Star of Cursrah Read online

  Light leaked in, too. From a crack in the ceiling peeked a pale light that touched the only furniture, a blunt pedestal topped by a glowing orb.

  Drawn as if hypnotized, the young woman stared. The orb was milk white, perfectly round, polished until it glowed, and the size of Amber’s fists. It sat nestled in folds of black cloth.

  “That can’t be sunlight,” frowned Hakiim. “We saw the sun set.”

  “Moonlight,” Reiver offered as he squinted at the orb. “Myths of Mystra, I’d almost swear this isn’t glass but a single jewel!”

  “That can’t be. Jewels don’t come the size of ostrich eggs,” Hakiim argued. “Can we take it? It’s lost treasure, doesn’t belong to anyone. So it’s ours, right?”

  Strangely, their roles had reversed. Avarice made the normally cautious Hakiim reckless, while the rash Reiver pulled his hand back.

  “Queer how it glows in such a tiny moonbeam,” the thief observed, “collecting the light like a mirror.”

  Reiver raised his hand to block the light but the orb glowed on.

  “Ah,” Reiver said. “Better not touch it. It’s en—”

  Unnoticed, mesmerized, Amber reached with both hands and clasped the moonlit globe.

  “Amber!” yelled both friends, who then froze at the sound of a whisper.

  A hiss issued from the close rock walls. Whistles joined in, until the adventurers looked for a thousand cobras. Within seconds, the hissing rose to a piping keen like a banshee’s wail, then a hurricane’s roar.

  Reiver yelled, “Jump!”

  Too late. The world exploded in wind, sand, and noise. Stone roof slabs blew off like palm fronds. Sand boiled around the hut’s walls, whipped into dust devils by cyclone winds. The three hunkered in a corner, covering their eyes with their scarves and arms lest they be blinded.

  The walls melted as hundredweight blocks were snatched loose and whisked into sandy darkness. Massive thuds resounded as boulders banged like dice. The sandstorm intensified until the crouching companions’ knotted headscarves lifted, and their hair was tugged by the roots. They might have cowered at the eye of a hurricane while primeval winds thundered around them like wrathful giants. Over the howling din they heard a sizzling, screaming roar as tons and tons of sand, an entire desert’s worth, were scoured from the ground around the moonstone.

  Amber and her friends breathed through their sleeves, gasping as the very air seemed pulled into the sky. They heard crashes, booms, thumps, and above all the fiery swirl of shifting sand. Rumbles shook the earth until the searchers feared the floor would collapse and bury them alive. Sand stung and spat like hail, threatening to smother them as it filled their clothes, filtered down their necks, sailed into their nostrils and ears and hair and eyes. The blistering winds puffed, pounded, blew, and buffeted, rocking them where they sat encircled by whipping sand. Beaten, breathless, and terrified, the three Memnonites clung together and curled into balls of misery that gradually grew numb before the storm’s fury.

  An eternity later, Amber shook her head awake. Sand spilled from her headscarf. Her eyes and lips were gummed shut, her cheeks and forehead chapped and raw. Picking at her face with filthy fingernails, she gradually leaked enough tears to uncrust her eyes and open them.

  Darkness. For a second she feared blindness; then a light peeked from low on the horizon. Sister Moon, full, round, and white, was near setting. Amber guessed they’d sheltered for hours while the storm raged, passed out or sleeping. Stiff from tying herself in a knot, she found Reiver wedged between her knees like a lapdog and Hakiim mashing her left armpit. Groaning, the daughter of pirates shoved the stunned companions aside and reached for a wall to help her rise.

  The block walls were gone. Everything was gone, except for the black square hole, pedestal, and orb. The globe in its nest of black cloth, Amber noted numbly, no longer glowed. It had reverted to plain glass like a big drop of water.

  Keeling over backward, Amber untangled her legs, rolled over, and crawled to her feet. Rising, she forgot to breathe as she turned a slow circle.

  The polished floor of pink-white marble tiles, a portion of which they’d seen in the stone hut, was revealed as an immense circle hundreds of feet across. Encircling the vast circle lay a moat filled with jumbled blocks of stone as big as oxcarts, and encircling the moat stood a city.

