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  “Can you really let him be Lord Mastrell?” Dirin asked. His voice was pleading now. “Ever since Elorin left, Drile has been lording over us like a King from the rimlands. He’s been talking about hiring us out as mercenaries to fight for private armies or to defend kelzin. We’ve been afraid, but there was nothing we could do. Even with his demotion, Drile is still the highest-raking sand master alive. Except you.”

  Except me. He’d spend all his life struggling against the mastrells and their leader. Could he really become one of them? He wavered, part of his mind warning him that Drile couldn’t be allowed to take control of the Diem, an equally strong part whispering that as bad as Drile was, Kenton might prove worse.

  Absently, he reached into his sand pouch and pulled out a handful, rubbing the sand between his fingers and his palm. The thin grains were almost soft to the touch. With barely a thought, he called them to life.

  The light of mastered sand instantly banished the alley’s shadows. His fist glowed red as he clutched the sand, letting it seep between the cracks in his fingers to form a ribbon that wove a simple pattern in the air. The feeling he had noticed earlier, before Khriss had interrupted him, was still there. The sand felt … weak. Still, despite the odd feeling, the experience of mastering sand was the same as it had always been.

  Eight years now he had worked with the sand, coaxing every ounce of power from its grains, driving it faster, controlling it with more delicacy. All because he had wanted to prove those above him wrong, and never because of the sand itself. It was beautiful, shimmering with radiance, twisting and spinning in the air.

  Perhaps it was time he actually became a sand master.

  Kenton raised his head. His sand surged around him as he turned, moving in rhythm with his determination. He whipped the golden sash out of its pouch and tied it around his waist.

  “All right, Dirin,” he said. “I’ll do it, but only to stop Drile. As soon as someone more competent can be found, I will give the Lord Mastrellship to him.”

  Instead of beaming in joy, however, Dirin regarded Kenton with amazement.

  “What?” Kenton asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “You’re that surprised that I didn’t abandon you?”

  “Kenton …look at your sand,” the boy said, raising a finger.

  Kenton looked up. The ribbon looked normal to him.

  “The other side.”

  Kenton turned his head. That ribbon looked normal too—

  He froze. Looking back and forth between the ribbons. There were two of them, hanging separately in the air. His eyes grew wide with shock—that must have been the feeling he had experienced, the feeling of weakness from the sand.

  “But, it shouldn’t be possible!” he whispered.

  All his life, he had only been able to master one ribbon. Sand masters didn’t spontaneously gain the ability to master more—or, at least, not after they passed into maturity. All acolents started out with one ribbon, but most quickly added more—at a rate of about one every few months—until they hit their limit.

  Then, they stopped, never gaining more. For most sand masters, this happened long before their advancement, though mastrells continued to grow on after being granted their sash. All hit an upper limit, however, even mastrells. Through practice a sand master could increase the amount of sand his ribbons could hold, but never how many ribbons he could control.

  Yet, Kenton had done just that. Experimentally, he moved the ribbons around. They obeyed, moving separately when he commanded. The movements were awkward—like tying to control two arms doing separate tasks—but they did obey. Between the time of the battle and the time he regained his powers, his abilities had changed somehow. It wasn’t supposed to be possible—but, of course, the books also said that once a sand master burned away his power, it never came back.

  “How … ?” Dirin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kenton confessed. He reached out a tentative hand, commanding one of the ribbons to split. And it did.

  “Three?” Dirin whispered in disbelief.

  Kenton commanded again, but the ribbon resisted. He struggled to make it split, but he ran up against a familiar wall—he had tried unsuccessfully for eight years to control two ribbons at once. He strained, trying to bend the sand to his will, and finally succeeded in splitting the ribbon in two—but as he did one of the other ribbons immediately fell stale, dropping to the ground.

  “It looks like three is the limit,” Kenton said with bafflement. Controlling all three at once was difficult, but no more so than one had been for him just a short time before.

  “It is a sign,” Dirin said quietly.

