City Under the Sand

XIII Night Travels

The man had walked to the elven marketplace. For days and days, he had kept his distance. He had started to feel stronger, better able to control the impulses that had led him there so many other nights. For the first few evenings, after the time he had almost been seen, he had stayed at home, surrounded by family, and told himself that this was all he needed. All he wanted.

For several nights after that, he knew he had been wrong. He wanted what he wanted. It was wrong, he knew that too, but he couldn’t help the wanting. All he could do was not act upon the desire. That demanded strength of him, only strength. He was a strong person. He could do it. He could want, and deny himself, at the same time.

Having arrived at that realization, he had been better. For the next days and nights, the elf women and their human companions had barely entered his mind. When he did think of them, it was only to dismiss the idea of acting again. The acts he had committed, that he still wanted to commit, simply weren’t that important to him anymore. His family, that’s what was important. And to have one was to resist the other. If he gave in, returned to the bazaar and watched once again for elves and humans to go together into the dark recesses of the Hill District, then he might lose his family. If he kept his family, it would only be by losing his once-unstoppable lust to kill.

For three days and nights, he had believed himself cured. But then, he had chanced to see an elf female on the street, beautiful, tall and rangy, dressed in attire that showed off her curves and her long legs and her wild, unkempt hair, and he had looked at that face, a face that spoke of pure animal sensuality, and he had known he was not cured at all. He was as lost as he had ever been.

Since then, he had come to the marketplace each evening, before the day’s heat had entirely dissipated. This was when the elf females could show off what they had to offer, when night’s bitter cold had not yet forced them to wrap themselves from head to toe. This was the time of day when the bazaar became a marketplace of flesh as well as of goods.

On this night, a dry, chill wind tore through the alleyways, beating the market’s canopies like drums. The man watched as elf and half-elf women strutted and displayed, and males—human, elf, and other races as well—made their selections and went off with them.

His fingernails dug into his palms. His mouth was dry, his lips bruised from being chewed on. He wanted to act, to strike like a serpent of retribution. Of justice.

But he couldn’t. He didn’t dare. He had risked too much just coming back here. To fall back into that old pattern would invite disaster.

Back home, the other members of his family went about their evening’s pursuits. That’s where he belonged.

With one last look back at a particularly striking half-elf woman, he spun on his heel and stalked toward home.

The first night out, Aric thought the cold would surely kill him. In Nibenay, he had shelter at night. There were those early days, after his mother’s death, when he had been on his own, but even then he’d always managed to find some nook or hole to escape night’s full brunt. And since reaching adulthood, he’d had the shop, its forge heating it excessively by day but keeping the interior pleasant at night. On the long journey to Akrankhot, there had been campfires and the shelter of the argosies.

Out in the open desert, however, there was no shelter. The temperature started dropping as soon as the sun went down, and once the stored heat fled the desert sand and the nighttime winds howled, every step was agony. They had surreptitiously carried skins of water and their furs and leathers, the same things that had provided relative comfort on the road, from the argosy to a building near the edge of the city. Myrana and Sellis had their own things, carried with them since they had left their caravan. But even they had not tried to travel at night.

As soon as the sun went down, while the others gathered for the evening meal, Aric, Ruhm, and Amoni joined Myrana and Sellis and struck out into the desert. They didn’t know when Kadya might notice they were gone—possibly not until morning. Before that happened, they needed to cover as much distance as they could. Kadya might send a search party after them. It would not be a large one, as she wouldn’t want to spare the laborers. And since the assumption would be that a nighttime trek across the desert would surely kill them, the party would not look hard, or for long.

That was their hope, at any rate. Aric knew that Kadya’s mind was capricious, that she might decide on nothing more than a whim that there was no goal more important than finding them and destroying them, or else imprisoning them and taking them back to face Nibenay’s justice. For all he knew, her magic, or Tallik’s, might allow her to seek them out from the comfort of her own fireside.

So he trudged on, even though he was sure his blood would freeze in his veins. The bits of flesh exposed to the air, around his eyes so he could see where he was going, had gone numb, but not before giving him the feeling of having daggers driven into his brain. The fur over his nose and mouth had frozen where his exhalations had dampened it. His extremities screamed with pain, his limbs protested every effort demanded of them.

