He pressed a button, and a holographic view of the Occidental Basin, including the Kamarean Republic, the Duchy of Akar, and some of Farhight, flickered into view. He expelled a few bubbles from his gills, retracted his second set of eyelids, and leaned in close.
“It never fails to amaze me,” his partner – he thought it was a woman at the moment; among his kind, such things had an irritating habit of changing irregularly – harrumphed, “how no less than three subspecies can exist in such barbarism.”
“The sea is immeasurably ancient, my dear.” he began.
“My dear?! I'm a man!” his – former – partner spluttered. “It has been so for a month!” Damn. Forgot again. He shook his head, expelled a few more bubbles, and began again.
“The sea is immeasurably ancient, and we almost as much so. You forget that this site alone has been settled for more than twenty thousand years. Yet these humanoids, all three subspecies, they share a characteristic – they breed like rats.”
“Whereas our population,” his former partner mused, her – his – its – bass rumble carrying through the water in a stream of bubbles, “is in steady decline.”
“Yes. And certain of them – the Kamareans, and the Graylinese, far to the north – have become technologically advanced that – combined with their numbers – they could possibly represent a threat to us. I, for one, have no desire to live confined to the deeps.”
“You have never left the deeps in your life.”
“Yes – but I could if I wanted to! And no hairless monkey is going to stop me. Yet they are too many, and we too few.”
“So... turn the hairless monkeys against one another.” the other sea-creature mused. “But who to use as our puppets?”
“I was thinking of these...” One wet finger dipped into the hologram, roughly pinpointing the location of the Duchy of Akar, stronghold of the Lanciars.
* * *
However significant this mysterious discussion might prove, it meant precisely nothing to Ankh. In fact, Ankh was in the most distant place possible from the sea: the Badlands.
His pack-camel, a sorry, bent-backed thing, carried his Lanciarial armour; he wore, instead, traditional Shai Qadi robes: partly as a disguise, and partly because they had been designed for this choking heat. The sea sucked all the warmth out of the lands to the west, but even though it bordered the Badlands as well, it left the roasting heat untouched. The endless sands, large enough to swallow Akar four times over and more, were broken now only by the bulky silhouette of Barrowmount, to the north-west and, beside it, the last fading visible remnants of Magia. Its white towers were darkened by dusk: the sun laid itself to bed, and the stars took to shining.
But this was a bad thing in the Badlands.
He remembered what Pontifex-Decanus Calstrade had told him. “You might not remember the land of your birth, but you are a Farhighter, Ankh, and you speak Salkiri.”
“Yes.” Ankh had answered, although his Salkiri was poor at best. Ankh was nothing if not dutiful. In fact, if Ankh weren't so totally unfunny, it would have been funny how ridiculously uptight he could be.
“As the situation stands, the Archpontifex is convinced that the... aah... shooting star in the sky,” Calstrade had said, “has some meaning. In fact, the Archpontifex believes it may have actually... ah... landed, somewhere in eastern Farhight. Our intelligence network is fairly thin there, but it seems the Asphernaeans claim it.
“Oddly enough, a Green Dragon – loyalist – Farhighter army approaching Aspherna has vanished. As you know, although Akar stands officially neutral, the Farhighter monarchy has always been a friend to Kallipolis. If the Blue Dragons had found some way to harness whatever that shooting star was, then the Green Dragons will stand no chance. Therefore, you are to go to Salicir - ”
“Salkir, sir?”
“Salicir in Akarean, I thought you knew. You are to go to Salicir – or Salkir, if you prefer – and act as the official Akarean representative. Feel free, if the Shahanshah asks you, to train his armies somewhat. Don't give away everything, though - ”
“Of course not, sir.”
“I forgot how clever you were, Ankh. I'm sure you know what you have to do. You have two camels waiting for you near the main gate – you can go as soon as you are ready.” Ankh had turned to leave then.
“Oh, and Ankh – one thing.”
“Yes?”
“When it gets dark, get off the sands. I am not being cryptic. There are outcroppings here, here and here: if you take refuge in these, you should be safe.”
It was dark. Ankh was on the sands. Calstrade didn't joke.
But what was he afraid of?
Ankh was certainly afraid of one thing, and that was being lost. He saw no outcroppings at all, where he was sure there was to have been one. All around him were lakes, rivers, veritable oceans of sand, all utterly inescapable. Ankh began to feel a worry gnaw at his heart – before he stamped it out. Ankh didn't laugh, and he certainly didn't fear.
