City Under the Sand

VII Into the Wastelands

They gathered at Sage’s Square, one of the few spots in the city with room for them all, and left through the Mekillot Gate. An expedition of such size couldn’t be kept a secret, and people had climbed the fifty-plus dense, blue-trunked agafari trees of Sage’s Square for a better view. Others lined the wide stone thoroughfare running from there to the gate to watch them go. Some cheered the procession, others shouted taunts or insults, though none knew the expedition’s purpose.

There were twelve argosies in the expedition, with four axles and many wheels, each of them pulled by a pair of mekillots. These armored wagons were largely empty at the journey’s start; people would ride inside them, and they carried water and supplies for the trip, but primarily they were meant to carry the metal from Akrankhot back to Nibenay. As the journey progressed, food and water would be consumed, making space for the return cargo.

Fifty goliath soldiers of Nibenay accompanied the argosies, along with an assortment of slaves, many of them muls, to do the hard work of lifting and loading. For now, the templar Kadya walked at the head of the expedition, although Aric suspected she would be riding within minutes of passing through the gate. He and Ruhm had chosen to leave the city inside a wagon. Although the expedition itself was common knowledge, being too large to hide, its goal was not, and Kadya had instructed them not to talk about it, even with friends. They had decided that staying out of sight would make it easier to avoid anyone who might want to ask questions.

Even so, they could hear the shouts of onlookers, and as they approached the gate, they shifted their shoulders and tapped their feet to the musicians playing from balconies suspended above it. Aric watched out a side window, better to watch the half-giant soldiers try to maintain their military bearing while swaying and strutting to the hypnotic melodies of the gate’s musicians.

The lumbering beasts, some thirty feet long, pulled the armored wagons at a steady, stately pace. People could have walked faster, but the strength of the animals would be needed to haul the steel back to the city. Aric tried to prepare himself for a long, uncomfortable journey.

Ruhm stayed in his seat, swaying gently with the rocking motion of the wagon. In front, beneath the seats occupied by the drivers, was space for storage. The main section had rows of sturdy wooden benches, with legroom between—although not much, considering most of the soldiers on the trip were half-giants. Because there were so many argosies and so few riders, some of them were filled stem to stern with supplies. “Will it be like this all the way?” Aric asked. He rocked back and forth, exaggerating the effect. “I think I’ll get sick if it is.”

“Oh, no,” Ruhm assured him. “It’ll be far bumpier out there, once we’re off the cobbled roads of Nibenay and the caravan road beyond the gate.”

“You’re joking!”

“You can walk any time,” Ruhm reminded him. He had traveled more than Aric, to Raam and Draj and even Gulg once. “Just don’t get too far ahead or stray into wilderness. Nibenay only sent one of you. What will the rest of us do, we can’t find metal under the city?”

“I definitely will walk as much as I can,” Aric said. “Better than being stuck in here.” He sniffed the air. “It already smells bad in here, worse than my rooms in Nibenay.”

“Worse when ten or fifteen soldiers in here trying to stay out of the sun. Stifling hot in these. Outside at least some hope of a breeze.”

“This is going to be a long trip, isn’t it?”

“Always are.”

Aric kept shifting from his seat to the window to watch their progress. Once through the gate, they passed between four giant statues of Nibenay, collectively called the Omnipotent Receivers. Each was sculpted in a different style, and from Aric’s recent experience meeting the Shadow King he knew the representations of him were more than a little idealized. Beyond those statues, the road sliced through the sparse farmlands of the sorcerer-king, then fields of sandgrass interrupted at irregular intervals by small tenant farms and clutches of adobe buildings.

Sure enough, within the first hour of travel, Aric had had enough of the stuffy air inside the argosy, which windows on the sides and the opening in front used by the mekillot drivers barely alleviated. He and Ruhm got out and walked alongside the wagons, enjoying the slight breezes and the changing scenery. Soldiers cursed and complained, slaves hiked on in stoic silence, occasionally breaking out into song but stopping when their overseers grumbled.

The caravan road they traveled would take them through the Blackspine Pass, between the Windbreak Mountains that shielded Nibenay from the worst of the northern winds, and the Blackspine Mountains. If they stayed on it, they would end up in Raam, but they had been told that they’d veer off the road long before that, and journey overland to Akrankhot.

Before the end of the first day, Aric could already see swaths of green coating the sides of the Blackspines. “They’re so lush!” he told Ruhm.

“This end,” Ruhm said. “Get rain here. Follow range to the east, there’s less and less.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Aric said. “It’s beautiful.”

“It is,” Ruhm agreed. “You been sheltered. Good thing you go on this journey, learn about the world.”

“I know a thing or two,” Aric countered. Having been on his own since his tenth year, he didn’t consider himself sheltered, but worldly wise. He had to admit, though, that his wisdom largely ended at Nibenay’s massive stone walls.

“Two is pretty small number,” Ruhm said. Aric couldn’t argue with that, so he shut his mouth and kept walking.

Here’s the way I heard it,” the soldier said. His name was Damaric, and he was a slave, pressed into military service. Aric hadn’t heard the details of his life, just the broad strokes. They were sitting around one of the expedition’s many campfires, after a dinner of biscuits sweetened with tiny dabs of kank honey on the second night, and already he and Ruhm were starting to become acquainted with some of the other travelers. A night wind whipped into the fire pit, sending sparks heavenward to meet the stars glittering above. The argosies had been drawn into a circle, both stoves inside each one lit, and fires built inside the circle to keep night’s cold at bay.

“Heard where?” another soldier challenged. This was a goliath whose name Aric but couldn’t remember. “Some drunk in a tavern?”

“I can’t say where I heard it,” Damaric said. “Because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“Let him talk,” Amoni said. She was a mul, also a slave, but not a soldier. She was along to perform manual labor. “I want to hear what we’re doing here.”

Damaric took a big swig from a bladder of wine. He was a tight, compact man with a powerful build, deep-chested, bull-necked and broad shouldered, but two full heads shorter than Aric. His brown hair was cropped short. He wore a thick mustache that obscured his upper lip, and he hadn’t shaved since leaving Nibenay so stubble roughened his cheeks and chin. A thick, knotted scar wormed across his throat, a wound he had been lucky to survive, and perhaps as a result his voice always sounded hoarse and strained. “I heard—from someone who was there, mind you—that an undead man came into the Council chamber while Nibenay was there.”

“Undead?” Aric asked.

“And smelling like it, they say,” Damaric replied. “Anyway, he stormed in, interrupting the Council’s session, and demanded to speak to the Shadow King. Since he was undead, no one saw the point of trying to execute him on the spot. Besides, his entrance made Nibenay curious. He bade the undead man—a mercenary, I’m told—tell his tale. This undead man told about the treasure he had discovered beneath Akrankhot, and then he keeled over, finally really dead.”

