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.