City Under the Sand

by Jeff Mariotte

  Rieve was inside a building. The mark on her face had faded, leaving only a faint bruise. The rope was no longer around her neck. But she was unhappy. Worry ridged her brow, tugged down the corners of her mouth. Aric wanted to tell her to have faith, that he was on his way, but she couldn’t hear him, and even if she could, he didn’t know that they would be able to successfully breach the fort’s walls.

  As he watched, she paced before a barred window. Aric brought the stone closer to his eye, looking for anything visible beyond the window. He saw a building with a patch of orange lichen on one wall, in a shape that reminded him of a dragon’s wing. Past that he saw the cliff that loomed behind the fort.

  “They’re near the back,” he said. “Close to the cliffs. Beside the building they’re in is another one, with lichen on it forming a shape almost like a scalloped wing.”

  “You see all that in the rock?” Mazzax asked.

  “Yes, it’s clear as day.”

  “Some rock,” Ruhm said.

  “It is that.” Aric dried it on his shirt and put it away, then drank the water from the bowl. No sense in wasting water. “Now all we need to do is figure out how to get into the back of the fort.”

  “I might have an idea about that,” Sellis said. “It’ll take some doing …”

  4

  Sellis and Myrana walked toward the fort’s front gate. They went slow, Myrana’s bad leg apparently giving her a great deal of trouble. At least, that was the effect she was going for. The truth was, these last weeks had been hard on her, and her leg was in considerable pain much of the time, so it wasn’t hard to fake.

  The guards atop the cliff shouted an alarm. From that point on, the guards in the towers watched them. She couldn’t imagine they were an interesting sight. Had she been alone, they might not even have bothered keeping an eye on her. But because she was with a man who was obviously a warrior, with twin swords jutting out above his shoulders, they didn’t dare not watch.

  When they were within hailing distance, one of the tower guards did just that. “You’d best turn around!” she called. “We’ve no interest in visitors here, nor patience for ‘em!”

  “We have business,” Sellis replied, and kept walking. Slowly. Keeping pace with Myrana, who struggled more with every step.

  “What sort of business?” the guard demanded.

  “The profitable sort,” Sellis said.

  The guard kept asking questions, and Sellis kept answering them with statements that only led to yet more questions. All the time, they grew nearer, and kept the attention of the tower guards and cliff guards riveted. Who are these people? they must have wondered. Where did they come from? And on foot? Are they mad?

  Sellis continued to evade giving any direct answers until they stood directly outside the front gate. “We’ve come to buy your prisoners,” he said then.

  “We have no prisoners,” a guard said.

  “I think you do.” Sellis took off a bag that had been slung to his back this whole time, and opened its top. The gold inside it fairly glowed in the sunlight.

  Of course, the bag didn’t exist, and neither did the gold. They were both magical illusions Sellis had created.

  But the raiders didn’t know that. Any who had become disenchanted with the spectacle of their approach were once more riveted to the scene.

  “You have four men and three women, of a noble family,” Sellis said. “You’re holding them for ransom, presumably. We’ve come to pay that ransom.”

  “What’s to keep us from killing you, taking your gold, and keeping the captives?”

  “Us,” Sellis said.

  That answer earned a roar of laughter from the assembled raiders. “You?” one asked. “Against all of us?”

  “You could try us,” Myrana said. “Perhaps you’ll have better luck than the last army we fought.”

  More laughter. The taunts continued, but no raiders ventured through the gate. Myrana and Sellis held their ground, trying to negotiate for the Thrace family’s release with people who had no interest in negotiating.

  Which, after all, was the whole idea.

  The others, Aric, Ruhm, Amoni and Mazzax, had left their hiding place first, striking far to the west and then working their way back along the base of the cliffs. There, the guards on top of the bluff would have to lean out to see them. Tower guards might have spotted them, but by the time they were in view of the towers, everyone was watching the strange couple’s slow procession toward the gate.

