City Under the Sand

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Farther?” Amoni almost whined. Perhaps she didn’t like the darkness. Aric wasn’t fond of it himself.

  He felt along the wall until he found another opening, with more stairs, leading down further. Above, they heard the crash of dune reaper warriors breaking through the bolted door, then the thumping about as they searched for the escaped Nibenese. But he kept going, silently, into the blackness, the others right behind. Each of them kept a hand on the next, as the dark was impenetrable.

  The stairs led down and down, eight steps, a small landing, a turn and then eight more. The deeper they went, the more convinced Aric became that they were going the right way. There was a vibration in his head, almost a song, growing stronger all the time.

  Then he realized that he could see a little, although they were far underground. They crossed a landing and at the bottom of eight more steps was a faintly glowing corridor of stone, the walls themselves somehow luminous.

  “Ahh!” Amoni said. It was the first vocalization any of them had made since hearing the reapers above them.

  “I think we’ve left our foes behind,” Aric said.

  “And left Kadya and the others to deal with them alone,” Damaric added.

  “I’ve no love for her sort of magic,” Amoni said. “But if anyone can defeat the dune reapers, it might well be her.”

  “While we’ve found what?” Ruhm asked. “Illuminated rocks?”

  “Unless I’m wrong,” Aric replied, “we’ve found what we were sent here for.”

  “The metal?” Damaric asked. “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” Aric said. “But we’re getting close.”

  They reached the bottom of the staircase. The corridor extended in both directions, faintly lit, as far as the eye could see. The walls, floor and ceiling were constructed of the same stone, the floor worn smooth as if from the passage of many, many feet over the centuries. More runes, like the ones on the door and others as well, were carved into the walls.

  Littering the floor were bone fragments. Here and there, whole bones stood out, but most had been stepped on, crushed, broken by feet passing through here over the span of years.

  “Ahh,” Aric said. “It’s some sort of battleground.”

  “Or abattoir,” Damaric added.

  “This must run beneath the entire breadth of the city,” Amoni said.

  “At least,” Aric said.

  “But which way do we go?”

  Aric listened to the humming in his head. He pointed toward the right, which he believed was the east. “This way.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Damaric said. “I’d hate to be lost down here.”

  “You have to trust me,” Aric told him. “The steel calls to me.”

  The others agreed, Damaric perhaps less happily than the rest, and they started in the direction Aric had indicated. They passed occasional doorways, most of those paved over with the same sort of stone. A few were open, and side tunnels led off in various directions, but Aric felt no pull to follow those. They kept to the main tunnel.

  After what felt like ages, they reached another doorway. Like so many they had passed, stone and mortar blocked it. But the vibration was so strong here, Aric was surprised the others couldn’t hear it. His whole body tingled, all his fine hairs standing on end. “Behind here.”

  “It’s sealed,” Damaric pointed out.

  “We need to unseal it.”

  “How?”

  Ruhm pushed past the others, taking Aric’s agafari-wood sword from him. “Like this,” he said. He started jamming the hard wooden blade into the mortar, chipping it away little by little. The others joined in, using whatever slender implements they had, attacking the mortar rather than the solid stones. Soon, Ruhm had chipped away enough mortar from one of the upper stones that he was able to shove his fingers through and get a grip on the stone. “Back away,” he said.

  The others complied, and he pulled on the stone, putting all his considerable weight into it. Mortar crumbled beneath it, and then the stone gave way, breaking loose several around it at the same time. They all reached into this larger hole and tugged together.

  Soon they could step through the doorway. On the other side they found a gargantuan cavern. The walls of the cavern must have been where the stone for the corridor came from, as they glowed with the same gentle luminosity.

  They were on a level slightly more than halfway to the cavern’s roof. A narrow stone staircase wound down, close beside a cave wall. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, stalagmites at the bottom reaching up to join them. In some places they met, forming columns. All of it was suffused with that soft glow. On each step, a different rune had been etched.