Somehow, it rang false.
His riding camel snorted, whuffing a blast of sand and night air. “What is it, boy?” Ankh asked, rubbing the beast's nose. It just snorted again, its eyes beginning to show whites. What does it sense? Ankh wondered. He peered into the deepening gloom -
And riveted on something.
A dust-devil. A little whorl of sand picked itself up from the desert, spinning about in a miniature imitation of a tornado. It was an innocuous enough sight, common in the Badlands when the dry, cold winds swept out to the sea.
But there was no wind.
Ankh was one of those logical people: he had had all the passion sucked out of him, leaving only a cold calculatedness. There was no wind, and the dust-devil yet had the tenacity to exist. How could the dust-devil pose a threat?
Or was that what Calstrade had been scared of at all? Did it bear any relation? Was he imagining things?
Ankh felt the worm of fear grow all over again.
And not without reason.
The sun dipped below the horizon, the moon beginning to rise, its watery, silvery light tinting the sands a deep silver-white – and something else. Ankh blinked, certain he had not seen correctly – surely there was no hunched shape, stealing off into the shadowy starlight?
He looked down. Beneath him, the sand rested.
“Move, boy.” he ordered absently, hitting his camel. It started forward, leaving Ankh to stew in his own juices. The sand was all around – how could he escape it? By moving, obviously. He should find an outcrop... sooner or later... one that would have a sandless cave in it...
A particle of sand whipped across Ankh's eyes.
Then another.
And another.
Ankh looked around – there was nothing, no shadowy monsters, no hunched shape, no dust-devil.
Another particle of sand shot across his field of vision.
No monsters. No shapes.
But he was in the dust-devil.
“Run!” he shouted, mostly for his own benefit, and the two scrawny camels lurched into bow-legged motion. More sand began to fly, blasting against his robes, tearing fabric and fur and flesh where it hit. The camels ran for all they were worth, their eyes closed, but Ankh couldn't close his eyes, because he was watching the thickening sandstorm that was following them.
And he was watching the shadows that prowled through it.
The sand howled now as it churned around them, so fast did it move, and the robes – and the camels – suffered for it. Ankh watched, horrified, as the pack-camel's fur began to strip away, worn and eaten thin by the sand-blasting. The creature yowled as thousands of tiny grazes began to etch themselves into its skin, releasing beady droplets of blood -
No. Ankh would not allow this.
He closed his eyes and refocused. His third eye, his mind's eye, opened fully, allowing access to the universe in all its eleven-dimensional glory, and he saw the camels, himself – and the sandstorm.
Just as he suspected. The sandstorm was a spell – but what was casting that spell? Ankh ignored that question for the moment, instead focusing on the sandstorm, vulnerable in eleven dimensions. Again, he focused, pushing his mind against the bright nebula of magic that constituted the sandstorm, drawing it into himself, dissipating the magic.
He opened his eyes, and the spellcasters came at him.
The night was his again, his to see and feel and breathe, the moonlight glinting down on sand and rock and the things that Calstrade had been so terribly afraid of. The camels put all their strength into their legs, running like the desert wind, but they couldn't outrun the horribly desiccated, loping forms behind them.
Ankh turned back for a better look.
It might have been human once, this creature, but that was before whatever curse ailed it had sunken its cheeks, atrophied its limbs, and given the stumbling four-legged non-grace of an overfed jackal. For all their reed-like thinness, its limbs, skin clinging to bone, ate up the ground beneath them; its skeleton, clearly visible beneath the papery thinness that served it as skin, clacked and jolted horribly against each other in a semblance of proper life. Its mouth, open as an empty grave, bristled with rotten, sand-eaten teeth, its nose had been pinched and twisted almost to nothingness; its whole body had had the moisture and the life sucked out of it, leaving nothing but a dry yet somehow functional mummy.
Its eyes were very much alive though. Shrunken and rolling and coloured like bloodshot ivory they may be, but they were very much alive.
It launched itself at Ankh, and he clove head from shoulders in a spray of sand. His sword sheared through the papery skin and brittle bone like a hot knife through butter. It flailed about, forcing out a reedy coughing sort of noise. He left it behind in the kickback from the camels' hooves, turning his face ahead.