  Amber stood on a slight rise in the valley’s exact center. From here she could see two or three miles in all directions. Every inch of the valley was laden with ruins. Not far off squatted a two-story complex with tumbledown walls and collapsed roofs. Yonder reared a pair of low ziggurats with rubble between. More buildings crouched around, some intact, some mere outlines. Far off Amber saw a depression that must have been a dry lake. Archways still marked some streets while others were broken. Staggered farther out were square apartments and cottages. Rising up the valley sides were stone walls and terraces and the hollow shells of mansions. In parks, dried trees and grape arbors hunched like tired skeletons.

  The night air was dead calm. The ghostly city glowed white. Every inch had been bleached by sun and scoured by wind until neither paint nor smoke soot lingered. Amber smelled nothing, not even death, just the salt rankness of clean sand.

  Awestricken, she trekked across the vast round floor to the very lip above the dry moat. Once wide as a marketplace, the moat was filled with broken blocks, smashed columns, and crushed roof tiles. Wall sections were painted with delicate frescoes now shattered. The phoenix, a mythical bird rising from fire to live again, occurred many times above the heads of the happy painted people. Seeing the brilliant colors and artwork, recalling the golden emblem on the doors, Amber knew this palace had once possessed a breathtaking beauty.

  Belatedly, as if waking, Amber realized this ruined Palace of the Phoenix was not rectangular, as they’d assumed from the glyph, but round as the sun or the moon. The round palace had sported cylindrical columns above a circular moat at the center of a dish-shaped valley, recurring circles that invoked the moon herself.

  This fabulous building had been deliberately destroyed, its roof and walls and columns systematically broken and hurled into the once water-filled moat.

  “Oghma take my eyes, that I ever saw such devastation,” Amber whispered to the moon. “Why? Why was this beautiful palace demolished? Who could do such a thing?”

  Glowing ghost white in moonlight, the dead city stood mute. Nothing lived here, Amber knew, but three misfit children too far from home.

  Far beneath Amber’s feet, a door creaked.

  No, not a door, but the lid of an oblong box.

  The tall box was tilted against the wall of a dark niche.

  The sarcophagus lid had once been brightly painted with an effigy of the occupant, but time and dust had besmirched the image until nothing showed but the vague outline of a human form. Inside the coffin stirred that form.

  Resin that had sealed the coffin cracked and crumbled off. The hands that pushed the lid were wrapped in bandages, each shrunken digit carefully defined in rough linen. Lacquered resin and sprinkled herbs trickled into dust as the hands flexed and shoved.

  Blocking the coffin’s foot were heaps of bones and brown rags. With ancient and petrified strength, the undead being pushed from within. Bones clicked and skittered, then the heavy cedar lid toppled free, slamming on the stone floor with a ponderous boom. No one alive heard the sound.

  The creature in the sarcophagus was swaddled head to toe in linen bandages, its only decoration a painted mask and double chain of tarnished silver. Suspended on the being’s breast was a vivid jewel the startling color of blood.

  Knocking off the painted mask, shedding resin dust and linen fiber, the monster stamped ancient bones as it stepped from its coffin.

  Free. Free for the first time in centuries, after eons of imprisonment, yet still a slave to magic. Magically animated, the creation was cursed to fulfill an ancient duty.

  Crushing skulls underfoot, the mummy shambled toward its task.
/>   To hunt the intruders.

  6

  The 383rd Anniversary of the Great Arrival

  “Am I some dung-shoveler’s daughter? A goose girl? A street smoother? A fat-bottomed milkmaid? A soldier’s trollop?”

  Midnight was approaching, and Amenstar stood naked—save for the bandage on her leg—before an armoire holding thirty feet of dazzling apparel.

  “Why do I have no decent clothes?”

  “Your Majesty,” simpered her eldest maid, “the seamstresses stitched seven gowns—”

  “I didn’t want to attend this stupid gala in the first place,” Star snapped.

  “But the ball’s in your honor, Highness,” put in her secretary-maid. “You must greet both the samirs of Oxonsis and Zu—”

  “I must marry them,” Amenstar shrieked in outrage. She slammed her closet doors, and her modest breasts swung in time. “One of them, anyway … That’s what this party’s about. Showing me off like a beribboned heifer at the Solstice Fair, a greased pig for farm boys to fight over. I might as well be a chicken in the meat market with my head on the block—”

  “If only you were a prize pullet,” interrupted a cool voice, “we could stuff you in a sack and stifle your cackling.”

