Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 5 - The Cerulean Storm (3 page)

The king slipped his arms, now as sinewy as those of a half-giant, around the heavy lens.
He lifted it easily, then moved toward the center of the plaza, shuffling to keep from
banging his knees on the huge orb. The crowd of Samaran children backed away, their
half-filled waterskins dribbling precious liquid onto the dusty ground.

“Where are you going?” Sacha demanded, floating at Tithian's side.

“I told you: to hide,” the king replied.

“What good will that do?” the head whispered into Tithian's ear. “There isn't a villager
here who'd hesitate to tell the Balkans where you are.”

“I've thought of that already,” Tithian replied.

As he spoke, the king concentrated on the people ahead, fixing their faces firmly in his
mind. He used the Way to visualize them clasping at their throats, choking and gasping for
air. He felt the energy of the Dark Lens flow through his body and into the ground. A
column of brown mist whooshed from the well, spreading over the plaza with the fetid,
caustic odor of charred flesh. The sound of coughing and gagging filled the air, then
Samarans started to drop, their strangled voices calling for help. The instant a body hit
the ground, its flesh grew ashen and began to wither.

Heavy steps sounded behind Tithian. The king turned and saw Riv charging, his muzzle
twisted into a snarl of rage. “Murderer!” The headman flung himself into the air.

Tithian shifted the Dark Lens to one hand and raised his other arm. He opened himself to
the lens's power. He felt a streak of mystic energy rush through his body, then Riv's
chest hit his hand. A dark flash erupted from beneath the king's palm, engulfing his
attacker in a pall of absolute blackness. The headman howled in pain, but the cry was
strangely muted, as if the ebon fire of the lens had swallowed it. Riv's scorched bones
clattered to the ground, trailing wisps of greasy, foul-smelling smoke.

Hardly seeming to notice her dead husband or any of the other dying villagers, Korla
stumbled to Tithian's side.
“I'm
choking,” she croaked. “Save me!”

Tithian shook his head. “You must die as well.”

Korla's eyes widened in disbelief. “No!”

“If Borys finds you, he'll tear your mind apart with the Way,” Tithian explained. “You'll
tell him where to find me.”

“I would never,” Korla said, stepping back in fear.

Tithian caught her hand and pulled it to the lens. A flame flashed beneath her fingers,
then her body erupted into a column of crimson fire. The blaze died away quickly, and all
that remained where Korla had stood were her bones, a pearly heap of ash, and a handful of
cracked teeth. Recalling that they had once nibbled his ear and made him feel young, the
king stooped over and picked up the incisors, slipping them into his shoulder satchel for
safekeeping.

As Tithian glanced around the square, he saw that most of the people near the well had
already died. Their bodies were shriveling into piles of dust and white bone that even
Borys would find impossible to interrogate. Farther away, the mist had just reached the
edge of the plaza. The stunned fathers were thrashing about on the ground, their purple
tongues hanging out. The goraks accepted their fate with more dignity, dropping to their
bellies and turning their yellow eyes away from the sun.

The king did not worry that the Balicans would find it strange that an entire village had
perished, for such catastrophes were far from rare on Athas. When the sailors walked among
the bones, it would be coins and chad nuts they sought, not answers.

Tithian grabbed Sacha and slipped the head into the satchel, then walked over to the well
and peered back toward the harbor. Above the huts of Samarah, he could see the faint
outline of dozens of masts showing through the heavy silt curtain. From outside the
village came muffled Balkan voices demanding that the gate be opened.

The king stepped into the well, using the Way to lower himself and the Dark Lens gently
into the pit. The gloomy depths swallowed them both, and Tithian settled into the tepid
waters to await Rikus and Sadira.

A deep boom rumbled over the butte, and golden cascades of sand spilled down the bluff's
waferlike ledges. The sound passed over the road, rolling across a salt-crusted lake bed
until it echoed off the craggy flank of a distant mountain.

Rikus looked up and frowned. The sky remained clear, the crimson sun blazing through the
olive-tinged haze of dawn. To the west, Athas's twin moons hung low over the Ringing
Mountains, silhouetting the distant peaks against golden crescents. A harsh wind hissed
over the top of the butte, but there was not a thunderhead in sight.