“What’s the treasure?” another slave asked. “I’d like to know what we’re to break our backs hauling.”

“Nobody knows.”

Aric almost spoke up, then decided not to. He didn’t know who was to be trusted, or if there was any reason that the expedition’s goal should remain a secret now that they were so far from the city-state. But he had been told not to talk about it, and he decided to continue that policy, at least for a while longer.

“That’s not what I heard,” another human soldier said. He sat directly across the fire from Aric, and the flickering flames gave his face an odd, uneven cast. “I heard someone sent a guardian to Nibenay, interrupting him as he lay with one of his templar wives. He was furious enough to have the thing destroyed, but before he did, it told him about the city under the sand. And I heard that the treasure is jewels of every description, piled so high it would take a day to climb to the top.”

“That’s nonsense,” Damaric said. “Who sent the guardian?”

“Nobody knows,” the other soldier replied.

A guardian was a floating obsidian orb, the mind of a powerful psion from an age gone by, but removed from its body. Guardians were said to have no will of their own, but simply to follow the orders of their masters, which made Damaric’s question a pertinent one—no guardian would have come before Nibenay unless someone had sent it.

“I was told that the word came by a number of messengers,” Amoni offered. “A hermit found the city, and he told a passing traveler, who told another, and so on, until eventually word filtered back to Nibenay. Each time the story was told, of course, the treasure grew and grew. At the gates, this last traveler told the guards about an abandoned city in which every building was made of gold.”

“I hope it’s a small city,” a goliath solder said. “Or we need more argosies.”

“What about you, Aric?” Amoni asked him. Her hairless, copper skin gleamed in the firelight. She was fully as tall as Aric, big and strong, with long, muscular legs. But she had a ready smile, a gentle manner, and brown eyes that were surprisingly sympathetic. “Surely you heard a story too—it seems everybody has.”

“I guess I wasn’t listening, then,” Aric said. “I don’t know how word of Akrankhot made it to Nibenay’s ears.”

“What do you think we’ll find there?”

Aric hesitated, not ready to give away what he knew.

Ruhm stepped in for him. “Sand.”

“No doubt,” Amoni said, and they all laughed.

It was only the second night, and laughter still came easily.

This was real darkness.

On the expedition’s third night on the road, they could still see the lights of Nibenay on the horizon, a glowing smudge. Finding absolute darkness in the city was almost impossible, unless closed up in a box or a windowless interior room. At night, lamps and lanterns and fires burned everywhere. The vast emporiums flanking Sage’s Square were open all night, and even in the densest thicket of the square’s agafari trees, lights from those were visible. So bright were the lights of Athas that on some nights, the stars and moons could barely be seen from inside the city.

There was a transient beauty to the daytime desert that Aric had never expected to find there. The landscape was a muted palette of brown, ocher, umber and buff, cracked and crusted and warped like old leather, dried out from use. In midday, with the merciless sun shining overhead, it flattened out and sunlight stabbed the eye from every surface, so that you had to walk with eyes narrowed to keep from going blind. But toward evening, the hills in the distance—and there were always hills in the distance, out here—turned blue and brown and purple as the vast bowl of sky went gray-black at one edge, then to the dark green of moss on the inside of a well to the lighter green of new spring leaves, finally shattering into brilliant shards around the setting vermillion sun. And in the morning, other hills reached up as if trying to catch the first rays of light as the sun burst over the horizon. Aric came to love the mornings and the dusks, the temperature neither too hot or cold and the light changing the landscape minute by minute, so that no day was like the one before it.

Four nights out, with Nibenay finally gone, Aric wrapped himself up in heavy clothing and a leather cloak, carried the agafari-wood sword issued to him at the journey’s start, and walked alone into the wilderness. He had no particular destination, he just wanted to see what he could see.

The moons were not yet risen, although green-tinged Ral would break the horizon before he made it back to camp. The expedition’s fires glowed until he put some dunes between himself and them. He stopped when he realized he could no longer see anything more than outlines against the stars. An icy wind bit at his cheeks, sending sand skittering down the dune flanks.

Never before had Aric known the sensation of being outdoors with no light but the stars to show his way. Because they were the only thing to see, he tilted his head back and stared into the sky, turning his body to make the stars spin. When he stopped, he was dizzy. He bent forward, hands on his knees, until the feeling passed.

Which was when panic set in.

Had he turned himself completely around? With no visible landmarks, he wasn’t sure which direction camp was. All he could hear was the wind, already hurting his ears. He shouted, but the wind whipped the words away so fast he could barely hear himself.

Someone could die out here in no time, cut off from shelter and warmth. The expedition carried much of its own firewood; there was precious little to be collected out here in the sandy wastes. How much time would it take to freeze to death? An hour? Less?

Stop, he told himself. Take a deep breath and think.

He took several. His thoughts were jumbled, piling up on each other in a way that he believed meant panic was returning. He knew that if he let it have its head, he would wind up running in one direction after another, wearing himself out. There was a chance of coming into sight of the caravan, especially if he climbed a high dune. But the chances were far better that he would wind up running in circles, never getting anywhere near his comrades, until he fell and couldn’t get back up.

Footprints, Aric thought. The sand was soft enough here to leave deep prints when he walked. He could simply follow those back, if he could find them in the first place. He looked toward the horizon, saw the first glimmerings of Ral there. Guthay would not be far behind.

He dropped to hands and knees, looking for his tracks. Where he had stood and turned in a circle—that stupid circle!—there were plenty.

Beyond that, nothing. The wind had already erased them.

He couldn’t just stay here. Soon Ruhm, who had objected to him going out in the first place, would go looking for him. Maybe with others. If they all got lost, it would be that much worse.

He decided to climb the nearest dune, to see if he could spot the sparks streaming up from the campfires.

He was on the steep side, but he leaned into it, planting his feet carefully, sidestepping for traction.

He was halfway up when the wind died momentarily and he thought he heard something break the silence. A shout from camp? No, something harsher, shorter. A chuff of breath, he thought, and close by.

He looked up to see how far from the top he was. Something blocked the stars for an instant, as if hunching at the rim, looking down. He barely registered it and then it was gone.

And that was the other reason he never should have done this. “Weather don’t get you,” Ruhm had said, “beasts will.”

“I’ll have a sword,” Aric had countered. “And I won’t be far from camp, just far enough to see what it’s like out here at night.”

“Don’t want to know.”

“That’s easy for you, Ruhm. You’ve experienced these things. I’ve heard stories, read a few, but my knowledge all comes from somebody else. I want to see for myself.”

“Crazy,” Ruhm had said. “Stupid.”

Aric hated it when Ruhm was right.

He leapt from the dune’s face, landing on the harder ground below. Right where he had started from, before deciding to climb. He still had his sword, and he raised it in case whatever was up on that dune sprang at him. It wasn’t steel, but it was sanded to a keen edge, and agafari wood was nearly as hard.

