City Under the Sand

by Jeff Mariotte

  But that red mark glowed in the firelight like it was a sun, blazing away, taunting him.

  He couldn’t ignore it.

  Whatever the risk, he had to say something.

  “That mark on your face, sir. You’ve always had it?”

  Myklan’s hand drifted to the red spot. “All my life. I suppose I’ve forgotten about it. Except when someone reminds me.”

  Rieve stared at Aric as if he’d lost his mind. Perhaps he had. He avoided her gaze and pressed on. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he said. “When I noticed it, it reminded me of something. Something my mother told me, about my father.”

  “Aric,” Rieve said, leaning toward him. “What are you going on about?”

  “My father was a human, as I’m sure you know. Mother said that looking upon his face always reminded her of the rising sun. The same could be said of you.”

  “I suppose,” Myklan said uneasily. “But …”

  “Her name was Keyasune.”

  “A lovely name,” Myklan said. “I’ve never heard it before. I’m sure she was a fine woman.”

  “She was. Strong and courageous. She raised me alone, of course, because my father abandoned her the moment he learned she would bear him a child. The child of a human and a half-elf. She said he seemed drawn to her, but hated elves, and that being with her made him turn his hatred on himself.”

  “Your father had a problem,” Rieve said. “But it’s nothing to do with mine, Aric, so stop.”

  “I’m sorry, Rieve,” Aric said, meeting her gaze at last. He held up a hand toward her, as if he could calm her with it. “I need to say this.”

  “My daughter has a point, young man,” Myklan said. “Any problems you had with your parents don’t concern us now. We’ve problems of our own.”

  “So I’ve heard. Poor Pietrus, accused of murdering all those people.”

  “What?” Rieve said. She was about to explode with anger. Aric hoped she didn’t attack him, because it was hard enough to get through this without also holding her off.

  “But it wasn’t Pietrus, was it?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Myklan said.

  “I think you do, sir. I think you’re not just Pietrus and Rieve’s father, but mine as well.”

  “Aric, stop it!” Rieve cried. “That’s an awful thing to say!”

  Myklan took his feet, clenching his fists. “That’s utter nonsense, and I won’t hear it.”

  But Solyara rose as well, stepping between her husband and Aric. “Let him speak,” she said. Her tone was resigned, her manner firm.

  “You’ve always been drawn to elf women, haven’t you?” Aric asked. “It was an urge you couldn’t resist. You met one—Keyasune, my mother—and for a while you tried to pretend you could really be with one. But you were ashamed of that urge, ashamed of yourself for giving in to it, and when she told you that I was on the way, that was more than you could take. You hated elves, hated them and wanted them at the same time, and to learn you would be the father of someone—something—who was even partly elf … that was worst of all. So you left her and never let her see you again. She spent her life believing you had died. I’m glad she did, because it would have been worse to know that you lived but were so ashamed you couldn’t bear to be near her.”

  “Solyara, this is nonsense,” Myklan said.

  “I think we should all hear it,” she replied. “He’s right, you know. Myklan’s head turns whenever he sees an attractive elf woman, even to this day. He has always been attracted to them. You try to pretend you’re not, but there’s no denying it, my husband.”

  “But, Solyara—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please, Myklan, respect me. I knew about the one, all along. So did others among our friends; you weren’t half as clever as you thought. Once, years later, I even went to the market. I’d found out who she was by then. I went, bought a scrap of something from her, I don’t even remember what now. I do recall how excited she was to get an actual metal coin, as if it was something she’d never seen. I felt sorry for her—spending all that time with a wealthy nobleman, and yet so poor that a simple coin could thrill her so. It was more than I owed, but I let her keep it all. She showed it to her child, and—oh. Oh, no. Aric. I never knew about you—that her child was his.”

  Aric’s hand had gone to his medallion, hanging around his neck for most of his life. Her coin, Solyara’s. His father’s wife’s. He had a vague memory of the incident, though he’d been young, and no memory at all of what the woman in his vision had looked like. It could have been Solyara. In those days most human women looked the same to him. “This is that coin,” he said. “She never spent it.”

