City Under the Sand

XIX The Fort

Advance riders had reached Nibenay with news about the caravan’s approach. So much metal filled the wagons that even the huge mekillots had a hard time hauling it, and several times the caravan had stopped to repair or replace wheels and axles.

Word spread quickly. Even though everyone knew the trove belonged to the sorcerer-king, who would use it for his own ends—outfitting the standing army of goliaths and slaves was the most common guess—there was still a general sense of excitement. No one, or so the rumors had it, had ever seen so much metal. Everybody wanted a glimpse, even though they would never own it.

Among Nibenay’s templars, the mood was even more agitated. The excitement was high, but so was the tension, as sister templars tried to outmaneuver one another, seeking some advantage. Kadya’s allies were smug, certain that their loyalty would be repaid. Others, especially those on the outs with Kadya or Siemhouk or both, struggled to find a way back into their good graces. Because Siemhouk was already so well placed, nobody expected a power shift so much as a settling of power, a further entrenchment of the existing structure.

And the Shadow King, for his part, waited with growing impatience for the caravan’s arrival. He knew better than to trust Kadya or Siemhouk. Or Dhojakt. Or any other of his wives, for that matter. Not completely. When a man had hundreds of wives and almost limitless power, he was surrounded by intrigue, double-dealing, backstabbing—sometimes literally—and naked ambition, every day of his long, long life. Nibenay knew that, and was no longer surprised when those things presented themselves. He wished for smooth, agreeable relations among his many wives, but he did not expect them. Nor was his son any more trustworthy—when Dhojakt told him to welcome Aric with open arms, Nibenay immediately put a price on the smith’s head.

He wanted the steel. He wanted Kadya to return so he could see how much truth there was, if any, to his son’s warning. He was curious about what Siemhouk’s reaction might be.

But during the long days and nights of waiting, he made plans. Whatever the future brought, he meant to be ready for it when it got here.

Sellis was a natural tracker, and following the trail the party from the House of Thrace had made was easy. Finding the bodies of the dead guards, stripped and left to rot in the son, had been worrying, but Aric already knew Rieve and her family were in trouble. It was clear what had happened—someone had captured them. Even without the visible trail, Aric would have known whom to blame.

Those raiders from Fort Dunnat.

They’d been humiliated, and many of their number killed, at Myrana’s false ambush site. Seeking revenge for that, they’d been turned away from the village of Yarri, again sustaining heavy losses. Following that battle, they had lingered about the area for several days, doubtless looking for another way to avenge their losses.

Now, obviously having no knowledge of Rieve’s connection to Aric, they had come across a party of nobles. Profit, not revenge, had dictated that they take those nobles captive—in addition to having their forces devastated in two separate battles, they had wasted time that might otherwise have been spent raiding caravans or other, less fortified villages.

Aric had to believe that Corlan had been taken as well, because Corlan’s trail and the families came together, before the point at which they found the soldiers’ bodies.

Where the trail led across rocky patches, or wind had scoured it so clean that not only Sellis could find it, Aric had to rely on his pebble and bowl of water. That led unfailingly to where the trail again became clear, and showed him that, although she remained a captive, she yet lived.

As long as she lived, Aric would rescue her.

If she died, he would kill every raider in the fort, or die trying.

The others were with him. In the first warm blush of morning, he had explained what the pebble had shown him the night before.

“What are we waiting for?” Myrana asked.

“It’ll take us out of our way,” Aric said. “Away from Nibenay. If Kadya reaches the city first—”

“We’ve had plenty of delays,” Sellis said. “Do we know she’s not already there?”

“She wasn’t when Corlan left it, but that’s the last we know.”

“Then we might rush there for naught, while your friends suffer at the hands of those damnable raiders.”

“That’s true.”

“Even when we get to Nibenay,” Amoni added, “we might not be able to do anything.”

“Also true,” Aric said.

“And you said this woman, your friend’s grandmother, works preserving magic.”

“That’s what Rieve said.”

“Well, we’ll need sorcerers on our side, if we hope to best Kadya with magic, right?”

“Yes.”

