching their heads while others pawed at their own faces or chests. In the rear ranks, as far back as the firelight extended, halflings took off running, as if to escape whatever Kadya had loosed upon them.

  The halflings facing Aric fell victim to it as well. One died instantly, her eyes rolling back in her head, body stiffening as she pitched forward. Another clapped his hands to his ears even as blood burbled up from his eyes and mouth. The third tried to turn and run, but his legs gave out beneath him and he fell atop his fellows, clawing at the air like a drowning man reaching for a rope.

  Watching the devastation, Aric realized it didn’t affect only the halflings. One of the wounded soldiers close by curled in on himself, gave an agonized scream, and died. Another, barely wounded as far as Aric could tell, dropped to his knees as though his legs no longer had the strength to support him. Even Aric felt weakened suddenly. He took several unsteady steps backward to get a wagon behind him before he fell.

  Defiling magic. Kadya had drawn from all their life forces in order to send that surge of powerful magic into the halflings.

  With the badly wounded soldiers dead and some of the others still reeling from their own templar’s spell, the ones who had strength left went after the halflings, dispatching those they could get to without leaving the firelight. The halflings offered little resistance. Heads rolled, swords and spears spiked bodies. Soon the soldiers gathered at the wagons again, wiping blades on shirts or rags torn from the minimal clothing the halflings wore, and binding their wounds.

  The boasting and the burying would come later. With the sound of the remaining halflings running off into the darkness, the Nibenese forces sat around dwindling fires or leaned against armored argosies. Conversation was sparse, most of it grumbles of complaint. “We could have beat them,” someone ventured.

  “We would have died trying, if she hadn’t done that.”

  “But how many of our own did we lose in the doing?”

  You yet live, as do I. It might have been different.”

  Damaric showed Aric a weary grin. “You did well.”

  “I survived.” Aric held up his left hand, which continued to bleed. “You came through fine, it seemed.”

  “As I said, I’ve been trained to fight since the time I could walk.”

  Aric moved closer to the soldier and lowered his voice. “I’m surprised that some complain openly about the templar.”

  “Warriors sometimes forget themselves in the flush of victory, Aric. However that victory is achieved. By morning they’ll have thought better of it, and spend the rest of the day worrying that she heard them.”

  Ruhm joined them, dripping blood from his crown to his toes. “That was fun,” he said.

  “Fun?” Aric repeated.

  “Sure.” He squeezed Aric’s shoulder. “You had fun too?”

  “I’m not sure I’d put it that way.”

  Amoni joined them too, flicking bits of halfling flesh off the blades of her cahulaks. She had suffered a few wounds, and she winced when she turned at the waist, trying to stretch her back. But the four friends had lived through the battle, and Aric couldn’t ignore the swelling of pride that spread from his breast.

  Later that night, however, when he tried to sleep, he kept seeing the image of Nibenese soldiers, fighting death until Kadya’s magic sucked the life force from them. Perhaps that had been necessary to defeat the raiding halflings.

  Then again, perhaps not.

  VIII

  VALLEY OF FIRE

  1

  The cistern fiend’s paralysis gripped Myrana for two days. The second day she was able to sit up on her own and eat but not walk. That night, it wore off, but she, Sellis, and Koyt didn’t want to leave the relative protection of the oasis. Instead, they waited until morning, filled their bellies and their water skins with fresh water, and started off once more across the desert. She had hated having muscles that refused her every command, and the urgency of her dreams had not let up, but even so, it was hard to leave a place with shade, shelter and plenty of fresh, clear water.

  The contrast, by mid-afternoon, was remarkable. The sun bore down with pitiless intensity. On foot all day, Myrana’s leg and hip sent pain shooting through her entire body, making her grit her teeth and bite back groans. She wanted no pity from her companions, and most of all she didn’t want them to feel—as men so often did, in her experience—that they needed to fix things, make them better. This situation couldn’t be fixed, unless they came upon some wild kanks or erdlus to ride. She was thirsty, hot, and aching, and that was just the way things were.

  Her dream-inspired route led them up a low rise. On the other side, the way was considerably steeper, a rock-strewn slope leading down into a wide, flat valley. The ups and downs were harder on her leg than flat stretches, so she looked forward to reaching that, but knew the descent would be difficult and painful.

  Sellis pointed to the hillside on the valley’s far edge, where a patch of green might have indicated a natural spring. “We’ll make it there before we stop,” he suggested. “And if it’s safe we can make camp by that spring.”

  “Water for three nights in a row?” Koyt asked. “Fortune smiles upon us, eh Myrana?”

  Myrana grunted a meaningless response. She liked the idea of another night beside water, but the far side of the valley was a long way off.

  Sellis touched her arm. “Shall we go down?” he asked. “Or would you rather rest first?”

  “I’m ready,” she said. The statement wasn’t entirely true, or altogether false. She would have loved to rest—perhaps for a week or two—but to accept his suggestion would be to show weakness. She wouldn’t do it. She was the reason they were here, in danger every hour of every day because she refused to ignore her dreams. “Let’s go.”

