Star of Cursrah Page 5

  All Amber could say was, “Sorry, but hush!”

  As the gig inched upstream, Amber squinted north. Atop a high ridge overlooking the river sat the squat block of Fort Tufenk, “The Fortress of Fire,” once the sole barrier that restrained the ravaging armies of Tethyr. Deep trenches for defense still scarred the moonlit slopes beneath the stone walls. Though Tethyr and Calimshan shared an uneasy peace, relations had been prickly ever since the Eye Tyrant Wars, and both sides still laid claims to the ruins of Shoonach and the old Kingdom of Mir. In this fort alone, two hundred troops trained daily for war. They were the Pasha’s Farisan, or standing army, and the elite Mameluks, descendants of slaves who’d won their freedom. Ears ringing, Amber peered and listened, but no torch flared, nor did a whistle or horn raise an alarm as their stolen navy gig crabbed past the keep. Steering under a luffing sail, she saw the fortress finally fall behind.

  Amber slipped a loop over the tiller and flexed her cramped arms. “Whew, we’re past it.”

  “We’ve got plenty of water,” said Hakiim. “The monks say the mountains suffered the deepest snows ever seen, so the rivers will flood all through Ches.”

  “Oh? I heard spring thaws are late, and we’ll have drought in Tarsakh,” said Reiver. “Who’s got something to eat?”

  “So much for predicting the weather,” sighed Amber. “Hey, don’t gobble. We need rations for six days.”

  Wedged backward in the prow, Hakiim nudged a jute bag with his toe. “I’ve got figs and prunes, and flat bread and dates, and some dried peas and goat cheese,” he said, “and a cake of pounded almonds, and mint leaves for tea if we can build a fire. I would have grabbed more from the kitchen but my Uncle Harun was grousing again.”

  “Grousing about what?” Having no family, Reiver often asked about his friends’. He munched bread slathered with hummas.

  “Oh, the usual. ‘When will you get serious about the rug trade?’ Never, is my answer, but I don’t dare say it.”

  Amber heard a lamb bleat. Along the dark, sloping riverbank, white jots of sheep and goats grazed by night amidst thorn bushes and evergreen oak. Just over a brow winked a shepherd’s campfire. Far to the east was the jagged line of the Marching Mountains.

  Nibbling a pigeon pie wrapped in paper, Amber asked, “Why don’t your sisters take over the business, Hak? Then you could do what you want.”

  “Oh,” Hakiim yr Hassan al Bajidh sighed as he rummaged in his haversack, “Asfora’s going to sea, and Shunnari’s getting married. Since my brother got killed in the fire, I’m the only one left to carry on the family name, but I’d rather—I don’t know—go adventuring.…”

  “I live with adventure every day, trying not to get killed or jailed,” drawled Reiver. “It’s hardly a lark.”

  “Still,” lamented Hakiim, “repairing rugs and rolling rugs and hauling rugs and haggling over rugs—better Ibrandul spirit me to the Underdark.”

  “Shhh, you’ll jinx us,” Amber said, putting her fingers to her ears to keep out evil notions. “Especially out here. You want skulks to drag us off while we sleep?”

  “Skulks only inhabit ruins.” Reiver winkled a cork from a bottle of Zazesspuran wine. “Of course, the Underdark underlies everywhere. In Calimport the Night Parade thrives on it.”

  “Cease your ghost stories,” Amber said.

  She cast about, but saw little except the high ridges that channeled the river to the Shining Sea. Amber lay back and tried to relax, but watching a million stars dance circles around the masthead made her dizzy and queasy. Soldiers called the River Agis—also called the River Memnon—the Troubled River because of the continual border clashes, and Amber couldn’t shake the feeling that they were sailing into trouble. She wished the moon would rise so she could offer prayers to Selûne.

  Trying to distract herself, Amber joined the conversation. “I know how Hakiim feels,” she said. “All I ever hear about is money and the family business—as if slavers were brass casters or felt makers. It’s funny, though. I grew up watching slaves come and go, lived with it all my life, but it’s only lately it seems wrong.”

  “The gods made them slaves,” Reiver said, repeating the conventional wisdom of Memnon. “Slavers just shunt them from master to master.”