Myrana saw where Amoni was leading, and picked up the thread. “So we help them first. Then we all go to Nibenay together and deal with this templar and her demon friend.”

“I don’t know that they’ll want to go back to Nibenay,” Aric reminded them. “They were anxious to put distance between themselves and the city.”

“If we rescue them, and we tell them what’s at stake?” Sellis asked. “Surely they’ll take the chance.”

Not everyone’s a hero, Aric was about to say. But the words tangled on his tongue. If he spoke them, he would be calling himself and his friends heroes, and he didn’t think of them that way. He only thought they were trying to do what needed to be done—that they really didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Then again, perhaps that’s what all heroes thought.

At any rate, he didn’t want to give the thought voice, for fear of sounding ridiculously self-important. “Let’s go, then. After my friends, even if the trail leads to the raiders’ fort itself.”

It did.

The fort butted up against a rocky cliff, its walls built from the same dark rock, so they didn’t see it until they were almost upon it. Guards had been posted up on the cliff, and more on towers abutting the walls. The companions halted when they realized they’d found it, themselves ducking behind some good-sized rocks so they wouldn’t be seen.

“How we going to get in there?” Mazzax asked. “Knock on gates?”

“I think we’ll have to be sneakier than that,” Amoni said.

“Sneaky is good,” Aric agreed. “But we don’t even know where inside that fort they’re holding Rieve and her family. There aren’t nearly enough of us to simply invade the fort and find them.”

“But we’re us,” Ruhm said.

“Yes, Ruhm, we are,” Aric said. “We’ve been lucky so far. Maybe more than just lucky, maybe we’re actually good at this sort of thing. But six against however many raiders are in there … the odds aren’t with us.”

“Fewer now than there were before,” Myrana pointed out.

“That’ll work in our favor.” Aric stole another glance at the fort, wishing he could see through its walls.

But he could! In a way, at least. “Hold on, perhaps we can get a view of the inside after all.” He took pebble and bowl from his pouch, poured some water in, dropped the pebble into the water. By now it was routine. The pebble slid immediately across the bottom to a point nearest the fort. Aric waited until the pebble’s surface had grown cloudy, then he took it from the water and held it toward the sun.

Rieve was inside a building. The mark on her face had faded, leaving only a faint bruise. The rope was no longer around her neck. But she was unhappy. Worry ridged her brow, tugged down the corners of her mouth. Aric wanted to tell her to have faith, that he was on his way, but she couldn’t hear him, and even if she could, he didn’t know that they would be able to successfully breach the fort’s walls.

As he watched, she paced before a barred window. Aric brought the stone closer to his eye, looking for anything visible beyond the window. He saw a building with a patch of orange lichen on one wall, in a shape that reminded him of a dragon’s wing. Past that he saw the cliff that loomed behind the fort.

“They’re near the back,” he said. “Close to the cliffs. Beside the building they’re in is another one, with lichen on it forming a shape almost like a scalloped wing.”

“You see all that in the rock?” Mazzax asked.

“Yes, it’s clear as day.”

“Some rock,” Ruhm said.

“It is that.” Aric dried it on his shirt and put it away, then drank the water from the bowl. No sense in wasting water. “Now all we need to do is figure out how to get into the back of the fort.”

“I might have an idea about that,” Sellis said. “It’ll take some doing …”

Sellis and Myrana walked toward the fort’s front gate. They went slow, Myrana’s bad leg apparently giving her a great deal of trouble. At least, that was the effect she was going for. The truth was, these last weeks had been hard on her, and her leg was in considerable pain much of the time, so it wasn’t hard to fake.

The guards atop the cliff shouted an alarm. From that point on, the guards in the towers watched them. She couldn’t imagine they were an interesting sight. Had she been alone, they might not even have bothered keeping an eye on her. But because she was with a man who was obviously a warrior, with twin swords jutting out above his shoulders, they didn’t dare not watch.

When they were within hailing distance, one of the tower guards did just that. “You’d best turn around!” she called. “We’ve no interest in visitors here, nor patience for ‘em!”

“We have business,” Sellis replied, and kept walking. Slowly. Keeping pace with Myrana, who struggled more with every step.

“What sort of business?” the guard demanded.

