The Heart of the Sands, Book 3 of The Gods Within (2 page)

Morgin first noticed
the shape of his head; it was enormous and triangular, though that hadn’t
been the case when the fellow sat in the shadows within the lean-to. He wore
sand yellow breeches tucked into calf length boots, an odd, knee-length robe
collected at the waist by a black belt, with a hood thrown up over his
strangely shaped head. He bent down over something in the sand with his back to
Morgin, and when he stood erect he lifted a small creature in his hand that
struggled to escape. He gave its neck a sharp twist and it went limp, then he
turned back toward the lean-to. It was then that Morgin understood what made
his head appear to be so oddly shaped. He wore some sort of broad, stiff-brimmed
hat, over which the hood of his robe had been thrown. The brim of the hat had
the effect of making a large tent of the hood, which, in the bright sun, hid
the man’s face in a deep and mysterious shadow.

As the man approached
the lean-to Morgin sat up, found that he was still dressed in the torn and
battered clothing he’d worn during his escape from the Decouix
dungeon. About his neck, someone—he assumed it had been the man—had
added a thick ring of intricately braided leather. It was too small to slip
over his head, and it had no clasp so he surmised it had been braided in place
while he lay unconscious.

“You’ll
grow used to the debt-ring,” a voice said.

Morgin looked up and
found the man standing over the entrance to the lean-to. The timbre of his
voice told Morgin he was still a young man, probably in his mid-twenties like
Morgin. “Debt-ring?” Morgin asked.

“Yes,”
the young man said. “I saved you from the sands. I gave you water—”
he held up the small, reptilian beast in his hand, “—and
now I’m about to feed you. You owe me a great debt, and it’s
not honorable to be indebted so.”

Morgin wondered if
this made him some sort of slave, and for a moment he considered resisting the
young man. But as the fellow threw back the hood and pulled off his hat, Morgin
saw the bone-white color of his skin for the first time. With his memories of
haunting the soul of the ancient Benesh’ere warrior Morddon still
fresh in his mind, he knew this man would be a fearsome warrior. Though, even
if he were able to defeat him, they were somewhere out in the middle of the
Great Munjarro Waste, and Morgin was wholly dependent upon him for survival.

The young man stabbed
a finger into his own chest. “I am Harriok, your new master. You
will address me as Lord Harriok.”

Morgin decided to play
along, then escape at the first opportunity. “Yes, Lord Harriok.”

“Very
good.”

Harriok bent down,
crawled into the lean-to, sat down with his legs crossed opposite Morgin, drew
a knife and began gutting the small creature he’d captured. Morgin
had been right about his age, a young Benesh’ere warrior with the
characteristic bone white skin, and coal-black hair tied into a braid that hung
down his back just past his shoulders.

Morgin cleared his
throat. “May I ask a question, Lord Harriok?”

Harriok nodded. “Go
ahead.”

“How long
ago did you find me?”

“Late
yesterday.”

Morgin ran his fingers
through his hair. “I feel much better than I think I should.”

Harriok held up the
creature he’d cleaned. “A few more hours and this
cratl and his fellows would have started picking at your flesh. But you weren’t
bad off. A little too much heat, not enough water, both easily remedied.”

Harriok finished
gutting the cratl. “Speaking of water,” Harriok said.
“You’ve put me a day behind schedule, and you’ve used water I hadn’t
counted on. As soon as the sun sets we’ll pack up and leave.”

“Where
are we going?”

“To join
the tribe. I was scouting our northern flank when I came across you lying in
the sand. But now that I’ve wasted a day here they’re probably well ahead of
us. It won’t be easy catching up. In fact we may not be able to
join them until Aelldie.”

“What’s
Aelldie?” Morgin asked.

“It’s
the largest oasis in the Munjarro, and the last oasis before we leave the sands
for the summer.”

“You’re
leaving the sands?”

“Of
course we’re leaving the sands. We always leave the sands in
summer. It gets too hot to survive so we go to the Lake of Sorrows. And you’re
asking too many questions.”

Morgin nodded meekly
and said, “Yes, Lord Harriok.” He smiled inwardly,
for though Harriok complained, he clearly enjoyed having someone to talk with.

Harriok cut the cratl
meat into strips and gave half of them to Morgin with a small ration of water. “Raw
cratl meat,” Harriok said, holding up a strip. “A
good source of water.”