Now he was back in the same spot, unable to see the camp, and not sure in which direction it lay. Only one thing had changed—now he was being hunted.

Despite the extreme cold, sweat tickled Aric’s ribs.

Could whatever was up there see well in the dark? He guessed it probably could, if this was its typical hunting ground. But was it even still there? Or had it circled around, climbing down the gentler slope, so that even now it crept up behind him?

He spun around, half-expecting to see yellow, feral eyes glowing in the blackness. But he saw nothing there, only dark emptiness. He felt only wind and terror.

It took almost a minute to realize that he could see better, however, than just a short while earlier. He didn’t know if it was his eyes adapting to the darkness or the fact that Ral had climbed above the horizon, and now distant, golden Guthay was edging above it.

He decided to take a chance—to start in the direction that felt right, based on where the moons were rising—and hope for the best. Better than standing here waiting to be attacked.

With new determination, he took one step, then another. With each pace, he felt better, more sure of his decision. He kept the sword ready, scanned the way before him with every step, stopped occasionally to check behind and around. He was going the right way, and he started to breathe easier.

That certainty lasted until he had been walking for a while—longer than he had walked on the way out. Then it abandoned him all at once. He gave an anguished, wordless cry.

“Aric!” he heard in response.

“Ruhm?” Wind whisked his words from his lips.

“Aric!”

The voice seemed to come from off to his left. He adjusted his course and started toward it, calling out every few moments.

Finally, he saw torches, borne aloft by Ruhm, Amoni, and some others. He ran to them, rushing gratefully into the overlapping circles of light. “There—there’s something out there.”

“Course,” Ruhm said.

“There are no doubt many somethings out there,” Amoni said. “Ruhm said you wanted to see what it was like in the darkness.”

Aric was shivering. The cold, he told himself, but not convincingly.

“I d-did.”

“Like it?” Ruhm asked.

“Not a bit.” That wasn’t precisely true. At first, he had. He had liked the novelty of it, had liked the solitude, the sensation that he was alone in the world instead of hemmed in by a city full of greed and strife and anger. But that hadn’t lasted long, and the parts he hadn’t liked had taken over.

Ruhm clapped him on the shoulder with one big hand, and led him back toward camp. Because he was a goliath, stern and sullen much of the time, not given to excessive conversation, he didn’t say “I told you so.”

But Aric knew he was thinking it, just the same.

On the sixth day out from Nibenay, they left the trade road. Each day they had passed at least one caravan, bound for Nibenay or Raam, usually glad to see a large armed force. The Gith Horde, people said, had been leaving their ancestral homes in the Blackspine Mountains to raid travelers, and although fifty soldiers might not be much of a deterrent, it was better than nothing.

But after they struck out north from the road, they stopped seeing anyone. These wastelands weren’t entirely deserted. The group saw the domed roofs of a wezer colony, and a couple of the giant insects even buzzed the expedition. Probably put off by its numbers, they apparently decided not to try to abduct any of its members and hurried back to their own colony. At one promising oasis, they saw a sand bride who took on the appearance of the most beautiful woman Aric had ever seen. On his own, he would certainly have gone to her, and would just as certainly have perished in her embrace. But the expedition had enough experienced hands along that they recognized the oasis for the trap it was.

After these dangers were spotted, along with numerous less-lethal creatures, word was spread to encourage everyone to ride inside the argosies rather than walking. As Ruhm had predicted, when the heavy wagons were hot and crowded, the smell grew worse and the unceasing rocking and swaying made Aric think his spine would splinter before journey’s end.

For the first couple of days, he had been enjoying the novelty of the trip. That had not lasted long, however. Now he just wanted it to be over. He had been coerced into coming in the first place, and although no one had died yet, everyone swore it was only a matter of time.

The ninth day, Aric was outside the argosy for a short while, just wanting to breathe fresh air and stretch his legs. On earlier days there would have been plenty of company outside, but there was little now, and while he tried to watch the horizons for attacks of any kind, he kept stumbling over the dips and rises of the sand beneath his feet.

“Aric, isn’t it?” a woman’s voice asked.

He looked up and to his right. Kadya leaned out the window of the lead argosy.

“Yes.”

“Have a care out there, Aric, we don’t want anything happening to you.”

“Thank you. I don’t think we want anything happening to anyone, do we?”

“Of course not. But you especially.”

He didn’t ask why. Ruhm had said it early on—he was the only psionic they had with an ability that could help find hidden stores of metals. Without him the whole expedition might fail.

“I just needed some air,” he said. “I’ll get back inside soon.”

“See that you do. And if you want to walk outside, take a couple soldiers with you. I can let them know they’re to obey your commands.”

A sensation of power welled up in Aric, but he pushed it back down. He knew he was important to the trip, but he didn’t want that importance going to his head. That would only make it harder to live his half-elf’s life once they got back to Nibenay, and would make his traveling companions resent him. On the road, as in the city, he believed his best hope for a peaceful life lay in keeping his profile low. “Thanks,” he told her. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

Kadya was annoyed with Aric. Nibenay, her husband and king, had specifically instructed her to keep the young man out of harm’s way. If he wouldn’t take the simplest steps to protect himself, though, what could she do for him?

Well, quite a lot, actually. But she didn’t want to waste any of her magic on him if she could help it. Arcane magic required the use of life forces to power it, and in this environment there wasn’t much life force around, except that belonging to those in her own expedition. She had already had to use magic a couple of times. The first time had been to destroy a gold scorpion that had approached her personal maidservant, their first day off the caravan road. That night at an oasis, another of the slaves in her retinue had been seized by some sort of road sickness, and started convulsing, pink froth showing at the edges of her mouth. Many thought the sickness was a result of Kadya’s magic, as if the life force of the slave had been tapped for earlier spells.

Everybody knew templars used magic, of course. But knowing it and seeing it were two different things, and Kadya thought that for the good of the expedition, she was better off keeping it discreet.

Still, she tried to keep an eye on the half-elf. Letting him die before the metal was located would infuriate Siemhouk as well as Nibenay. Nibenay could kill her in an instant, but it was Siemhouk’s vengeance she feared. She could make Kadya’s life long and miserable. And she wouldn’t hesitate to do so if Kadya crossed her in any way.

Which made crossing her a dangerous game.

But Kadya hadn’t wanted to come on this trip just to serve her young mistress. To the extent that serving Siemhouk also worked toward her own goal, she was glad to do it. In the long run, what she wanted was to take Djena’s spot—and from there, just perhaps, restore the position of Templar of the King’s Law to the dominant position it was meant to have. That would require Siemhouk either dying or losing favor with her father, of course. But Kadya had seen his moods swing from one extreme to another, and his love for Siemhouk, even though she was his own kin, could change in time.

Kadya was sure Siemhouk had her own hidden objectives for this expedition. Such was life inside the Naggaramakam, a constant struggle for position, the never-ending play of strategies and counter-strategies.