“The profitable sort,” Sellis said.

The guard kept asking questions, and Sellis kept answering them with statements that only led to yet more questions. All the time, they grew nearer, and kept the attention of the tower guards and cliff guards riveted. Who are these people? they must have wondered. Where did they come from? And on foot? Are they mad?

Sellis continued to evade giving any direct answers until they stood directly outside the front gate. “We’ve come to buy your prisoners,” he said then.

“We have no prisoners,” a guard said.

“I think you do.” Sellis took off a bag that had been slung to his back this whole time, and opened its top. The gold inside it fairly glowed in the sunlight.

Of course, the bag didn’t exist, and neither did the gold. They were both magical illusions Sellis had created.

But the raiders didn’t know that. Any who had become disenchanted with the spectacle of their approach were once more riveted to the scene.

“You have four men and three women, of a noble family,” Sellis said. “You’re holding them for ransom, presumably. We’ve come to pay that ransom.”

“What’s to keep us from killing you, taking your gold, and keeping the captives?”

“Us,” Sellis said.

That answer earned a roar of laughter from the assembled raiders. “You?” one asked. “Against all of us?”

“You could try us,” Myrana said. “Perhaps you’ll have better luck than the last army we fought.”

More laughter. The taunts continued, but no raiders ventured through the gate. Myrana and Sellis held their ground, trying to negotiate for the Thrace family’s release with people who had no interest in negotiating.

Which, after all, was the whole idea.

The others, Aric, Ruhm, Amoni and Mazzax, had left their hiding place first, striking far to the west and then working their way back along the base of the cliffs. There, the guards on top of the bluff would have to lean out to see them. Tower guards might have spotted them, but by the time they were in view of the towers, everyone was watching the strange couple’s slow procession toward the gate.

In this way, moving quietly, the four companions made it to the base of the wall, where it abutted the cliff’s face. The hard part would be getting over the wall. Since they had no ladder or means of making one, they scaled the cliff, knowing they would be visible from the towers as they did. Myrana and Sellis kept the raiders occupied, though, and none so much as glanced their way. From his position on the cliff, Aric studied the buildings nearby until he spotted the one with the lichen patch he had seen in the pebble. Then he pointed out the building next to it, in the right place for the view through Rieve’s window.

“That’s the one we want,” he said quietly. When they had all identified the right one, they dropped one by one over the wall and into the fortress.

Aric had barely touched down when he heard a voice shout, “That’s him!”

One of the raiders who had been among those who first captured them was glaring at him and drawing a steel short sword. A new cut traced a line from the raider’s left shoulder almost to his belly; earned in the battle against the thri-kreen or the villagers, Aric guessed, and he was anxious to taste vengeance for it. Another raider had been walking with him, carrying a pike. Both raiders ran toward Aric, shouting an alarm as they came.

This wouldn’t be as easy as Aric had hoped.

At least his new sword would finally be tested.

He whipped it from its scabbard. The blade sung in the air as Aric slashed back and forth, enjoying the feel of it. The swordsman reached Aric first, running with his sword held out before him as if Aric would just stand there and let it pierce his chest.

Instead, Aric waited until the raider was in mid-stride, not quite balanced, and swung his blade into his, from the side. The blow staggered the man. Aric followed up with a lunging thrust, which the man only just parried. The raider took a couple of steps forward, more careful ones now, as Aric recovered from the lunge. The blades clashed together, lightly, each man feeling for the other’s weaknesses. The raider was strong, but so was Aric. And Aric’s blade was a full foot longer than the other man’s.

The other raider tried to intervene with his pike, but Ruhm’s club bashed the weapon away and then, on the return swing, crushed the raider’s skull. He wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

But more raiders were on the way, summoned by the shouts. Ruhm and Mazzax took up positions at the end of a building, ready to fight anyone who came from the front of the fort. Amoni went to the other end, in case raiders came that way.

The swordsman was better than he had seemed at first. Even with his short blade, he parried Aric’s attacks and kept up his own. Two more raiders came up behind him, taking their turns thrusting at Aric and swinging an axe at him, and then Aric was holding off three. They grunted and cursed, and he ignored them as best he could. The raiders had only to delay them long enough, and they would be surrounded, with no hope of getting Rieve and her family out safely.

