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Authors: Kevin L. Nielsen

Sands (Sharani Series Book 1) (4 page)

BOOK: Sands (Sharani Series Book 1)
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“Alright, everyone!” Jenthro shouted. He drew his sword and accepted a light pack from one of his sons. “Make for the stoneways! If the Migration has started early, maybe the rains in the Oasis have passed as well.”

From the back of the room, someone screamed.

Sailfins burst up through the many caverns that opened into the greatroom. Their massive dorsal fins shone sickly grey, each of the supporting spines a deep, rich red tipped in yellow. A prick from one of those spines was death. Hovering a few feet off the ground, the monsters crashed into the assembled group like sandtigers among sheep.

A woman screamed and disappeared amidst a storm of flashing, twisting teeth and flesh. Long, serpentine sailfin bodies twisted around victims, massive maws taking limbs or torsos in a single bite.

Chaos took the group. Taren leapt to his feet, cursing, and yanked Lhaurel up behind him. He shouted out unintelligible orders as he yanked the dagger from Jenthro’s stunned grip. With barely a pause, he slipped the dagger between their bound wrists and cut the bonds free, cutting into Lhaurel’s already-wounded wrist in the process. Grabbing a sword from a passing soldier, Taren dashed into the fray, not looking back at Lhaurel.

Lhaurel struggled to her feet. Her limbs shook and trembled. Blood pooled everywhere, staining the rust-colored sand a deeper, more vibrant shade of red.

A sailfin flew by her, skimming across the ground and then back up into the air with a strange crackling noise, grabbing an old man by a shoulder and taking him to the ground beneath its massive weight. Lhaurel couldn’t help but scream, her mind and memories shouting at her to run.

Lhaurel stumbled toward one of the exits, trying to ignore the chaos and carnage around her. A single thought kept her moving, pushing past the dead and dying around her.
The stoneways. We’ve got to make it to the stoneways. Run!

Someone crashed into her, knocking her to the ground. She fell hard, cutting her hands on the rocks and sand. The wound on her wrist added to the red on the sand.

Must get up. Stoneways. Make it to the stoneways.

She froze halfway to her feet. Saralhn stood directly in front of her, struggling with her massive pack. From the side, a sailfin turned and, spotting the struggling woman, flashed toward her, mouth agape. Lhaurel shouted a warning, but the sound was lost in the chaos and confusion. She looked around, hoping to spot anyone who could help. A nearby warrior dashed by, glanced at the scene, and ignored it, fleeing down the cavern with a stream of others. To face the genesauri was death. To flee—run—that was the only chance at life.

Lhaurel glanced to her left, toward the narrow passage only a few paces away. She could make it if she ran quickly enough. The narrow passage would slow the sailfins’ pursuit, giving her a chance. From there she could make it to the safety of the stoneways as fast as her legs could carry her.

The sailfin drew closer, a faint keen sounding from its vibrating fin.

Lhaurel got to her feet, a surge of adrenaline shooting through her, rushing through her veins like early morning frost, pushing her up despite the fear. She looked up at Saralhn and then back at the narrow tunnel to her left. Lhaurel was not a warrior, despite her clandestine training. She didn’t even have a sword. But she wasn’t going to let Saralhn die undefended. She wouldn’t abandon her.

Lhaurel raced across the ground, spraying up sand. To the side, the water urns burst, spilling their contents across the sand and mingling with the blood. Saralhn looked up, finally dropping the pack so she could stand. Her eyes went wide with fear, terror freezing her where she stood as her gaze fell on the sailfin bearing down on her.

Lhaurel wasn’t going to make it. She was going to watch Saralhn die, and there was nothing she could do—

Suddenly the Roterralar was beside her, his red robes the exact color of blood. He matched her pace, a sword in each hand.

“Here!” he shouted, tossing her one of the swords.

Lhaurel snatched it out of the air without thinking. Tradition and rules be damned to the seven hells. The man spun to the side, tackling Saralhn out of the way just as the sailfin would have struck. Lhaurel kept running forward, sword tip leading the way.

The blade dug into sailfin flesh, the momentum of its forward progression tearing the sword from Lhaurel’s grip. Lhaurel crashed into the rest of the creature’s long, muscular body, spinning and dropping to the rocks and sand. She got to her feet almost instantly, adrenaline still pulsing through her, terror giving her a mental acuity she never would have had otherwise.