  “Oh, Aric, I’m so sorry.”

  Myklan had stopped protesting, and Aric wanted to change the subject. He swallowed back a bitter taste. “I don’t know how long it’s been going on,” he continued. “But the urge you felt, the urge you couldn’t deny, has stayed with you. Worse, perhaps, since I was born. You might not have known me, but you knew of me, you knew somewhere in Nibenay you had a child, born of a half-elf. That must have driven you mad. Yet still you couldn’t stop wanting elves, or hating yourself for wanting them.”

  “Aric,” Corlan said. “I think Rieve is right, you’re saying things you can’t prove, things that once said there’ll be no turning back from.”

  “I know, Corlan. And believe me, I wish I didn’t have to. But now Pietrus has been accused of Myklan’s crimes, and Myklan is letting his entire family suffer for what he’s done.”

  “What?” Rieve asked. She jumped to her feet, turned way from the circle, toward the second fire. Her shoulders shook with sobs. Corlan tried to comfort her, but she writhed away from his touch, burying her face in her hands.

  “Your desire for elf women turned into violence, didn’t it? You couldn’t be with them, and you couldn’t stop wanting to. So there came a day when you killed a human man who dared take what you wanted so badly. And you killed her. Because she saw you? Or just because of who she was? It probably doesn’t matter.”

  Myklan was shaking with rage. His face had gone white, except for that mark, and he was biting his lower lip so hard Aric expected him to draw blood. But he had stopped protesting.

  “And that made you feel better, at least for a time. But then the urge came again. Was is stronger this time? You satisfied it in the same way. In time, perhaps, the urge changed. You no longer burned with desire for those elf women, but for the desire to kill them, and the men with them.

  “Finally, you were seen, chased. But the people who chased you home couldn’t believe that Myklan of Thrace, esteemed member of the nobility, could have done such things. No, it must have been Myklan’s addled boy, Pietrus.”

  Pietrus was sitting across from Aric. His hands were over his ears, and he made a low-pitched, keening sound. Tears dribbled down his cheeks. Sheridia knelt by him, stroking his shoulders, but he didn’t seem to know she was there. He was the one Aric felt worst about in all this, and he was sorry he had started it while Pietrus was present. There had been no choice, though. Having come to the realization, Aric had to say something.

  “You were happy to let them think it. Happy to let your own family believe you had to flee Nibenay because Pietrus was accused. Perhaps you even let them think that maybe the mob was right, that Pietrus was guilty of those murders. Getting away from the city was the only solution, the only way to protect your son. But it wasn’t Pietrus you were worried about, was it? You were worried that someone would realize it was you all along.”

  “You were out that night,” Solyara remembered. “I didn’t see you come home, and you told me you’d been there for more than an hour when the mob started screaming outside. But you were winded, your cheeks flushed with effort. You had just come home, hadn’t you?”

  Myklan didn’t answer. He shook, and stared into the fire, and chewed his lip.

  “If our guard Bryldun were here, instead of killed in the desert by thos
e awful raiders, we could ask him,” Solyara went on. “But he’s not. Another death on your conscience, Myklan? How many is that?”

  “All right!” Myklan sank to his knees, folded over, pounded the earth with his fists. “Yes, yes, yes!” He loosed a great, anguished wail. “Yes, all of it, it’s true!”

  “Father!” Rieve cried through her own sobs. “No, Father! I won’t believe it!”

  “I’ve known for a long time that there was something wrong,” Solyara said. “That he hated elves, but couldn’t stop looking at them. That there was a fire burning somewhere deep inside him that I could never see, never extinguish. I didn’t know the extent of it, but I should have found out, I suppose. I was afraid to push too much, afraid of what I might find.”

  Myklan drew himself back to a seated position. His eyes were rimmed with red, and sand coated his face where tears had dampened it. “Yes,” he said, more composed now. “I’m sorry, Solyara. My Rieve, my Pietrus, I am so sorry. But it’s all true.”

  He pointed a quivering finger at Aric. “You … yes, I am your father. But it is not true that I abandoned you, although I admit, to my shame, that I did your mother.”