  5

  In this way, moving quietly, the four companions made it to the base of the wall, where it abutted the cliff’s face. The hard part would be getting over the wall. Since they had no ladder or means of making one, they scaled the cliff, knowing they would be visible from the towers as they did. Myrana and Sellis kept the raiders occupied, though, and none so much as glanced their way. From his position on the cliff, Aric studied the buildings nearby until he spotted the one with the lichen patch he had seen in the pebble. Then he pointed out the building next to it, in the right place for the view through Rieve’s window.

  “That’s the one we want,” he said quietly. When they had all identified the right one, they dropped one by one over the wall and into the fortress.

  Aric had barely touched down when he heard a voice shout, “That’s him!”

  One of the raiders who had been among those who first captured them was glaring at him and drawing a steel short sword. A new cut traced a line from the raider’s left shoulder almost to his belly; earned in the battle against the thri-kreen or the villagers, Aric guessed, and he was anxious to taste vengeance for it. Another raider had been walking with him, carrying a pike. Both raiders ran toward Aric, shouting an alarm as they came.

  This wouldn’t be as easy as Aric had hoped.

  At least his new sword would finally be tested.

  He whipped it from its scabbard. The blade sung in the air as Aric slashed back and forth, enjoying the feel of it. The swordsman reached Aric first, running with his sword held out before him as if Aric would just stand there and let it pierce his chest.

  Instead, Aric waited until the raider was in mid-stride, not quite balanced, and swung his blade into his, from the side. The blow staggered the man. Aric followed up with a lunging thrust, which the man only just parried. The raider took a couple of steps forward, more careful ones now, as Aric recovered from the lunge. The blades clashed together, lightly, each man feeling for the other’s weaknesses. The raider was strong, but so was Aric. And Aric’s blade was a full foot longer than the other man’s.

  The other raider tried to intervene with his pike, but Ruhm’s club bashed the weapon away and then, on the return swing, crushed the raider’s skull. He wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

  But more raiders were on the way, summoned by the shouts. Ruhm and Mazzax took up positions at the end of a building, ready to fight anyone who came from the front of the fort. Amoni went to the other end, in case raiders came that way.

  The swordsman was better than he had seemed at first. Even with his short blade, he parried Aric’s attacks and kept up his own. Two more raiders came up behind him, taking their turns thrusting at Aric and swinging an axe at him, and then Aric was holding off three. They grunted and cursed, and he ignored them as best he could. The raiders had only to delay them long enough, and they would be surrounded, with no hope of getting Rieve and her family out safely.

  If not for that urgency weighing on him, Aric would have enjoyed the contest. He had to end it quickly, though, or lose his life here in a raiders’ fort. He could hear his friends engaged with other opponents, so there would be no help from those quarters.

  “Rieve,” he shouted, since their presence had already been given away. “Rieve, it’s Aric!”

  So distracted, the first raider landed a blow against him. The short sword raked across his left thigh, drawing blood. Sudden, searing pain brought Aric back into the fight. He backstepped, brought his blade down against the other man’s. He s
lashed at the raider’s collarbone, but his move was blocked, and the two blades ground together, frozen in place for the moment, the other two closing in for the kill.

  First blood drawn, and it was his own. Not exactly the progress he hoped for.

  6

  When we’re free,” Rieve was saying as she paced a groove in the dirt floor, “I want to raise an army. I want to come back here and dismantle this place, stone by stone. People like this, these raiders, have no place in a decent world.”

  Corlan sat on the floor, his back against a corner, knees up with his arms resting on them. He lifted his head. “You might have forgotten where we are,” he said. “I live on Athas, in the city-state of Nibenay, so I’m not sure what a decent world is.”

  “You know what I mean!” Rieve shot back. “We’ll never have a decent world if people are allowed to behave like this.”

  Her grandmother patted Rieve’s shoulder. The old woman’s eyes were filled with that calm acceptance that never failed to lighten Rieve’s mood. Her face was lined, her hair silver, but her back was straight, her jaw firm, and she remained a rock of solidity in Rieve’s often turbulent life. “This is difficult for us all,” she said. “Nobody likes to be victimized like this, to be held against our will.”