She found her sword still sticking from the sailfin’s body. She ripped it free as the creature twitched, writhing on the ground and threatening to stab her with one of its poisonous dorsal spines. She brought the sword down on the sailfin’s back, cutting deeply into the flesh until it struck something hard. Again and again she struck, terror, adrenaline, and fear driving her, cutting into the beast long after it had stopped twitching.

Heaving lungs forced her to stop. She paused, sword held in front of her with a shaking, trembling hand. There was red on the hilt, lots of red. She didn’t know if it was hers or the sailfin’s. She looked down at the broken, mutilated corpse in front of her and immediately felt sick.

She looked away, and her gaze fell on Saralhn and the Roterralar man, standing on the other side of the sailfin corpse. His expression was unreadable. Saralhn’s was a look of horror.

Something cracked against the back of Lhaurel’s head. Pain exploded through her consciousness, and she fell, sword dropping from her hand. She blinked once and then faded into darkness.

Chapter 3 – Desperation

 

There was a time when these people would not have let one of their children come within a thousand spans of me. Now they provide me with one, Briane. One whose presence is a constant reminder of their desperation.

-From the Journal of Elyana

 

“Well, you’ve gotten yourself into a fine old mess.”

The voice resounded as if from a long distance away, though upon reaching her ears, it echoed in them like a beating drum. Her thoughts bounced around her head and left her swimming in confusion. Eyes fused shut, sight and senses gone, Lhaurel struggled to form a coherent thought.

Where was she?

Lhaurel tried to think but couldn’t focus. The salty tang of blood and sweat hung heavy in the air. She tasted blood on her lips. All she could feel was pain, pain everywhere.

Boots crunched against sand and sounded against the rock as someone approached. She tried to move but was restrained. Someone pressed a waterskin to her lips, and she drank gratefully, regaining some clarity of thought despite the pounding, throbbing pain in her temples. She took another drink, and the pounding faded slightly. Whoever was there turned and walked away a few steps.

She noticed, for the first time, the orange glow behind her eyelids. Realization hit her with the force of a storm. She’d been strung up on the rocks—bait for the coming genesauri horde. Those sun-blasted, fever-stricken Sidena had finally done what they’d threatened to do all these many years. Lhaurel had finally pushed their tolerance too far. She tried to fight down the terror, though she didn’t have the strength left to fight her bonds. Her head throbbed every time she tried to move.

The footsteps grew closer. Maybe they were here to watch.

Sunlight blared down on her, burning her pale flesh and searing her eyes, and she blinked them open. Two involuntary tears leaked down her cheeks and mingled with the dust and sand that clung to her face. There was blood there as well, both old and fresh, but the tears did little to wash it away.

A shadowed silhouette blocked out the sun.

“Who’s there?” she asked. Her voice came out as a rasp.

A man smiled down at her, and even through the pain she noticed he had a wonderful smile. His face was plain, and he was far from the most handsome man she’d ever seen, but his smile was surprisingly endearing.
Foolish girl,
she thought,
you’re about to die and you’re concerned about his smile. Think! Figure out how to get out of this!

“I’m trying to decide whether I should just leave you here.” The Roterralar dropped to his knees on the stone next to her, leaning down so their faces were only a foot or two apart. How had she not recognized him before? He smelled of rust, earth, and sweat, though his breath carried a cloying freshness to it, as if he had been chewing herbs. “In fact, that is what Taren and the others would want me to do. I mean, you’re the one they caught with a weapon. They’d want me to let you get eaten, flesh stripped from your bones bit by bit. I’ve seen the sailfins do it before. They peel the skin off you first.”

His voice was jovial, as if he were telling a friend a favorite tale or even a joke, but his eyes were hard grey stones, locked onto hers, reflecting none of the levity with which he spoke. It left her suddenly cold despite the sun beating down upon her.

Lhaurel swallowed and almost choked on phlegm. It hurt to cough.

“Or I could save you,” he continued in the same light, conversational tone, “Give you the chance to make amends for my intervention on your behalf. The choice is yours. You can stay here and be diced into fodder not fit for swine,
or
you can let me save you.”

