City Under the Sand

XII Glimpses in the Dark

Aric saw an Athas that surely had never been: a lush, forested world, where a gentle breeze could set a million leaves quivering. Birds flew over the forests in great flocks, and animals left the shelter of huge trees to drink at the shores of rushing rivers. Wildflowers of every color carpeted the valleys and the wild meadows beyond vast cultivated fields. Glorious cities gleamed in vivid, golden sunlight.

But as he watched—a tiny part of him protesting, aware that he was not truly present in those scenes, but viewing them as if from the back of a high-flying Athasian roc—the peaceful world before him was riven by strife. He could not determine the source of the unrest, but in its wake forests burned and rivers dried up. People in those cities stared toward the skies in horror, and then the cities crumbled. Finally, as deserts spread across the beautiful, serene world he had glimpsed so briefly, that brilliant yellow sun dulled, then turned to the dark red color so much more familiar to him.

And as if suddenly transported into Akrankhot itself, he saw a powerful, sun-bronzed man wielding a broadsword—I’m holding that sword, he thought, before the idea flitted away like a dried blade of grass in a heavy wind—battling what seemed to be an army of foul, depraved creatures. He slayed many but killed himself in the process.

Aric felt the loss as personally as if the big man had been a close friend, and tears dampened his eyes even as the visions continued. In place of the mighty-thewed warrior, he saw the citizens of Akrankhot, trembling in fear of the powerful forces sweeping their planet, terror of a conflict between beings for greater than themselves. And there was something else, something dark and horrible, with too many limbs and tentacles and teeth, and on its twin tongues Aric could taste the blood of innocents, and—

“Ungh …” Aric moaned and thrashed and blinked. Faces loomed around him, causing panic to well up in his chest. He tried to scrabble away, then saw that it was only Amoni and Ruhm, the closest things to friends he had.

He was in the cavern beneath Akrankhot, on the staircase landing, a heavy broadsword weighing upon his chest.

And something else was there, too; its psionic tendrils probing at Aric’s mind.

Aric jerked into a sitting position. “Are you hurt, Aric?” Amoni asked. “You fell, and then you were … dreaming, perhaps …”

Aric closed his eyes, gripping the broadsword with both hands to draw as much strength from the steel as he could. He sensed all the other metal nearby, on the cavern floor—rods and posts and columns and bars of it, gold, lead, iron, steel, silver, copper, bronze—and he reached out with his psionic abilities and touched that, and for an instant the vision of a bygone time almost returned, but he fought it off. He needed to concentrate, to focus on summoning what energy he could from the steel and on blocking the unknown incursion into his mind. The cold, solid bulk of steel comforted him, made him strong.

He turned his attention inward, where it seemed he could see several slimy tentacles oozing through cracks in his mental defenses. He took each in turn, pinching it off until the tentacle itself retreated, then disposed of the segments in an infinitely deep pit he imagined.

Finally, the thing’s efforts ended. Aric was himself again, weakened by the experience, soaked with sweat that chilled him in these subterranean depths. But himself, just the same.

“I’m fine,” he said. “But … that was strange.”

“What happened?” Ruhm asked. “You were lost.”

“Yes … wait, where’s Damaric?”

“He went on ahead,” Amoni said.

“By himself?”

“I hope so. I don’t think there’s anyone else down here.”

“Do you … feel anything strange? In your heads?”

“Nothing in mine,” Ruhm said.

“I don’t,” Amoni said. “What are you talking about, Aric?”

Aric got to his feet. His head still swam, and the ground beneath him seemed unstable, shifting moment by moment. But an overpowering urge to get down the stairs filled him, to get to that metal. “Come on,” he said. He hoisted the broadsword and started down the steps.

With every spiral of the staircase he grew stronger. The metal no longer sang to him the way it had, and the visions had already faded, like memories of some event that had happened to him years before.

The cavern’s floor was uneven, but a path had been worn smooth between the bottom of the staircase and the great mass of metal. Before the metal, his hands resting against it, stood Damaric.

Aric reached the bottom first and ran toward the looming bulk. He heard Amoni and Ruhm close behind.

“Damaric!” Aric called.

The soldier didn’t respond. Damaric just stood there, looking at the mound of piled steel. Aric shouted his name again, once again earning no response.

In the gentle glow of the rock walls, the steel gleamed, its varied tints and hues reflecting colored light back at the observer. As he neared it, Aric felt a strange sense of familiarity, as if seeing home after a long absence.

