White Sand Page 9

  The group circled for a good half an hour before finding a break in the wall of rock that was wide enough to bring their mounts through. Khriss had hoped to find a plain or plateau on the other side, a place where a natural spring could have been found. Unfortunately, her first glimpse revealed something much less encouraging.

  “Imagine that, more sand,” Cynder noted.

  It was a broad white basin, a continuation of the sands they had crossed, though the sheltered plain had created dunes that were much less pronounced. The rock continued in a ring, perhaps the remnants of an enormous volcanic crater. Whatever it been before, it was now filled with the same white grains that saturated every other piece of Dayside’s cursed ground.

  Flennid, Torth, and Jeron stood in a disconsolate line near the mouth of the opening. “No water,” Flennid spat quietly, shooting Khriss an accusatory look.

  “No water,” Baon agreed, scanning the plain with the spyglass, “but there’s definitely something here.”

  “What?” Khriss asked with surprise.

  “Specks of color,” Baon informed, passing her the glass. “Ones that don’t fit what we’ve seen in the desert.”

  Khriss looked across the plain. She could barely make out what Baon had seen—to her, they only looked like dark marks on the otherwise white plain. They might have just been rocks, she couldn’t say for certain.

  “If you say so,” she said, lowering the glass.

  “I do,” Baon replied, throwing back the side of his rope and pulling free a pistol. “I assume you want to investigate?”

  Khriss paused, then nodded, tapping Stump to move forward. The other soldiers, sensing Baon’s careful wariness, nervously fingered their pistols.

  “Put those away,” she ordered curtly. “You won’t need them.”

  The three noblemen looked at each other, then tapped their mounts forward, guns still held at the ready.

  The ride that followed was nervous to the point of anxiety. Tension was high because of the rationing, and Khriss could see from the look in Flennid’s eyes that if anything so much as squirmed, he would shoot it. Baon’s dots of color resolved as they approached, taking on human shapes. As they got closer, however, they soon realized that even squirming was beyond the forms’ power.

  Baon, watching through the glass as they approached, was the first to make the determination. “Dead bodies,” he announced quietly. “Hundreds of them.”

  “Ridos,” Flennid swore silently, growing even more nervous as he scanned around the crater’s rim.

  “Looks like they’ve been dead for some time,” Baon continued. Then, almost hesitantly, he added, “Duchess, you might want to stay back.”

  “I can handle dead bodies, captain,” she informed with more resolve than she felt.

  “I don’t know that I can,” Acron confessed, wiping his brow with a dirty handkerchief.

  “Come, now, Jon,” Cynder said encouragingly. “Weren’t you the one who was so excited to experience the ‘simple life of a primitive?’ I suppose nothing could be more simple than this.”

  Baon ignored them both, climbing off his mount as they approached the first body. It was mostly buried in the sand, the only clue of its existence a piece of cloth that had once been white. Dried with blood and crusted with sand, it was easy to tell that the poor soul hadn’t died of natural causes.

  Baon approached with a firm step, sliding his thin longsword out of its sheath and using it to pull the rest of the corpse from its shallow sand grave. Khriss gasped in disgust as a group of tiny black insects scuttled away from the body, leaving behind a corpse that was mostly bone.

  “No weapons,” Baon noted, continuing to pull the body free. “No armor either, just a robe.” There was a brief flash of gold from the sand and, curious, Baon dug it out with the point of his sword, uncovering what appeared to be a gold-colored sash.

  “Ry’kensha!” a sudden voice yelped.

  Khriss spun in surprise. Indan sat atop his mount, his eyes wide with fear. Then, suddenly, he grabbed his hammer and spun his beast around, galloping it away from the group. “Ker’Naisha, Ai’Dakasha Nan’Mashainto!”

  “Oh, Ridos,” Baon swore, dashing toward his own mount, intent on following the frightened boy.

  A sudden explosion sounded in the air. Indan slumped in his saddle, then toppled backward onto the white sands. His mount continued forward, oblivious to the fact that it had lost its rider.