  She started down the slope first. Small rocks skidded out from beneath her feet. Every time she planted her left leg on the down slope, another twinge of pain traveled up her spine.

  The men paused for a moment at the top of the slope. They didn’t think she could hear them, over her own scrabbling sounds, but her ears were keener than they knew. “She’s tough.” Sellis said.

  “Aye, tough as they come. That leg …”

  “You would never know that at this time yesterday she could hardly take a drink on her own.”

  “When we’re falling down with exhaustion, she’ll be leaving us behind. Shaming us.
”

  “She’s leaving us already,” Sellis pointed out. “We should catch up. This loose slope could be treacherous, and if she should lose her balance …”

  “Bad leg or no, she looks steady. If we fall trying to keep up with her, I’ll laugh.”

  “Laugh through the pain, you mean.”

  “Aye, for certain. It’s a long way to the bottom.”

  Long way or not, they made it without incident. Hiking across the valley floor was indeed easier, and after the long, steep descent, she was ready for easy. The ground was firm and even, the rocks big enough to be seen and avoided but not so large that they required major detours to skirt. Between the rocks and scrubby brush, cactus, and occasional patches of tall, brownish grass, they could see about halfway across the valley.

  They made steady progress. Here they wished again for kanks, as those huge insects could cover this sort of territory at a rapid pace. The sun pounded down upon them as it moved through the sky. On the hillside, cooling breezes had blown over them, but here in the valley no such relief presented itself. As they walked, even the shade seemed to dry up; at the valley’s fringes, runoff from the hills, during whatever infrequent rains came, nourished the plant life, but toward the valley’s center that tapered off until the plain became nothing but a hard, flaked crust of earth with rocks sitting on top.

  A little more than three quarters of the way across, Sellis drew up short and pointed to what appeared to be a jumble of boulders off to the south. “I don’t like that,” he said.

  “They’re just rocks, no?” Myrana asked.

  “I’m not so certain.”

  Koyt eyed the boulders, shielding his brow against the slanting sun. “There’s a fire pit in front,” he said. “Not burning now, but it’s there.”

  Myrana narrowed her eyes and peered at it. Koyt was right. Beyond the pit, a slanted boulder leaned on two others, and a dark hole might have been an opening into a cleverly disguised home. “Do you think someone lives there?”

  “A hermit, perhaps,” Sellis said. “I would expect any living in this valley to be closer to that spring, but it’s less than an hour away, perhaps well less.”

  “Should we hail him?” Myrana asked. Any member of a trading caravan had some experience with hermits, or good or for ill. Some of them sought out interaction with travelers passing through, while others guarded their solitude with fierce determination.

  “If he’s there—or she, I’ve encountered more than one female hermit—then he knows we’re here.”

  “Many I’ve seen are mad,” Myrana said. “And men are more likely than women to go mad, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Koyt said.

  “Maybe it has to do with how that madness is exhibited,” Sellis offered. “I’ve certainly run across some madwomen, too, but they seem to favor city life. It takes a special kind of insanity to make someone want to live alone like this, so far from everything.”

  “I don’t like it,” Myrana said. “Let’s keep going.”

  They moved on, uneasy now. The nape of Myrana’s neck tickled. Is someone watching us? she wondered. She, Sellis and Koyt marched forward, not talking, each lost in thoughts or worries.

  “Kalipher warned you!” a voice screeched. The speaker stood atop a boulder just ahead of them and to the east, perhaps forty paces from the travelers. They stopped. Sellis whisked his swords from their scabbards and Koyt snatched his bow from his shoulder and an arrow from its quiver in one smooth motion.

  “Warned us of what, old man?” Sellis demanded. “And who’s Kalipher? We’ve never seen you before, nor heard that name.”

  “Kalipher stands before you, and Kalipher warned you to keep out of his valley!” The hermit wore a long, gray robe—although, Myrana noted, it might not always have been gray, as it appeared to have been patched from time to time but never washed—and a cap of the same color that fit snugly across his brow but hung down past his shoulder, its end resting on his chest. His thin arms were spread wide, as were his bare feet. He had a long beard that had, if anything, received even less care over the past decade than the robe. The distance was too great to see all the detail, but Myrana thought there were twigs snarled in its tangled mess, and perhaps insects and small rodents as well.

  “You warned us of nothing,” she replied. “And we had no idea this was your valley. Why would you need all this land?”

  “Never you mind that, girl. Mayhap t’were not you, after all. Kalipher would have remembered a cripple. But you are intruders, the lot of you, and Kalipher don’t like intruders. Not one bit.”

  “We’re only passing through,” Koyt assured the hermit. “We’ll be gone in no time.”

  “After you have made liberal use of his spring, Kalipher has no doubt!”

  “We had thought to drink from it, but surely the three of us can’t deplete such a rich spring.”