Damaric still hadn’t turned. Aric put a hand on his shoulder. “Damaric?”

Now Damaric whirled about, his face a twisted mask of rage. He lashed out with a clenched fist. Aric, taken by surprise, raised no defense, and the fist caught him on the cheek. Aric crumpled to the cavern floor, dazed. The broadsword flew from his hands.

“Damaric!” Ruhm shouted. “Why—”

Damaric stepped past Aric and toward the goliath, spinning his singing stick in his hands. Its whirling, musical tones were loud in the quiet of the cave.

Aric pawed the ground for the dropped sword. Amoni shouted at Damaric, but Ruhm had already dropped into a defensive crouch, raising his greatclub to counter the singing stick. Damaric attacked once, the stick flashing faster than the eye could follow. Ruhm blocked with the club. The stick swept upward from below. Ruhm got his club in place just in time, and the stick clashed against it, bounced off, came back toward Ruhm’s left. Ruhm tried to swing the club, but was a fraction of a second too slow, the club harder to wield than the slender stick, even with all his might. The singing stick hit Ruhm’s shoulder, drawing blood and driving the goliath to one knee. He swung the club in a great arc toward Damaric, but the soldier stepped back and the club whistled harmlessly past.

Aric found the sword and regained his feet.

He had liked Damaric. Liking anyone came hard for a half-elf, trusting harder still. But he had seen the slave soldier as a friend, and he didn’t want to hurt him.

Damaric, however, was clearly no longer himself. He was trying to kill Ruhm, and Ruhm truly was a friend. Aric held the sword in both hands, ready to strike. “Damaric,” he said, giving the man one last chance.

Damaric turned, singing stick moving so fast it was nothing more than a blur.

And Amoni took advantage of that moment to charge in, her cahulaks swinging at the farthest extent of their rope. When the blades met Damaric’s neck, his head was sheared off, landing somewhere off the smoothly worn path. Damaric’s body sank to the ground, singing stick clattering and bouncing for almost a full minute before it stilled.

In the sudden silence, Ruhm stood up, holding his right hand over his injured shoulder.

“What got into him?” Amoni asked.

“Don’t know,” Ruhm said. “My thanks.”

“I felt something too,” Aric said. “It tried to get into my head. I blocked it, but I guess Damaric couldn’t.”

“I hated to kill him,” Amoni said.

“You had no choice,” Aric assured her. “He would have killed us all if he could have.”

She looked at the soldier’s fallen from. “All he wanted was to live free, if only for a day, before he died, right? I understand that desire completely.”

“It wasn’t him,” Aric said. “Something else was in him, possessing him. Damaric would never have turned on us like that.”

“What should we do with him?”

“He’ll have to be brought out of here,” Aric said. “But not now, not by us.”

“Why not?” Ruhm asked.

“Because we need to tell Kadya about what we found,” Aric replied. “This is what we’re here for. The sooner we let her know where it is, the sooner it can be loaded onto the argosies and we can go home.”

“Home has more appeal for some than for others,” Amoni said, glancing once more at Damaric. “At least here, on this journey, I have tasted from time to time the flavor of freedom.” She smiled. “Besides, I was brought along to help with the heavy labor, so once we tell Kadya, then my real work will begin.”

“Those dune reapers might be waiting,” Ruhm said.

“If Kadya and the others haven’t defeated them by now, then we’ll all die here,” Aric said. “I say it’s time we find out.”

On the surface again, it was immediately apparent that Kadya had defiled the land with her magic. The road was littered with the corpses of insects, and what few hardy plants had tried to grow there since the shifting dune exposed part of Akrankhot to the sun had turned to ash.

Amoni swore. “There are better ways,” she said. “Kadya doesn’t understand the forces she’s playing with.”

“Or does,” Ruhm countered. “And doesn’t care.”

“In either case, I see no reapers,” Aric said. “That’s something, anyway.”

“Something, I suppose.”

On the way back to the main avenue, they came across the corpses of several dune reapers, blackened as if burned by terrible fires. Amoni frowned at them as they passed by. “I don’t want to know how they died,” she said. “It’s too terrible.”

“They would have killed us, given the chance.”

“That’s in their nature,” Amoni said. “There’s nothing they can do about it. They have to feed their queen. And it’s in our nature to fight back, not to consent to being sacrificed. But we have minds that can overcome our instincts.”

“You’re not saying we should have just let them kill us.”

“I’m not,” Amoni said. “Just that if we’re to be better than unthinking beasts, we have to take into account the cost of our decisions.”