  “No, Amber’s right,” Hakiim added. “Now that we’re pondering our own futures and freedom, we’re more aware of other peoples’ lives—and plights.” He peeled a desert orange, chucked the thick rinds in the river, and continued, “No one’s really free. Everyone has a master, or customers to please. The only one who’s truly free in Calimsham is Sultan Sujil, though I suppose in some ways he answers to ten thousand citizens.”

  “Still, slaving makes my family no better than the likes of the Twisted Rune, or the beholders, or illithids. Sorry, Reive.” The thief made the fig sign, thumb between middle fingers, to ward off evil names. Amber trailed her fingertips in the river, keeping watch for crocodiles. “I’m not sure my family’s got a future in slavery anyway. Since the Reclamation, my cousins can’t capture slaves from Tethyr, so now they hunt in Athkatla, which is risky. If I could, I’d let the slaves go free and find another occupation, preferably anything not obsessed with coin. I’d be happy.”

  “You scorn money because you’ve never lacked for it,” returned Reiver. “I pray to Waukeen and Lliira for any at all. A bag of gold would solve all my problems. Between the Night Arrow and the Syl-Pasha’s brother fighting to control the Undercity, and El Amlakkar busting heads, there’s no future for a thief except as gallows bait.”

  “So,” Hakiim challenged, “if you could do anything, what would you choose?”

  Amber chewed her cheek a while, considering. “To start, I’d read all the Founding Stories in the library.”

  “That’s a lot of stories,” said Reiver.

  “Reading’s a hobby,” Hakiim added. “You can’t make a living at it.”

  “I know,” Amber said, then slapped at a mosquito with wet fingers, “but I love the old stories the storytellers recite in the bazaar and the grove behind the library. Tales culled from dragons, can you imagine?”

  “ ‘Never trust the story, but always trust the storyteller,’ ” quipped Reiver. “I can make up dragon tales—ulk!”

  Reiver flipped backward against the mast, Amber jounced off her tiny perch in the stern to sprawl in the bilge, and Hakiim lost his kaffiyeh in the water. Struggling upright, Amber asked, “What happened?”

  “We ran aground on a sand bar,” Reiver said, peering over the gunwale and trying to rock the boat. “I’d say we’re stuck till the tide turns.”

  “When’s that?” Amber swiped water from the seat of her breeches.

  “Uh, twelve hours? Doesn’t the tide turn twice a day? Or does it take longer in the spring?”

  Hakiim wrung out his headscarf and said, “Might as well send an elephant to sea. You’d sail into a fog and beach in the Theater of Allfaiths.”

  “A good place to pick pockets,” the thief observed, “and nobody’ll spill their morningfeast on you from seasickness.”

  Amber studied the shoreline thirty feet away, then ran down the sail. “Looks like our holiday begins with wet feet,” she said, “unless you two can walk on water.”

  “Let the sailor go first,” joked Hakiim, “to test for crocodiles.”

  “The stink from his dirty feet will drive them away,” laughed Amber.

  “You insult the honest dust of your home city,” Reiver said.

  “Drag the anchor ashore, Hak.” Amber buckled her horsehide sandals around her neck, shrugged on her rucksack, grabbed her capture noose, and added, “I don’t mind walking now, but I’d rather ride back to Memnon.”

  Probing ahead with her long wooden handle, the daughter of pirates sloshed through ankle-deep water, following the curving sandbar to the shore. Reiver skimmed along quietly as a fish, but Hakiim hurried, tripped, and splashed down like a harpooned whale. Once ashore, the three wedged the anchor between two boulders and jammed a big roc
k on top to hold it fast.

  Amber dried her feet and donned her sandals, ready to go, and barefoot Reiver was already waiting. Hakiim was busy arranging an old rucksack made of carpet scraps on his back, lashing a jacket and blanket atop it, hanging a haversack of food and a canteen on his shoulder, and slinging a jingling scabbard for his curved scimitar through his belt. When all of that was finished, he was stuck holding his round shield in his left hand.

  “What do I do with this?” he asked.

  “Skim it across the river,” advised Reiver.

  “I can’t throw it away. I only know how to fight with shield and scimitar combined.”

  “If we need to fight,” Amber teased, “just spin around and charge the enemy with that backpack. It’s thicker than any armor I’ve ever heard of. Oh, here, hold still.”

  With nimble fingers, she tied his leather-bound shield atop his rucksack. Hakiim waggled his pack and bonked his head on the shield’s rim.

  “I’ll fall over backward.”