  All over the floor and on every rock shelf and outcropping were bones. Thousands must have been slaughtered here. Animals, monsters, people—there was no way to know what the bones had come from. They were everywhere.

  And the steel … the steel sang.

  From this height, it was a shapeless, formless mass, sitting on the cavern floor. But Aric knew what it was. More metal than he had ever imagined in one place, mined and smelted and shaped.

  “It’s here,” he said, his heart racing. “It’s really here, just as Nibenay said it would be.”

  Damaric pointed down at the hulking shapes. “That’s all metal?”

  “It is.”

  “Incredible.”

  Aric started down the stairs, almost at a run. “I know!”

  Excitement built in him with every step down, until he thought he would surely burst. The singing in his head was louder than ever, like a choir of a million voices.

  Then, on the way down, he spotted an almost whole skeleton, lying on a shelf of rock just off the staircase. He couldn’t make out what type of creature it had been—not quite human or elf, but something not too different, he believed. It was covered in cobwebs, and some of the brown bones had, over time, separated from the others. It, like everything else he had seen in this city, seemed impossibly ancient.

  Jutting from the skeleton’s bony ribs was a steel broadsword.

  Aric put down his wooden sword and leaned off the staircase as far as he dared. The tips of his fingers could just brush the sword’s hilt. But he couldn’t close them, couldn’t get a grip on it.

  The sword wasn’t new—it was as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—but it looked intact. The workmanship, as far as he could see in the faint glow of the rocks, was spectacular. He longed to hold it in his hand.

  Clutching his coin medallion in his left hand, he reached out again with his right and the sword hilt shifted, just enough to fall into his outstretched palm.

  He closed his hand around the sword, and the singing in his head ceased so abruptly he wondered if he had gone deaf.

  “Aric?”

  It was Ruhm. Aric could hear—and besides, he reminded himself, it wasn’t my ears hearing that anyway.

  “I’m fine,” Aric said.

  “Good. Had me worried.”

  “But look.” Aric drew the heavy sword from the skeleton, supporting his grip with his left hand to hold it steady. Its blade was long, gleaming in the rocks’ glow, and appeared to be in very good condition: old, with nicks and scratches, but still sharp and sturdy. “A steel sword, as fine as any I’ve …” His words trailed off, as the staircase seemed to turn inside out around him. The glow faded from the walls, and once again, Aric plunged into absolute blackness.

  XII

  GLIMPSES IN THE DARK

  1

  Aric saw an Athas that surely had never been: a lush, forested world, where a gentle breeze could set a million leaves quivering. Birds flew over the forests in great flocks, and animals left the shelter of huge trees to drink at the shores of rushing rivers. Wildflowers of every color carpeted the valleys and the wild meadows beyond vast cultivated fields. Glorious cities gleamed in vivid, golden sunlight.

  But as he watched—a tiny part of him protesting, aware that he was not truly present in those scene
s, but viewing them as if from the back of a high-flying Athasian roc—the peaceful world before him was riven by strife. He could not determine the source of the unrest, but in its wake forests burned and rivers dried up. People in those cities stared toward the skies in horror, and then the cities crumbled. Finally, as deserts spread across the beautiful, serene world he had glimpsed so briefly, that brilliant yellow sun dulled, then turned to the dark red color so much more familiar to him.

  And as if suddenly transported into Akrankhot itself, he saw a powerful, sun-bronzed man wielding a broadsword—I’m holding that sword, he thought, before the idea flitted away like a dried blade of grass in a heavy wind—battling what seemed to be an army of foul, depraved creatures. He slayed many but killed himself in the process.

  Aric felt the loss as personally as if the big man had been a close friend, and tears dampened his eyes even as the visions continued. In place of the mighty-thewed warrior, he saw the citizens of Akrankhot, trembling in fear of the powerful forces sweeping their planet, terror of a conflict between beings for greater than themselves. And there was something else, something dark and horrible, with too many limbs and tentacles and teeth, and on its twin tongues Aric could taste the blood of innocents, and—

  “Ungh …” Aric moaned and thrashed and blinked. Faces loomed around him, causing panic to well up in his chest. He tried to scrabble away, then saw that it was only Amoni and Ruhm, the closest things to friends he had.