  “How do you stay so calm, then?” Rieve asked. “Why aren’t you spitting mad?”

  “I suppose I just try to take the longer view. The more spiritual view, in some ways. Things happen in life that are beyond our control. Many of them are good things, and others bad, or at least that’s how we perceive them at the time. Sometimes, later on in life, our view changes, and we realize those things we thought were awful might not have been so bad after all. Perhaps they showed us new directions to grow in. Perhaps they slowed down the pace of life and allowed us to examine our inner selves in some new way.”

  “That makes some sense, I suppose. But this? How can this be anything but horrible? Waiting out the rest of our lives in some fortress prison until these thugs decide to kill us? That can’t be good.”

  “I’m not saying it is, necessarily. Certainly it’s bad from our immediate viewpoint. And it’s possible, of course, that you’ll do exactly what you say—get out of here, put together an army, and come back to wipe this place off the planet. That would be a good result from a bad situation, don’t you see? The pain you’re undergoing now would lead, eventually, to you doing something for the betterment of everyone.”

  Rieve hadn’t thought of things that way, had given no consideration to the idea that anything good could grow from this experience. Of course, for that to happen, first she had to get free somehow. Then she had to be able to access the family fortune, or earn a new one of her own.

  But even that, she realized, would be something she had never imagined doing, that she probably wouldn’t have thought of, had it not been for the raiders. To amass a fortune big enough to hire an army, she would have to provide some service or goods that others wanted to buy. In doing so, she would be filling some need.

  Grandmother was right. Good could grow from the worst situations, if one only looked at things the right way.

  It didn’t make her glad they had been taken captive, but it made her not hate the experience with quite the white fury she had just minutes ago. Maybe there was something she could learn, about herself, her family, Corlan, or the world. She vowed to keep her heart open to that possibility, to observe and take in events as they occurred, rather than waste all her energy resenting them.

  She was about to thank Grandmother for the advice when she heard muffled cries outside. “Something’s going on out there,” Corlan said, springing up from his corner and rushing to the window. Rieve joined him there, gripping flaking, rusted iron bars and straining to hear. There were more shouts, then what sounded like fighting, the clang of steel against steel.

  “Probably just a bunch of drunken raiders brawling,” Father said.

  “I don’t know,” Corlan said. “I don’t hear any laughter, and very few curses. Mostly it sounds like serious combat.”

  Rieve kept listening, hoping for any clue.

  And then she heard her name.

  “It’s Aric!” she said. “He’s come for us!”

  “How did he know where we were?” Father asked.

  “I gave him a pebble that Grandmother gave me,” Rieve said. “It was meant to be for Corlan, but … well, you know.” She didn’t want to torment Corlan further about his first reaction to the news of their leaving, and why. He was sorry, he had ultimately made the right decision, and she was content to leave it at that. “It showed him where we are.”

  “And we doubtless left a clear trail,” Mother added. “So many raiders, in addition to us, could hardly have done otherwise.”

  “We’ve got to let them know we’re in here,” Rieve said.

  “We need to do more than that,” Corlan said. “If we heard the fight, the raiders have heard it too. Aric and his friends will be overwhelmed.”

  “Then we need to help them,” Grandfather said. “They came to help us, so we can do no less. Sheridia?”

  Grandmother glanced at the thick wooden door, barred from the outside, that held them in the small, dirt-floored room. “There might be something I can do,” she said.

  “Whatever you can,” Grandfather said. “And now would be a good time.”

  “I can help too,” Corlan said. “When they captured us, they took all my belongings, but they all came to the fort with us. Which means that somewhere out there is my psionocus.”

  “You have a psionocus?” Father asked. “With you?”

  “Well, close by someplace. I shouldn’t have to be able to see it to activate it. I only have to be able to concentrate.”