Aric let the matter drop. He didn’t understand quite what Amoni was driving at. Most people hated defiling magic, as did he. But that hatred was a gut reaction—much, he supposed, the same as the instinct that drove dune reapers to hunt and to take their prey back to the nest to feed their bloated queen. Those few occasions he had seen defiling magic at work, he had been disturbed by the effect it had on living things around it—in the case of the halfling attack on the caravan, even sucking the remaining vestiges of life from wounded soldiers. He didn’t know enough of preserving magic to know, except through stories, how different it could be.

Kadya had destroyed the reapers before they could kill every member of the caravan. That was a good thing. Rather than argue with Amoni about it, he scanned the streets they passed for the rest of the expedition.

They saw a couple of other groups and hailed them, so that by the time they located Kadya, waiting back at the wagons with a large detachment of guards, there were sixteen of them.

“Why are you here?” the templar demanded as they approached. A mul was fanning her, and the startling suddenness of her bark caused him to miss a stroke. She glared at him until he started again, then swung her attention back to the group before her. “I told you to keep searching until—”

“We found it, templar,” Aric said. Ordinarily he would not have interrupted a templar, but on this occasion he expected that she would forgive him.

“You found it? The metal?”

“An enormous trove,” he said. “As much as the Shadow King described, perhaps more. Every kind of metal I’ve ever heard of.”

“How easily transported will it be?”

“It’s been shaped,” Aric said. “It’s in bars, poles, rods, blocks, and so on. It will be a huge amount of work—it is far underground, accessed by long staircases. Bringing it up will be difficult. But once it’s up, loading it into the argosies should be nothing.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Worry not about the difficulty of that job, Aric. You have done yours, and more quickly than I could have hoped.”

“One thing, templar. There is.… something down there. Something tried to get inside my head, but I fought it. Damaric wasn’t so lucky. It got to him. He attacked us, and Amoni had to kill him. So when the metal is being hauled to the surface, I recommend people work in pairs, at least, and probably larger groups, so that someone can always stay alert to danger.”

“Another thing with which you should not concern yourself, Aric. I don’t know what you experienced, but I assure you that we will take precautions against it.”

Amoni and Ruhm had stood silently by while Aric made his report. Now he remembered what Amoni had said about her work only beginning. “And … perhaps since Amoni saved our lives when Damaric turned against us, she can be relieved of hauling duty? She is only out of the gladiatorial pit because her back was broken, and—”

Kadya made a dismissive gesture with her left hand. “Your service is appreciated, Aric. I will make sure that Nibenay knows of your rapid fulfillment of your mission. But don’t test my patience. The labors assigned to slaves are no one’s affair but my own. I know you think Amoni is your friend. I have eyes, and I’ve seen the three of you—and Damaric—together often during our journey. But Amoni is a slave, a mul bred to fight and, failing the ability to continue in the pit, to work. She is no one’s friend. You, Aric, and your goliath companion, should explore the ruins to see if there’s more metal, and beyond that you are relieved of any further obligation. But the workers will work. You can rest for the moment, Amoni, while runners bring in the other search parties. But there’s plenty of daylight remaining, and once everyone is gathered together, we’re going to start going after that metal. Understood?”

“Yes, templar,” Amoni said. She would not meet Aric’s gaze.

“Aric, go,” Kadya said. “Take Ruhm, get some water, get out of the sun. You’ve earned your rest.”

Aric had been dismissed, and he knew it. He tried once more to catch Amoni’s eye, but having failed that, he and Ruhm went to their argosy, intent on a meal and perhaps a nap while the day’s hottest hours passed.

We have found it

Found the metal?

Yes. It’s just as the dead man described. Vast stores of it. We may actually have to send more argosies, as we lost some en route.

Kadya had not dared report the discovery to Siemhouk until she had seen it for herself. She didn’t think Aric and his friends would lie, but that was not a risk an intelligent person would take. She’d had Amoni lead her and a few others to the trove, examined it under torchlight even though the glow from the oddly luminous walls would be sufficient for the work crews, then returned to her own argosy to contact the high consort.

That contact would have been nearly impossible, had it not been for Siemhouk’s mastery of the Way. She did the heavy lifting, so the hardest part was reaching out and “tapping” Siemhouk, letting her know Kadya desired her attention. On most occasions, it had been Siemhouk who reached out first, and those were easy.

Whatever we need to do, we shall do. Let me know when yours are loaded, and if we need more they can be on the way while you’re returning.