Once during the night he saw streamers of light in the sky that illuminated people he had once known: his mother, customers from her stall in the marketplace, children he had played with, even Rieve and her grandfather. They were huge, spread across the sky from horizon to horizon, and he was walking toward them. It wasn’t until Ruhm slapped him and shook him into consciousness that he realized he had been hallucinating.

He touched the scar in his eyebrow, but his hand and face were both numb, so he didn’t feel it. “Why did you hit me?”

Ruhm pointed toward the others, off in the distance, silhouetted against starlight on the top of a low ridge. “We’re over there. You were wandering off by yourself.”

Aric pointed toward the sky, but the streamers were gone, and so were the people. “I was … I was seeing things, I think. My mother was there. Rieve. Other people I’ve known. I was walking toward them.”

“Walking toward the dead,” Ruhm said.

“Rieve’s not dead!” Aric protested.

“You would be if I hadn’t noticed you weren’t following behind.”

Aric understood his point. He would have become hopelessly separated. They never would have found him in the dark, and by morning his trail might have been erased. If they spent time looking, they all might have been caught by Kadya’s soldiers. “Thank you, Ruhm,” he said. “It’s … it’s just so cold out here. I don’t know if I can go on.”

“Must,” Ruhm said simply. He led Aric to the rest. They huddled together for a few minutes, sharing body heat none of them had to spare, and then continued.

He didn’t think he had ever been so happy to see the sun rise.

After sunrise, they risked sleeping for a couple of hours. Then they started out again. They killed a greater boneclaw that day, providing them sustenance, although they could not make use of its carapace and had to leave it behind.

Every time they reached a high point, they stopped and checked their back trail. If Kadya had sent pursuers, they were not yet in view. They didn’t dare follow the path they’d taken to Akrankhot from Nibenay, because Kadya and her party would doubtless take that same route home.

Late in the day, they narrowly escaped notice by a monstrous sand worm, watching covertly as it slithered and burrowed and humped its way across the desert. Ruhm wanted to tackle it, but the others argued that they couldn’t carry its meat, tasty though it might be, in addition to that of the boneclaw they already had. And a sandworm was a far deadlier foe than a boneclaw. Should the five of them engage it, every likelihood existed that some would perish in the trying.

So the days went. Walking, always walking, under a sun that pounded down without mercy. After that first night, no one even suggested continuing to hike in the darkness. Their route took them through vast, sand-filled valleys and over the rocky ridges intersecting them. The creatures of the desert were either predators or prey. They fought when they had to or when hunger spurred them on, and hid when necessary. The journey was neither glamorous nor the stuff of heroic ballads. It was long and arduous, but it had to be done.

Amoni, Aric noticed, seemed out of sorts. When they fought the boneclaw she was right there with them, even delivering the killing blow. But at other times, when making camp for the night or deciding on a route, she was quiet, doing what someone told her but taking no initiative. Once when Aric and Myrana were filling skins at a spring they had found, high up on a narrow shelf of rock, Amoni stood nearby watching but didn’t offer to hold any of the skins even when they threatened to fall over the side. Finally, Aric said, “Amoni, could you grab these before they fall?”

“Of course,” Amoni said. She picked them up, but seemed not to be aware that she could have simply done so, rather than waiting to be told.

That evening, he took her aside and mentioned it.

“You’re right,” she said. She looked away from him, at the streaks in the olive sky where the setting crimson sun painted it. “I am accustomed to doing what I’m told.”

“But you’re nobody’s slave now. You’re free.”

“That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”

“Only you have to act free. Aren’t you pleased to be owned by no one but yourself?”

She picked up a pebble, turned it over in her fingers, gazing at it as if it held secrets only she could detect. “It frightens me.”

“Why?”

“You’ve never been a slave, Aric. I can’t expect you to understand. I’ve lived their life according to someone else’s rules. It’s terrifying to realize that suddenly the only rules are my own. I … I am trying to accept my freedom. But at the same time, as long as you’re all here with me, often it’s easiest to just let old habits take over. I know you don’t own me. And I’m not saying that you act as if you do. It’s only me … acting as if you do. Acting as if I need you to tell me where I should stand or sit, what I should look at or not look at, what I should think.”