So she planned to keep Aric safe, at least until the metal had been retrieved. But if he made it necessary, he might find himself riding the rest of the way, bound and gagged inside her private argosy. She had smiled and wished him well, when he declined her offer of assistance. She just hoped, for his sake, that he didn’t mistake her protection for friendship.

Aric was simply another tool, like the shovels and picks and hammers brought along for the slaves to use once they got there. And once a tool’s usefulness was at an end, it could be discarded without a second glance.

They had spotted the oasis hours before, from a cleft in the rocky ridge they were crossing. Myrana was trying to keep them on the path her dreams had set out for her, but the dream route occasionally lacked specifics, and each night she had to plumb those dreams for clues as to the next day’s travels.

They had departed the caravan with only one soldier kank, as that had been all that Welton could spare. Although Myrana tried to argue the point, Sellis and Koyt would not ride the creature, insisting it was meant for Myrana alone. She had relented, secretly thankful. She wanted to be fair, but walking all day made her legs ache, and since she didn’t know what they were headed toward, she wanted to save her strength.

On the fifth night of the journey, they had lost the kank.

Koyt had been standing watch while the others slept, Myrana hoping desperately for a dream that would chart the next day’s course. Koyt sat near the fire, longbow across his lap. The kank, four feet tall and eight long, was asleep just outside the firelight. Koyt claimed later that he heard nothing until the first dagorran used its concussive blast attack on the kank. The kank lurched upright, letting out a squeal of pain that woke Myrana and Sellis. Koyt quickly nocked an arrow and scanned for a target. When he saw the dagorran charging the kank, he led it slightly and let fly.

The shaft darted into the dagorran’s open maw, driving through so that the point jutted from between its bulging eyes. The crystals on its back, which people said powered their psionic abilities, dimmed from a dull glow to none at all as it dropped to the ground just inches shy of the kank.

But there had been more than one dagorran, and they attacked from several directions at once. The second hit the kank with another concussive blast. With what was left of its strength, the kank caught that one in its pincers. Koyt hit another with an arrow, and Sellis moved in, a sword in each hand, and dispatched the one the kank held.

One more dagorran’s psionic attack, however, was all the kank could bear. The huge insect dropped to the dirt, twitched a few times, and then lay still. Sellis and Koyt slaughtered the other two dagorrans trying to move in to feed on Myrana’s mount, but it was too late for the kank. No one slept well for the rest of that night, and by morning the dead kank’s stench was so foul they couldn’t wait to travel, even though Myrana’s dreams had been interrupted so she didn’t know for sure which way to go.

They had briefly debated returning to the caravan, but decided against it. The caravan had no doubt continued on its way, the opposite of the general northwesterly direction they had headed, so five days gone meant ten days’ travel to catch them. For all they knew, their own destination was far closer.

But with three of them on foot, one of them half-crippled, their progress was quite a bit slower. By the time they sighted the oasis, the water bladders were growing perilously light. Regardless of where Myrana’s dreams might have wanted them to go, they all agreed that detouring to the oasis was the best idea.

They approached it at late afternoon, after it had hovered there in the distance all day, taunting them with promises of shade and fresh water. When they were still almost a quarter of a league away, Sellis halted the group.

“Oases can harbor all sorts of dangers,” he said.

“Sellis, I’ve been living in the desert my whole life. You think I don’t know that?”

He folded his arms across his chest, his muscles bunched and round, forearms veined, tracked by scars. He was almost thirty, and was in many ways the most capable, experienced man she had ever known. His pale blue eyes missed nothing. He was quick to laugh, and when he did, head thrown back and mouth open, it was all she could do not to join right in. But when he was serious, those eyes narrowed and a deep gash appeared between them, as though a tiny hatchet had split his brow, and his usually smiling mouth turned into a thin, grim line. Jutting over his shoulders were the hilts of his twin swords, worn crossing each other on his back.

“I’m not saying it to educate you, Myrana. I’m only explaining why I’m going ahead alone.”

“What, so you can drink first?”

“Myrana!” That was Koyt, shorter and leaner, but just as deadly with his bow as Sellis with his twin swords. His face was round, with liquid brown eyes, and she might have thought him soft if she didn’t know him. He mopped sweat from his eyes. “You know that’s not what he means.”

“I was teasing, Koyt.”

“Koyt will cover me from here,” Sellis continued. “If it’s clear, I’ll wave you in.”

“It had better be,” Myrana said. “We need to stock up on water.”

Sellis flashed her a quick grin, dimples carving his cheeks. “Now who’s telling us what we already know?”

Without another word, he trudged toward the oasis. Koyt drew an arrow from the quiver he kept on his back, right between his shoulder blades, and fitted it onto his bowstring.

“Can you really hit something from this distance?” Myrana asked. She knew he was a skilled archer, but this seemed impossibly long.

“Let’s hope Sellis doesn’t have to find out.”

The oasis appeared calm from this distance. A light but steady breeze ruffled the fronds of tall palms, so they flashed light and dark in the afternoon sun. Beneath them was thick shadow, and somewhere in that shadow, Myrana knew, was water.

So close. She slipped the bladder off her shoulder and took a drink.

“Easy,” Koyt said, his voice calm but firm. “Save it.”

“But there’s bound to be plenty there.”

“If we can get to it.”

As she had said, Myrana had lived on the road, cutting across one desert or another, since the day of her birth. She was fully aware of the dangers an oasis could conceal. She just wanted this one to be different, to be safe, so they could drink their fill, get out of the sun, and make camp in a grove of trees that would offer shelter from the night winds.

Sellis walked right up to its edge and paused. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and Myrana guessed he was trying to peer into the shadows. Apparently satisfied, he stepped into the shade of the palms, and an instant later he was gone.

“Now what?” Myrana asked. “How can you shoot something you can’t see?”

“Let’s go a little closer,” Koyt said. He kept his tone even, but she could tell he was worried, too. If he hadn’t been he wouldn’t have so quickly disobeyed Sellis’s instructions.

They started forward. After they’d been walking for a couple of minutes, Sellis reappeared on the fringes of shadow and waved them in. “Looks fine to me!” he shouted.

Koyt offered a relieved sigh and slipped his arrow back into its quiver. He and Myrana picked up their pace, Myrana’s staff digging into the earth with every step. It seemed forever, but then the cooling shade cut the day’s heat and she could smell water, see its reflection casting shimmering light onto the undersides of the palms.

“Everything seems clear,” Sellis said as they approached. “Drink up, and fill those skins.”

“Can we camp here tonight?” Myrana asked.

Sellis eyed the horizon. “We still have almost an hour of daylight.”

“But we’re not even sure we’re going the right way, Sellis. Let’s stay here tonight, and I’ll dream tomorrow’s route.”