I will.

Who found it? That half-elf, Aric.

Then Father was right to send him, wasn’t he? Father is always right.

Our husband is very wise.

Indeed.

I will be in contact when I have more news, Siemhouk.

The girl—the high consort—broke off the connection without replying. That was fine with Kadya. She saw Siemhouk as a path to power, not truly an ally, and certainly not a friend. The girl frightened her. Whenever she was in mental contact with Siemhouk, she was terribly aware of how easy it would be for the high consort to probe other parts of her mind, the places where her dreams and ambitions were stored. That, Kadya knew, would mean her death.

And Kadya wanted more time to investigate Akrankhot before they “spoke” again. Wandering around the city as much as she had done, she’d had the impression that it was something more than it seemed. There was power here. Hidden, tucked away someplace, but power just the same. She meant to find it.

All that metal, too, down in the cavern—that wasn’t just a storehouse, not that far underground. It made no sense to put metal down there, only to have to haul it up again when it was needed. There was more to that, too.

She opened the door to her argosy, stood blinking in the bright sunlight for a moment. As always, after she had a conversation with Siemhouk, she was left with a dull headache throbbing behind her eyes. A couple of her goliath guards stood outside the wagon, and she indicated them with a finger. “Come with me,” she said. “We’re going into the city again.”

“Just the three of us, Templar?” one asked. “Or shall I gather a party together?”

“Just us. We’re safe enough.”

She hoped that was true. She had destroyed the dune reapers, but there was precious little life left in Akrankhot to draw on. If faced with another major threat, her magic might not be strong enough to save them.

But she didn’t want any others knowing what she was about, so that was a chance she would take.

She had noticed runes, on the floor of a large, elegant building on the main avenue. The building had struck her as an important one, a center of government or some such. Something had seemed odd about those runes, but it wasn’t until later on that she had realized what. They had been inscribed on that floor, she believed, much later than the building’s construction. Possibly even later than its abandonment. She wanted another look at them.

Another thought struck her before they left. “Wait here a moment,” she told the guards. “Then we’ll go.” She went back inside the argosy, closed the door, and opened the lid of a trunk she always kept locked. From it she removed a few essential items: a particular scroll, a phial containing crumbs of rare earth and one of the Shadow King’s blood, and a small circle of polished glass.

Runes written in some ancient, forgotten language would be hard to translate. She had an alternative plan—she would consult with whatever mystic sages knew about this place, and from them she could learn the truth about Akrankhot.

And about whatever was buried beneath it, along with all that metal.

With those items gathered into a cloth purse, she started for the door again. When she put her hand on it, she felt a sharp pain between her ears, where that headache had been building. Siemhouk, tapping me? She paused, opening herself to such a communication. But Siemhouk was not there. Nobody was.

Still, she was sure there had been something … some unseen entity reaching into her mind.

She should find out who or what it was, block it, even destroy it.

Instead, she found that she welcomed it. Her headache vanished, and a feeling of power—of liberation, from some near-eternal bondage—filled her. She threw open the argosy’s door and stepped out again into the light, sucking in a great lungful of fresh desert air.

“Let’s go,” she said. “There’s much to do, and not much daylight left to do it in.”

The guards fell in around her, and together the three of them walked back into Akrankhot. And this time, Kadya felt, she owned everything she surveyed.

The slaves worked day and night, hauling metal up the staircases—a second one had been discovered, at the cavern’s far end—and loading it into the wagons. Soldiers, too, were pressed into service, causing Ruhm to joke that Damaric would have been glad he’d been killed, since he never would have wanted to perform such menial labor.

Aric and Ruhm, however, found themselves at loose ends. A couple of times Ruhm lent his muscles to the cause, for lack of anything better to do. Aric, however, didn’t want to go back into that cavern if he didn’t have to. Metal or no, the place made him uneasy.

On the second day after their discovery, he and Ruhm explored the city’s farther reaches. They had walked more than an hour to get to this point. Here, the desert still covered vast swaths of Akrankhot, and sand surged down other streets as if it meant to reclaim those as well.

The roads were narrower and more tightly packed than the ones nearer the wall. Instead of being laid out on a strict grid, they curled and wound about one another, like those in Nibenay. Sometimes one was blocked, a building constructed across it, as if the builder had been oblivious to the fact that there had been a thoroughfare there first.

“This part of the city follows no plan at all,” Aric complained, after they had, once again, followed a serpentine path only to find that it led nowhere of interest.

