The Gods of Amyrantha (54 page)

Stellan turned away and walked to the large bay window, staring out at the clouds scudding across the

sky, driven by a wind he couldn't feel locked in this cell. It had seemed so simple before.

He looked down wistfully at the long drop to the water below, wondering if he could break the window and jump before the guards in the outer guard room got to him. Probably not. And there was no guarantee the fall would kill him. The tower sat on the edge of the lake. Unless the water was particularly shallow, or concealed a bed of hidden rocks, a fall might simply result in multiple fractures and his rapid recapture.

Stellan was a little surprised to find himself examining the option of suicide so dispassionately. Even more surprised to find himself rejecting the idea. Maybe, despite all that had befallen him, he wasn't quite as ready to die as he'd imagined he was.

Allowing himself to be framed for murder, Stellan realised, was tantamount to the same thing.

'Sharisha?'

The feline in charge of his guard moved closer to the bars. She was a tabby, a distinct 'M' marking her forehead. Stellan had been here long enough to learn her name, but she wasn't one of the more garrulous guards so he'd not often spoken to her. 'Sir?'

'Would you deliver a message for me?'

She watched him with great suspicion. 'That would depend on who you wished your message delivered to, my lord.'

'Declan Hawkes.'

The feline thought about it and then nodded, seeing nothing wrong with passing on a message to the man who was — for all intents and purposes — her boss. 'What did you want to tell him?'

'Can you ask him to visit me? Tell him I said we need to talk.'

'You're planning to confess, then?'

'Just ask him to come, Sharisha. Please. And tell him it must be today.'

The feline nodded again and turned from the bars. She called a tallish black-and-white feline to her, whispered something in her ear, to which the black-and-white saluted and then hurried from the guard room.

'Grella will deliver your message. I've no guarantee she'll be able to find Master Hawkes, however. He may not even be in the city.'

'He'll be here,' Stellan said, taking a seat on the small stool at his desk.

Jaxyn Aranville has signed a warrant for Arkady's arrest and sent people to Ramahn to her bring back to Herino.

Declan Hawkes wouldn't be anywhere else.

CHAPTER 54

Arkady surprised herself, once they reached the open desert. When they'd started out from the Temple of the Way of the Tide in Ramahn, she had thought she would never despise anything quite so much as she did the wretched beast that carried her across the sand. By the time they left Tarascan and reached the open desert again, she had changed her mind. On this ugly creature's broad feet and spindly legs rested her very survival. Two days into the desert, Arkady was patting it fondly and calling it by name.

Its name turned out to be Terailia, which was Torlenian for 'nasty bitch', she discovered a few days after they set out, not 'sand dreamer' as their cameleer had tried to convince them, to the guffaws of his companions. Terailia was aptly named; a cantankerous cow with little patience and the tendency to nip at anything that came within reach of her, but for some reason she took a liking to Arkady that bordered on obsessive. Although Tiji was a competent enough rider, as soon as they dismounted, she would let nobody but Arkady tend her.

The cameleers had warned all their passengers to take great care to secure their camels when they stopped each day. According to their guides, no matter how well you treated them, they were sly, untrustworthy creatures with a tendency to abscond if you failed to hobble them, or tie them to something solid.

Arkady quickly learned how to attach the hobbles around Terailia's front legs while she was kneeling. It

proved less difficult than she feared. All the camels in the caravan were accustomed to being secured in such a fashion, and usually offered only a token resistance, although the hobbles did make standing an awkward affair. She thought the practice cruel until she noticed a beast one of the acolytes had failed to secure, hopping away on three legs the moment he thought the coast was clear. The incident had everyone in the caravan — with the possible exception of the hapless acolyte who'd had to retrieve and resecure the beast — holding their sides with laughter, which surprised Arkady, because she was starting to think there wasn't much left in this world to laugh about.

Life took on a rhythm of its own in the desert. She would fall exhausted into her bedroll at night under the vast desert sky and sleep like the dead until the cameleers roused them at moonrise for another few hours of trekking. Then they would stop while it was still dark and allow their passengers and camels to rest for a while — sleep if they were lucky — only to be shaken awake again before dawn to have breakfast, saddle the camels, pack up the camp and be on their way before the sun seared its way over the horizon. Arkady had learned to drink the bitter Torlenian green tea, eat with her fingers and to check the sand for snake tracks, scorpion tracks and especially the symmetrical stitch pattern the poisonous hakar beetles made before she lay down to sleep, after another of the acolytes was bitten and left weeping in pain for the next two days.

The shroud she had cursed so roundly every day since coming to Torlenia became a blessing. Protected from the sun, it was loose enough to allow the air to circulate next to her body and it also meant she could wear minimal clothing underneath. The smell of her unwashed body faded into the background and she no longer noticed it over the reek of the camels and the need to conserve water.

She conscientiously drank the last drop in her waterskin each day, watched the dwindling supplies on the pack-camels, and told herself these men made this journey on a regular basis and they were in no danger of running out of water.

The desert surprised Arkady. She had expected nothing but endless days of boring, rolling sand dunes, and while there were plenty of dunes, for long stretches the ground was hard, rocky and scattered with pale green and silvery vegetation, clinging to the rocks with grim determination. According to the cameleers, it rained here once a year if you were lucky. These tough little plants were thriving on what they'd managed to collect in a shower of rain months past.

Arkady admired their tenacity, wishing she was as resolute.

There were rocky ridges poking up out of the sand every now and again and they rode in their shadows whenever they could, glad of the shelter and the chance to stop squinting in the harsh light. Occasionally they would crest a ridge and the whole daunting vista would lie shimmering before them. On those days, Arkady found it easy to imagine this place had once been the bed of a vast inland sea, the heat mirage making the air appear liquid, enhancing the underwater illusion.