Koyt had outpaced her and dropped to his knees beside the shimmering green pool, shoving knife-edged blades of grass out of his way. “I agree with her,” he said. “Camp here, push on tomorrow.”

He lowered his face toward the water, cupped his hands, and drank. Myrana had almost reached the stiff, broad-bladed grass. Sellis stood watching, a sword in each hand, as the water began to churn and roil before tentacles burst from beneath the surface.

“Water worm!” Sellis cried.

Myrana let out a shriek, dropped her staff and yanked the dagger she wore from its sheath on her belt.

Water rolled off the creature in sheets as it shot up from under the surface. The thing was a translucent green, invisible inside the water. As it rose into the air, it revealed a thick cylindrical body, like a massive snake, with squirming rose tentacles encircling it.

Koyt scrambled back from the pond’s edge and snatched up his bow. A tentacle darted at Myrana and she dodged it, slashing at it with her dagger. Thick green blood spurted where she cut it, and a foul, rotten stench filled the air. Sellis hacked at it, too, slicing a tentacle and being drenched in awful blood for his trouble.

Koyt’s bowstring twanged and an arrow flew into the creature’s side.

Myrana’s blade cut into a tentacle, but then another wrapped around her ankle. It released before she was able to swing at it, but where it had touched her, the flesh burned. She took a step backward, then another, and the leg the creature had caught—her right leg, the good one—almost gave out beneath her.

She remembered what she had heard about water worms, also called cistern fiends. Their tentacles contained a paralyzing poison, which they used to bring down their pretty. Once they were subdued, the fiend would suck out their bodily fluids, feeding the nutrients and eliminating the rest as pure water into the well or pond they inhabited.

“Don’t let those tentacles touch you!” she called. She slashed at another one coming toward her.

The thing had twenty feet or so of its length out of the water by this point, thrashing around madly. Koyt sank two more arrows into it. Sellis lopped off another tentacle. Myrana dodged one, but her good leg was already partly paralyzed, and she slipped on the damp grass by the pond’s edge. She went down on her knees, and a tentacle snaked around her waist. Even through her clothing she could feel the fiery sensation of its touch.

She raised her dagger to chop at it. Before she could, yet another arrow slammed into it. The cistern fiend jerked back, its tentacle pulling taut, and Myrana was hauled into the water.

She hit with a splash, but the surface was so roiled from the creature’s writhing that it was barely noticeable. She pawed at the surface, but the tentacle circling her waist dragged her under. Another caught her right leg, just above the knee, and then one twined around her right wrist.

Myrana had managed to catch a breath on the way into the water, but not much of one. She felt her lungs would burst as the thing held her beneath the pond’s surface. Her body was quickly going numb, her muscles refusing to obey her mental commands.

But in the water, her legs were both equally useful, the crooked as strong as the straight. She told herself not to panic—listening to herself was another story, especially as her lungs ached to draw breath—and she forced her bad leg to kick at the tentacle where it gripped the other. At the same time she moved the dagger—she hadn’t the strength left to slash through the water—to the one holding her wrist, and she began sawing at that one. When its blood flowed beneath the surface, its heat warmed her skin.

She had to have air. The tentacle around her wrist released when she cut deeply, but the one gripping her waist kept tightening. Her mouth burst open and bubbles of air escaped, and she managed, only just, to clamp it shut again as it filled with water. She gave one more mighty kick with her bad leg, and the tentacle clutching her ankle gave way.

One remained. The fiend kept jerking and thrashing about, so she knew Sellis and Koyt still battled it on the surface. But she couldn’t count on them to kill it in time to save her. She held the dagger out as far from her body as she could manage, and drove it right toward herself. The point stabbed into the tentacle. It tightened more in response, and the world started to go black. She pushed harder. Hot blood mixed with churning water. She kept pushing until she felt the tip of her blade emerge and poke into her own belly.

Only then did she draw the blade out. The tentacle let go, and Myrana pulled for the surface with every muscle that still functioned.

Koyt’s strong arms were around her, tugging her from the water. Sellis stood hip deep in it, crisscrossing the air with both swords, cutting the fiend into bloody chunks that splashed into the water like thrown rocks. Koyt dragged her onto shore, several feet from the water’s edge, laying her down on her back.

“Are you …?”

“I’m alive,” she said. “That’s as much as I can say.”

“Good.” He turned his attention back toward the fight, nocking and loosing another arrow before dropping the bow and pulling a dagger. He dashed into the water. Myrana wanted to raise her head to watch, but she couldn’t. The thing’s poison had spread through her, and her muscles were no longer her own to control.

It didn’t last long. Scant minutes had passed before Koyt and Sellis both stood over her, soaked and bedraggled, coated in the dark green slime that was the fiend’s life’s blood.

“Myrana,” Sellis said. “You’re well?”

She tried to answer, but now not even her voice worked. She couldn’t so much as blink.

“She spoke moments ago,” Koyt said. “Before I joined you in the pond.”

“Paralysis, then,” Sellis guessed. “It will wear off, Myrana. The damned thing is dead now, so we’ll make camp here tonight and you should be better by morning.”

Koyt broke out in laughter. Sellis stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What?” he asked.

“That’s what she wanted all along,” Koyt said. “To camp here in the oasis, under the shade of the palms.”

A smile creased Sellis’s face, and that contagious laugh burst from him. “Ha! So she did. I had no idea of the measures she’d take to ensure that we did. Good job, Myrana.” He went to one knee beside her, resting his hand comfortingly on her shoulder. “And good job fighting that thing—if not for you, we’d never have bested it.”

Myrana wanted to smile, to thank him, and most of all, to laugh at how she had gotten her way. She had to settle for laughing on the inside.

The mood in camp was tense.

Aric had stopped counting days and nights—there were too many of them, and they ran together in his mind, long hot days of walking himself to exhaustion or riding inside a steaming, stinking, rattling, rocking argosy full of soldiers, and cold, uncomfortable nights during which he tossed in his sleep, dreamed frightening, fitful dreams.

And that was before people started to die.

The first was the night after he had gone off by himself and found himself lost in the desert. A soldier had wandered away from camp, to empty his bladder, he told one of his fellows. He had barely disappeared into the darkness beyond the firelight when everyone in camp heard a cry of sheer terror. A search party, hastily thrown together, carried torches into the darkness and found his bloody remains. Damaric was part of this party. He told Aric and Ruhm that they had located the soldier’s head some twenty or thirty long paces from the body. They never did, Damaric swore, find his heart.

Since then, they had gone at a rate of one or two a night, with only occasional nights of peace. Some were never found, others not located until morning’s light made searching the desert’s vastness easier. Trails of blood often led to the bodies, or what was left of them.