“They tell you what to think?”

“They try. That rarely works.”

“Well, you’re free now. Don’t forget it, and don’t let us spoil it for you.”

The next morning, Aric rose at dawn, starving. It had been days since they’d killed any prey, and their food stores had depleted severely. They had tracked a lirr pack for hours the evening before, but when darkness came and they lost the trail, they’d had to give up. Aric sat up, shoved off the skins he slept beneath. Ruhm, Sellis and Myrana were in camp, Myrana sleeping still, but Amoni was gone. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Gone when I awoke,” Ruhm said. “Hour, little less.”

“Are there tracks?”

Ruhm pointed to some, shallow depressions already being filled by blowing sand. They led away from camp and into the distance, but not in the direction they had been traveling. Not toward Nibenay.

“Would she simply leave us behind?” Myrana asked, sitting and rubbing her eyes.

“I … I don’t know.”

“She’s a slave, right?” Sellis reminded them.

Aric remembered her lack of initiative. She was accustomed to taking orders, not to doing for herself. The entire time they had been on the trip, he didn’t remember her ever coming up with an original idea. She was good at battle, good at self-preservation. She was strong and could carry great weights, in spite of her back injury. But when it came to making her own decisions, she had no experience. She had never had to do it. “She is. But she hoped to be free, and to live that way the rest of her life.”

“Apparently she’s free now,” Sellis said.

“She was free the minute we walked away from Akrankhot!” Aric snapped. “At least as far as I was concerned.”

“Perhaps she didn’t feel free, then.”

“Well, I wish her good fortune.”

“I wish she hadn’t abandoned us. We may yet have need of her.”

“I wish it too,” Myrana said. “I like her company.”

“As do I,” Aric said. He crossed his arms over his chest, but his momentary anger was made less dramatic by the loud rumbling of his stomach.

“Today we find game,” Ruhm said.

“We had better,” Aric agreed. They turned to the business of packing up their things.

But just as they were ready to depart, a figure appeared on the horizon, something with what appeared to be a massive head and shoulders on a body so slender it seemed it couldn’t support all the weight there.

It took another ten minutes before they were able to recognize Amoni, longer still before they could make out what she carried across her shoulders. It was a gray-skinned lizard with a colorful tail and a bright membrane around its neck—a lirr that must have weighed at least two hundred pounds.

“There are more,” Amoni said when she reached camp. “But I could only carry the one.” She ducked her head and heaved it from her shoulders into the dirt.

“You went off by yourself?” Aric said.

“I knew they were out there. We were hungry.”

“You saved our lives!” He went to Amoni and hugged her, hoping someone else would start cleaning and cooking the lirr while he did. Luckily, that thought had occurred to Sellis, and he was already busy. “I am so hungry.”

“I know we’re in a hurry,” Myrana said. “But next time we’re running low on food perhaps we should devote ourselves to finding more before we’re out completely.”

“There’s so much here that perhaps we won’t run out again,” Aric said. He knew even as he spoke the words that they were overly optimistic.

“We’ll run out,” Sellis said. He glanced at Ruhm, but he didn’t need to point out how much the goliath consumed on any given day.

“I suppose,” Aric said. He could cover the distance to Nibenay faster alone—faster even than the trip out, with the mekillots pulling the wagons at their slow but steady pace. Although only half-elf, he had still inherited some of the elven ability to run fast and with great endurance. Ruhm, with his long legs, could keep up with him for a while, but Aric would outpace him over any distance. And Myrana slowed the group down considerably.

But alone and on foot, the likelihood that Aric would survive the trip lessened considerably. It was not, he supposed, impossible for a solo journeyer to travel from point to point on Athas. But it was risky, and all the more so for someone who had not, until recently, ever left his native city.

No, his best hope was in staying with the others, praying that their head start meant they would reach Nibenay before the demon-possessed templar did.