  “A sign from whom?” Kenton said with a snort. “Have you suddenly converted to Ker’Reen?”

  Dirin blushed sheepishly, but his eyes continued to glimmer as he looked at Kenton’s ribbons.

  Kenton turned, looking out of the alley at the collection of sand masters and townspeople waiting for the inevitable announcement of Drile’s ascension to the Taisha.

  The Council isn’t going to like this, Kenton thought as he prepared to step out of the alleyway. Of course, they were used to dealing with him. He had petitioned them on four separate occasions, attempting to use the Law against his father. He had lost all four petitions to nearly unanimous votes.

  Hopefully, this time would break the trend. He would hate to have motivated himself so heroically only to fail.

  “Well, Dirin,” he mumbled. “If you’ve suddenly decided to become religious, you might want to say a prayer for me. This is going to take some serious divine intervention.”

  And with that he stepped forward, his three ribbons of sand whirling around his body.

  Chapter Nine

  Khriss watched Kenton walk away, disappearing around a corner without giving the darksiders a second look. She stared distractedly for a moment, allowing the boatman to herd her onto his tiny vessel, before snorting and seating herself.

  “I knew he would abandon us,” she informed to no one in particular.

  “You sound disappointed,” Cynder replied, seating himself beside her with a chuckle. “Weren’t you complaining just a short while ago about his continued presence in our company?”

  “I’m happy to see him go,” Khriss defended. “I just thought it rather abrupt of him to leave us here, after all we’ve done for him.”

  Cynder just silently raised his eyes to the heavens as the daysider boatman began to row them across the lake.

  Khriss turned from the insufferable linguist, intent on forgetting about Kenton and turning her attention back to her task. She had crossed the desert—which apparently wasn’t a desert at all—and found her way to Kezare, capital of Lossand. The city was to have been Gevin’s final destination. She had to find out what had happened to him after he got to the city—assuming, of course, that he had even made it this far. He could have very easily died crossing the sands; Khriss and her group nearly had.

  Khriss shook her head. She had to assume that Gevin had arrived at Kezare. There was something about the prince—something about his obstanance—that told her he would have made it to his destination. Even if inquiries had told him the Sand Mages weren’t real, he would have pressed on to Kezare. He would have had to prove his failure to himself.

  But how was she going to discover anything? Her only means of communication had just run off, leaving her party once again to the mercies of its own linguistic ability. Cynder had spent a number of hours during their trip interrogating Kenton about dayside languages, but the elderly linguist still had only a passing grasp on daysider. In addition, the tongue Cynder and Khriss had learned was what Kenton called Formal Kersha, language of Kershtian religious services. Khriss’s group had absolutely no experience with the tongue Kenton called ‘Lossandin.’

  Khriss made little progress with her doubts as they crossed the lake—though Acron nearly succeeded in capsizing them on two separate occasions when he tried to stand and get a better view of the approaching city. The
small dayside boat was not designed to deal with someone of the anthropologist’s girth. They arrived without misfortune, however. Khriss took Acron’s hand as he offered it to help her from the boat, and Baon quietly gathered up their baggage—making no complaints at having become the de facto packman.

  Kezare was not as she had pictured it. True, it was on an island, like the books said, but it was far from what she would have called grand. The buildings were mostly clay or stone, and tended to be blockish. Many of them were multi-storied, and their size combined with the narrow streets to give the island an overloaded feeling, like a bag that was packed so full it was about to burst. The buildings almost seemed to be pushing one another into the lake, some running right up to the water’s edge. Over all it looked less grand than it did crowded, dirty, and loud.

  Acron, apparently, disagreed with her.

  “It’s amazing,” the hefty anthropologist breathed, rubbing his short beard. “It is like we’ve traveled back in history! Not a single building made from wood. And look, none of the roofs are peaked—though, I suppose that makes sense, what with the lack of snow. I wonder how they deal with sanitation? And transportation—the roads are so packed with bodies. Do you suppose everybody really walks?”