  “Can it really help us?” Rieve asked.

  “It might. Just let me focus on it. And I have to deserve it. That’s what Tenavry said. ‘Deserve every gift.’ ”

  He sat in the corner again, closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Rieve supposed he was conjuring up an image of the little beast he had told her about when he sculpted it.

  “Focus fast,” Grandmother said softly. She had turned to face the door, and she spoke words in a language Rieve didn’t know, moving her hands in a strange pattern at the same time. After a few moments, she whispered, “Bang on the door.”

  Mother was nearest the door, so she thumped on it with her fists.

  “Quiet in there!” a guard shouted. “Don’t think that—”

  Grandmother made a yanking motion with her hands, and there was a louder thump on the outside of the door. The first guard released a wail of terror, and a second one’s voice yelled, “What have you done to him? Let him go!”

  “We’ve done nothing!” Grandmother called. “Any problem he has is of his own making!”

  “What’s going on out there?” Father asked.

  “I believe he’s stuck to the door,” Grandmother said. Her voice had never sounded sweeter.

  Someone on the outside pounded on the door, writhing against it and screaming, “Get me off! Get me off!”

  Then the bar fell from the door. Before it could be replaced, Rieve and her father rushed the door and it swung out. They bowled over one guard, and the other was still pressed flat against the wood, crying for help.

  The guard on the ground tried to scramble to his feet. Grandmother spoke some more words and made another gesture, and a cloud of dust from the dirt road blew up into his face, filling his eyes and mouth. He started coughing and spitting, and, blinded by the dust, he fell back again. “Come on,” Grandfather said. “We’ve got to find Aric and the others!”

  “Wait!” Rieve ran back into the room that had been their prison. Corlan was still there, sitting in the corner, eyes squeezed shut, hands undulating slightly as if floating on some wafting breeze. “Corlan, let’s go!” she shouted. “Corlan!”

  Corlan didn’t move.

  7

  The more he fought, the more Aric’s sword fed him. At first he thoug
ht he was imagining it. But the longer he did battle, the better he felt. Stronger. Whenever his blade made impact with other steel, he felt a shock up to his shoulder, as he expected. After a while, he realized that those shocks were different from the ones he experienced when the blade struck wood or bone or stone. Those hurt, tiring him. But steel on steel—those gave him more energy, not less. They eased the ache the other ones caused.

  Not only that, but regardless of what his sword touched, just the very act of holding it, of moving it through the air, seemed to strengthen and energize him. The steel was him, and he was the steel, and this was what he was made for.

  Aric broke through the first raider’s defense and ran him through, the sword slicing clean and not stopping until the cross guard slammed into the man’s belly. Putting his left hand flat against the man’s chest, Aric withdrew the sword. Thanks to the fuller groove he had cut in the blade, it came away easily, without the suction that sometimes occurred. The raider fell away, and Aric swung the blood-slicked blade up to block an axe blow.

  From that point, things grew ever more chaotic. Aric caught the obsidian axe head on his hand guard, twisted and flicked his wrist, and wrenched it from the wielder’s hand. He snapped the blade right to left and the razor-edge point sliced the raider’s throat so neatly that the man didn’t know he was hurt for several moments, until blood dribbled down his chest. Then he screeched and put his hands to his neck, and the wound opened up. Another raider sliced at Aric with wrist razors, three-bladed weapons attached to his arms. Aric held him off for a bit, finally slicing up into his right arm, severing it below the elbow. The raider cried out, tried to nestle his damaged arm, and stabbed himself in the biceps. Aric ended the man’s misery with a swift thrust to the heart.

  More raiders filled the space between alley and building. Aric lost himself in battle. Bleeding from a score of cuts, he fought like a whirlwind, his new sword flashing this way and that, blocking an attack and slicing flesh in the same motion. He battled dwarf and dray, mul and goliath, elf and man. Somewhere along the way he ceased having to think about what he was doing and simply acted, as if possessed of a wild nature born to the blade.