If they didn’t, then they might never return to Nibenay at all. Aric had no way to know what Tallik, unbound and possessing a practitioner of defiling magic might do, but he imagined it would be violent and destructive. He had, in fact, wondered if the vision he had believed to be of the distant past had also showed the future. Although the Athas he knew was nowhere near as lush and serene as the one that had apparently once existed, it could still be unsettled, its institutions overthrown, whatever fragile peace existed shattered in an instant.

And from the sensations he had felt—when Tallik had tried to enter his own mind, and when he had touched Kadya’s—he had no doubt that the demon’s essence was the purest evil.

Evil, and a savage hunger, left to fester beneath Akrankhot for centuries.

It sounds as if you’ve been everywhere, Myrana.”

They were lounging around a campfire. It was the night of Amoni’s kill, and their bellies were full. The day’s progress had been hampered by a wrab attack, three of the bloodsucking winged serpents hunting together, and although the comrades had defeated the creatures, most of them had suffered at least one bite. In the late afternoon they had spotted an oasis in the distance, and they had pushed on through the gathering dusk until they reached it and ascertained that it was safe to stop at. Filling themselves and their skins with fresh water, they made camp a short distance away. A fire, fed by downed branches and fronds from oasis trees, held off the night’s cold.

Myrana and Aric sat close together, and she had been telling him of her travels with her family’s trading caravan. “Not really,” she said. “I have seen much of the Tablelands, it’s true. But nothing beyond those, and there is much else to the world.”

“I suppose. It’s just that when you’ve never been anywhere, like me, even a few journeys seem like a lot.”

“You’ll find more adventure, Aric.”

“Do you think so?”

“I sense a need in you. Perhaps one that’s just been awakened, but a powerful one just the same. You have spent your life in one place, but now that you’ve tasted the outside world I don’t think you’ll stop exploring it.”

“You might be right.” That simple fact meant more to him than she could have known. He had his small circle of acquaintances in Nibenay, but most strangers he met were off-putting, distrustful of half-elves. For someone to accept him so readily—and not just accept him but seemingly to understand him—was a rare occurrence indeed.

Rare, and wonderful.

He was about to say something else when a distant rumbling sound caught his attention. “What’s that?”

“Sounds like a storm,” Sellis said.

“A rainstorm?”

Sellis and Amoni were on their feet, peering into the darkness. “That’s what it sounds like.”

Aric sprang up and gripped Myrana’s hand, helping her stand. Real rainstorms, like true friends, were so uncommon that he remembered every one he had experienced.

“Do you think it’ll reach us?”

“It seems to be headed this way.”

Aric still had Myrana’s hand clutched in his. She squeezed. “Ready to get wet, Aric?”

“I can’t wait.”

He didn’t have to wait long. The storm still sounded as if it was some distance away, but without warning, drenching water flooded down from above. The campfire guttered and went out. Aric and the others were instantly soaked, head to foot. For a few moments, the water was refreshing. Aric tilted his head toward the sky and opened his mouth, letting it run down his throat. But soon, with the sun having long since set and the night’s chill settled in, the combination of the fire’s absence and wet skin and clothing left him freezing.

At the same time, his body seemed to be rebelling from within, as if all the moisture inside him was trying to push out through his flesh. Already dimpled from the cold and wet, he saw his veins swell his skin, pores opening, liquid starting to seep out.

“It’s not a storm!” Sellis cried. “It’s a beast!”

“What manner of beast?” Aric yelled. He had to scream to be heard over the pounding downpour.

“A rain paraelemental beast!” Myrana shouted back.

The rain, or what had seemed at first like rain, passed on, but that only meant that the beast itself had reached them. It rose in the moonlight to a height of almost twenty feet, looking like a mobile, sentient waterfall, spray curling where it touched the ground.

But an ordinary waterfall didn’t have a sinister purpose, or roam about the desert. A rain paraelemental sucked up whatever moisture it could find. It had to have been summoned by a worshipper, then escaped his control, been released, or destroyed its summoner. The beast skirted around them and went to the oasis, giving the traveler’s a moment’s respite. Aric was shivering uncontrollably. They all were, he saw. At least his skin was no longer oozing, for the moment.

“It’ll be back,” Sellis said. “As soon as it drains the oasis.”

“How do we fight it?”

“I don’t know that we can.”

