Swords v. Cthulhu

The Thief in the Sand M. K. Sauer

Her execution was not set for dawn, as she had hoped, but rather at midnight — the coolest part of the day. She was to be a spectacle — something she had tried hard to avoid since she was a girl — to keep the denizens of the sandy desert capital occupied with gore and grandeur, instead of the scorching heat of the midsummer drought.

The palace, so barren and stark on the morning of her sentencing, was now lavish with expensive silks the color of the clarion sky set against the harsh orange of the surrounding sands. They twisted in the wind; an effusion of fabric that threw shadows across the polished floors. So many torches were lit that she had to blink in the half light to see her accusers. They stood before her like a row of statues in lavish, serpentine clothes, and looked down on her prostrate, ragged form.

Her last sight of this earthly realm would be the faceted jewels inlaid in the stone floor, while waiting for a wicked curved sword to slice through her neck. She wished the shadows didn’t show the silhouette of the executioner quite so clearly. She could feel the greedy eyes of a thousand spectators settling on her back.

“Last words?” the hooded swordsman asked, his black eyes gleaming with the promise of a swift death.

“Mercy,” she responded in a parched voice. Her lips cracked and even the blood dripping from the cuts felt sluggish in the midnight heat.

“Mercy! Mercy!” A few wailing voices took up the chant until her ears rang with their cries.

“Where was your mercy for the victims of your deft fingers? How many lives has your unscrupulous thievery ruined?” The shah’s disinterested voice carved through the sounds of a thousand people rearranging themselves. His large beard and necklaced chin moved with the practiced fluidity of one who had sent many to their deaths. Rings around his fingers tinkled as he fidgeted on his pillowed and perfumed throne. One of his sons yawned, as another picked at his nails. She was nothing to this mighty ruler, this deity of the desert.

“Mercy! Mercy!” the cries continued until the word no longer made sense to her ears.

“Still,” the shah returned, finally sitting up in his throne to give a proper look to his people, “even a thief deserves a respite, as the gods decree.”

Why the crowd wished to see her spared baffled her until she saw the shining ladle coming toward her. The entirety of the crowd became silent — so much so that she wondered if perhaps she had gone deaf. The water, straining against the edge of its container, had ensnared all of the hungry eyes and taken their voices. A single drop spilled and a thousand throats groaned with fevered anticipation. They didn’t want to see her live — mercy meant water, not life. They ached for even a glimpse of it on a faraway platform that might as well have been the heavens, it was so distant.

A glimmer of hope pulsed through her for the first time since being caught.

She felt a shift beneath her skin: a tunneling, excavating force that made her limbs rigid and begin to tremble. Her dry lips opened like leaves greeting the rising sun as another hooded man brought the small mouthful of water to her shriveled maw.

She wished she could taste it — how long had it been since she had tasted water? But before any reached her tongue, a million squirming parasites burst through her taste buds and pores, crowding to get a single drop to power themselves into a hurtling frenzy. A small explosion of worms rippled down her throat and spread to the very corners of her body. She felt her flesh spreading open — revealing the innermost tissues and delicate organs to the biting air for a brief second — before the whole world folded and she was heaved elsewhere.

The sky was no longer a caliginous cerulean, but a stormy miasma of sick-looking, pale green clouds and clawing creatures careening through the atmosphere. A large tentacle the thickness of five men abreast lazily dropped from above and laid waste to a desiccated landscape in exasperated fury. It was searching for her. As soon as she had shifted into this dimension, she had felt it begin to look for her. Six more tentacles threw themselves from the clouds as she appeared.

She had to escape quickly. It had been too long since she had appeased the creature, and it wanted her blood. Not too different from the situation she had just left, she mused, calculating how long before the few sips of water burned through her system. As soon as the precious liquid was absorbed, she would be stuck in whatever world she happened to be in. Pushing herself outward, straining at the very bonds that separated the two dimensions, she oozed her way back into the palace, an arm’s length away from the shah. A brush of a tentacle whiffed by her dark hair before collapsing into the spaces between worlds.