“Old part,” Ruhm observed.

“Probably. These buildings look much older than the first ones we found.” The architecture was even more unadorned than the elegantly simple lines of the structures lining the grand avenue. These had been thrown together out of wood, mud and straw. Most of them were two stories tall, but some were only one. Others had been added onto gradually, over what seemed to be a period of decades, if not centuries. Their exploration was made interesting by the things people had left behind, and which the sand had then preserved: cooking and dining utensils, furniture, even what seemed to be children’s toys.

They spoke in low tones, their gazes roving constantly. The dune reapers hadn’t been spotted since their first attack, but unless they had left the area, the queen would still be in the underground nest, possibly surrounded by drones and plotting another assault. And there could easily be other threats about. To fail to consider that possibility, anywhere on Athas, was suicidal.

They were just coming out of a house, apparently built in stages, one room at a time, with ladders and makeshift staircases connecting the different levels, when they heard the sound.

Even at this end of town, where space seemed to be at a premium, the upper levels of many houses had been made inaccessible. Aric had told Ruhm about the vision he saw in the cavern, and suggested that perhaps the great conflict sweeping across Athas had frightened Akrankhot’s populace, causing them to concentrate on their downstairs and subterranean space and leaving the heights as a buffer against some potential threat from above. In this house the rooms had been so small and the ceiling so low that Ruhm had been able to see into the abandoned upstairs sections from the level below. “Nothing there,” he had said. “Sand, dust.”

“No furniture?” Aric asked. The downstairs had been crammed full of tables and chairs and benches and beds.

“Nothing.”

“All right. Let’s keep going.”

In truth, he was beginning to lose interest in these explorations. The only thing spurring him on was the knowledge that there was nothing better to do back at camp, and always the possibility that he and Ruhm would be put to work if they went back there. At the rate they were going, the hauling and loading would take at least another two or three days before the argosies were full.

As they emerged from that house’s doorway, its door long since crumbled to dust, they heard a distinct intake of breath, the kind of sound someone makes when they’re caught off guard. Aric and Ruhm glanced at each other. Aric drew his new antique broadsword from the makeshift scabbard he had cobbled together. Ruhm, as always, had his club in hand.

Aric looked an unvoiced question at Ruhm. The half-giant shrugged. Ruhm had both been stepping out the door, Aric right behind him, and neither knew precisely where the sound had come from.

Aric breathed quietly, through his mouth. His muscles were coiled, prepared to react to any threat. Ruhm’s posture was more casual but he was always ready for a fight. Aric almost hoped for one, because he wanted to see what he could do with this huge steel sword.

“It’s you!” a female voice cried. Then the speaker emerged from around a curve in the road. A little younger than Aric, he guessed, she was lovely, with night-black hair and a fresh, open face. She walked with a limp and carried a staff. Beside her was a battle-scarred veteran holding two bone swords in a way that gave the impression he was good with both. Suddenly Aric didn’t hope for a fight, after all.

“It’s who?” Aric replied. “Who are you?”

“Myrana Ligurto,” the young woman said. “Of House Ligurto?”

“Never heard of it,” Aric said. “I have,” Ruhm said.

“I am Sellis,” the swordsman said. “Employed by House Ligurto to defend and protect the girl.”

“My name is Aric.” He nodded his head toward Ruhm. “And my companion is Ruhm. Both of Nibenay.”

The young woman came forward, the end of her staff touching the ground with each step. “What did you mean by that?” Aric demanded, halting her progress. “You said, ‘It’s you.’ ”

Sellis remained alert, every bit as tense as Aric was. But Myrana appeared relaxed, even comfortable in their presence. It was a wonder she wasn’t dead yet, if this was her typical way of greeting strangers.

“It’s just—I saw you, in dreams. As soon as I spotted you in that doorway, I recognized you.”

“You saw me in dreams?”

“Yes. My dreams … they’re more than simple sleep stories. They mean something. Recently a series of them led us across the desert to this place. And for these past several nights, you’ve been part of them.”

Aric wasn’t sure how to take that. On the one hand, he was intrigued. She had dreamed about him—or more likely, dreamed about someone whom he resembled enough for her to think they were the same man. On the other, showing up in a stranger’s dreams was a little disturbing, as if he couldn’t keep track of himself after he went to sleep, and wandered about the world at will.

Plus, she hadn’t said what kind of dreams these were, or what his role in them had been. Were they romantic? Was he a villain? She had given no indication.

“You came here because of dreams?” he asked. “From far away?”