  Flennid sat, his smoking pistol held clutched in shaking fingers, staring at the dead guide. A second later Baon tore the nobleman from his saddle.

  “Boy, you are an idiot!” the mercenary informed, slamming Flennid back against the mount’s hard carapace. The pistol slid from stunned fingers.

  “I … I thought he was going for help,” the nobleing stuttered. “That he’d led us into a trap.”

  Baon held Flennid for a moment, his eyes wide with anger. Then he sighed, dropping the boy to the sands. Flennid sat shaking as Baon retrieved the fallen pistol and slid it into his belt. “I hope to the Divine that map of yours is accurate,” he mumbled to Khriss as he climbed atop his mount and galloped in the direction of the fallen guide.

  #

  “Recognize this?” Baon asked, holding up a large piece of what appeared to be tonk carapace. There were thin wooden tubes extending from its sides, however, and several bulbous chambers underneath. The front of the contraption held three thin carapace tubes, the ends of which just barely jutted out from underneath the dome-like shield on the top.

  The weapon, however, was hardly in good condition—even ignorant of its workings, Khriss could tell that much. Several of the tubes had been torn out, and there was a large crack running across its carapace top. All three of the chambers underneath bore similar spider-web crackings.

  “I assume it’s one of the weapons we saw earlier,” Khriss noted. They had found a collection of tents in a sheltered hollow at the back of the plain. Most of the tents were void of anything useful, but, thankfully, a few held barrels of stale water. She had sent Flennid and the others to search through the camp for supplies, and left Baon to investigate the field of bodies. Indan’s wound had been, unfortunately, fatal. It felt odd to Khriss, using the habitation of what must belong to one of the corpses on the field, but it made more sense than erecting their own tents.

  “Right,” the mercenary agreed, dropping an arrow on tent’s table. It was long—like an arrow fired from a bow, rather than a crossbow. The tip, however, was cylindrical, rather than flat like a regular arrowhead, and it had a small plug behind it that fit the size of the weapon’s tubes.

  “There aren’t very many of them,” Baon continued, “though from what I can tell—which isn’t much, considering the level of decomposition—most of those people were either killed by arrows like these or longer ones, probably fired from a regular bow.”

  “And is it really fired by air pressure?” Cynder asked. The older professor sat on a stool to Khriss’ left, rubbing his chin with interest. Acron, however, was stooped over on the other side of the tent, inspecting the contents of a small chest beside the wall.

  Baon shrugged. “I don’t know how it works, professor. The broken piece on the side does look like a pump, however.”

  Cynder shook his head in thought. “I still find it hard to believe that the people on this side of the world have the technology to create the seals and valves that would be required of such a weapon.”

  “Try and find us one that isn’t broken,” Khriss requested, accepting the device from Baon.

  “I’ll try, duchess,” Baon said without conviction. “There isn’t much left besides bodies. There aren’t even very many arrows. I would guess arrows like these—or, rather, the wood to make them—is scarce, which would explain why most of them were recovered by the victors.”

  “But they left these tents alone,” Khriss noted. The tents had been blown by winds, but there were no signs of their being searched—the fact that a few contained water proved that
much.

  “True,” Baon agreed. “Regardless, the arrows are gone. None of the fallen men have weapons on them. Either their weapons were gathered by the victors, or they never had them in the first place.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have had weapons?” Acron asked. With a disrespect for the dead that appalled Khriss, the stoopy professor had confiscated a robe from the room’s chest, and was cutting it into spare handkerchiefs.

  “You’re the one who is always talking about primitive cultures, professor,” Baon said. “Primitive people don’t fight the same way that the Dynasty does, with supposedly ‘civilized’ restrictions. If these people were surprised by their enemies, then it would have been a slaughter. The way the bodies fell—in a disorganized, haphazard manner—seems to suggest such was the case. There’s no sign of ranks—most of the bodies are scattered and isolated.”

  “You know a lot about war, dear man,” Cynder noted. “Of course, I guess that’s what you are paid for. What is that?” Cynder pointed to the other object Baon had brought into the tent—what looked like a human leg bone.