  “How can that be?” Aric asked.

  “You must have known, all these years, that you’ve had a secret benefactor. Someone looking out for your interests, interceding from time to time. Gifts, financial assistance. Your smithy …”

  “That was you all along?”

  “None other.”

  “I thought … never mind. I never dreamed it was my own father, doing those things.”

  “It’s true, boy,” Tunsall said, “that Myklan’s the one who recommended I commission Rieve’s sword from you. He spoke highly of your work.”

  “I had means,” Myklan added. “I knew you were there, knew your mother was gone. You needed help, and I was able to help. I never hated you, Aric. Keyasune, yes, by the end, but mostly myself.”

  The rest of it, Aric had figured out on his own, just from seeing the mark on Myklan’s face and knowing his history through the knife.

  But this … this came as a shock.

  More than that. He felt sick. He felt like he had been stabbed in the gut.

  He had told himself it was the Shadow King. If not him, then some wealthy stranger, who had taken an interest in him for reasons he could not fathom. There had never been any clue, any hint that it had been his own father doing those things.

  He wondered, if he had known that, if he would have found a way to refuse those gifts. Without someone’s interference—Myklan’s, as it happened—he might be a blacksmith’s apprentice. Instead, the shop’s owner had handed it over to him, without hesitation. Paid off, Aric had learned. Now he knew who had paid him. Myklan wasn’t particularly frightening—or wasn’t, unless to human men in the company of elf women—but he had plenty of wealth to spread around.

  He owed Myklan, it was that simple.

  He hated the man. The idea that Myklan was his father, and had left his mother in her time of need, and had murdered people through some bizarre compulsion, made him want to pluck his own eyes out so he wouldn’t have to see his closest friends staring at him. He didn’t want to look at his father. Hot tears stung his own cheeks, and he turned away from the others and swiped a hand roughly over his eyes.

  Myklan was a liar and a killer. Aric had killed, too—these last few days he had killed many, had lost himself in killing, come to think it was something he was good at. Was that inherited from his father?

  But Myklan was a liar and killer who had taken an interest in his son, albeit from a distance. Who had gone out of his way to help Aric. Could he be entirely hateful? He told himself it was necessary.

  That was a question Aric could not answer. Someday, perhaps. Not tonight. Not while he burned with rage.

  “It’s true, and Pietrus, I am sorry that you were blamed for my crimes. I never meant for that to happen. I tried to control myself—as Aric said, I tried to resist, but I just couldn’t. There’s something inside me, and it drives me to do these things, and if I could cut it out with a knife I would happily do so.”

  “You need to make amends,” Solyara said. “You can’t let them blame Pietrus for this. Or ruin everyone’s life because of what you’ve done. Bad enough you’ve ruined your own.”

  “I … I know,” Myklan said. “I will. When we get back to the city. While Sheridia is helping them battle … whatever it is. I’ll go to Djena, I’ll tell her … I’ll tell her everything. I swear it.”

  Aric took some comfort in that. Rieve and her family would be allowed to return to their home, their lives. There would be a scandal, of course. But if Myklan was willing to take the blame, then the others might get past it.

  The conversation tapered off. No one, Aric included, wanted to press it anymore. People settled down under blankets, between the twin blazes that held off the night but could do nothing against the darkness in men’s hearts. No one spoke to Aric, not even Ruhm. He was alone again, here in the company of those he’d considered friends. He had seen the truth and spoken it, that was his crime—that, perhaps, combined with being half-elf. Being the event that had, after all, driven Myklan to murder.

  He wasn’t surprised that no one came near him, no one accidentally brushed him as they settled under their furs. Before they reached Nibenay, if they did, the others would probably find some reason to leave the group, not to help him battle Kadya and Tallik, after all.

  It would be Aric’s fight in the end. One individual, trying to make a difference, despite the odds.

  Quiet sobs erupted here and there during the night, and Aric doubted anyone would get much sleep. But, to his own surprise, he drifted off quickly, while Corlan stood guard.