If not for that urgency weighing on him, Aric would have enjoyed the contest. He had to end it quickly, though, or lose his life here in a raiders’ fort. He could hear his friends engaged with other opponents, so there would be no help from those quarters.

“Rieve,” he shouted, since their presence had already been given away. “Rieve, it’s Aric!”

So distracted, the first raider landed a blow against him. The short sword raked across his left thigh, drawing blood. Sudden, searing pain brought Aric back into the fight. He backstepped, brought his blade down against the other man’s. He slashed at the raider’s collarbone, but his move was blocked, and the two blades ground together, frozen in place for the moment, the other two closing in for the kill.

First blood drawn, and it was his own. Not exactly the progress he hoped for.

When we’re free,” Rieve was saying as she paced a groove in the dirt floor, “I want to raise an army. I want to come back here and dismantle this place, stone by stone. People like this, these raiders, have no place in a decent world.”

Corlan sat on the floor, his back against a corner, knees up with his arms resting on them. He lifted his head. “You might have forgotten where we are,” he said. “I live on Athas, in the city-state of Nibenay, so I’m not sure what a decent world is.”

“You know what I mean!” Rieve shot back. “We’ll never have a decent world if people are allowed to behave like this.”

Her grandmother patted Rieve’s shoulder. The old woman’s eyes were filled with that calm acceptance that never failed to lighten Rieve’s mood. Her face was lined, her hair silver, but her back was straight, her jaw firm, and she remained a rock of solidity in Rieve’s often turbulent life. “This is difficult for us all,” she said. “Nobody likes to be victimized like this, to be held against our will.”

“How do you stay so calm, then?” Rieve asked. “Why aren’t you spitting mad?”

“I suppose I just try to take the longer view. The more spiritual view, in some ways. Things happen in life that are beyond our control. Many of them are good things, and others bad, or at least that’s how we perceive them at the time. Sometimes, later on in life, our view changes, and we realize those things we thought were awful might not have been so bad after all. Perhaps they showed us new directions to grow in. Perhaps they slowed down the pace of life and allowed us to examine our inner selves in some new way.”

“That makes some sense, I suppose. But this? How can this be anything but horrible? Waiting out the rest of our lives in some fortress prison until these thugs decide to kill us? That can’t be good.”

“I’m not saying it is, necessarily. Certainly it’s bad from our immediate viewpoint. And it’s possible, of course, that you’ll do exactly what you say—get out of here, put together an army, and come back to wipe this place off the planet. That would be a good result from a bad situation, don’t you see? The pain you’re undergoing now would lead, eventually, to you doing something for the betterment of everyone.”

Rieve hadn’t thought of things that way, had given no consideration to the idea that anything good could grow from this experience. Of course, for that to happen, first she had to get free somehow. Then she had to be able to access the family fortune, or earn a new one of her own.

But even that, she realized, would be something she had never imagined doing, that she probably wouldn’t have thought of, had it not been for the raiders. To amass a fortune big enough to hire an army, she would have to provide some service or goods that others wanted to buy. In doing so, she would be filling some need.

Grandmother was right. Good could grow from the worst situations, if one only looked at things the right way.

It didn’t make her glad they had been taken captive, but it made her not hate the experience with quite the white fury she had just minutes ago. Maybe there was something she could learn, about herself, her family, Corlan, or the world. She vowed to keep her heart open to that possibility, to observe and take in events as they occurred, rather than waste all her energy resenting them.

She was about to thank Grandmother for the advice when she heard muffled cries outside. “Something’s going on out there,” Corlan said, springing up from his corner and rushing to the window. Rieve joined him there, gripping flaking, rusted iron bars and straining to hear. There were more shouts, then what sounded like fighting, the clang of steel against steel.

“Probably just a bunch of drunken raiders brawling,” Father said.

“I don’t know,” Corlan said. “I don’t hear any laughter, and very few curses. Mostly it sounds like serious combat.”

Rieve kept listening, hoping for any clue.

And then she heard her name.

