The Bone Desert

Prologue

Hazim’s Parlour was closing early. Hazim himself, rarely seen in the hasham den, emerged not long after nightfall with two of his burly Karami bodyguards. They started ushering the patrons out, regardless of how delirious or inebriated they were. Those who tried to resist were forcibly ejected. The regulars went quietly. Even affected by the den’s opiates, they weren’t going to argue with Hazim. Not tonight. Not when the normally unflappable hasham seller was so obviously afraid.

The parlour’s front doors and windows were boarded, but business continued unseen. The rear rooms had been commandeered, bought for a price that Hazim hoped he was never offered again. He withdrew to his private chambers without dismissing the two Karami, and barricaded the door for the rest of the night.

His new clients were not the sort of people he wished to spend the night-time hours with.

‘Barkash?’ asked one of them. The parlour’s rear room was supposed to be kept for only the wealthiest of clients, but the new edicts by the city’s ruling council had brought hard times on downtown business. The chamber was now mostly given over to storage space, the walls stacked with sacks of unfiltered hasham leaf and the various other contraband goods Hazim’s criminal network had acquired over the years – silk from Merport, counterfeit coins forged by renegades from the Jelali banker guild, grain stock being held for merchants wishing to avoid the city’s market tithes. The air, lit by a single tallow candle set on a small table at the room’s centre, was dark and heavy with dust.

‘Yes,’ came the answer to the question. ‘The target is expected to arrive there within the next three days. How long they will stay, I do not know, but I doubt they will wish to linger.’

‘And beyond Barkash?’ the original speaker asked. He was a Kharadron, clad in the bulky silver armour plates and rubbery sky-suit worn by the airborne duardin reivers, his face obscured by a grim, gold-etched ancestor mask. There was another of his kin beside him, a heavy blunderbuss slung casually over one shoulder.

‘Now, that, I do not know,’ answered the voice, lost in the shadows at the far end of the room. ‘But it is likely Khaled-Tush, and from there the Eight Pillars, or the Temple of the Lightning.’

A murmur ran through the assembled group. Besides the Kharadrons there were four others present in the back room. Two were human females, dark-haired and black-eyed, clad in the shimmering, multi-hued silkweave and pearl strings of traditional tribal dancers of the Alharab. The third stood apart from the others, wearing a heavy cloak, its species and gender unknowable behind cowl and veil.

‘And you wish the target dead?’ one of the two Alharabi dancers asked. ‘Not taken?’

‘Dead,’ the voice hissed. ‘Plus proof of its demise, by whatever means you can procure.’

Silence followed, disturbed only by the clawing and scratching sounds of the rats that seemed to infest the hasham den.

‘Full payment only to the group that makes the kill?’ the Kharadron asked eventually.

‘That is correct, duardin.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ the duardin growled, nodding his kinsman towards the door.

The assassins left, the Kharadrons first, followed by the Alharabi. The cloaked figure went next, saying nothing. Only after they were all long gone did the being in the shadows stir and depart, melding instantly with the refuse-stinking darkness in the crumbling alleyways outside.

It was a long time before Hazim dared check the back room and bar its open door.