Her reflexes had been sharpened by her years on the streets and she drew the decorative sword at his side and pointed it at his throat. Dull as it was, it was still sharp enough to cut him open — especially as the rush of escaping the creature rocketed through her tendons and muscles, strengthening every part of her.

Within seconds the court erupted, and the thief could feel the numberless eyes on her again. Many recoiled in fear at her now green and scaly skin. Gills had formed around her jawline, her eyes were large and bulbous, unblinking in the torchlight, and webs had taken over the spaces between her fingers.

“Djinn!” the astonished shah choked out, as she drew her arm back to strike a blow that would take his head.

A sword clanged against hers. The vibration set her bones to aching, but she held on, only to be met with the grim face of one of the previously bored princes — the one who had been picking his nails. His eyes were alive now. His entire body reverberated with frantic intensity.

The prince let out a bellowing war cry and brought his sword down for a glancing blow across her face. She blocked, but the very end of his sword glanced off her brow and drew a small line. Thick blood crawled rather than dribbled down her face. As she turned to launch her own attack, she crushed the few escaping worms with her palm.

This needed to end quickly — only a few seconds more before all of the water was used up and her strength would falter. She swung downward — such a long and unwieldy weapon compared to her sharp daggers — and almost cleaved into the prince’s shoulder before he rolled out of the way. Scanning his movements, she knew where he intended to stop and allowed herself to slip into a gap between dimensions. She barely missed the crushing weight of a large, squirming tentacle before landing exactly behind the prince. Her sword was at his throat before he could do anything.

“Weapons down,” she barked to the guards who were just now coming to his aid. Their fight must have been done in mere seconds. Time became a sluggish, gargled thing when she traveled. The palace guards paused, weapons still drawn, but not daring to move. The prince’s panicked noises finally drove his father out of his stupor.

“Do as she says,” he whispered, and the clangs of dropped weapons echoed throughout the halls. He turned to speak to her with lips ashen and drawn. “Please, don’t hurt him.”

She thought of him seconds ago, a king in all domains, secure in the knowledge that only death could touch him, but that his death would be further away than any other. She wished to see him grovel, to know the pain that plagued her, but even the cleverest of traps could be reset, given enough time. The stalemate would have to be broken.

The prince wriggled in her grasp and she could feel his rising hysteria. It was like holding a small, writhing worm that couldn’t understand the difference between flesh and dirt in its need to hide itself away.

“If you promise to leave my son alive, I can tell you the location of the Ma’ah Steed.”

The prince gasped and struggled to rise.

“Father — no! We have been pursuing the Steed for years!”

“Your life is more important than any trophy or glory.” The shah seemed to have shrunk in stature as his aged hands stroked his graying beard.

“More important than the welfare of our people? The Ma’ah could sustain our kingdom with water for the next fifty years!”

“We will find another way. We always do,” the shah said, in a resonating, peremptory tone that banished all argument. “One such as you —” he gestured to her webbed fingers as all traces of the parasites burrowed back into the depths of her body, “ — one with your abilities would benefit greatly from the powers that the Ma’ah Steed is said to possess. You are familiar with the Great Water Horse of the shifting sands?”

“I am,” she croaked. “A hundred thousand drops of water for a hundred thousand years for the man who can capture and tame the water beast of the sea-sands. Even in my faraway childhood in a faraway place were such tales told.” She looked at her now normal hand, seeming to try to see through the layers of skin and muscle to the bone, before speaking again. “I accept your offer, but I require three things if I am to leave without violence: my weapons, a flask of water — a mouthful will be enough — and your son.”

“What?”

“The word of the shah is law, but what is your law to one such as me? I require your son so that I know you will not pursue me in the desert after I leave. I will need no map, no faulty directions, if I have something precious of yours to ensure my continued survival. I promise not to harm a single hair on his body and to return him to you whole after we find the Great Ma’ah. With these conditions, I will leave peaceably, never to return to your kingdom again.”

“The word of a thief carries no great weight either, I am afraid.” The sigh escaped from deep within his chest and fell, heavy, into the room. A small light crept back into his eyes as he rose to greet her grim face. “But I accept. Now, release my son.”