Several times, Aric volunteered to accompany the search parties, but Kadya would have none of it. “Not you,” she told him privately, standing in the shade of an argosy one morning. On the journey, she wore a leather leggings and a loose top, and she kept her brown hair piled up on her head. Behind her, the mekillots belched and fidgeted, ready to get going. “You are too valuable to this expedition. Stay in your wagon and take no foolish chances.”

“But some of these people have become my friends,” he protested.

“I don’t care if they’re your brothers and sisters,” she said. The expression on her face was one of barely controlled rage. “You don’t go out there. Nibenay wants me to keep you safe. I can’t do it if you’re away from the caravan.”

“Very well,” Aric said. He would get his chance, he decided—if the slaughter continued—sometime when she was otherwise occupied. He would just go out with one of the search parties, and deal with her anger when he returned.

Kadya, satisfied that she had won the argument, was walking away from Aric when this morning’s party returned. They bore the remains of yet another goliath soldier in their arms. The day’s travel would be delayed long enough to dig her a shallow grave.

One of the soldiers, a human, broke off from the other searchers and strode up to Kadya. He stopped before her with clenched fists resting against his hips, chin thrust toward her. “Templar,” he began. “There’s been enough death. Let’s return to Nibenay while there are enough of us left alive to make the journey.”

“I’m sorry,” Kadya said, barely restraining a laugh. “Did my husband put you in command of this expedition without telling me? How unusual.”

“You know he did not,” the soldier said. He stood his ground, but Aric detected a falter in his voice. “But we’re losing people every night now. How long can this go on?”

“Until we’ve found Akrankhot and retrieved what Nibenay wants from there,” Kadya said.

“It had better be small, lady, because there won’t be many left to carry it.”

Others had gathered to observe the confrontation. Even those who held their mutilated comrade stared with rapt attention. Nobody stood up to a templar in this way—not if he expected to survive the encounter.

At the same time, Aric was glad someone had found the courage. He suspected the same was true of most of the people making the journey. Kadya had used magic on several occasions already. Between that and the ongoing, almost nightly deaths, people were ready to rise up against her leadership. But they all knew it was suicide to try, and that had held them back.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about, soldier. Yes, there have been some killings—people caught by sand cactus, that one who strayed too close to a hungry mekillot. Whose fault were those deaths? Surely not mine. You’re soldiers, killing and being killed is what you do. So stop arguing and do it before I lose patience with you.”

Aric felt a presence at his shoulder. Ruhm loomed over him, bending toward his ear. “Only reason she hasn’t struck him down, she knows we’ll need every sword arm we got.”

“You might be right,” Aric said. He wished he knew what to think of her. She showed precious little concern for the dead. But she had, for the most part, been decent to him. And her husband Nibenay had sent him on this trip, promising rewards. For all he knew, Nibenay really was the one who had watched over him for most of his life—he couldn’t truly believe that, but he couldn’t make himself completely discount it, either. Anything was possible, and who knew the secret heart of the Shadow King?

The two friends walked away from the ongoing confrontation. Aric didn’t want to see what she might do to a soldier who dared argue with her in front of others. “She’s been protective of me,” he told Ruhm. “But it’s true, if we keep losing people to whatever is stalking us—if that’s indeed what’s happening—we’re all in more danger every day.”

“Dune freak, I heard.”

“Really?”

Ruhm shrugged. “Could be.”

Aric tried to picture an anakore—a dune freak—erupting from underground in a burst of sand, all claws and fangs, grabbing someone and dragging him back down with it. Ferocious predators, they lived in colonies beneath the sand, and they could sense the vibrations of people moving about on the surface.

“There are so many dangers in the world, Ruhm. Ones I never even considered, living in the relative safety of Nibenay.”

Ruhm didn’t answer. The goliath might have talked himself out. But Aric still had something to say, something that had been wearing on him day and night, and this seemed his best opportunity. He looked away from Ruhm, out across the trackless waste surrounding them. “I don’t think I’ll make it back there alive. I’ve had this feeling, since before we left, that I was saying goodbye to the city for good.”

“You’ll make it,” Ruhm said. “They need you.”

“Until we’ve reached Akrankhot and found all the metal. If it’s even there. After that—what good am I? Nibenay offered to share the wealth with me, so he might want me killed before the expedition gets home. Anyway, if Akrankhot is even real—and I’m starting to have doubts, it’s taking so long to find it—who knows what sorts of creatures might be hiding in there? Something’s killing good soldiers out here along the way, but when we’re in there, confined in a city …” Aric shuddered. “I hate to think what could happen.”

Aric knew he sounded like a coward, but at the moment he didn’t feel particularly brave. He had never claimed to be any kind of hero. People noticed heroes.

“You’ll be good,” Ruhm said simply. He clapped one of those huge hands on Aric’s shoulder and gave it a crushing squeeze, then wandered off. Aric supposed it was meant to reassure him.

It didn’t work.

After dinner, around the fire, everyone determinedly avoided the subject of the deaths, or the fate of the soldier who had stood up to Kadya. No one had seen him since the confrontation. Any number of things could have befallen him, but some claimed Kadya had turned him to sand and scattered him on the breeze. Aric and Ruhm sat with Damaric and Amoni, the mul, all of them huddled under furs against the night’s bitter chill. Instead of talking about the killings or what tomorrow might bring, Amoni had delved into her past.

“I was bred to be a gladiator,” she said. “And I was a good one, too.”

“You’re still here,” Damaric said. Frost rimed his thick mustache. “That’s something.”

“Twenty-seven bouts. Not without a scratch, but without any life-threatening injuries. It was the twenty-eighth that was a bitch.” She gave them a smile and took a healthy swig of the ale that Kadya had so thoughtfully arranged to be brought on the journey, and distributed in rationed measures. “The worst part is, I was up against a brohg warrior. Nothing I hadn’t beat easily before.”

“What happened, Amoni?” Aric asked.

“After several kills, I started to accumulate somewhat of a following,” she said. Aric had noticed before that the mul tended to keep to herself—she was happy to share food, drink and conversation, but even then she sat off by herself even while others huddled for warmth. And she glanced about often, as if making sure no one was sneaking up on her. “People came just to see me, to cheer me on. It swells your head, hearing your name ringing from wall to wall. Fortunately, my fellow gladiators mostly liked me, except those I fought. Still, there were rivalries, petty feuds. Like in any group of people, I guess. There was a goliath I had been … let’s say, friendly with—a slave whose master fought him in the pit instead of working him or allowing him to be used in the military. I won’t go into the whole thing, but there was another female gladiator who was envious of me, and another male who was after her, and things got ugly.

“At any rate, there I was, battling this brohg. Ugly bastard,” she shuddered, “all those arms. You know how they love their spears. This one was using a triple attack, a spear in each of three hands and a rock in the fourth. I had suffered a few cuts, nothing terrible, and succeeded in wrenching two of the spears from its hands. I was about to run it through when that gladiator I mentioned, the male—a mul he was, too, of all things—struck. He had arranged for an accomplice, a powerful psionic, to sit in the front row, right there among my cheering fans. As I was about to deliver the killing blow, I glanced over at them, and that’s when the accomplice struck. He used the Way to cloud my head. I was there, and suddenly I didn’t know where I was, who I was, what I was doing.