“It’s Aric!” she said. “He’s come for us!”

“How did he know where we were?” Father asked.

“I gave him a pebble that Grandmother gave me,” Rieve said. “It was meant to be for Corlan, but … well, you know.” She didn’t want to torment Corlan further about his first reaction to the news of their leaving, and why. He was sorry, he had ultimately made the right decision, and she was content to leave it at that. “It showed him where we are.”

“And we doubtless left a clear trail,” Mother added. “So many raiders, in addition to us, could hardly have done otherwise.”

“We’ve got to let them know we’re in here,” Rieve said.

“We need to do more than that,” Corlan said. “If we heard the fight, the raiders have heard it too. Aric and his friends will be overwhelmed.”

“Then we need to help them,” Grandfather said. “They came to help us, so we can do no less. Sheridia?”

Grandmother glanced at the thick wooden door, barred from the outside, that held them in the small, dirt-floored room. “There might be something I can do,” she said.

“Whatever you can,” Grandfather said. “And now would be a good time.”

“I can help too,” Corlan said. “When they captured us, they took all my belongings, but they all came to the fort with us. Which means that somewhere out there is my psionocus.”

“You have a psionocus?” Father asked. “With you?”

“Well, close by someplace. I shouldn’t have to be able to see it to activate it. I only have to be able to concentrate.”

“Can it really help us?” Rieve asked.

“It might. Just let me focus on it. And I have to deserve it. That’s what Tenavry said. ‘Deserve every gift.’ ”

He sat in the corner again, closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Rieve supposed he was conjuring up an image of the little beast he had told her about when he sculpted it.

“Focus fast,” Grandmother said softly. She had turned to face the door, and she spoke words in a language Rieve didn’t know, moving her hands in a strange pattern at the same time. After a few moments, she whispered, “Bang on the door.”

Mother was nearest the door, so she thumped on it with her fists.

“Quiet in there!” a guard shouted. “Don’t think that—”

Grandmother made a yanking motion with her hands, and there was a louder thump on the outside of the door. The first guard released a wail of terror, and a second one’s voice yelled, “What have you done to him? Let him go!”

“We’ve done nothing!” Grandmother called. “Any problem he has is of his own making!”

“What’s going on out there?” Father asked.

“I believe he’s stuck to the door,” Grandmother said. Her voice had never sounded sweeter.

Someone on the outside pounded on the door, writhing against it and screaming, “Get me off! Get me off!”

Then the bar fell from the door. Before it could be replaced, Rieve and her father rushed the door and it swung out. They bowled over one guard, and the other was still pressed flat against the wood, crying for help.

The guard on the ground tried to scramble to his feet. Grandmother spoke some more words and made another gesture, and a cloud of dust from the dirt road blew up into his face, filling his eyes and mouth. He started coughing and spitting, and, blinded by the dust, he fell back again. “Come on,” Grandfather said. “We’ve got to find Aric and the others!”

“Wait!” Rieve ran back into the room that had been their prison. Corlan was still there, sitting in the corner, eyes squeezed shut, hands undulating slightly as if floating on some wafting breeze. “Corlan, let’s go!” she shouted. “Corlan!”

Corlan didn’t move.

The more he fought, the more Aric’s sword fed him. At first he thought he was imagining it. But the longer he did battle, the better he felt. Stronger. Whenever his blade made impact with other steel, he felt a shock up to his shoulder, as he expected. After a while, he realized that those shocks were different from the ones he experienced when the blade struck wood or bone or stone. Those hurt, tiring him. But steel on steel—those gave him more energy, not less. They eased the ache the other ones caused.

Not only that, but regardless of what his sword touched, just the very act of holding it, of moving it through the air, seemed to strengthen and energize him. The steel was him, and he was the steel, and this was what he was made for.

Aric broke through the first raider’s defense and ran him through, the sword slicing clean and not stopping until the cross guard slammed into the man’s belly. Putting his left hand flat against the man’s chest, Aric withdrew the sword. Thanks to the fuller groove he had cut in the blade, it came away easily, without the suction that sometimes occurred. The raider fell away, and Aric swung the blood-slicked blade up to block an axe blow.