They dined on raw
cratl and hard brown journeycake. Near dusk the temperature dropped and he took Morgin out onto the sand. It was
then that Morgin first saw the other, larger lean-to in which Harriok’s
horse rested quietly on its haunches in the shade.

Morgin helped him
clear several traps that had snagged other reptilian creatures like the cratl
and a few small rodents. Harriok snapped each creature’s neck then
tossed it in a sack.

“Aren’t
we going to clean them?” Morgin asked.

Harriok shook his
head. “Not now.” He looked up at the darkening sky. “Now
we travel. We’ll stop when the sand starts to heat up at sunrise. There’ll
be plenty of time for that then.”

Both lean-tos folded
up into an impressively compact bundle. Harriok gave Morgin a knee length
hooded robe like his own, adding, “I have to take care of my property,”
and they were on their way.

Harriok rode while
Morgin walked close behind him, and by the stars he could tell they headed due
west. A three-quarter moon lit the yellow dunes beautifully, though there was
really nothing to see but an endless ocean of sand. It was not easy walking on
the sand. It shifted and slid beneath his feet, and it often required two steps
just to travel the length of one. Harriok rode a special breed of horse Morgin
had heard of but never seen. It had large, broad hooves that didn’t
sink far into the sand, with a lean, compact body that didn’t
require excessive water or feed. Mounted, Harriok could have pushed Morgin to
travel much faster, but instead set a reasonable pace that Morgin maintained
without difficulty.

He trudged along in
silence for a good while, was concentrating on keeping his footing in the loose
sand when Harriok surprised him. “What’s your name?”

“Morgin,”
he answered, then realized he should have lied. A wanted man shouldn’t
use a name others might recognize.

“What
were you doing out on the sands?”

Morgin knew the Benesh’ere
hated the Decouixs, so he decided a common enemy might put him in a better
light with this young warrior. “I ran afoul of some Decouixs, and
it was either the sands, or get my throat cut.”

“Are you
a clansman?”

“No. Just
a wandering swordsman.”

“Well,
you can’t have wandered all your life. You must have come from
somewhere.”

It would be wise to
stay as close to the truth as possible, so Morgin made up a life for himself
not unlike that of some of his childhood companions. “I’m
the son of an Elhiyne freeman. My father was a soldier and my mother a kitchen
maid. I was raised at Elhiyne itself, and taught some soldiering skills.”

Harriok turned about
in the saddle and looked down at Morgin, his voice filled with curiosity. “You
grew up in the castle?”

“Aye,”
Morgin answered flatly.

“What was
it like? Was it big? It must be strange to live surrounded by stone like that.”

Morgin told Harriok
about Elhiyne. He described every detail of the place, and the people who lived
there, which fascinated the young Benesh’ere warrior. But for
himself, he grew sadly homesick.

“You miss
them,” Harriok said. “I can tell.”

For all his bluster,
Harriok treated Morgin almost as an equal. To maintain a good pace they took
turns riding the horse, though Harriok tied one end of a good length of rope to
Morgin’s debt-ring, and the other to his wrist. If Morgin tried to
spur the horse into a run and escape, the young Benesh’ere could
easily yank him from the saddle. And only occasionally did Harriok remember
that Morgin was in his debt and demand that he call him “Lord.”
They stopped near midnight to eat,
then traveled on, continuing at a steady pace until well past dawn since the
air remained cool during the first few hours of morning. But as the
sands warmed Harriok called a halt. He
taught Morgin how to pitch the lean-tos, then how to set traps in the sand. By
that time the air had grown thick and hot, so they retired to the shade of the
lean-to.

Morgin wanted to drop
instantly into sleep, but first they cleaned their catch from the previous day, cut the meat into strips, ate some of it raw
and lay the rest out in the sun to dry. After they lay down in the lean-to, and
before sleep took them, Morgin asked, “Do you own me? Am I a
slave, or something?”

“Of
course not. You owe me a debt of honor, and until it’s repaid you
are mine to do with as I please.”

The next night went much as the first. They kept up a steady
pace while Harriok quizzed Morgin incessantly about life among the clans. But
near dawn, just as the sky began to lighten, Harriok stopped abruptly, stood up
in his stirrups and sniffed the air.

“Water,”
Harriok said excitedly. Then he climbed down out of the saddle, and with some
urgency untied his pack.

“Help me,”
he said.