“That’s all the brohg needed. He threw the other spear away, picked me up in his four hands, bent one knee, and brought me down hard, smashing my back against his knee.

“I guess it was obvious to everyone that there had been some cheating going on, although not the brohg’s doing. Anyway, because of my popularity—my fans would have torn the place down, or tried to, had the brohg been allowed to finish me off—the match was halted. My spine was broken in four places. I was out of the gladiatorial business, needless to say.”

“That must have been painful,” Aric said, aware how much his words understated what she had endured.

“Yes,” she replied, wincing at the memory. She set her mug down on the dirt and arched her back, hands on her hips. “Pain like I hope you never have to imagine. I haven’t been allowed back into the pit, but I was trained for game hunting in the Crescent Forest, and have brought down my share of wild beasts these past few years. And of course, what use am I if I can’t fight? I’m lucky they conscripted me to do manual labor. So here I am.”

“Sounds great,” Damaric said. “Not the manual labor part. Or the back. But the freedom. For the most part, you’ve been able to do what you want, whether it’s fighting or hunting.”

“Have you always been a slave, Damaric?” Aric asked. Ruhm was sitting with his back against a boulder, sipping his ration of ale and keeping quiet. But he was taking it all in. When Ruhm was quiet, it was a safe bet he was listening intently. Or sleeping, but his mouth would have been open had that been the case.

“Born and raised,” Damaric said. “My mother was carrying me when she and my father crossed into Nibenese territory. They were barbarians, you might say. Not citizens of any state, living off the land, stealing when they had to, working when they could. My father had been employed from time to time as a mercenary. But then they were caught on Nibenese land. My father mouthed off to some templar, and they were both consigned to slavery. My father didn’t take to it. He was killed on his ninth or tenth escape attempt. But my mother was tired of fighting, and she had a baby on the way. So she submitted, and I was born a slave’s child. Trained in military ways since I could walk, or so they tell me. Never known a day’s freedom.”

“You look like you’ve taken to it,” Amoni said.

“I’m hale enough, if that’s what you mean. But freedom? Some days it’s like I can almost taste it. Then others, it’s as far away as the clouds. When I heard about Tyr …” He shook his head. “I’m not educated. I hear about things like Kalak’s death, and the uprising in Tyr, and I don’t have any historical basis to understand it. But it sounds like someone just rang a bell and set thousands of people free.” He gave a low whistle. “What that must be like.”

Amoni looked like she was going to say something. Instead, she shot a look over her left shoulder, snatched up her cahulaks, and sprang to her feet. The motion tipped over her mug, and precious ale soaked the ground.

“What is it?” Ruhm asked.

She stared intently into the darkness beyond the fire’s glow. “Probably nothing,” she said. “I’m just a nervous type, right?”

Aric combed through his memory of the seconds before Amoni rose. Damaric had been saying something. Had there been a sound from out in the wastes? The scrape of bare feet on sand?

The mekillots grumbled and snorted, making Aric nervous. A couple of other soldiers emerged from wagons. They stood close to Amoni, joining her in scanning the night. “You heard it too?” one asked.

“I heard something. So do the beasts.”

The other soldier took a step away from the fire, toward the pitch-black desert.

It was his last step.

A chatkcha arced out of the night.

It caught the unsuspecting soldier at the top of his nose, cutting across both eyes. The man had started to move his head, hearing the whistling sound as it approached, but he didn’t move it enough. The weapon made a slicing sound as it hit him, then kept going, spinning back to its thrower’s hand.

Up and down the caravan, soldiers spilled from the argosies or lurched up from around the fires. Some were half-dressed, others fully armored with weapons at the ready. They all dashed to the caravan’s east side, where the first attack had come from.

The next assault was a hail of stones, as big as a goliath’s fist. A soldier near Ruhm went down with a gash in his scalp and blood pouring into his eyes. Cries of “Raiders!” rang out.

Aric drew his wooden sword. Ruhm, his greatclub gripped in both hands, looked for someone to use it on. Damaric spun a singing stick, his hands at its middle, its distinctive whistling tones providing a musical counterpoint to the shouts of warriors seeking an enemy.

“What kind of raiders?” Aric asked.

“Dead kind, soon,” Ruhm replied.

“Face us!” Damaric called, impatient to start the fighting. “Don’t hide in the dark like old women!”

As if in response, the attackers showed themselves.

Aric wished they hadn’t.

“Halflings!” went the shouts of the soldiers. “It’s halflings!”

Faces painted with what must have been the dried blood of the caravan’s dead, the halflings charged out of the desert screeching incomprehensible words from voracious mouths. They carried every kind of weapon imaginable; ivory swords and obsidian-tipped spears, gouges and gythkas—some wielded the horns of of exotic animals, filed to dagger-sharp points. Most were naked, or nearly so, though a few wore pieces of chitin armor no doubt stolen from previous victims of their raids. Halflings, Aric had heard, bore no trace of humanity. They were savages with only bloodthirstiness and cruelty in their feral little hearts.

It seemed there were hundreds of them.

They swarmed into the Nibenese soldiers, cutting and stabbing as they came.

Damaric stepped to meet the onrush. His rod spun so fast it seemed to be a solid shield, the wider ends batting away halfling weapons and crushing skulls at the same time. Amoni gripped the handle of her cahulaks and swirled them about, four-bladed heads at the rope’s ends slicing through flesh and sending halfling blood spraying into the air. Ruhm seemed pleased to have an enemy he could see, and he waded into their midst, his club flying this way and that in a killing flurry.

For a few moments, Aric thought none of the halflings would reach him. After all, Kadya said he was to be protected. Surely soldiers would surround him any moment, keeping him safe from the raiders.

But Ruhm, Amoni and Damaric were all engaged with multiple opponents, as were the few other soldiers nearby. The halflings kept coming, and when Aric saw the glint in the horrible yellow eyes of one staring right at him, he knew he had met his first foe.

The halfling bore a short spear with an obsidian tip. Ducking around the swarm trying to get at Ruhm, he came straight for Aric. Aric raised his sword. The halfling thrust his spear forward, and Aric parried the attack, wooden blade clacking against the spear’s shaft. But Aric didn’t recover from the parry fast enough to make an attack of his own, and the spear came at him again. Aric stepped back and to the side, bringing the blade around in a down-sweeping motion, left to right. It stopped the spear from stabbing him, but the stone tip sliced across his belly, opening a thin cut.

Sweat was running down Aric’s face, stinging his eyes. He stabbed at the halfling, who beat the blade away. The spear streaked toward Aric again. He lurched backward and caught the shaft in his left hand. With a mighty heave he yanked the halfling toward him and brought his blade up for the killing thrust.