“Far enough,” Sellis answered. “Eleven days in the desert.”

Aric was shocked. “Just the two of you?”

“We were three.” Myrana looked at the road, and he could read sadness in her stance. “Now two.”

“I see. Did you see anything else in these dreams? What made you decide to follow them?”

“Nothing specific,” Myrana said. “Except you. You’re half-elf—I didn’t realize that until last night.”

“I am.” Dreams or no, anybody could reach that conclusion, looking at him.

“Your father was human, and your mother died when you were very young.”

“That … that’s true.”

“I know. As I said, my dreams are somewhat more meaningful than many people’s.”

“But what did you expect to find here?”

“That I never knew. Only that I would discover the purpose after I arrived.” Her skin, darkened from exposure to Athas’s sun, reddened slightly. “I thought that perhaps you were the only purpose. Meeting you. But I knew there must be more to it than that.”

Aric decided to trust her. As long as he had Ruhm by his side, ready to act if that decision proved ill advised. He shoved the big sword into its scabbard. Sellis did the same with his. Ruhm couldn’t put his club away, but he rested the heavy end on the ground.

“That’s all?” Aric asked. “Now that you’re here, do you have any other idea as to the purpose?”

Myrana brushed long, black hair off her cheek. “Last night, the dream changed again,” she said. “I know it’s strange, telling you these things so soon after meeting you, but … I feel I must. Do you understand?”

“Not really,” Aric said. “I’ve never had such dreams. But I suppose I’d had strange things happen to me from time to time, and heard about more. So go ahead. Tell us, and we’ll try to believe you.”

“It was about this place,” she began. “Does it have a name?”

“Akrankhot.”

“Yes! I knew that, in the dream, and then forgot it upon waking. Akrankhot. There is something foul here. Something evil, and terribly powerful. It’s buried beneath the city, and protected by a magical structure of some kind, like a huge cage.”

Aric turned as cold as if day had suddenly become night. The pile of metal, that force he had felt, trying to get into his head. The way Damaric had attacked them.

Myrana’s brow furrowed, and she limped right up to Aric and rested a hand gently against his cheek. “You’ve seen it,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

Aric swallowed and gestured toward Ruhm. “We found it.”

She left her hand where it was a few moments longer. Aric wouldn’t have minded if she had left it there all day, and into the night. Standing this close to her, he could smell her and gaze into her huge brown eyes, the color of distant mountains in the full light of morning sun. She was slender and muscular, with womanly curves that moved under her simple shift. He realized he was staring. As long as that hand stayed on his cheek, he was powerless to stop.

She removed it, as if she had seen the thoughts its presence stirred within him. She didn’t look away, though. “Did you tell anyone else about it?” Myrana continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it hadn’t. Probably for her, the touch had been just that, a touch, not signifying any stronger emotion. He tried to pay attention to what she was asking.

“Yes,” Ruhm said, saving Aric having to answer.

“It’s why we came here,” Aric explained, finding his voice again. “We were sent by the the Shadow King himself to find the metal buried beneath Akrankhot. I was tasked specifically with locating it, because I have a … a psionic connection to all sorts of metals.”

“Interesting,” Myrana said, in a way that made Aric think it wasn’t really.

“Anyway, after we found it, we reported it to the templar in charge of the expedition. It’s being loaded onto wagons now.”

“In my dreams, I saw runes around the cage.” She knelt and etched some in the sand. “Like these.”

“Those were on the door,” Aric said. “And on the stairs, leading down toward the steel. You’re saying that it’s the cage? That whatever is underneath is kept in check only by that?”

“So my dreams led me to believe.”

“And the fact that it’s being taken apart and moved? What does that mean, then?”

Myrana rose again, an effort that made her bite her lower lip. When she was upright, she rested some of her weight on her staff. “Then, I’m afraid, we’re all doomed. Anyone within this city. After that, who knows? Whatever is imprisoned there is powerful indeed, and whether it can be stopped again, I have no idea. All I know is that it was imprisoned in the first place for a reason.”

“We must warn Kadya,” Aric said. “Perhaps it’s not too late. They’ve moved a good amount of steel, but there’s still some left. If it’s still caged, then—”

“We can warn her,” Myrana agreed. “I fear, though, that if much has been taken away, then we’re probably too late. And when that evil force, or being, gets loose, it’s going to be seeking vengeance. Let’s make haste, while we yet live!”