The mul passed his hand over his kank's antennae, bringing the mount to a halt. The insect
was twice the size of a man, with a chitinous body and multifaceted eyes bulging from the
sides of its head. The wicked mandibles protruding from its maw made it look as though it
could have destroyed a pack of lirrs, though in truth it was a timid and rather gentle
creature.

Rikus sat astride the kank's thorax, his feet dangling among its six legs and almost
touching the ground. With a rugged, heavy-boned face and a hairless body that seemed
nothing but knotted sinew, the warrior looked even more dangerous than his mount. In his
case, however, appearances were not deceiving. He was a mul, a dwarf-human half-breed
created to live and die as a gladiator. From his father, he had inherited the incredible
strength and endurance of the dwarves, while his mother had bestowed on him the size and
agility of the humans. The result was an ideal fighter, combining both power and
nimbleness in a single frame.

When another boom did not sound from behind the butte, Rikus lowered his hand to the
Scourge of Rkard. As his fingers touched the hilt, the sword's magic filled his ears with
discordant sounds: the roaring wind, the rasp of falling sand, and the pounding of his own
heart. From the shadowed cracks of the butte cliffs came the clamor of chirping crickets.
Somewhere out on the lake bed, a snake's belly scales whispered across the rough surface
of a hot stone.

Rikus also heard something that disturbed him more: the drone of human voices, no doubt
coming from a faro plantation that lay on the other side of the butte. The words were
muffled by distance and the high bluff. Still, the mul could tell that many of the farmers
were yelling, some even screaming. As he listened, a loud, sonorous laugh drowned out the
human voices, and he knew that something was terribly wrong at Pauper's Hope.

Rikus took his hand away from his sword and faced the inhuman figure at his side. “Do you
hear that, Magnus?”

Though Magnus called himself an elf, he did not resemble one. Born in the magical shadows
of the Pristine Tower, he had been transformed into something that looked more akin to a
giant gorak than an elf. He had a hulking, thick-limbed body covered by a knobby hide,
ivory-clawed toes, and hands the size of bucklers.

His face was all muzzle, with an enormous, sharp-toothed mouth and huge round eyes set on
opposite sides of his head.

“The boom? It wasn't thunder,” Magnus answered.

“It doesn't take a windsinger to know that,” Rikus replied. “What about the voices? Use
your magic to find out what's going on.”

Magnus turned his eloquently pointed ears toward the butte and listened. After a moment,
he shook his head. “The butte's too high for me to understand their words,” he said. “Even
a windsinger cannot listen through rock.”

Rikus cursed. He and Magnus were due at a meeting of the Tyrian Council of Advisors by
midmorning. Normally, it would not bother him to make the council wait, but today he and
Sadira were asking for a legion of warriors to take to Samarah. Being late would not put
the advisors in a mood to grant his request.

A damson-colored shadow fell across the road. The mul looked up to see a cloud of ivory
dust drifting over the summit of the bluff. Although the wind carried most of the
scintillating mass out over the dry lake, some of the powder fell toward the road like a
soft rain.

Rikus held out a hand and caught a light dusting in his palm. The stuff was the color of
straw, with the silky texture of finely ground flour. Rikus touched his tongue to the
powder. It tasted dry and bland.

“This is faro!”

The mul held his hand out toward the windsinger.

“It looks freshly ground,” Magnus observed. “The boom we heard could have been a
collapsing silo. That would explain all the excitement.”

“I don't think so,” Rikus said, remembering the deep laugh that he had heard over the
concerned voices. “We'd better have a look.”

The mul dismounted,

“Is that really necessary?” Magnus protested. “When she contacted me last night, Sadira
made it dear that she wants you present when the meeting starts.”

Rikus scowled at this. “She should have thought about that before she sent us to inspect
the outpost at the mine,” he growled. “She'll just have to handle the council on her own
until we arrive.”

He led his kank off the road and tethered it to a boulder.

Magnus sighed in resignation. “At least let me send word that you'll be late.”

“After we see what's happening,” Rikus said. “It'll be better if we can tell her how long
we'll be.”