It seemed as if they were constantly stopping and starting. The cameleers drove them hard from before sun-up until midday, when it simply became too hot for man or beast to keep moving. The whole caravan would rest then, munching lethargically on dried camel jerky and dates while they waited for the sun to move on. Midafternoon, at some point Arkady could never really identify, the cameleers would sense the sun had passed its zenith and they would climb to their feet yelling 'hurry-hurry' to their passengers, as the camels were freed from their hobbles so they could resume their journey. They would travel until after dark,

turning in some time before moonrise to sleep the sleep of the truly exhausted, until they began the whole process again the following day to the persistent cries of 'hurry-hurry'.

On their fourth day west of Tarascan, one hundred and twenty miles of desert behind them and another two hundred ahead, Arkady witnessed her first sandstorm.

It crept up on them slowly. At first it was nothing more than a vague uneasiness that permeated the caravan. Even Arkady, for whom everything in the desert was new, could sense the subtle change in the atmosphere. The camels grew increasingly fractious; the acolytes looked at one another with questioning, puzzled frowns while the cameleers sat a little straighter in their saddles, tense and alert, like startled rabbits sniffing the air for danger.

And then someone noticed the horizon moving closer. The sky had taken on a decidedly pink cast. At almost the same time as Tiji pointed west, saying, 'Tides, look at that ...' one of the cameleers let out a ululating cry of alarm.

'What's happening?' Arkady asked the frantic cameleers, shouting to each other, arguing in Torlenian so rapidly Arkady had no chance of following their conversation. They were pointing and gesticulating toward a rocky ridge jutting out of the sand a bare mile north of them, while others shook their heads and waved their arms around frantically.

'There's a storm coming,' Tiji said, although she seemed to be having trouble making out what the cameleers were shouting at each other. 'They're arguing about whether we should dig in here or head for that ridge, I think.'

'Wouldn't we be safer over there?'

'That's what Farek is saying. The others are objecting because they think we won't make it, or because it's haunted, I'm not sure which.'

Arkady shook her head, clinging to the crossbar as Terailia backed up skittishly, sensing something was amiss. 'Haunted, did you say? Tides, that's just our luck, isn't it? We're stuck in the open desert with a sandstorm about to descend upon us and the only shelter for ten miles is
haunted?'

Before Tiji could answer, the cameleers began to dismount. Seeing her companions kneeling to disgorge their passengers, without prompting, Terailia did the same. Farek, the head guide, began to run down the line shouting 'hurry-hurry, get bed-rolls, hurry-hurry' at the acolytes. He stopped when he reached the women. By then Terailia was on her knees and Tiji had already climbed off.

'What's happening?'

'Big storm. You hurry-hurry,' he said in Glaeban, probably for Arkady's benefit. 'Must get in bedroll. Must stay in bedroll. Hurry-hurry.'

'Aren't they going to pitch the tents?'

Farek shook his head impatiently at Arkady's question. 'Tent just blow away. Go poof! Bedroll better. Bedroll low. Keep back to the wind. Stay in bedroll 'til sand stop blowing.'

'What about the camels?' Tiji asked.

'Hobble camels. Camels fine. Can see in sand.'

With that strange assurance, Farek continued along the line of camels, yelling 'hurry-hurry' to everyone he encountered. Arkady climbed off Terailia and reached for the hobbles hanging from the back of the saddle.

'Do you think it's a bad one?' she asked, as she pushed the camel's huge head aside to avoid being spat on while she secured the hobbles.

'Is there such a thing as a
good
sandstorm?' Tiji asked, quickly shaking the bedrolls out with one eye on the western horizon.

With a feeling of creeping panic, Arkady tied off the hobbles and turned to the west. The horizon was already closer, the sky no longer pink, but a dark rusty

colour. The air was strangely still, charged with anticipation. Had it not been for the advancing darkness, and the pervading sense of fear radiating from the cameleers, Arkady would not have believed there was a storm on the way.

'Hurry-hurry!' Farek yelled as he scurried past them. 'Back to the wind. Keep back to the wind.'

'How long will it last?' Arkady called after him.

'Hours, days ... who knows? Keep waterskin close. Back to the wind. Hurry-hurry.'

Even before he'd hurried out of earshot, the wind began to pick up. It was faint at first, but decidedly gritty. Arkady hurried to Tiji's side and with a last worried glance over her shoulder at the advancing storm, she lay down beside her. 'Are you sure this is the right way?'

'Storm's coming from thataway so we face thisaway,' the little Crash said. 'Back to the wind, remember?'

'I hope this works,' Arkady said, glancing around. By now the camels were all hobbled and turned loose and everyone was climbing into their bedrolls, pulling the canvas covers over themselves for protection. Although they seemed to know what they were doing, Arkady didn't miss the concern on the men's faces. They were genuinely afraid, she realised, and that frightened her more than the dark sky or the gritty wind. These men must have suffered through many a sandstorm. For this one to scare them meant it was a bad one.

'Hurry-hurry.'

She pulled her waterskin under the cover with her, feeling the wind pick up, buffeting even the low profile she offered, lying on the sand. She waited, holding her breath, which she let out impatiently when she realised what she was doing.

And then the light vanished completely and the storm hit.

The noise was unbelievable, the illusion of being in the middle of an inland sea more intense than ever because the wind sounded like nothing so much as waves breaking on a distant shore, the feel of it almost as solid as water. Arkady lay there, terrified; unable to move.

Arkady cowered in her sandy cocoon, her heart pounding, as the sand whipped around her, the weight of it making it hard to breathe. She tried to remember to sip water from the skin, but time had dilated and blurred until her whole world was defined by nothing more than the muted sound of the wind, the heavy weight of the sand that was piling up on top of her, and the terrifying realisation that she was being buried alive.