  “Lies gush from your mouth as blood from a split skull! You’ve no idea how rich it is, unless you have been here before!”

  “We could see the band of greenery around it,” Sellis said. “From yon hills. To me that indicates a healthy flow.”

  “We seek no trouble, Kalipher,” Myrana said. The hermit appeared every bit as mad as she had feared. “We want only to cross the valley in peace, perhaps taste of the spring’s fresh water, and leave you alone.”

  “Mayhap you seek no trouble, cripple, but trouble you’ve found!” He clapped his hands together, performed a gesture, shouted some words Myrana didn’t understand. When he showed his palms again, a blast of intense heat blew toward the travelers.

  A patch of sparse grass near Myrana’s feet burst into flames. So did the edge of her sarami. She slapped out the fire, but Kalipher was already sending another blast their way.

  Koyt loosed his arrow at the hermit. Before it had covered half the distance, the hermit flicked his fingers at it and the arrow caught fire. It sailed on for another instant as a burning arrow, then charred into ash, lost its momentum, and drifted harmlessly to the ground.

  “Take cover!” Sellis said.

  Her pains and weariness forgotten, Myrana darted for the shelter of the nearest large rock. Kalipher shot another bolt of heat her way. It missed, and there wasn’t much around to burn, but a stray twig caught fire. Then she was behind the rock, breathing hard, wondering how to battle an opponent who couldn’t be touched.

  Koyt ducked behind a different rock, and Sellis sought shelter behind a fallen length of tree that had been there so long it had petrified. Koyt drew three arrows from his quiver, nocked the first, and fired it. In less than a heartbeat, he fired the second and then the third, the bowstring twanging so quickly that one sound still lingered on the air when the next drowned it out.

  None of the three found their mark; Kalipher crisped them all mid-flight.

  “Stones!” Myrana cried. “He can’t burn stones!” She selected a good-sized one and hurled it at the hermit. It sailed true, but fell short. Sellis picked up a larger, flat stone and side-armed it as one might a discus. Kalipher tried to deter it with his fiery blast, but it hurtled through, striking him in the ribs. He lost his balance and toppled from the boulder.

  While he was on the ground, Koyt fired another arrow. This one got closer before burning up.

  “Save your shafts!” Sellis called. “We’ll doubtless need more before we’re home again!”

  Myrana threw another stone, putting all her strength behind it. This one reached the hermit, but he batted it away, suffering, she hoped, a bruised hand in the doing. She ducked back behind her sheltering rock and cast about for another stone she could hurl that far. She needed another way. Casting stones would never hurt this wild hermit.

  “No!” Kalipher shouted as a huge tangle of vines with dozens of closed white flowers rose in front of him. “Villainy most foul!” He blasted at the flowers, causing some of them to blacken, smoke curling up from them. But others swiveled toward him and opened their petals. Reflective sap coating those
petals of the burnflower caught the sun’s light and shone it in concentrated form at the hermit. His gray robe smoldered in numerous places, then exploded in flames. The last she saw of him, he was running toward the shelter of his little rock home, smacking at the fire and screaming curses.

  “Where did that burnflower come from?” Sellis asked as she limped toward them.

  Myrana shrugged. “Perhaps he was somehow using its heat to attack us,” she speculated. “And caused it to manifest before him.”

  “Good an explanation as any I can think of,” Sellis said. “Let’s get away before he returns.”

  They started off once more, heading directly for the spring on the far wall. Before they had taken fifteen paces, Kalipher’s furious voice sounded behind them. “You haven’t seen the last of Kalipher!” he cried. “The next intruders in Kalipher’s valley will taste Kalipher’s true wrath, this Kalipher swears!”

  “Let’s make sure it’s not us,” Myrana said. “I’d as soon never see Kalipher again.”

  “I agree. There’s nothing here we’d need anyway,” Sellis said. He laughed—but he hurried his pace, just the same.

  2

  Siemhouk lounged on her pillows, chatting with three of her fellow—but lesser—templars, all as naked as she, when her brother came to the door. “Sister!” Dhojakt barked. “I would speak with you. Alone!”

  Siemhouk lifted her eyebrows, and the templars took her meaning. They rose, bade hurried goodbyes, and departed, squeezing through the door to avoid any physical contact with the monstrous form that her father insisted was related to her. He shifted his cilops-like lower half, on its dozens of short, pointed legs, to let them pass.

  He wanted something from her, otherwise he wouldn’t have pretended at politeness.

  “Come in, then,” Siemhouk said, showing her impatience. The templars had been boring, their chatter inane, their machinations and the ambitions they served petty. But then, few in Nibenay were her intellectual equals. Dhojakt, perhaps. Still, she hated talking to him if it meant having to look at him. His centipede’s legs twitched as he skittered into the room, hooked claws clicking on the floor. He was more human from the waist up, but that insectlike lower section protruding from his sarami was too unpleasant to look at. At least had the good grace to spend most of his time in the shadows.