Lhaurel didn’t respond. She had no reason to trust him. No reason to even speak to him at all.

“You’ve got about two minutes before the genesauri get here.”

Lhaurel lay there, torn in the agony of indecision. The stories spoke of the Roterralar as wanderers, nomads that somehow managed to survive the Migration out on the sands on their own. For sands sake, that’s what their names
meant.
Mothers whispered to their children of strange deaths and accidents attributed to these men. A calf born with two heads was the work of a vagrant Roterralar. A child sick with fever after one passed through the camp was attributed to the evil glare a Roterralar had given the child when he’d run across his path. At least, the mother would warn, the Roterralar hadn’t eaten him. They were said to do that. It was also said that the Roterralar could make themselves appear a hundred feet tall and disappear into the sands, or else ride on the backs of the genesauri. And they would kill you as soon as look at you.

The sun beat down, burning her eyes and scorching her flesh. Blood throbbed and pumped from her wrists and ankles where the leather cut into her flesh. The silence was deafening—the silence that heralded the last few moments before the sailfin pack burst up out of the sand and descended upon their prey. The genesauri were coming, sands take them. Her fear of them outweighed any distrust. The indecision passed in a sudden moment of release.

“Fine,” she said finally.

“First, you must swear a blood oath to the Roterralar.”

Lhaurel blinked, though the effect was lost through her squinting.

“You have about one minute left.”

Her clan had left her behind to die to aide in their own escape. Honestly, she couldn’t blame them. She’d violated their laws and traditions. “Fine, I swear by the blood within my veins that my loyalty is now and forever to the Roterralar.”

“You don’t really mean that, but I’ll hold you to your oath.”

The man rose to his feet, appearing for a moment as if he were encompassed by a shroud of red-grey mist from the sun’s brilliant radiance behind him. He pulled out a dagger, knelt, and cut Lhaurel free. Rising and putting fingers to his lips, he let out a shrill whistle that tore at Lhaurel’s eardrums. An echoing response came almost immediately, but from above them.

Blood flew back into her limbs with a rush, leaving them prickling as if she had stepped on the spine-covered shell of a rashelta. The smell of sweat and blood grew stronger when the bonds fell away. She arose on shaky limbs, taking the hand that the Roterralar proffered when the pain threatened to drop her back to the ground. Her head ached, and she couldn’t seem to keep her balance. The man’s grip was like iron, keeping her on her feet

“Did Saralhn make it?” Lhaurel asked, steadying herself and letting go of his hand.

“Who?”

“The girl we saved.”

“I don’t know.”

It would have been worth it if she’d saved Saralhn.

Something large passed in front of the sun. A creature of talons and feathers plummeted toward the earth, a streak of mottled brown and grey and yellow.

Lhaurel shrieked in a combination of surprise and awe as the creature spread its wings and reared in the air.

Clouds of dust sprang up beneath the creature’s powerful wings. With an ear-shattering cry, the creature extended massive, taloned feet and alighted on the ground, standing with its head easily a span above Lhaurel’s.

The man walked up to it and gently stroked the mottled plumage.

The creature’s wings raked back in a sickle shape on either side of its long body. Black orbs, deep, dark pools of intelligence, studied her over the top of a hooked yellow beak.

The majesty took Lhaurel’s breath away and, for a moment, at least, made her pains somewhat lessened.

“This is Skree-lar,” he said, holding out a hand.

For the first time, Lhaurel noticed the leather harness buckled around the bird’s torso.

“And it really is time we left here.”

As if to accentuate his words, the high-pitched wail of a sailfin pack ripped through the air.

The man didn’t wait for Lhaurel to respond. He seized her by the arm and dragged her over to the bird. She had completely underestimated the danger of this unknown man. His grip was strong, but she resisted despite the pain, and he stopped pulling immediately.

She glanced to one side, contemplating making a run for it.

He followed her gaze. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said, glancing out over the rolling dunes with narrowed eyes. “You can come with me and take a chance at living or stay here and welcome certain death. And it seems a pity, really, for you to have chosen to come with me already just to hesitate when confronted with something
out of the ordinary
.”