Ruhm grabbed up his club without waiting for the thing to come back. They had camped far enough from the oasis to allow other creatures who might want its water to approach it without having to go through them, but near enough to make use of its pool in the morning before they moved on. Ruhm ran toward it, and when he reached the traveling waterfall, he swung his huge weapon at it.

Aric, Amoni, Sellis and Myrana followed Ruhm, and Aric had almost reached him when the club struck the water. The water buckled under the blow, but then straightened again. A jet shot out, hitting Ruhm with enough force to knock him back a dozen feet and flatten him against the ground. Most men, Aric knew, would have been crushed. Only the goliath’s great strength allowed him to survive it.

He didn’t know that a half-elf would. But he had a big metal broadsword, and the beast had hurt his friend. He swung the sword in a wide, flat arc. It sliced through the water, and he thought he heard a change in the pitch of its liquid voice, as if he had caused it pain.

The creature turned a jet of water against him, as it had Ruhm. He reeled under its force, shoved back, collided with Myrana. As the pair fell, he managed to turn so that he landed on her face down, arms and legs spread out around her, shielding her from the worst of the water’s impact and taking it on his back instead of his chest and face.

The beast might kill him, but if he could, he would keep it from killing Myrana too.

Aric heard his companions shouting and fighting, and then he heard another sound, one he didn’t know. It sounded vaguely like a giant sheet of fabric being torn, or perhaps hundreds tearing at once. He couldn’t even guess at what it was.

When it ended, the force of the water smashing against his back was gone. He raised his head from where it nestled next to Myrana’s. “Are you hurt?”

She blinked, droplets clinging to her eyelashes, and offered him a tentative smile. “I won’t be, if you get off me.”

“Sorry,” he said. He went to hands and knees, careful not to put any of them on her, and moved away, then rose unsteadily to his feet. He was bruised, felt as if he had been dragged behind runaway kanks for several leagues, but he didn’t think anything was broken.

When he turned, the beast was gone. The oasis pool was almost dry, with only puddles remaining, and even the trees looked as if a fire had passed by, evaporating any moisture from them. Bits of green remained at the ends of their leaves, but in the soft moonlight that was barely visible.

“What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” Amoni said. She was just now sitting up. “It knocked me down, same as it did you. With the water rushing into my face I couldn’t see a thing.”

“I guess you all weakened it enough,” Sellis said. “When I struck, it dissipated almost at once.”

“Lucky,” Ruhm said. “All lucky to be alive.”

“You’re right, Ruhm,” Aric said. “And thank you, Sellis. However you defeated it, we all owe you.”

“No, Ruhm’s correct, I got lucky too.”

“We should s-s-see if we can g-get a fire lit again,” Aric stammered. With the adrenalin and violent motion of the fight behind them, they were left wet and cold. In minutes, the water would freeze, and the beast would have killed them anyway.

“The fuel’s s-soaked,” Myrana pointed out. Her teeth, like Aric’s, were starting to click together.

“Perhaps,” Sellis said. “But if the b-beast sucked enough moisture from them, then p-perhaps …”

He hurried to the far side of the oasis, away from where the beast had turned to fight them. In what seemed just moments, Aric saw the glow of embers, then flame lick the darkness. “C-come,” he managed, grabbing Myrana’s hand once more. The water had very nearly frozen. Less than a minute to go, he believed, and they would die where they stood, not falling until the next day’s sun melted them.

But they worked their way into the fire’s circle of heat. Sellis had it roaring in no time. No other creatures would dare approach the oasis tonight, not with a fire like that going, and even if they did they wouldn’t find any water in the pool. Sitting as close as they dared, they let the fire dry them out and warm them, until finally, as morning approached, they slumbered.

They got a late start the next day. They hadn’t had much sleep, and they had to wait until the sun dried out the rest of their belongings, left behind at their campsite when they had stormed the oasis to kill the rain paraelemental beast. Aric still didn’t understand how Sellis had defeated it, he was only glad the warrior had done so.

Once their things were dry and they were hiking along once more, the sun had heated the air to the point that Aric almost missed his near-frozen state of the night before. When he said as much, Myrana chided him. “You’re never satisfied, are you?”