  Star whirled to find her mother filling the doorway. Behind her, six maids and four bodyguards stared at a high spot on the wall. The samira’s dozen maids trooped behind their mistress and curtsied deeply.

  The first sama arched a kohl-darkened eyebrow and said, “Is that your intended garb, dear daughter? This is only your coming out party, not your wedding night.”

  Huffing extravagantly, Star extended a limp hand and received a robe. Tartly, she sneered, “If the samirs have journeyed this far to seek my hand, perhaps they should see the whole package. Kingdoms may collapse if I’m returned on my wedding night because the goods weren’t delivered as bargained.”

  The sama sighed in imitation of her daughter. Waggling her fingers caused maids to scurry to retrieve a low, armless chair. The queen sat, accepted a silk handkerchief, and dabbed her brow.

  “Amenstar,” she sighed, “why must my most difficult daughter be the eldest? Try to listen, dear, for the novelty if nothing else. You must understand that nobles, male and female, have a duty to marry well.”

  “I know what you’re going to say, Mother,” Star groaned, “I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

  “Then hear it again,” her mother glowered. “Royals’ lives are not their own. We belong to the city, to history, to our ancestors, and to our descendants. Commoners may marry whom they please because their lives don’t matter. Ours do. The price we pay for wealth and prestige is that we marry not for love, but for position, for the good of our homeland and families. That is why—” the Sama leaned on her words—“you must welcome the Samirs of Oxonsis and Zubat. Your father, myself, and the other wives have spent many long days comparing their military and economic merits—”

  “—and which shall be awarded the prize mare?” Star jabbed.

  “More like a sow, and a bristly one at that,” the sama said. “No, you’ll marry whoever proves the more powerful prince. Both are heirs to thrones, but negotiations have so far proved unfruitful. Cursrah needs to ally to protect our—”

  Star slapped both hands over her ears and shrilled, “One more word about politics and I’ll scream until I faint!”

  The sama shot from her chair and snatched her daughter’s hands. Stunned, Amenstar stepped back. Her mother hadn’t touched her since birth.

  The sama’s black-rimmed eyes blazed. “I wish you weren’t highest born,” she hissed, “so you could be whipped raw like some guttersnipe. Hear this: you will dress in your finest gown, you will appear at the stroke of midnight, and you will dazzle both samirs. If you can waste pleasantries on common friends—who are not invited to this reception—you can please royal guests as well. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, First Mother.”

  Never had Star’s mother grown so angry, and Star was too stunned by her reaction to make further trouble.

  “You’d better, or I’ll see you sold to a cannibal prince past the Dragon’s Wall, and your sister Tunkeb can entertain our guests,” the sama threatened. Her glare did not soften, but she bid a retainer step forward. The courtier carried a pillow upon which sat a bright, bundled handkerchief. “Enough, now. For this historic occasion, your sixteenth birthday, your father and we wives have fashioned a present.”

  Still rattled, but curious, Amenstar picked away the handkerchief’s corners carefully, as if fearing a deadly asp might uncoil from its folds. Seeing the present, she frowned.

  “Am I to wear this tonight?” the young samira asked. “I’m not sure it goes with my outfit.”

  The queen stifled a sigh and said, “Wear it anyway.”

  On the pillow was cradled a tiara, a silver headband scrolled with zigzagging squares around a square-cut moonstone of milk white radiance. Star settled it on her head and found that it fit perfectly; naturally, since the royal silversmiths knew all her sizes. Star remained aloof, since she received exquisite gifts daily.

  “How does this complement tonight’s … historic occasion?” she asked her mother.

  “The moonstone is a storytelling charm. It remembers all it sees and can later recall the images for the wearer, as if dreaming. Wear it tonight and record your coming-of-age ceremony, though you refuse to come of age. There’s a matching piece of jewelry to go with it—but that’s a surprise for later.”

  Star admired her tiara in a polished bronze mirror. It went well with her dusky skin and accented her noble nose and brow. Mention of matching jewelry intrigued her, but before she could ask, her mother rambled on.

  “… Everyone will be eager to see you, so do arrive promptly at midnight, dear, or else.”

  Her mother swept from the wing with a score of retainers in her train.