  Acron continued to babble as the boatman tied their boat, then began calling in Lossandin toward a stone cottage just beyond the wooden docks. When there was no reply, he grumbled to himself, bowed to the darksiders, then went jogging toward the building.

  “Should we follow?” Khriss asked.

  “Not unless you want to help me carry all of this,” Baon replied, setting the last of their saddlebags in a pile on the docks. “I suspect he will return—Kenton did say he had arranged to have us transported somewhere.”

  “Lonzare,” Khriss said with a nod. “Though he didn’t bother to explain what it was. That man is insufferable.”

  “We will find out soon enough, I suspect,” Baon replied, shrugging.

  “Aren’t you even curious?” Khriss asked. “He could be sending us anywhere.”

  “Wondering won’t get us there any more quickly.”

  “Yes, but … .” Khriss trailed off, realizing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with Baon. The mercenary simply refused to be properly curious. So, to alleviate her own frustration, she turned to another topic. “What do you think of the city?” she asked, nodding toward Kezare.

  Baon replied by pulling a small piece of carapace from one of his pockets—one of the fragments he had retrieved from the fallen Kershtians’ armor. He dropped it off the side of the dock, letting it fall to the water with a solitary plunk. Khriss watch as it began to bubble, melting away before it could sink more than a few inches.

  “The city is very well placed,” Baon said. “Hard to attack, easy to defend.”

  “But very congested,” Khriss noted.

  “True,” Baon agreed. “That could be good or bad, depending on how it were used. The sheer number of streets and houses would slow an enemy army—both because of confusion and because of temptation to plunder. But, the population also makes protecting the people a virtual impossibility. This would make a difficult battlefield for both sides.”

  “Other than the martial applications, what do you think?” Khriss asked, looking back over the busy streets.

  Baon shrugged again. “It’s a city.”

  “That’s it?” Khriss asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “For now,” Baon said.

  True to Baon’s prediction the boatman returned a few moments later. Following him were a couple of burly Lossandin men and a young, dark-haired girl. Khriss frowned, trying to determine the girl’s race—she could have been either Lossandin or Kershtian. The dark hair seemed to imply Kershtian, but her skin didn’t have the olive cast to it. Of course, it was smudged with enough dirt that it was hard to tell.

  The boatman smiled, pointing at the two men, then held up two fingers. “Za lak,” he said.

  “Two coins,” Cynder translated. “How surprising—I actually understood him.”

  “Not two coins,” the little girl corrected, speaking Dynastic with a horrible, almost indecipherable accent. “Two Lak. Can give them other coins if want, but will be paying them more than they have ever been worth.”

  Cynder blinked in surprise, looking down at the little girl. Then he turned back to Khriss with a chuckle. “By the Divine—I’m wondering why I even bothered to learn this language. Everybody seems to speak Dynastic.”

  “Not everyone,” the girl said. “Just me. Come.” The girl barely waited for the two packmen to pick up their baggage before darting off into the crowd.

  “I guess she’s to be our guide,” Cynder observed.

  “I thought Kenton said the boatman’s son would be guiding us,” Khriss said with a frown.

  Cynder shrugged. “All I know is that if we don’t hurry, our possessions are likely to arrive at our destination without us.” He nodded toward the packmen, who had already started to follow the girl.

  “Let’s go,” Khriss said, nodding a grateful farewell to the boatman.

  #

  Her estimation of Kezare proved correct in one area, at least. It was crowded. Khriss and the others practically had to fight to move through the mass of people. The first few minutes were horrible; Khriss was accustomed to people giving her a great deal of room. She was, after all, of noble blood. The daysiders didn’t seem to care about her personal space—they jostled, shoved, and bumped into her. The smell of their dirty, unwashed bodies was nearly enough to knock her unconscious.