The mul led the way up the butte, clambering over sharp-edged rocks that had already grown
hot in the morning sun. The boulder field soon gave way to a talus slope dotted with
quiverlike clusters of arrow weed. Magnus grabbed whole handfuls of the yellow stalks and
used them to pull himself up the steep pitch. As the canes snapped between his thick
fingers, a tangy, foul-smelling odor filled the air. Rikus could only look on in envy and
scramble up the loose gravel on all fours. His skin was not as tough as the windsinger's,
and the steins of the plants were lined with razor-sharp ridges.

When they reached the cliffs near the top of the butte, it was Rikus's turn to gloat. He
crawled up the vertical crags easily, while Magnus cursed and groaned with the effort of
pulling his heavier body up the precipice. At times, the windsinger had to use his fist to
beat a suitable handhold into the rock face.

Upon climbing onto the summit, Rikus found himself looking out over a wide, shallow canyon
flanked on one side by this butte and on the other by the ashen crags of the Ringing
Mountains. The orange soil was speckled by thickets of gray-green tamarisk and spindly
catclaw trees, while crests of dark basalt wound across the valley floor like the
shattered vestiges of some ancient and long-forgotten rampart.

The highest crest in the valley stood as tall as a small mountain, and was known locally
as Rasda's Wall. Tyr's newest relief farm, Pauper's Hope, lay behind its bulk, completely
hidden save for the green stain of a faro orchard spilling from behind the immense
barrier. The field was made verdant, Rikus knew, by the waters of a deep well that the new
farmers had laboriously chiseled through a hundred feet of granite bedrock.

More than a dozen figures were splashing down the shallow ditches of the faro field.
Though the distance was too great for Rikus to tell the race or sex of any of the people,
he could see that they were running hard, occasionally glancing over their shoulders at
something hidden from view by Rasda's Wall.

“I was right. There's some kind of trouble.” Rikus looked down at Magnus. The windsinger
was only halfway up the cliff, hanging by a single hand thrust into a narrow fissure. “I'm
going ahead,” the mul said. “Follow me as soon as you can.”

Without waiting for a response, the mul drew his sword and rushed down the gentle side of
the butte. As before, a tumult of sounds filled his ears: gravel crunching beneath his
feet, the hot wind sizzling through the brush, the alarmed hiss of a lizard scrambling for
cover. Now that the high butte did not stand between him and Pauper's Hope, the drone of
the farmers' voices came to Rikus more clearly. Some yelled for help, while others called
the names of missing loved ones. Most simply screamed, their cries hoarse with terror.

Rikus heard other voices that worried him more. These were much louder than those of the
farmers, with deep timbres and booming laughs like the one he had heard earlier. After
dodging past half a dozen clumps of arrow weed, the mul reached the valley floor. He was
close enough now to see that the fleeing fanners still wore the paupers' rags in which
they had dressed as Tyrian beggars, and were sunburned and haggard from the struggle of
adjusting to life outside the city.

From behind the fleeing paupers reverberated a sharp command, as loud as thunder: “Come
back, you little vermin!”

At the shoulder of the ridge, where the crag was not as high as the rest of Rasda's Wall,
a pair of huge heads appeared above the crest. The size of small kanks, the heads had
shaggy brows and greasy braids of matted hair hanging off them. They had eyes so huge
that, even from an arrow's flight away, Rikus could see that they had brown irises. Their
teeth resembled long yellow stalactites. One of the figures had a hooked nose as large as
a kank mandible, while a pair of plump, bulbous lips distinguished the other's face.

“Giants!” Rikus hissed, hardly able to believe what he saw.

Though the mul had never before seen a giant of the Silt Islands, he did not doubt that he
was looking at two now. They were as tall as gatehouses and twice as broad, with huge
barrel chests and limbs as thick as an iron-wood. As they walked, they crushed faro trees
and smashed irrigation ditches, leaving a series of small ponds behind where their feet
had sunk into the ground.

Rikus didn't understand what the giants were doing here. Their race lived near Balic, in
the long estuary of dust that twined its way inland from the Sea of Silt. From what he had
heard, they were an aloof people, using the dust sea to insulate their island homes from
visitors. Occasionally they journeyed to the Balican peninsula to sell their hair, which
made excellent ropes, or to raid caravans and farms. But he had never heard of them
traveling inland as far as Tyr.