She nodded and threw the sword to the ground, taking a step back. Servants scrambled noiselessly to find her belongings and to assemble a suitable pack of clothes and provisions for the prince. The thief slunk into the shadows, disguising the unsettling feeling in her stomach that would not go away until she could make her way to the winding sands outside of the capital. The prince argued in a low voice with his father that distracted some, but most of the harried glances carried her way were piercing and swift. No one dared look her in the eye, lest her tainted being somehow slither over to them. She had to check to ascertain that her skin was, indeed, its normal dark brown and her curly black hair no longer touched by green or webbing. Their gaze was heavier than it had been at the glistening drops of life-giving water, and it unsettled her; she wished once again to be alone.

Within twenty minutes she had an escort of fifty guards in a phalanx to the wall. At the gates, the prince pressed his forehead to his father’s, heaved a gravid goodbye, and then accompanied her past the border. Once she was on the other side, her small daggers and a sloshing flask were chucked over the stone wall to land in the sand at her feet. As she strapped on her belt and adjusted everything, she raised a tattered piece of black cloth to cover her face from the rising sun, leaving only her eyes exposed. The parasites didn’t like the beating orb any more than she did, and they pulsed with displeasure.

“We’re leaving now? As the sun begins to boil?” the prince asked in disbelief. They were his first words to her.

“Every servant was bustling within the city by the time we left. Many more than required to find my belongings and to equip you for a journey. The shah intends to go after us under cover of darkness, despite his promises otherwise. I intend to put as much distance as I can between them and us. So, the faster you lead me to the Ma’ah, the faster you can find your father’s men and be back home. He will see that the word of a common thief holds more honesty than a rich man’s.”

She gestured for him to walk in front and into the blazing fury of the sunrise. Slowly, he plodded westward and began their journey to find the Great Ma’ah.

As the sun grew, their steps became thoughtful and paced; the parasites inside of her delved deep, trying to find some solace from the burning heat. The prince fared no better, but he dared not ask for them to stop.

Relief came as the sun began to sink, and she looked back to see their winding trail of footprints slowly being eaten by the ever-present, wind-fueled dust devils. The city was a small dark spot below the mounds of the hills they had crawled to the top of around midday. Flashes of shining light off spears and helmets greeted her as she ordered the prince to stop and build a fire. He obliged, happy to sit and engage in something else other than staring at the orange horizon, sun-blind and burned.

Once the fire crackled, illuminating their faces and keeping their hands warm from the encroaching chill, the prince found a satchel of food in his pack and began to peck at the rations. After a few bites he looked at the thief, and then, with downcast eyes, offered her a small piece of dried meat. His hand lingered in the air for a few moments until he took it back and scoffed.

“You don’t eat?”

“This is all I need,” she replied, opening the flask at her hip and quickly draining it of its contents. As soon as the water passed her teeth, she grabbed the shocked prince and dragged him, screaming, into the other, chaotic world.

Once there, the clouds thundering and the sky an even darker shade of torturous green, she stayed still, holding the struggling prince in her scaled arms. Large tentacles burst out of the sky and plummeted toward them, until they blotted out the haunting, ethereal light. They grabbed hold of the proffered prince and drew him into the low clouds, until she could no longer hear his shrieks. The small piece of dried meat fell to the ground as she slipped back to the fire.

The prince was sitting across from her, his eyes blank as if they were clouded with cataracts. His jaw was slack. A faint bit of drool pooled before staining his shirt. She rose, leaving the inert prince there. His only movement was a fluttering protrusion that was slowly growing somewhere within his torso, just barely visible through his clothes.

Taking only the flask filled with water that had been provided for him and furtively hidden, she went westward in the direction they had been traveling all day. The army sent after them was hidden in the folds of the sand dunes, but she knew that their small fire would reveal the prince’s location and he would be reunited with his father, not a single hair out of place.

The Great Ma’ah awaited her and the parasites she carried. She was positive she could find her way to his slumbering presence from the prince’s directions. The thief set off in the soft sand under a full moon and a clear, cloudless sky.