Morgin could only
provide minimal help since he had no idea what Harriok was trying to do. “What
are we doing?” he asked.

Harriok grinned. “A
mist still, for water. Just wait and see.”

They quickly assembled
what appeared to be a strangely shaped and oddly inverted tent. It was a
contraption made of wooden stakes and a circular piece of oiled cloth about as
wide as the spread of a man’s arms. The stakes supported the outer
edges of the cloth about knee high off the sand, while in the middle Harriok
placed a small stone that weighted the center of the cloth downward. With that
done, they then went about the business of making camp, though it was much
earlier than the previous morning.

As they worked, Morgin
noticed a light mist forming just off the surface of the sand. But by the time
camp was fully set it was knee deep and as thick as a heavy fog, and Morgin had
difficulty seeing through it to set the last trap. Then the sun rose, and the
mist dissipated.

“Quickly
now,” Harriok said, and taking up a nearly empty water skin, he
stood over his strange contraption. “Come here and help me.”

As Morgin approached
he looked down into the bowl of the little inverted tent, and in it he saw the
small rock Harriok had placed there to weight down the center. It now lay
beneath the surface of a good-sized puddle of water.

Harriok pulled the
stopper on the water skin, handed it to Morgin, bent down and took hold of one
edge of the oiled cloth to support it as he pulled one of the stakes. Morgin
didn’t need to be told what to do. He carefully held the water
skin in place while Harriok lowered that edge and let the water drain into the
skin. With that done, they quickly disassembled the mist still, repacked it,
and retired to the lean-to. Again, Morgin dreamt of Shebasha and Aethon’s
tomb.

That night, as they traveled under the star-lit sky, Morgin
felt the tug of something arcane, a pull that started out as a faint sensation,
but grew stronger with each step. By the time they began erecting the two
lean-tos in the morning, he knew
they were in the vicinity of something unusual. When the tents were ready and
he could take a free moment, Morgin climbed to the top of a nearby dune to scan
their surroundings. To the south he caught a glint of something shiny on the
horizon, though that didn’t seem to coincide with the direction of
the pull he felt. When he shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted, he could
just make out a jagged silhouette, like that of a city with tall, glassy
spires.

“Ah,”
Harriok said as he joined Morgin at the top of the dune. “The
ruins of Kathbeyanne, the phantom city. We call it the city of glass.”

The words
city of glass
triggered an old memory. After Csairne Glen, when the archangel Metadan had
fought Ellowyn in his dreams and knocked her unconscious, he’d
given Morgin a message, something about the Unnamed King and his consort the
god-queen Erithnae, and seeking the
god-sword, and failing, and asking three
questions in the
city of glass
. Morgin struggled to recall the message in its
entirety, but the memory eluded him.

“Have you
gone there?” Morgin asked.

Harriok shook his
head. “That’s a fool’s errand. It’s
enchanted. If you walk toward it, it will always remain on the horizon and you’ll
never get there. Eventually, you’ll find that you’ve
walked in a vast circle. It’s a dangerous trap for the unwary.”

Morgin, facing the
city squarely, closed his eyes and concentrated on that arcane pull that had
drawn his attention. With Morddon’s memories he recognized the
scent of the fabled city, recalled looking through the ancient warrior’s
eyes at the grand palace of the Shahotma for the first time, the spires that
reached toward the heavens, balconies and balustrades that soared high above
the city, with level upon level of parapets and battlements. In front of it had
been a massive parade ground, with the barracks of the Benesh’ere
and the twelve legions of angels to one side. It was there, haunting Morddon’s
soul, that he’d first met TarnThane, the griffin lord,
AnneRhianne, the Benesh’ere princess, and Gilguard, warmaster of
the Benesh’ere, all ancient and long since gone.

Standing atop a dune
in the middle of the Munjarro with his eyes closed, he would have sworn the
city lay to his left, not straight in front of him. He opened his eyes, and the
vision of Kathbeyanne lay on the horizon directly before him. If the gods had
left an enchantment on the city so it appeared to be where it was not, one
would certainly walk in circles trying to get there. On the other hand, if he
ignored the mirage and walked toward the pull of the arcane, might he actually
reach the fabled city? Morgin decided to say nothing of this to Harriok. Maybe
someday he’d come back and seek out Kathbeyanne, the
city of glass
, and
ask those questions. Though first he’d have to find Metadan and
ask him to repeat that message.