For that reason, he only just saw the sand-creature picking up its head and setting it back on its neck. It wrenched and twisted, and those bones clambered up the neck – and it loped back towards Ankh.
And there were more of them.
The camels galloped faster, but now the sands were picking up again. The camels – having suffered the sandstorms' attentions once – brayed and went even faster. Run, Ankh prayed, watching the sand-ghouls chase them. Run for all you're worth.
An outcrop loomed out of the sand-winds, a stately, sand-blasted spire of limestone, antedating the desert.
And at its base, a hole. It was the outcrop Calstrade had talked about.
Ankh looked back. The sand-ghouls, awkward limbs flailingly gaining, trailed behind him like hounds behind a fox. But Ankh was determined that – unlike the fox – he would fight back.
He looked back and locked eyes with the first pursuer.
His third eye opened, and he saw the world in eleven dimensions, including the shrivelled, ancient consciousness that passed for the sand-ghoul's mind. Magic they might be, but only after a limited fashion. He dove into the creature's mind, ignoring the bumping and jouncing from beneath him -
And saw the creature the sand-ghoul once had been.
They were good to their people, the Badlands. The Shai Ala, the Shai Kazi, the Shai Sheliv, and all the other peoples of the Badlands, all knew how to get the bounty from the desert and live well. There were underground rivers and orchards, unknown to the wetlanders, remnants of the time when the Badlands were the irrigated, cultivated heart of a planetwide, foreign empire. Only the Shai Qadi refused to join in this bounty, preferring instead to live a hard, arid existence above in the sands, disdaining the soft existence of their brothers and sisters. The Shai Qadi, too, kept to the gods, a superstitious foolishness. What need had the Shai Ala, or any of the other tribes, of the gods when they had such ancient bounty, when they could just sleep away their time?
Naturally, the gods differed.
One night, the people of the desert never woke up. They lay in their hammocks and tents and orchards, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. As they slept they starved and hardened and shriveled, till the Shai Qadi – the only ones spared the curse – watched their erstwhile brothers with horror where once there had been disdain.
Then, one night, the people of the desert woke up again.
They preferred to sleep rather than pray; therefore, they would live during the night and brood during the day, bringing to others the rest that was denied them. They were given power over the sands but forbidden to leave them. Any human in the Badlands, save the Shai Qadi, were fair game.
Sleep. The sand-ghouls didn't want to kill Ankh – they wanted to make him sleep, the long sleep the gods had forced on them.
Ankh's concentration was broken.
A warm tide of comfort, relaxation and dreams, at odds with the hideous exterior the sand-ghouls presented, rolled over his consciousness. He tried to fight it, his eyes wide open, but they sagged and closed -
No! He would fight! He drew on the utmost reserves of his power and punctured the drugging nebula, leaving the sand-ghoul's mind unprepared.
Like a fruit, he crushed it.
At long last, the sand-ghoul slept. It collapsed into the sand, finally dead -
And Ankh, he went inside the cave. Upwards, into the outcrop, it tunneled, leaving no sand inside -
- but the sand ghoul pursued him. Resigned, he vaulted off the back of his camel, leaving the two beasts to run to the end of the cave, his feet impacting the serried floor as the foremost sand-ghoul leapt and bounced up the passage -
And stopped, its foot balanced on one single grain of sand.
Ankh laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed, something both of us know he does very little, as the sand-ghouls flailed impotently, trying to find the sand to reach them. Still chuckling, he went to the very back of the tunnel and bedded down, the shrieks of the sand-ghouls being sweet music to his ears.
* * *
Ankh raced ahead, his pack-camel lagging behind. The sand-ghouls, released from meditation by the dawn of night, chased him across the sand. He had spent the entire day moving as fast as he felt the camels could, yet still night fell before he was safe. The familiar sands whipped around him, the familiar hunched shapes prowled after him, and he batted away attack after mental attack, trying to force him into sleep. But he was having none of it -
A rain of fire arrows slammed into the sands. Some hit the sand-ghouls, setting their desiccated bones alight. Ropes dropped all around him and he stopped, exhausted, as men in conical helmets slid down and attacked the sand-ghouls with whatever weapon it was that worked against them.
One of them picked him.
“It's okay,” he said to Ankh, in a thick accent. “we've got you. You're safe now. Welcome to Farhight.”
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