  Fortunately, she had Baon. Whether he noticed the look on her face or whether he simply guessed she would need room, Baon suddenly began to make space where there had previously been none. People shoved, he shoved harder. People pushed, but he was much taller—and more massive—than anything Lossand could produce. People began to notice for the first time that the body they were shoving was much larger than what they were accustomed to, and their eyes opened wide with amazement as they turned up to stare at the massive black-skinned giant that stood in their midst.

  Within a few moments the crowd had pulled back, flowing around Baon like raging waters before an enormous stone. Khriss and Cynder crouched in Baon’s wake—Khriss breathing deeply, Cynder humming quietly to himself.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled to Baon.

  “Come on,” the warrior simply replied, pushing his way through the crowd—which alacritously parted before him. “We’ll lose our guide.”

  “Where’s Acron?” Khriss asked, suddenly realizing she had lost track of the anthropologist.

  “There,” Cynder said, nodding to the edge of the crowd. Acron’s large head could be seen bobbing happily underneath a colorful canopy.

  Khriss considered calling out to him, but the noise of the crowd would obviously render her voice ineffectual. Fortunately, Acron began to push his bulk their direction a moment later. When he met up with them, he wore one of the Kershtian forehead medallions around his head.

  “You should never have given him any money, My Lady,” Cynder said with a soft groan.

  “Move. Now,” Baon ordered, walking forward.

  The crowd thinned as they left the docks, and eventually Khriss was able to relax. She still felt nervous—there were far more people on the streets than she found comfortable—but at least they weren’t jostling into her. Her diminutive guide waited impatiently just beyond a line of tall shops with colored canopies. She didn’t give Khriss a chance to ask any questions, instead turning to scamper away, leading them further into the city.

  Even without the press of bodies from the market place, the city still felt cramped to Khriss. The tall buildings looked like prisoners waiting to be executed—crammed into long lines with their walls pressed close together, their postures stooped and top-heavy with balconies and canopies. Of course, the thin streets and tall buildings meant plenty of shade as relief from the sun, but Khriss wondered how anyone could survive in a city so crowded.r />
  The streets weren’t cobbled—they didn’t need to be, the ground appeared to be solid rock, though there were patches and drifts of sand hiding in corners and alleys. The canopies and drapings were more colorful than what she had seen in the Kershtian towns of the kerla. Of course, the colors were still far from as vibrant as those of darkside, but only so much could be done with the bright sun dulling everything.

  Their urchin of a guide led them gradually toward the center of the island. The land sloped upward as they walked, but before they could reach a point where Khriss could overlook the city, their guide stopped and turned down a particularly narrow alleyway.

  Baon regarded the alley with a dubious look. It was small enough that his shoulders would almost touch either side. “Good place for an ambush,” he noted.

  Khriss snorted. “Who would want to ambush us?” she asked.

  “I’m just making an observation,” the warrior said before walking into the alleyway, his hand resting on his sword hilt.

  Khriss followed, as did the others. A few feet down the alleyway, their guide turned and walked through what must have been an open doorway in one of the walls. When Khriss arrived, however, she discovered that the doorway looked something more like a tunnel—a vaguely squareish opening cut in the stone wall. It was large, wide and tall enough to accommodate even Baon and Acron without trouble.

  Their guide stood beside the opening. “Have arrived,” she informed. “Lonzare, like promised. Two Lak for packmen.”

  “Wait,” Khriss said. “Where are we?”

  “Lonzare” the girl repeated.

  “Yes, but what is Lonzare?”

  “Place you were going,” the girl said testily. “Pay packmen.”

  Khriss frowned, peering through the dark opening. There appeared to be shadowed forms moving deep within the tunnel—perhaps Baon was right, maybe it was an ambush. Then she realized something—or, rather, she heard something. A few words, echoing through the stone tunnel. Words in Dynastic.

  “You don’t suppose … ?” she asked, listening closely. She could have sworn to the Divine that the voices were all speaking in Dynastic. “Come on,” she said, removing her dark glasses and waving for the group to step into the darkness.