The halfling’s eyes were full of hate, and his scent was rank. He snarled at Aric, then tugged back on the spear. The shaft dragged through Aric’s fist and the obsidian head sliced his palm and fingers. Second blood, and still all that had spilled belonged to the half-elf, none to his savage foe.

He had to do something fast. His comrades battled half a dozen halflings at once, and here he was being sliced to ribbons by a single one. He remembered his battle against four elves, how he had woven a web of shining steel—

But that was the difference, wasn’t it? With steel in his hands, he was a different person. This wooden sword had an edge to it, but it felt like he was fighting with a tree branch.

The halfling nicked his right arm with the spear’s edge. Concentrate, fool! Aric told himself. Ragged gasps of breath tore at his throat.

Aric launched himself forward. The halfling threw his weight to his rear foot, but that didn’t give him enough distance, and Aric landed too close for the spear to come into play. The half-elf’s sword was almost useless at this range, too, but he held it low, point up, and grabbed the halfling’s shoulder in his left hand. He pulled the halfling to him and pushed the blade at the same time. It met resistance, but cut through the halfling’s flesh, glanced off bone, tore at his innards. An expression of dismay and then agony twisted the halfling’s horrible face. His spear fell to the ground and the halfling went limp in Aric’s hands.

Aric shoved him backward, drawing his sword out at the same time. More halflings converged on him, two of them, a female armed with a wrist razor, the other a male with a crude club. Bolstered by his victory, Aric engaged them both at once.

If the halflings had a strategy beyond overwhelming their foes through sheer numbers, none could see it. They had, it was true, picked off soldiers here and there over the last few days, putting the entire expeditionary force on edge. But that slow attrition was forgotten as the halflings surged toward the light, breaking on the Nibenese defenses like a muddy red wave.

The Nibenese goliaths stood more than twice as tall as the halflings, with correspondingly greater reach. Most of the soldiers were armored, and even those who were laborers instead of soldiers had access to shields, and armored wagons to hide behind when the halflings launched aerial bombardments of rocks and chatkchas.

All of which meant the battle was closer than it might have been, had Nibenay’s army been less well trained, disciplined, and equipped, or the halflings less numerous. Aric dispatched his two newest foes with a lucky slash that split one open from his collarbone to the center of his chest, and a precise thrust that pierced the other’s heart. But for every halfling who fell, it seemed two or three more took his place. When he found himself facing three at once, his newfound confidence faltered.

Ruhm bled from a score of wounds, although certainly some of the blood soaking his huge form had surely come from the halflings mounded around him. Amoni swung her cahulaks with ferocious abandon, lips parted and teeth clenched, and the dead and wounded before her formed a wall that other halflings had to climb to get to her. Damaric’s singing stick had taken some punishing blows, but he seemed mostly unscathed so far. Other soldiers were dead and dying everywhere, some almost under Aric’s feet. The combined stink of halfling bodies, viscera, blood and death was everywhere, inescapable.

Aric didn’t know how long any of them could go on. He had powerful arms and shoulders, a blacksmith’s strength, but there were so many halflings. Soon he would start to grow weary, and then what?

“Kadya,” he heard someone say in a surprised tone. Others repeated her name. Aric parried three attacks and risked a hurried glance over his shoulder.

The templar had climbed on top of one of the argosies. Halflings hurled stones at her but she ignored them and they sailed harmlessly past. Her lips were moving, though no one in the thick of battle could hear what she said, and her hands made fitful gestures. A stiff wind blew up from behind her, ruffling her clothing and tearing her hair from the pin holding it up. Around her, the air itself seemed to waver. Then she thrust her hands forward, toward the halfling force, and that rippling air spread out from her, past the Nibenese but striking the halflings with almost physical force.

As the wave flowed past them, halflings dropped their weapons and staggered about, dazed. Blood flowed from noses, ears, and open mouths. Some fell down clutching their heads while others pawed at their own faces or chests. In the rear ranks, as far back as the firelight extended, halflings took off running, as if to escape whatever Kadya had loosed upon them.

The halflings facing Aric fell victim to it as well. One died instantly, her eyes rolling back in her head, body stiffening as she pitched forward. Another clapped his hands to his ears even as blood burbled up from his eyes and mouth. The third tried to turn and run, but his legs gave out beneath him and he fell atop his fellows, clawing at the air like a drowning man reaching for a rope.

Watching the devastation, Aric realized it didn’t affect only the halflings. One of the wounded soldiers close by curled in on himself, gave an agonized scream, and died. Another, barely wounded as far as Aric could tell, dropped to his knees as though his legs no longer had the strength to support him. Even Aric felt weakened suddenly. He took several unsteady steps backward to get a wagon behind him before he fell.

Defiling magic. Kadya had drawn from all their life forces in order to send that surge of powerful magic into the halflings.

With the badly wounded soldiers dead and some of the others still reeling from their own templar’s spell, the ones who had strength left went after the halflings, dispatching those they could get to without leaving the firelight. The halflings offered little resistance. Heads rolled, swords and spears spiked bodies. Soon the soldiers gathered at the wagons again, wiping blades on shirts or rags torn from the minimal clothing the halflings wore, and binding their wounds.

The boasting and the burying would come later. With the sound of the remaining halflings running off into the darkness, the Nibenese forces sat around dwindling fires or leaned against armored argosies. Conversation was sparse, most of it grumbles of complaint. “We could have beat them,” someone ventured.

“We would have died trying, if she hadn’t done that.”

“But how many of our own did we lose in the doing?”

You yet live, as do I. It might have been different.”

Damaric showed Aric a weary grin. “You did well.”

“I survived.” Aric held up his left hand, which continued to bleed. “You came through fine, it seemed.”

“As I said, I’ve been trained to fight since the time I could walk.”

Aric moved closer to the soldier and lowered his voice. “I’m surprised that some complain openly about the templar.”

“Warriors sometimes forget themselves in the flush of victory, Aric. However that victory is achieved. By morning they’ll have thought better of it, and spend the rest of the day worrying that she heard them.”

Ruhm joined them, dripping blood from his crown to his toes. “That was fun,” he said.

“Fun?” Aric repeated.

“Sure.” He squeezed Aric’s shoulder. “You had fun too?”

“I’m not sure I’d put it that way.”

Amoni joined them too, flicking bits of halfling flesh off the blades of her cahulaks. She had suffered a few wounds, and she winced when she turned at the waist, trying to stretch her back. But the four friends had lived through the battle, and Aric couldn’t ignore the swelling of pride that spread from his breast.

Later that night, however, when he tried to sleep, he kept seeing the image of Nibenese soldiers, fighting death until Kadya’s magic sucked the life force from them. Perhaps that had been necessary to defeat the raiding halflings.

Then again, perhaps not.