  “After a mile you’ll know what to throw away,” Reiver assured him. The thief showed only pouches at his belt and a thin canvas bundle over one shoulder, though his patched and saggy clothes could have concealed more.

  Reiver scaled the ridge like a squirrel to scout the country beyond, and Amber joined him. Hakiim plodded up the slope, already puffing, and peered into the nearly total darkness.

  “Hey,” he said, “where are we going?”

  Amber squinted. Far off, faint against the night sky, jutted a tiny, upright finger of shadow against the deep indigo of the night sky.

  “There,” Amber said.

  “Not much to see,” groused Hakiim.

  “This is ancient history,” Amber protested, “and it’s fascinating.”

  “It’s boring.”

  “Oh, come now,” Amber coaxed, “aren’t you curious about who built this tower? Don’t you wonder what it overlooked, or guarded, and who’s stood here before us?”

  “No,” said both young men.

  “You should have stayed home, you grumps.”

  “We grumps are going down,” announced Reiver. Careful of handholds and footing, he and Hakiim began to spiral down the narrow stairs.

  “Go, I don’t care.”

  Alone, Amber circled the tower’s top, window by window, squinting as afternoon sun glinted on the brassy desert. North lay the crumbling ridge that lined the river. Patches of sand were still dimpled by their footprints. Eastward peeked a brown smear, the foothills of the Marching Mountains. To the west lay only more wastes, which dropped away at the south. The desert was mostly sand, shelves of shale, and jumbled rocks. Tufts of coarse yellow grass cropped up here and there, as did patches of low thorn bushes. Scattered about were Calim cactuses, tough and flat and half-buried in sand. Amber had already dug out one cactus spine that had pierced her camel hide sandal. After that, she walked more warily.

  In a long morning’s walk they hadn’t seen a soul, yet Amber knew people had once regularly crossed these wastelands. From her high perch in the tower, she could clearly see blocks of black basalt and carefully fit flagstones forming a roadbed. The road had been grand in its day, wide enough for six horses abreast, she reckoned, but now it was obscured by sand.

  Was this a spur of the ancient Trade Way that crossed the desert from north to south or a different road altogether? The Trade Way had always been lined with paired minarets, while this tower stood alone. Perhaps the other tower had fallen and been buried, or maybe uncaring men had looted the stones to build huts for goats.

  Amber looked east and west and wondered where the road had run. Was it from the mountains to the sea? Had it connected forgotten cities or markets? Holding her breath, Amber imagined this tower when it was brand new, perhaps washed with lime and hung with a brilliant flag. Tall guards in painted armor might have waved as chariots with red wheels and spirited horses dashed by or stood grimly facing east toward barbarian empires, determined to repel a brutish horde of hobgoblins or drow shrieking hideous battle cries. Had there been battles here, and brave deeds with the flagstones drenched in blood? Had princesses and commoners met here for illicit love under the moon? Had kings and spies met secretly in this very room? Was this a guard tower at all, built for war and defense, or a minaret for calling the religious to prayer, or a temple to an unknown god, or a wizard’s retreat? Or something else?

  Whatever its use, few clues were left in the tower. The high ceiling, corbelled into pointed arches, may have been gilded once, shining in the sun, but it was bare slate now. The only furniture was a stubby column with twisted brass brackets; whatever they’d held had been stolen long ago. No paintings or inscriptions or maps adorned the walls, nor even graffiti, bat droppings, or birds’ nests.

  “You’re not boring at all,” she said to the tower.

  Only a sandy-colored lizard heard her, watching from a windowsill with beady eyes and a lipping tongue. Amber’s sandals squeaked as she descended the stone stairs. It was a lonely sound.

  Outside a breeze sighed, for Calim’s Breath always haunted the desert, but the mournful tones sounded tired. Amber sniffed. The air smelled of salt and dust, but nothing living. The fellows lounged against the tower’s eastern side in the shade. Reiver ate, as usual, while Hakiim dozed. After sailing most of the night, they’d walked seven or eight miles inland to reach Amber’s goal. The minaret had proven farther away than it looked, for distances were deceptive in the desert with nothing to compare against. At noon the men had wanted to turn back, but Amber had trudged on, so they followed. The sun hung over their shoulders every step of the way, a cruel tyrant who dominated desert and sky. Even now, as day waned, the sun inflated while dropping toward the horizon.