  Baon picked up the bone lightly then, grasping it in two hands, he snapped it in two. The bone practically disintegrated in his fingers, shattering into tiny shards and chips at the slightest amount of pressure.

  “What do you make of that, professors?” he asked, dusting off his hands. “I only found a few of those, but they were the only bodies that had been completely stripped of flesh. In fact, they looked like they had been drying in the sun for years.”

  Cynder fingered a chip of bone, grinding it into powder on the table top. “These bones are old,” he mumbled. “Amazingly old. A burial ground of some sort?”

  “You are the learned one, professor,” Baon said, taking a quick drink from his canteen, then taking a seat by the table.

  Cynder chuckled. “Learning is all a matter of circumstance, my friend,” he noted. “I have no skill in this area.

  “I think you’re right,” Khriss said, looking at the bone. “If it weren’t a burial ground, why would there be aged bones here? Perhaps they came for a ceremony of some sort.”

  Cynder nodded to himself, rubbing his chin in thought. “Perhaps one of the villages lost a valued elder,” he mused, “and its people came to the sacred place to bury him. They were ambushed, however, by a rival village, and slaughtered. Maybe the fight itself unearthed a few graves—or maybe the victors did so to defile them—which would explain why you found some on the surface.”

  Baon shrugged. “Sounds good to me. You might be missing one thing, though.”

  Cynder looked up with a questioning look. Baon reached over to tap on the table with a dark finger. It was made of wood, though the base appeared to be shiny black carapace. “This wood didn’t come from one of those desert villages. It was cut from real logs, not the thin reed-like strips that make up our tent poles and the wood we’ve seen in the villages.”

  “By the Divine,” Cynder said with a chuckle, rubbing his fingers across the table. “I didn’t even think of that.”

  Baon caught Khriss’ eyes, and his earlier comment came back to her. Observation. Something they often fail to teach in that university of yours.

  “Lossand,” Khriss decided. “It’s the only place where there would be enough water to grow proper lumber.”

  “If you say—”

  “Duchess!” a voice screamed. A second later, Baon was out of his seat, pistol cocked. Jeron’s cries were not warnings of danger, however. The thick-armed soldier pulled back the tent flap, panting in the heat. “Duchess,” he repeated, “we’ve found one that’s still breathing!”

  #

  Cynder turned the man’s head to the side, checking his pupil. The daysider was unconscious, but judging from the empty water barrel next to him, he had at one point been awake enough to drink. His skin was dried and cracked, and the skin on his face was peeling. He was alive, however, which was more than could be said for the rest of the bodies.

  “Well?” Khriss asked.

  “Well, My Lady, he’s dehydrated—but you could probably have guessed that much. Other than that, I can tell you little. My medical training is hardly comprehensive.”

  “Leave him,” Flennid decided. “We barely have enough water for ourselves.”

  The group looked from the young nobleman to Khriss, who knelt next to Cynder. Flennid’s order was a challenge. “No,” she decided. “We bring him.”

  “Ridos, woman!” Flennid spat. “You will kill us all!”

  Khriss met his eyes for a moment, then looked away. “We can’t leave him,” she affirmed.

  “Besides,” Baon growled. “Since someone was kind enough to murder our guide, we might need some help getting out of this desert.”

  Flennid hissed, but backed down before Baon’s hard face. Finally, the young nobleman pushed his way out of the tent, mumbling something about Khriss’s foolishness. Jeron and Torth stood hesitantly at the departure, then rushed out after him.

  Khriss turned her eyes back on the daysider. He wasn’t the same race as the villagers—his hair was light, instead of the uniform black, and his features more subdued. He wore the same white robe as the rest of the fallen, and tucked into his white sash was a second, golden one.

  Who are you? She wondered. Will you be able to tell us what happened here?

  They sat for a few minutes, watching Cynder do his best to administer to the fallen man. After about five minutes, Baon suddenly turned, his head cocked to the side. Khriss looked at the mercenary, a question on her face, but he quieted her, frowning in consternation. Then he cursed, dashing out of the tent. Khriss and the professors followed, and Khriss hastily replaced her dark spectacles as they stumbled back out into direct sunlight.