“I just wish there weren’t such extremes,” he said. “Baking hot during the day, icicles at night. Why can’t the world just be temperate for a change. Inside that cavern, when I saw a vision of Athas as it once was, there were vast forests and lush meadows full of grass and flowers. That world couldn’t have been as forbidding as ours.”

“That world is long gone,” Amoni said. “If your vision was even true.”

“It was true in other respects,” Aric argued. He was thinking of the battle that had left all those bones under Akrankhot, and the sword he had found. And Tallik, of course. Tallik was real enough.

“Perhaps it can be restored to that state,” Sellis said. “If we can turn our backs on magic long enough to stop destroying it.”

“Not all magic is destructive,” Myrana reminded him.

“That’s what some say, it’s true,” Sellis admitted. “But I believe magic is magic—whether it’s preserving or defiling, when people rely it there’s always the temptation to take it too far. Better to stay away from all of it. Just take our chances with no magic, and see what happens.”

Aric’s hand went to his medallion, without his conscious participation. “What about the Way?”

“I don’t think it’s inherently destructive,” Myrana said. They were marching up one of the low, rocky hills crossing their path, trying to carve a straight line toward Nibenay. “I don’t have a problem with those who use the Way. As you said, Aric, I have seen a lot of the world. For the most part it’s a harsh, wasted place, ravaged by forces none of us can comprehend. But there are glimpses of beauty to be had. Enough that I can’t help believing that if it were left alone for some time, it could yet recover and become someplace livable. Like you saw in that vision.”

“You might be right,” Aric said. “It’s sad that none of us will live to see that day.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I do. For the world to change so much, it would take centuries. We’ll not live that long.”

“I suppose not.”

Ahead of them, having already reached the top of the rise, Ruhm held out a single huge hand. “Shh!’ he said. He crouched down and waited for the others to join him. “Raiders,” he said, pointing into the valley on the other side. A group of thirty-five to forty cut people across the valley, some on foot but most mounted on kanks or erdlus. This was no trading caravan—they had only three wagons—and they looked like they could move fast when they needed to. Even from here Aric could see that they were comprised of a variety of races: humans, elves, muls and others.

“Have they seen us?” Sellis asked.

“Don’t think so,” Ruhm said.

“We’ll stay low a while,” Sellis suggested. “Until they’ve moved on.”

Aric couldn’t argue with that. He sat. The others sat around him, Myrana close to his left side. There was no shade, and the sun pounded them with ruthless ferocity, and they were making no progress. Aric, frustrated, hurled pebbles down the hillside into a scraggly brush.

“Is something bothering you, Aric?” Myrana asked.

“I just hate sitting here doing nothing when we should be moving fast. By now Kadya has doubtless got the argosies filled and the caravan on the march toward Nibenay.”

She stroked the back of his arm. “I’m slowing us down. I’m sorry. If you want to go on ahead … or you, Ruhm and Amoni, then Sellis and I can follow at my speed.”

He was tempted to accept her offer. At the same time, however, he wanted nothing to do with it. He couldn’t say why, not out loud. How could he tell her what it was like to grow up a half-elf, abandoned by a father he had never known and left too young by a mother who died? Unloved and seldom trusted, making his way in the world with few close friends. Since the moment she had put a hand on his cheek, he had felt that she accepted him. They had a bond, he thought, that had been at once as strong as any others he’d known.

He didn’t want to leave her behind. Even alone, he didn’t know if he could reach Nibenay in time—or, if he did, whether it would help stop Tallik from doing whatever it was he had in mind. Given that uncertainty, he had no interest in leaving Myrana behind, possibly never to see her again.

“No,” he said finally. “No, we stay together, the five of us. We’ll have a better chance of survival that way.”

“Thank you, Aric.” She gave his arm a squeeze, then released it. “I was hoping you felt that way. But I had to offer.”

“Raiders gone,” Ruhm said. Aric looked. The raiders were nearly out of sight behind the hills. The companions rose and started picking their way down the slope.

They were out in the middle of the sandy valley floor, where there was no cover larger than the occasional sparse cactus or scrubby tuft of grass when the raiders came back, heading straight for them.