  “Scoot over.” Amber plunked in the shade and sipped from her water bottle, refilled from a brackish well dug into the tower’s ground floor. She slipped off her sandals, scrubbed sand from between her toes, and checked the cactus thorn’s red jot.

  “I’ve got blisters,” Hakiim said, examining his own feet. “When do we head back to the boat?”

  “Why not sleep on the top floor of the tower?” asked Amber as she peered about at the landscape.

  “Is that safe?”

  “No place is safe,” Reiver said, “but the desert’s probably safer than sleeping in the boat. Animals come down to the river to drink at night, and predators wait in ambush. The shore is a battle zone after dark.”

  “I always heard the safest lands are near the rivers, where the jackal cannot reach,” Hakiim offered. “What kind of predators?”

  “Lions, red wyrms, killer warthogs, man-eating bears, dragon-kin …”

  “Stop baiting him, Reiver, and stop fretting, Hak.” Amber scratched ankles red from sand flea bites and said, “Nothing’ll get you. It’s called a desert because it’s deserted.”

  “Mostly deserted,” Reiver said, then flipped over a flat stone and exposed a red-backed scorpion. It danced a defiant circle, tail crooked to sting.

  “Eyes of Nar’ysr!” Hakiim scrambled backward so fast he thumped over.

  Reiver drew a dagger from inside his shirt, caught the scorpion under the belly, and flicked it away. “You have to beware,” he said, “but we’re probably safer here than on the streets. In Memnon you can bump into villains with knives and no scruples, or burn up from bottlemist plague. The desert’s more dead than alive, and spirits can’t harm you—much.”

  “That’s true,” mused Amber. “The greatest genies of all time move at every hand. Memnonnar’s bound into this sand and rock we sit upon, and Calim mingles with the air we breathe.”

  “They watch always and still possess powerful spells,” hedged Hakiim. “Only a fool would offend a genie.”

  “True.” Amber proclaimed loudly, “May the names of Great Calim and Mighty Memnonnar be ever a thousand times blessed!”

  Reiver peered at the sky and said, “Both are trapped tight and doomed to stare at each other forever. That’s a lot of hatred passing bet
ween them. I’m surprised the ground doesn’t boil like lead and the sky crackle with heat lightning. Wild Calimshan seems pretty peaceful.”

  “Somewhere out here lie the Fields of Teshyllal,” said Amber. “That’s where the elves of Tethyr, Darthiir Wood, and Shilmista ended the Era of Skyfire. They helped the High Mage Pharos fuse the genies into the Great Red Crystal that still hovers in the air.”

  “Somewhere else, obviously.” Hakiim scratched his ankles till they bled. “There’s nothing here but scorpions and sand fleas.”

  “Even the genies aren’t dangerous anymore,” continued Reiver, “unless you’re swallowed by Memnon’s Crackle, where the sand sizzles and pops and swirls like quicksand. More dangerous are the hatori—the sand crocodiles, or the two-legged crocodiles like the Penum-brannar raiders, or the little things you might step on: snakes, werespiders, poisonous plants. There are night spirits like banshees and spectres and ghasts—”

  “Stop!” ordered Amber.

  Hakiim looked around repeatedly, as if the desert might explode under them. “Maybe we should sleep in the boat,” he said, “moored out in the river.”

  Reiver hid a smirk. “A whale or a kraken could burp and swallow—”

  “Enough! There are no whales in the river. Still, I’m disappointed. A holiday should be an adventure.” The daughter of pirates stood, dusted her seat and trousers, tugged on her pack, pointed her capture noose, and said, “Let’s continue south. It slopes down. Maybe there’re caves or something.”

  She marched across the flagstone road and crunched on shale. The young men followed. Reiver checked their back trail and said, “Keep the tower in sight. It’s our only landmark, and we don’t have a compass.”

  “You do so,” Hakiim chuckled. “A solid gold one stuffed down your shirt!”

  “That’s a sailor’s compass,” Reiver grinned. “It only works at sea.”

  They walked. Shale squeaked underfoot, and pebbles clicked on rocks, then soft sand made them sink to their ankles. The landscape dropped and grew more jumbled. In the shadows of knee-high boulders grew al-fasfasah grass, thorn bushes, and stunted tamarisk trees. These tiny oases made homes for jerboas, red foxes, and horned lizards. In clusters of sprawling Calim cactus lurked red spiders and sand squirrels. Somewhere out of sight a burrowing owl hooted.