  A dozen wide-eyed maids awaited Star’s next move. Opening her closet door, she grabbed an armful of clothes, all her new-sewn gowns, and flung them to the floor.

  “You heard my mother,” she said. “I need a fine gown. Throw these rags in the fire pit. We’ve got two hours before midnight. Fetch me a dozen seamstresses if you have to break down doors and drag them here by the hair.”

  Maids scurried like quail, but Star snagged her secretary’s wrist.

  “Bring papyrus and quill,” Star ordered, “I’ll send a message to Gheqet and Tafir … and see what my mother thinks of that!”

  “Are you sure your family won’t object?”

  By the light of a dozen bronze lamps, Amenstar held various outfits in front of Gheqet and Tafir, clothes looted from her brothers’ apartments.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  Star had finally settled on a red sheath with many delicate pleats that complemented her red-brown skin, all sewn with silver thread that matched her silver tiara. The gown clung from just above her nipples to the floor, its sheerness providing a peekaboo effect she hoped would detract from her limp—her calf still ached as if a dagger were buried in the muscle. Her hair was freshly braided into cornrows with pearls and silver beads that jarred musically when she moved, and perfumed with myrrh for a resinous, woodsy smell. The moonstone tiara, newly polished, glittered as if alive.

  “You look stunning, Star,” said Tafir, “almost like a princess.”

  “Except all that kohl around your eyes makes you look like a cross-eyed zebra,” smirked Gheqet.

  “Yes. Don’t your eyelids droop from the weight?” returned Tafir.

  Maids standing along the walls tittered.

  “Hush.” The princess flung clothes at the men, a green samite tunic to Tafir and a yellow-and-white striped toga to Gheqet, and said, “Wear that, Taf. It goes with your coloring. Gheq, this makes you look taller. Hurry! Strip!”

  The young men balked, and the maids giggled. Since arriving, Tafir and Gheqet hadn’t been able to take their eyes off the maids, each selected for personal beauty in imitation of S
tar, and dressed in the palace’s next-to-nothing shifts.

  Actually, the men were boggled just being in the royal residence and Star’s personal chambers. Summoned with messages delivered by maids in dark cloaks, they’d been smuggled into the royal compound’s dizzying tunnels—the same tunnels, so ran rumors, where trespassers died excruciating deaths at the hands of the vizars. Amenstar assured her visitors that they were safe, and her personal bodyguards stared right through them, yet a nervous queasiness lingered.

  Star’s fabulous, casual wealth stunned them. Room after room of her chambers exhibited embroidered rugs, exotic pets with jeweled collars, gold-leafed mirrors, blue glass chandeliers, elegant guards with lyre-shaped halberds, glowing mosaics, even two gold chamber pots, and now the First Samira of Cursrah wanted them to crash a formal ball in the Palace of the Phoenix.

  “I said hurry!” Star clapped her hands, and the fellows jumped. “Don those clothes so the maids can dress your hair, and stop gawking. They’re just common hussies. You can take a few home if you like, after the ball. Heaven knows they’re useless to me. Now get dressed!”

  Precisely at midnight, Samira Amenstar and her entourage marched into the Palace of the Phoenix.

  First stamped M’saba, the gigantic rhinaur, her kinky hair upswept and painted blue, her long body draped in a blue, star-painted mantle as big as a tent. In hands the size of bushel baskets was clutched a halberd with a lyre-shaped blade, its keen top edge winking. The halberd’s pole trailed a banner emblazoned with Star’s eight-pointed emblem. Next strode two regal horn blowers with four-foot, silver-chased ram’s horns, then Captain Anhur and twelve bodyguards, all in blue and gold, and six maids in demure sheathes and shawls of brilliant beads. Star reclined on a leopard skin draped across a sedan chair decorated with gold leaf that sat atop the shoulders of more guards. Trailing came a page girl carrying a giant rainbow fan of ostrich feathers, more maids, the thunderstruck Gheqet and Tafir in princes’ finery, and finally more stone-faced guards leading or carrying the slate-blue saluqis, gabbling parrots, sleepy ocelot, and on a velvet blue pillow, a rarely seen tressym. This unusual creature from the far north was a silver-furred, slant-eyed cat with gossamer wings dappled like a peacock’s.