From that point, things grew ever more chaotic. Aric caught the obsidian axe head on his hand guard, twisted and flicked his wrist, and wrenched it from the wielder’s hand. He snapped the blade right to left and the razor-edge point sliced the raider’s throat so neatly that the man didn’t know he was hurt for several moments, until blood dribbled down his chest. Then he screeched and put his hands to his neck, and the wound opened up. Another raider sliced at Aric with wrist razors, three-bladed weapons attached to his arms. Aric held him off for a bit, finally slicing up into his right arm, severing it below the elbow. The raider cried out, tried to nestle his damaged arm, and stabbed himself in the biceps. Aric ended the man’s misery with a swift thrust to the heart.

More raiders filled the space between alley and building. Aric lost himself in battle. Bleeding from a score of cuts, he fought like a whirlwind, his new sword flashing this way and that, blocking an attack and slicing flesh in the same motion. He battled dwarf and dray, mul and goliath, elf and man. Somewhere along the way he ceased having to think about what he was doing and simply acted, as if possessed of a wild nature born to the blade.

When he stopped to catch his breath, more than a dozen corpses surrounded him, bodies piled upon bodies.

Ruhm, Mazzax and Amoni had been busy too, but between them the count of their dead didn’t equal Aric’s. All were wounded, but none fatally, Aric was glad to see.

“Aric, you were incredible,” Amoni said. She was winded, with red patches on her cheeks and forehead. “A trained gladiator and I only killed six.”

“Four for me,” Mazzax put in.

“Five,” Ruhm said, a little sourly. “The dwarf got one of mine.”

“She wasn’t dead yet when she came to me,” Mazzax countered.

“I weakened her.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Aric said. “We need to find Rieve and her family, before more raiders get here.”

“How will we do that?” Amoni asked.

Aric put his left hand beside his mouth and took a deep breath. “Rieve! It’s Aric! Where are you?”

Silence held, with only the distant sound of more raiders wending their way from elsewhere in the fort. Then Aric heard something else, a strange, sibilant fluttering. “Look!” Mazzax cried. He pointed into the air.

A bizarre, tiny creature flapped over their heads. Green and blue and red, with yellow and black stripes on a long, serpentine tail that gestured toward them almost like a curled finger, it turned in rapid circles, as if trying to attract their attention.

“Look at its tail!” Aric said. “I think it wants us to follow it!”

“Is it a trap?” Amoni asked.

“Only one way to find out!” The winged creature took off in a straight line, and Mazzax raced behind it. “If trap it be, then I’ll add to my count!”

“Let’s go!” Aric shouted. He thought it was on their side, and in any event, he didn’t want to lose sight of the dwarf. He ran after them both, and Amoni and Ruhm fell in behind him.

He saw the Thrace family at the same time as the raiders did.

“Rieve!” he cried.

“Aric!”

Nine or ten raiders rushed toward them from a side road. The little creature hurtled toward them, and Corlan, who had acquired a bone sword somewhere, stared at it with a beaming smile on his face. “It worked!” Corlan shouted. “You’re alive!”

A psionocus, then, Aric knew. A manufactured beast, brought to a sort of life as the servant of a powerful psion. He remembered being told that Corlan was a student at some psionic academy.

The raiders were closer to the Thrace family than Aric and his friends were. Corlan, the only one armed, looked away from his creation in time to notice them. Aric had already broken into a sprint, but Corlan met them first, his yellowish-brown weapon flicking out and cutting the fingers of a raider wielding a lotulis.

Corlan slew that foe and moved to the next, and Aric recalled that he had been selected to teach Rieve swordsmanship. No wonder—in addition to being psionic enough to animate a psionocus, he was good with a blade.

Aric joined the fight. Almost instantly, the wildness overtook him again. He was fully immersed in the battle, but at the same time a sense of calmness filled him, as if he knew he would win—or if he didn’t, then it didn’t really matter. As if the fight, not the result, was what counted.

A minute later, perhaps less, it was done. Aric was coated in blood, little of it his own. His blade had drank deep. Amoni, Ruhm and Mazzax had barely reached them when their enemies had fallen.

