“Well, Kadya,” someone said. “What’s the plan?”
The templar checked the position of the sun. “Soon it’ll be dark. We’ll make camp, dine, sleep. In the morning, exploration will begin.”
Her gaze, pointedly, fell on Aric as she spoke that last.
He knew what was expected of him, and he hoped he could fulfill those expectations. Standing here at the city’s edge, he felt no pull from metals of any kind. He touched his coin medallion, taking comfort in its familiar smoothness, but even it had long since stopped speaking to him; the only essence contained within it after all these years was his own.
Since no one wanted to be the first into those buildings—not with night falling—the argosies were drawn into a circle before what remained of the city wall. Fires were built, mekillots fed and watered. It all resembled any night’s camp since leaving Nibenay.
Except that on the other side of that low, crumbling wall was a vast, unknown city. And although it appeared empty, no one knew if that was truly the case.
With the setting of the sun, the sky darkened, and soon a chill settled over the land. Aric took furs and leathers from the argosy and settled before a fire. As usual, Ruhm, Amoni and Damaric joined him there. The tension of earlier seemed to have vanished, at least among the others. For his part, Aric felt guarded, as if having had his trustworthiness questioned, he could not completely trust them.
“What do you think?” Damaric asked when he settled in with a plate and a mug. “It’s bigger than I expected.”
“The city?” Amoni replied. “It’s big, yes. It appears to have been prosperous, in its day.”
“Aye,” Damaric said. “Some big buildings there. And so close to the city wall. Inside, they may be larger still.”
“I keep thinking of how it must have been,” Aric said. “So many people. Were they happy? Did they live in freedom or bondage? Was joy part of their daily lives, or fear?”
“Always either or?” Ruhm asked. “Both at once, perhaps.”
“Sure,” Aric said. “Both at once. Like people everywhere, probably.”
“Freedom and bondage?” Damaric asked. “How does that work?”
“There are degrees, I mean,” Aric said. He knew his intent would he hard to explain to someone who had lived every day of his life a slave—and in truth, he had no idea how that must feel. “Take me, for example. I’m not saying I’m a slave in the same way you are. But I run my own business. I have debts and I have debtors. I have to keep working, day in and day out, to make sure I can pay my creditors, and at the same time I have to keep after those who owe me. If I hadn’t been ordered by the Shadow King to accompany this expedition, I would be there still, and with those same concerns. It never ends.”
“But tomorrow you could walk away from Nibenay, away from your debts,” Damaric said.
“And so could you. You would be hunted down wherever you went, and so would I. Do you think those who lend don’t have ways to track someone?”
“I suppose,” Damaric admitted.
“I said it was different. But an obligation is a form of bondage, and the more of them one has the stricter that bondage becomes. I could, if I chose, stop working and spend my days in the Hill District, spending what remained of my coin on pleasures of the flesh. But I would be picked up as a vagrant, soon enough, and forced into slavery myself. So the lines can be blurred.”
“I never thought of it that way, Aric,” Amoni said. “That’s an interesting viewpoint.”
“Don’t forget most important obligation,” Ruhm said.
“What’s that?”
“Paying me!”
Aric laughed, his mood suddenly lightened.
He hoped for an easy day tomorrow, full of fascinating exploration and free of danger. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe that would be the case.
Damaric had drawn guard duty. He was allowed a couple hours to sleep, but he was restless, and had finally only fallen into a deep sleep shortly before he was awakened. His head felt thick, his eyes gummy. He might have been walking through a thick fog.
But he took up the station his captain ordered, where the argosies came nearest to Akrankhot’s wall. The wind had finally died. In the still air, the only sounds were the crackling of the fires, snoring from the wagons and the occasional rustle as someone inside shifted positions.
After a few minutes in the cold air, Damaric was more awake. He walked to keep his blood moving, a few steps this way, a turn, a few back. On one occasion when he was facing toward the city, having given up on the idea that any kind of threat would arise during the night, and his primary hardship would be not falling asleep and freezing to death, he saw something move on one of the narrow roads that ran parallel to the grand avenue.
He stood still, watching. Both moons were high, casting light onto the roadway, but he saw no one. He couldn’t begin to identify that flash of motion, but he was convinced he had seen something. He took a dozen steps that way, past the wall that here was nothing but a nub of stone jutting through sand. His skin crawled, the small hairs on his arms and neck standing up. In a dead city, anything alive was not to be trusted.
Anything alive and hiding was all the more suspicious.
Rather than continuing toward the city, he returned to the caravan, walking backward and checking his footing a couple of times but otherwise not taking his gaze off the city. He decided not to alert the others. Yet. If it had only been a shadow, a trick of the eye, there was no sense stirring things up, waking workers who would need their strength during the day to come.
But if there were something out there, he would see it when it showed itself again. Because he was wide awake now, and didn’t plan to look away from that city under the sand until the sun was high in the sky.
X
Death in the Desert
These last few nights, Myrana’s dreams had changed. Instead of focusing on the route she needed to take, she kept seeing images of a tall, muscular young man with long dirty blond hair. She had the basic route mapped in her mind, and they followed it as closely as possible.
She believed they were close to their destination. The appearance of the young man in the dreams caused her to think he was part of whatever this was all about, part of what they would find when they got where they were going.
On this particular morning, she awoke from those dreams with an odd, profound sense of loss, as if she had been close to the man, or at least close to answers about what this all meant, and they’d been snatched away at the last minute. Koyt tended to the fire, making a morning meal of a jankx he had killed the night before. The creature’s pelt was barely large enough to use, but it had been cleaned and set aside, and the meat’s aroma set Myrana’s stomach growling. Myrana didn’t see Sellis at first, but then he came around a dune, walking toward camp with a thoughtful expression. The sadness from the dream stayed with her, making her wonder if it was really all about the dream, or if she simply missed her family and friends.
“Morning, Myrana,” Koyt said.
“That smells wonderful, Koyt.”
“It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m famished, suddenly.”
“I hope you’re not too hungry,” Sellis said. “We only saw the one jankx, remember, and they’re small.”
“I won’t eat your share, Sellis, don’t worry.” She waited until he reached camp and sat down. “Where were you?”
“I thought I heard something, just as the sun was coming up. But I don’t see anything, or any tracks in the sand.”