“Terrible eating,” Ruhm answered. He had come up behind them, without Aric even knowing he was there. “But good luck.”
“So some believe,” Amoni clarified. “Not all of us. Enough, though, to judge from the spectacle they’re making.”
Damaric approached them, showing off the claw he had acquired. “I don’t know about luck,” he said with a grin. He touched the claw’s point. “But it’ll make a fine dagger.”
Amoni shot him a withering glare. Damaric nodded. “It’s a bit ghoulish, but why waste it? The drake won’t need it anymore.”
Amoni twitched her head and drifted away from the wagons, and the other three followed. “When I was helping pull corpses from one of the argosies, people were angry, upset, and maybe speaking more freely than they should have been.”
“What you hear?” Ruhm asked.
“Mutiny, almost. They know Kadya’s magic has saved their hides, more than once. But still … it’s magic. Nobody likes magic, except those who use it.”
“True,” Aric said. “But what can anyone do about it?”
“Nobody’ll do a thing,” Damaric said. “She can freeze a charging earth drake in an instant.”
“Lucky for Aric,” Ruhm said.
“I know,” Aric said. “If it had reached me … don’t know what would have happened.”
“We’d be scraping you off the argosy,” Damaric said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not saying anyone is planning to act,” Amoni elaborated. “I’m only telling you what the mood is. She’s got people worried.”
“We’d do well to stay alert,” Damaric said. “I obey my captain, and she obeys Kadya. If that changes …”
Aric felt the full weight of Amoni’s gaze pressing down on him. “I won’t say anything,” he said, catching her meaning. “I mean … I guess I owe something to Nibenay, for choosing me for this expedition—although at the moment I’m not sure that’s so much an honor as a possible death sentence. But I don’t trust Kadya, and my loyalties, such as they are, are to the Shadow King, not to some templar along for the ride.”
“It’s only talk, anyway,” Amoni said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Soldiers will always grumble and moan,” Damaric added.
Are they dropping the subject because of me? Aric wondered. He wanted to be trusted. But elves weren’t trustworthy, everyone knew that. Tell an elf a secret and he’ll be selling it five minutes later.
He had thought he was past that with Amoni and Damaric. He had believed they had struck up a true friendship, one that overlooked all their backgrounds—the fact that he was a half-elf, that Amoni was a mul, Damaric a slave with barbarian parents, Ruhm a goliath with the bad taste to work for a half-elf instead of as a soldier.
If not? If he’d been wrong?
He guessed he was on his own, then. Or he and Ruhm, as always.
Once they got to Akrankhot and his worth to the expedition was over, he would have to stay vigilant. There would be no one to depend on to keep him alive then, except himself.
By the time the caravan emerged from the hills into open desert, a ferocious wind had sprung up. Rather than providing relief from the day’s heat, the wind aggravated it. It felt to Aric like those times he had to reach inside his forge—carefully, with tongs—his face near the fire to see what he was doing.
And the wind picked up desert sand, blowing it against them like fine scouring dust. Kadya had said the city should be visible when they cleared the hills, but it wasn’t. The olive sky was barely visible through clouds of sand.
Aric and Ruhm walked, Aric’s guards apparently having decided that since he had survived his encounter with the earth drake, he was on his own. Ruhm nodded toward the argosy they usually rode in. “Inside’s better.”
“You’re right,” Aric said. “I wanted to see this Akrankhot, but I can’t see anything if I’m blind.”
They returned to the argosy. Others had also wanted to get out of the stinging sand, so it was nearly full, but people shoved over and made space for them.
Tension inside was every bit as bad as out, the air as brittle as frozen drake. Nobody talked much. Aric heard no laughter, no games or teasing. They might have been a wagonload of murderers on their way to the gladiatorial pit.
He wished he didn’t feel the same way.
The mekillots surged forward against wind and sand. The drivers shielding their faces with arms, straining to see the argosy in front of theirs, not caring about the route except to hope the one at the front of the train knew the way.
The wagon picked up speed. The bumping and bouncing grew progressively worse. Mekillots were never truly fast, but they could move slowly or they could move somewhat less slowly, and the drivers urged them to push the limits of that second pace.
“What’s the rush?” a soldier demanded. “You can’t even see where you’re going!”
“Kadya’s worried that the sands will cover up the city before we reach it!” one of the drivers shouted. In his left hand he worked a long whip, spurring the mekillots on. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life digging through sand!”
“Maybe not,” Aric said. “But I don’t want my life to end because we’re racing ahead blindly.”
“Racing?” Ruhm asked.
“All right. Hurrying, then.”
Another bump knocked him into the air, and he came down with a painful thump.
With sand stealing in through the windows and the constant thrashing about, Aric wondered why they needed the argosy at all. They could have saved the weight and simply dragged everybody along behind the mekillots.
Finally, a cheerful cry sounded from the front wagon. The others spread out enough for their passengers to see through the forward windows. Sure enough, there, through the curtain of sand, was a ruined city, half submerged.
At last, they had reached Akrankhot.
The caravan stopped at what had once been the city’s outer wall. In punishing wind and sand, everyone climbed from the argosies and faced the ruins of what must have been a great city. A wide avenue led between the remains of buildings of fabulous size and grandeur.
As opposed to the buildings Aric was accustomed to, the ornately carved facades of Nibenay, these were more plain, and elegant in that plainness. Stately columns fronted some, most at the top of wide staircases. Some columns had collapsed and lay in pieces at the base of the stairs, like felled trees in the Crescent Forest. Other buildings had roofs that had fallen in. A few were nothing but rubble. Everywhere, for what appeared to be several leagues, were the remnants of turrets and towers that once might have pierced the sky. The sun was sinking behind the city, but from this angle it looked as if it might be lowering into the very center of Akrankhot.
Everywhere, there was wood. Aric had never imagined that so much wood could be used in the construction of a city. This place must have been surrounded by forests once, with enough water around to feed all that life. He could barely conceive of it.
Looking at it, Aric could imagine what the street must have been like in the city’s prime. Grand processions would have been held here, citizens flanking the walkways between the avenue and the fronts of the buildings, while the city’s nobility and military paraded down the center. Akrankhot must have been a great center of civilization.
And now it was empty, its streets and avenues lifeless, its broken-walled buildings housing nothing but wind and sand. The shouts and cheers that must have echoed down canyons of stone and wood and mud had long been silenced. Perhaps the ghosts of the dead haunted these ramparts. Could a civilization able to build a city on such a scale ever truly die?