“Aric,” Rieve said. Ignoring the gore coating him, she rushed into his arms, embracing him with a warm, tight fervor that almost made him forget Corlan watched. “You came for us.”

“Of course,” he said. “But we’ve got to go. There’ll be more raiders coming.”

“Which way?” Tunsall asked.

The psionocus fluttered its wings, beckoning again with that little tail, and then shot off the way they had come. “Follow that!” Aric said. “It’ll show us the way out!”

Rieve slapped at her hip. “My sword! They took it …”

“I’ll make you another,” Aric promised. “Come on!”

They all dashed off behind the tiny winged thing. Aric looked back once, noting that Rieve and Corlan ran hand in hand.

He was surprised to find that he wasn’t more upset.

We had better take our leave,” Myrana whispered. Raiders were opening the gate. Their numbers had decreased considerably, as something had been drawing them away little by little—something she believed must have been Aric and the rest, fighting to free his friends.

“Do you think they’re finished?”

“I don’t know, but if we don’t do it soon, we will be.”

Sellis still had his swords, of course. And she her dagger.

But the raiders’ mood had changed. She hoped that meant Aric’s group was winning, and the raiders were angry over yet another defeat.

Hope was only hope, though, not certainty. Myrana’s only certainty was that if those raiders got the gate open and attacked them, there would be a bloody battle—maybe a long, bloody battle, maybe short—which wouldn’t end until she and Sellis were dead.

“Fine,” Myrana said. “Ready to run?”

“I’m ready.”

The raiders unlatched their wooden gate and scraped it open, bumping it against the ground as it swung unevenly on its hinges. Before they could throng out after Myrana and Sellis, he hurled the bag of gold coins over their heads. It landed in the road behind them, bursting at the seams, gold spilling everywhere.

“So it’s the gold you want?” Sellis shouted. “Have it, then! It’s yours!”

Raiders stared at the two strangers, but the pull of gold was stronger. With a loud outcry, they darted for the coins.

Myrana and Sellis ran.

And as each coin fell from the bag and hit the earth, it bounced into the air, turning into a golden bubble instead of a coin. Whenever someone touched one of the gold bubbles, or a bubble brushed against any other surface, it exploded. Within moments, raiders were squealing in pain, their hands blown off, a few of them dead. Their structures suffered too, as the explosions loosened timbers or knocked stones from walls. The dozens, then hundreds of smaller bursts combined into one massive explosion.

It shook the ground, even dozens of feet away. Myrana’s legs were knocked out from under her, but Sellis caught her up and kept running. Another blast sounded, and gold sprayed into the air.

“That,” he said, “is some serious magic!”

“It’s about as dangerous as my magic gets,” she said. “You can put me down.”

He set her on her feet, and they kept running, back toward where they had tied the kanks, out of sight of the fort. “I don’t like using magic to kill,” she said. “Even to injure is bad. My magic is meant to preserve, to protect.”

“You were protecting us!”

“That’s the only reason I did that,” she said. “Even so, most of those raiders will live. They might be temporarily blinded and deafened, and they’ll think twice about giving chase. But I never meant to kill them that way.

“Look at Athas. Could it have always looked this way? Scorched by the sun, frozen at night, with little water and less shade? Could a population ever have grown under such conditions? Many believe it’s magic did this, dark magic. Magic tied to death and destruction. It’s not just in the spells themselves, but in the motives behind them. Magic meant to kill is just not something I choose to partake of.”

“I understand,” he said. They topped a low hill and the kanks were right where they’d left them. Aric and the rest had not yet returned. “I don’t mean to make you keep explaining.”

When she spoke again, any anger had left his voice. “It’s fine, Sellis. I want you to understand, that’s all. I can’t fix everything bad that happens with magic, and I won’t intentionally use it to kill. But it’s a useful tool sometimes.”

“You’ve been wonderful, Myrana. Here I thought I was protecting you, when all along it’s been the other way. I’m not sure I deserve what your family pays me.”

“When we finally get back to them, I’ll tell them you said so.”

“You won’t have to, because I will.”

They both started laughing, and sat down to wait, all tension between them evaporating like a puddle of water in the Athasian sun.