He vaulted up onto Skree-lar’s back, the bird having hunkered down into the sand so he could do so. His hands moved in a blur as he took leather leads from the harness and attached them to rings hidden in his robes. That done, he again reached down and offered her a hand.

Lhaurel hesitated. She could run and try to make it on her own. If she made it into the warren the Sidena called home, she could lose the sailfins and then try and make it to the Oasis on her own once that pack had passed. She dismissed that plan almost immediately. She wasn’t about to brave the sands on her own with the genesauri loose. It was the same reason she hadn’t left to join the outcasts, the same reason she’d never simply run away. She feared the sands and the demons they contained. She hesitated a moment longer.

A moment too long. The man lost his patience and seized her arm, pulling her up behind him as if she were no heavier than a small child. Just as she landed, the sand ruptured and spewed out a geyser of sand, and a sailfin burst into the air.

“Hold on!” the man shouted, and he gave a sharp, whistling trill.

The bird spread its wings and launched into the air.

Lhaurel awkwardly seized the man around the waist, feeling hard muscles beneath the cloth of his robes. She found herself blushing furiously and berated herself silently at the foolishness of it all. What was she? A girl or a woman?

All further thought was blown from her mind as the bird drove its wings downward in a single, powerful stroke that pushed it higher into the air.

The sailfin gave chase, sinuous serpentine body twisting into the sky as if it were swimming through the air. A row of black dots extending backward from the corner of the jaw seemed to crackle and spark the higher it rose into the air. Twice as long and almost as thick as the bird she rode, the sailfin’s scream grew to a frenzied, cacophonous pitch.

Lhaurel wanted to scream, wanted to will the bird to fly faster, fly higher, but the sailfin matched the bird’s beating wings surge for surge. Another sailfin burst out of the sand, flying upward. Two more followed, then half a dozen more a few seconds later.

The man swore under his breath and urged the bird onward with his hands and another pattern of whistle bursts.

The original sailfin was gaining on them. It was only a few inches away from the bird’s gleaming talons, jaws agape as if it would attempt to swallow them all in one bite. Lhaurel looked down into the creature’s gullet, seeing rotting flesh and yellow-stained teeth as long as her hand.

Skree-lar flapped harder, its wing beats strong and shallow, yet stiff and uncomfortable.

Fear tightened Lhaurel’s grip at the man’s waist.

Suddenly, the sailfin seemed to fall away.

An awful sound filled the air like bone scraping against rock. It took her a moment to realize that the sound was the man laughing, distorted by the wind. If her hands hadn’t been locked around his waist, feeling the rise and fall of every wheeze, she wouldn’t have believed it.

“How can you laugh at a time like this?” she asked, swallowing a mouthful of dust and sand that left her in a fit of coughs. Her pains returned as the adrenaline and fear faded.

By way of response, the man gestured down. The sailfins hovered nearly four spans below them, stationary in the sky except for the strange undulations that made up their normal movements. With each beat of Skree-lar’s wings, Lhaurel was taken higher. The genesauri remained where they were. One of them seemed to swim upward toward them but only wriggled in place. It hissed, a high-pitched, grating sound, and then the pack turned and dove back into the sand. Scores of dorsal fins rose up out of the sand as the others descended into it, the rest of the pack welcoming back its companions.

“Why aren’t they following us?” Lhaurel shouted, keeping her mouth close to his shoulder to avoid the dust and wind.

“Look!” he shouted, gesturing.

Lhaurel glanced where he pointed and then turned her whole head to take in the sight. A handful of the massive birds of prey, riders on their backs bearing long, metal spears, sped along the desert floor. High above them, more of the rider-bearing creatures circled in complicated aerial patterns. Light glinted off the ends of spears clutched in the riders’ hands. With shrieks that rent the air, the birds and their riders descended upon the sailfin pack.

Who were these strangers? She’d never seen so many Roterralar before—in fact, she’d never seen nor heard of more than one being in the same place at any given time, nor had she ever heard anything, even legends, about these mysterious bird-warriors.

“That’s why. Now shut up and hold on!”

Lhaurel started to reply angrily, but then a sudden thought struck the barb from her lips. She was flying on the back of a giant bird!

BOOK: Sands (Sharani Series Book 1)
12.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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