  In the distance, already out of bow range, three familiar figures rode toward the basin’s exit. By rope, they led eight other tonks—the rest of the mounts and pack animals … pack animals that held every drop of water the expedition had left.

  Chapter Five

  Baon set three pistols on the table, each one thunking dully against the wood. “We have three pistols,” he said, “my two, and the one I took from Flennid. However,” he continued, lining a small handful of cylindrical, paper-wrapped charges below the weapons, “we only have ten charges, plus the four loaded in my pistols. We also have my sword,” he said, nodding to the sheathed weapon tied at his side.

  “We have barely enough water to fill our three canteens,” Acron said nervously. “I searched through the tents—the water we found earlier had already been packed on the tonks.”

  Eyes turned to Khriss. She shook her head. “I assumed we were going to sleep here today, so I brought my bags into the tent, but they aren’t going to be of much use. I have the map, some changes of clothing, and my scientific instruments.”

  “This isn’t good,” Baon mumbled.

  “My good man,” Cynder said with a chuckle, “I hardly think you need to point that out to us.”

  Baon continued to rub his chin in thought. “All right,” he finally said. “You have some decisions to make, duchess.”

  “Me?” Khriss asked.

  “You are in charge of this expedition, are you not?” Baon asked. “This isn’t the Elisian senate. It’s your expedition; you tell us what to do.”

  “I know,” Khriss continued. “It’s just that I didn’t think we had a choice.”

  “We always have choices, duchess,” Baon informed. “We can try to make it to a town, or we can wait here and hope someone comes to bury those bodies.”

  “Of course,” Cynder added, “if the entire town was slaughtered, then there won’t be anyone left to care.”

  “That is the risk,” Baon said. “And, even if they did survive, there is a good chance that they aren’t willing to risk coming back—otherwise, why leave the bodies for so long? Still, we would definitely last longer on the water we have if we stayed here in the shade.”

  “Waiting to die,” Khriss said with a sick feeling.
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  “I’m not giving an opinion, duchess, I’m stating options. So, we can go or we can stay, or we can try a mixture of both—wait for a while, then go. Another consideration is what we do with him,” Baon nodded to the daysider who lay, still unconscious, on the room’s cot. Over the last few hours, Cynder had incrementally dumped nearly half a canteen’s worth of precious water between his immobile lips, hoping to hydrate him somewhat. Even though the ministrations were done at Khriss’s order, it was difficult to watch the water go in such a potentially wasteful manner.

  “We don’t have mounts anymore, duchess,” Baon explained. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to carry an unconscious man, but it is not an easy task. I would be the only one strong enough to attempt it, and I can guarantee that we won’t be able to go very far if I do.”

  “We can’t leave him,” Khriss mumbled, almost to herself.

  “Poor savage,” Acron agreed.

  Khriss studied the sleeping form, a feeling of helpless responsibility weighing on her back. Her expedition had started as nine, but she had almost immediately lost Captain Deral and his lieutenant to that Dynastic border patrol. Now, three more had deserted because of her poor leadership. Besides herself, only three remained—and it appeared it was her prerogative to choose which way they were going to die.

  “We stay,” she finally said. “For now, at least. The map shows a four-day hike to the border of Lossand, and it’s a few days further before we reach the first marked town. If there’s anything closer, then it’s not on the map. That unconscious man is our only chance.”

  Baon nodded, accepting her decision without argument. “Very well,” he said. “Then I am going scouting. These rock formations appear to extend back for a distance—perhaps your original instinct was correct, and I’ll find a natural spring.”

  He didn’t sound very optimistic.

  #

  Kenton could hear a voice. It seemed familiar for some reason, like words spoken by a friend long forgotten. He focused on the voice, letting it lead him through the darkness, the unfamiliar blackness, the night of his mother’s stories. He wanted so much to retreat before the dark, to huddle in the back of his mind, but the voice coaxed him forward. It burned like a candle in the distance, a guide through the darkness, and he followed it, crawling forward until … .