When they reached the wagons, after a hurried run across the city, Kadya was overseeing the loading. The argosies had been taken into town, as close to the stairways as possible. A procession of slaves marched to and fro, each carrying either a chunk of metal or helping tote pieces too large for a single one to lift. At the argosies, they handed their burdens to other slaves who stacked it neatly inside. The mekillots had had an easy time of it coming to Akrankhot—on the return trip they would earn their feed, and then some.

Aric pointed to eight wagons with closed doors. “Those are already full,” he said. “Which means they’re nearly done, at least with this trip.”

Myrana turned to the swordsman who had accompanied her. “If I hadn’t been paralyzed by that cistern fiend, we might have arrived in time!” she said. “Those days we lost … I fear we’re too late.”

“Perhaps not,” Sellis said. “We’ll just have to see.”

“I’ll talk to the templar,” Aric volunteered. “She doesn’t like me, but I have the king’s approval so she might listen to me.”

Kadya sat on a small mound of iron bars too long to fit into the argosies. They would have to be cut down, or strapped to the tops of the wagons. In the meantime they had been stacked nearby. Aric hurried to her side. He had a stitch in his side from the run. His face was flushed, and he had not entirely caught his breath. “Templar,” he began. “We must stop removing metal from the cavern at once!”

“Whatever for?” Kadya asked. “Who are those strangers?”

“They’re Myrana and Sellis, of House Ligurto. Myrana has dreams in which truths are revealed. She knew all about me before she met me. And she says there’s something—she knows not what—inside that cavern. Imprisoned there, caged by the metal. Releasing it … well, she says it’s indescribably evil, and tremendously powerful. We can’t know what the result of freeing it would be. But it won’t be good.”

He had managed to get his words out, but the stitch flared up, like a dagger between his ribs. He bent forward, bracing himself with a hand against the iron bars that Kadya sat on. Her left hand rested on the same bar that he touched.

And once again, images swam into his head, blotting out the world around him and replacing it with another. Once again, he saw what he had before, on the stairs leading down to the cavern, when he touched the ancient sword he still carried.

The creature he had glimpsed, all limbs and tentacles and teeth—a demon, Aric knew, although he couldn’t say how—was carried, struggling the whole time, down an almost unending flight of stairs marked with runic symbols. Mystical bonds contained the demon’s form, but not his fury. He was a horrible sight, with thick stubby horns above angry eyes that shone with a sickly yellow-green fury. His gray-green skin appeared mottled with lichen or mold and thick with oozing pustules, not a smooth patch anywhere. His fanged mouth snapped at everything, two long, narrow tongues lapping at the world, and tusks on either side of his long nose were crusted with dried blood. The bonds held his many limbs and tentacles fast, kept his claws from doing damage, prevented him from using his muscular, many-pronged tail, but more important still, they dampened the powers of his mind.

His name was Tallik.

An early Athasian sorcerer had summoned him here from—somewhere else, the words made no sense to Aric even in the context of the vision—but Tallik had proved too difficult for the sorcerer to control. Finally, that sorcerer—working with other, more powerful beings—had been able to capture and imprison the demon beneath Akrankhot, in a cage made of all the metal that could be gathered, because only massive amounts of enchanted metal could hold Tallik fast.

And there he had waited.

Waited for someone to come along, so that he could reach out, take over that one’s mind, use that one to find others, any who could muster the necessary effort to dismantle Tallik’s prison and let him loose.

Aric shook his head, trying to clear it of images from the past and pay attention to what was going on around him. His skin crawled from the briefest contact with Tallik. He wanted to scour himself with gritty sand, to scrub off any traces of the evil he had touched, the vicious nature of the demon coming through Kadya and into him. Tallik feasted on fear and hatred and death. Life and happiness were as repugnant to him as the demon was to Aric. But Kadya was saying something. Aric made himself listen.

“… will look into your concerns, of course, Aric. After all, we have you to thank for finding the metal in the first place. But I don’t believe we have anything to fear. The young lady was probably confused. Not all dreams, after all, mean anything. Even for such a one as her.”

“Good,” Aric said, “that’s good.” But he hadn’t removed his hand from the iron bar, and neither had she. Another thought flashed into his mind—not an image this time, just words ringing in his head with utter clarity. There was no mistaking their source.

It’s past time to have some soldiers kill Aric and his friends—especially these new friends. He’s served his purpose, and now he’s just getting in the way.

The “voice” he heard in his head was Kadya’s. But behind it was something else—something he recognized as the presence of Tallik.