  He was in the cavern beneath Akrankhot, on the staircase landing, a heavy broadsword weighing upon his chest.

  And something else was there, too; its psionic tendrils probing at Aric’s mind.

  2

  Aric jerked into a sitting position. “Are you hurt, Aric?” Amoni asked. “You fell, and then you were … dreaming, perhaps …”

  Aric closed his eyes, gripping the broadsword with both hands to draw as much strength from the steel as he could. He sensed all the other metal nearby, on the cavern floor—rods and posts and columns and bars of it, gold, lead, iron, steel, silver, copper, bronze—and he reached out with his psionic abilities and touched that, and for an instant the vision of a bygone time almost returned, but he fought it off. He needed to concentrate, to focus on summoning what energy he could from the steel and on blocking the unknown incursion into his mind. The cold, solid bulk of steel comforted him, made him strong.

  He turned his attention inward, where it seemed he could see several slimy tentacles oozing through cracks in his mental defenses. He took each in turn, pinching it off until the tentacle itself retreated, then disposed of the segments in an infinitely deep pit he imagined.

  Finally, the thing’s efforts ended. Aric was himself again, weakened by the experience, soaked with sweat that chilled him in these subterranean depths. But himself, just the same.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “But … that was strange.”

  “What happened?” Ruhm asked. “You were lost.”

  “Yes … wait, where’s Damaric?”

  “He went on ahead,” Amoni said.

  “By himself?”

  “I hope so. I don’t think there’s anyone else down here.”

  “Do you … feel anything strange? In your heads?”

  “Nothing in mine,” Ruhm said.

  “I don’t,” Amoni said. “What are you talking about, Aric?”

  Aric got to his feet. His head still swam, and the ground beneath him seemed unstable, shifting moment by moment. But an overpowering urge to get down the stairs filled him, to get to that metal. “Come on,” he said. He hoisted the broadsword and started down the steps.

  With every spiral of the staircase he grew stronger. The metal no longer sang to him the way it had, and the visions had already faded, like memories of some event that had happened to him years before.

  The cavern’s floor was uneven, but a path had been worn smooth between the bottom of the staircase and the great mass of metal. Before the metal, his hands resting against it, stood Damaric.

  Aric reached the bottom first and ran toward the looming bulk. He heard Amoni and Ruhm close behind.

  “Damaric!” Aric called.

  The soldier didn’t respond. Damaric just stood there, looking at the mound of piled steel. Aric shouted his name again, once again earning no response.

  In the gentle glow of the rock walls, the steel gleamed, its varied tints and hues reflecting colored light back at the observer. As he neared it, Aric felt a strange sense of familiarity, as if seeing home after a long absence.

  Damaric still hadn’t turned. Aric put a hand on his shoulder. “Damaric?”

  Now Damaric whirled about, his face a twisted mask of rage. He lashed out with a clenched fist. Aric, taken by surprise, raised no defense, and the fist caught him on the cheek. Aric crumpled to the cavern floor, dazed. The broadsword flew from his hands.

  “Damaric!” Ruhm shouted. “Why—”

  Damaric stepped past Aric and toward the goliath, spinning his singing stick in his hands. Its whirling, musical tones were loud in the quiet of the cave.

  Aric pawed the ground for the dropped sword. Amoni shouted at Damaric, but Ruhm had already dropped into a defensive crouch, raising his greatclub to counter the singing stick. Damaric attacked once, the stick flashing faster than the eye could follow. Ruhm blocked with the club. The stick swept upward from below. Ruhm got his club in place just in time, and the stick clashed against it, bounced off, came back toward Ruhm’s left. Ruhm tried to swing the club, but was a fraction of a second too slow, the club harder to wield than the slender stick, even with all his might. The singing stick hit Ruhm’s shoulder, drawing blood and driving the goliath to one knee. He swung the club in a great arc toward Damaric, but the soldier stepped back and the club whistled harmlessly past.