  3

  Corlan’s head drooped toward his chest. He was in danger of falling asleep before his turn on guard was over. The breakneck trip from Nibenay to catch Rieve, then captivity in the raiders’ fort and the wild escape—these things had sapped the strength from him. Activating his psionocus had taken more energy than he had expected, as well. But someone had to stay awake.

  He shook his head to clear it, then rose to his feet and walked around camp. Snoring, wriggling forms were barely visible beneath heavy layers of furs—an arm over here, a foot there sticking out, but for the most part his companions were well covered. The fires had diminished a little, and fuel in this part of the land was hard to come by, so he didn’t stoke them quite yet. He would before it was time to wake Amoni for her shift—the fires couldn’t be allowed to go out, or everyone would freeze, furs or no.

  Walking around the outside rim of the fires’ warmth, Corlan considered the night’s drama. Myklan, a murderer? Hard to believe. The man had confessed, though. And in truth, he had never known Rieve’s father that well. Solyara, yes, and Tunsall, and even Sheridia, who had often been busy at some pursuit or other that Corlan now knew probably involved her magic. Myklan kept to himself, though, when he wasn’t out overseeing the family businesses. On those occasions when Corlan had spent time with him, it often seemed that his thoughts were elsewhere, far away. Now Corlan realized, with a shiver, that at any of those times he might have been thinking about his killings, or dwelling on the lust for elf women that was the source of his self-loathing.

  One aspect of Myklan’s confession, though, came as good news to Corlan. He had recognized a growing attraction between Rieve and the half-elf Aric, and that, on top of his unthinking response to Rieve’s troubles, had made him worry that he was losing her. But if she and Aric were half-siblings, then Rieve wouldn’t act on that attraction, however strong it was.

  His feet crunched on the desert sands as he walked in circles, determined to remain alert. He didn’t know something else heard him, something that lived underground but could sense prey moving about on the surface.

  Then it exploded out of the ground, sending up a flurry of sand. Corlan heard it and cried out. He grabbed for a bone sword he had liberated from a fallen raider at the fort.
>
  Some of his companions awoke, lurching upright as the desert mastryial attacked.

  The beast was as long as Corlan was tall, a giant scorpion almost invisible until firelight glanced off its dark brown carapace. Its huge pincers clacked together and its tail arched over its back, the stinger at the tip bobbing as it scuttled forward on six legs.

  Corlan thrust at it with the bone sword, but it only glanced off the creature’s hard chitin, which was widely prized for its excellent armor. He shouted again, a wordless sound, and swiped at it again, holding off the advance of those fearsome pincers.

  The half-giant, Ruhm, charged forward wielding his greatclub. He gave a cry and swung the club down at the mastryial. The weapon smashed into the thing’s left pincer with a great cracking sound, and the mastryial gave a squeal of pain. Its other pincer darted faster than Corlan’s eye could follow, grabbing the club and wrenching it from the grasp of the mighty goliath. When the tail stabbed toward Ruhm, he had no choice but to leap backwards, out of its path, and the creature hurled the club far from the firelight. Ignoring the darkness, Ruhm dashed after it.

  Amoni, Aric, and Myklan arrived at Corlan’s side together, and a few steps behind came Sellis, his twin swords whistling in the dark, and Mazzax bearing his heavy-headed maul. Amoni’s cahulaks spun on their rope, and Aric jabbed at the beast with a sword of gleaming steel. Amoni closed with the mastryial first, her weapon biting into its carapace. It skittered backward, stabbing at Amoni with its long, segmented tail.

  Sellis sliced at that tail, but it whipped about so fast that his blades cut only air. Aric thrust his sword’s point into one of the segments. The mastryial grabbed at his blade with one of its pincers. Having seen what it did with Ruhm’s club, Aric tried to yank his sword away. The thing’s grip was too firm, and it tugged Aric forward, off his feet.

  The creature darted forward and back, its many legs carrying it in quick, jittery motions. Too many tried to fight it, and with Aric sprawled before it, Corlan bumped into Amoni and tripped over Aric’s legs. He landed on Aric’s back with a heavy thump, pinning Aric to the ground. The mastryial’s stinger hovered over them.