The demon had already possessed the templar. He controlled her now. She was having his cage torn apart as quickly as she could, in order to completely free him.

And all of this due to Aric’s own efforts. Could he ever be forgiven? Could he ever forgive himself? He should kill her right now. He almost reached for his sword, then stopped. He didn’t know enough about this sort of thing, but he didn’t believe that killing Tallik’s host would mean killing Tallik. It would likely just move into someone else.

Once more, he was faced with the reality that one person couldn’t change anything on Athas; his action, or Kadya’s death—neither would accomplish anything. Her soldiers would kill him on the spot, and the demon would survive.

Uneasily, he drew his hand away from the iron bars. “Th-thank you, Kadya. I-I’ll go now.”

He barely made it through those simple statements, and he turned away before she had dismissed him, hurrying back to Ruhm, Myrana and Sellis. Instead of speaking, he beckoned, and they hurried back into the city. Finding a secure place inside one of the large buildings on the grand avenue, he told them what he had seen.

“You have to put your trust in dreams, Myrana,” he said at the conclusion. “I put mine in steel. If I touch steel, I can often learn things about whoever last handled it. And if I touch it while someone else is, I get a peek inside that person’s mind. In Kadya’s, there’s a terrible darkness, and there’s Tallik, the demon. I could hardly sense Kadya in there at all.”

Myrana sat on the large room’s tile floor, her back against a whitewashed wall that had only browned slightly over the years. “Then we are too late!” She buried her face in her hands. “And now she wants to kill you, because you know!”

“She wants to kill us all,” Aric corrected. “Not just me. Even our friend Amoni, a mul slave who’s helping to bring the metal up from below.”

“Her soldiers will have to kill me first,” Sellis said. “And they’ll find that’s no simple task. Come on, Myrana, we’ve done what we came here for. Let’s get away from this forsaken city.”

Myrana dropped her hands and stared at Sellis in surprise. “Leave now? We didn’t come just to give warning, Sellis. At least, that’s not what I believe. We came to help if we were able.”

“But if it’s too late to help—”

“We don’t know that. If there’s any way to stop this demon, this Tallik, we have to try.”

“I don’t think we can stop him, Myrana,” Aric admitted. “Even if Kadya wasn’t against us. I think he has too great a foothold for that. Too much of his cage has been destroyed, and none of us are sorcerer enough to put it back together.”

“Then all is lost?”

“Not necessarily, although time is short. We need to leave here, race back to Nibenay, and warn the Shadow King.”

“Him?” Ruhm asked. He snorted. “Probably already knows. That’s why he sent us.”

Aric couldn’t allow himself to believe that. “When I saw him, spoke to him, I didn’t have that impression, Ruhm. I think he sincerely wanted the steel, for its own sake. I’m not saying others in his court didn’t know, but I don’t think he did. I don’t even think Kadya did, until we were here.”

“What can he do?” Myrana asked. “If he is willing to help?”

“He’s the most powerful sorcerer in the Ivory Triangle,” Aric said, hoping it was true. “If it takes sorcery to re-imprison Tallik, he’s the one who can do it.”

“Do you know what kind of damage such sorcery would cause?” Sellis asked. “The whole of the Crescent Forest might be destroyed.”

“But if the other choice is a demon as fearsome and powerful as Tallik seems to be, then that’s no choice at all,” Aric countered. “We lose a forest, but we save the world?”

“I doubt the choice is that stark,” Sellis said.

“You haven’t seen Tallik, or … felt him. I think Myrana’s right. He’s unbridled evil, and as strong as any force I’ve ever heard of. If I’m wrong about Nibenay, if he refuses to help—or can’t—then we … I don’t know. We find a Veiled Alliance chapter, and see if they can summon the necessary magics to defeat Tallik.”

“I’m with Aric,” Myrana declared. “We strike out for Nibenay. Should we go now?”

“We need to let Amoni know,” Aric said. “She’s in as much danger as the rest of us. And her strength will help us survive the journey back to Nibenay. We’ll get to Amoni, and then tonight, once it’s dark—that’s when we’ll leave. We’ll slip away from the soldiers standing guard, and they won’t even know we’re gone until morning.”

“Assuming she doesn’t send them to kill you before that,” Sellis reminded him.

“Right,” Aric agreed. “Assuming that. We have no other choice, though, so that’s a chance we’ll just have to take.”

“The other choice is that we leave now.”

“We can’t leave Amoni to be killed. I’m sorry, Sellis. Go if you must. But for me, that’s no choice at all.”