  Aric found the sword and regained his feet.

  He had liked Damaric. Liking anyone came hard for a half-elf, trusting harder still. But he had seen the slave soldier as a friend, and he didn’t want to hurt him.

  Damaric, however, was clearly no longer himself. He was trying to kill Ruhm, and Ruhm truly was a friend. Aric held the sword in both hands, ready to strike. “Damaric,” he said, giving the man one last chance.

  Damaric turned, singing stick moving so fast it was nothing more than a blur.

  And Amoni took advantage of that moment to charge in, her cahulaks swinging at the farthest extent of their rope. When the blades met Damaric’s neck, his head was sheared off, landing somewhere off the smoothly worn path. Damaric’s body sank to the ground, singing stick clattering and bouncing for almost a full minute before it stilled.

  3

  In the sudden silence, Ruhm stood up, holding his right hand over his injured shoulder.

  “What got into him?” Amoni asked.

  “Don’t know,” Ruhm said. “My thanks.”

  “I felt something too,” Aric said. “It tried to get into my head. I blocked it, but I guess Damaric couldn’t.”

  “I hated to kill him,” Amoni said.

  “You had no choice,” Aric assured her. “He would have killed us all if he could have.”

  She looked at the soldier’s fallen from. “All he wanted was to live free, if only for a day, before he died, right? I understand that desire completely.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Aric said. “Something else was in him, possessing him. Damaric would never have turned on us like that.”

  “What should we do with him?”

  “He’ll have to be brought out of here,” Aric said. “But not now, not by us.”

  “Why not?” Ruhm asked.

  “Because we need to tell Kadya about what we found,” Aric replied. “This is what we’re here for. The sooner we let her know where it is, the sooner it can be loaded onto the argosies and we can go home.”

  “Home has more appeal for some than for others,” Amoni said, glancing once more at Damaric. “At least here, on this journey, I have tasted from time to time the flavor of freedom.” She smiled. “
Besides, I was brought along to help with the heavy labor, so once we tell Kadya, then my real work will begin.”

  “Those dune reapers might be waiting,” Ruhm said.

  “If Kadya and the others haven’t defeated them by now, then we’ll all die here,” Aric said. “I say it’s time we find out.”

  4

  On the surface again, it was immediately apparent that Kadya had defiled the land with her magic. The road was littered with the corpses of insects, and what few hardy plants had tried to grow there since the shifting dune exposed part of Akrankhot to the sun had turned to ash.

  Amoni swore. “There are better ways,” she said. “Kadya doesn’t understand the forces she’s playing with.”

  “Or does,” Ruhm countered. “And doesn’t care.”

  “In either case, I see no reapers,” Aric said. “That’s something, anyway.”

  “Something, I suppose.”

  On the way back to the main avenue, they came across the corpses of several dune reapers, blackened as if burned by terrible fires. Amoni frowned at them as they passed by. “I don’t want to know how they died,” she said. “It’s too terrible.”

  “They would have killed us, given the chance.”

  “That’s in their nature,” Amoni said. “There’s nothing they can do about it. They have to feed their queen. And it’s in our nature to fight back, not to consent to being sacrificed. But we have minds that can overcome our instincts.”

  “You’re not saying we should have just let them kill us.”

  “I’m not,” Amoni said. “Just that if we’re to be better than unthinking beasts, we have to take into account the cost of our decisions.”

  Aric let the matter drop. He didn’t understand quite what Amoni was driving at. Most people hated defiling magic, as did he. But that hatred was a gut reaction—much, he supposed, the same as the instinct that drove dune reapers to hunt and to take their prey back to the nest to feed their bloated queen. Those few occasions he had seen defiling magic at work, he had been disturbed by the effect it had on living things around it—in the case of the halfling attack on the caravan, even sucking the remaining vestiges of life from wounded soldiers. He didn’t know enough of preserving magic to know, except through stories, how different it could be.