“Now why do you want to get all rude like that? Here I am, busting my butt to do you royal honors, and you’re being unpleasant. Relax, Majesty. Your grave will be the biggest and best of all. The foxes and jackals and vultures will never get at you.”
Something small took a bite of Megelin. He squealed, imagining things crawling all over him down there. Or maybe he was not imagining things. Another bite followed, then another.
The sun soared higher. It beat down into Megelin’s face. Boneman hummed as he went on stacking stones. He confided his plans for a future spent enjoying the treasure in all those donkey packs. “The Disciple’s preachers told the truth. If we’re patient God will grant us what we deserve.”
Boneman said that just before he placed the slab that shut out the sun. That and, “Sleep tight, Majesty.”
Megelin wept. He begged. Vaguely, remotely, he heard Boneman humming or chatting as he interred Misr and Mizr. Megelin convinced himself that this was only a cruel practical joke. Boneman would dig him out once his bully streak had been fed.
Despite the pain and terror Megelin fell asleep. Sleep was an escape. He dreamed a dream that recalled his father’s adventure when he crossed this same desert, headed north. In that dream Megelin approached the ghost and recognized him, as his father had not done then.
That devil was no spirit. He was not supernatural at all. He was Old Meddler, playing the games he played to keep the world a violent place.
Megelin wakened. The darkness had turned solid. The air had cooled. He could not move. Boneman had done nothing to alleviate his condition. He was lightheaded with hunger and thirst and in substantial pain where insects-small ants, he suspected-had been eating him. Despite all, he felt optimistic. Old Meddler would come for him! He was a valuable resource. Likely the ancient had been on his track for some time.
Panic threatened.
He fought it down. He had to keep an iron grip. A rescue would come. He was the goddamned King. He would show Boneman what Megelin bin Haroun could do. Boneman would, indeed, get what he deserved! Boneman’s fate would be the punch line to this cruel joke.
Something began snuffling round the cairn. It grumbled to itself. It tried nosing rocks off the pile. They were too big. Then there were more snufflers. They growled at one another and grunted as they circled, eager to get at the meat. Then there were a half-dozen things all angrily frustrated.
Megelin barely breathed.
But then he began to whimper. The beasts had gotten at one of the twins. A growling, snarling contest exploded as the pack determined feeding order.
A small rock by the left side of Megelin’s face slipped out of the pile. Its departure let the slab blocking his view of the sky tilt and slide slightly to the left. Megelin was blinded by the light of a millions stars. Then all he could see was a dark muzzle and cruel teeth illuminated from the side by moonlight. Hot carrion breath burned his face and filled his lungs.
…
The winged steed planed high above the desert. Its brain was that of a horse. Its thoughts were neither complex nor quick but they did work in great, slow rhythms that, in time, eventually executed mildly abstract processes.
It had lived for millennia. It had developed some fixed opinions during that time. Among them was a conviction that immortality was wasted if it had to be spent as the tool of a defective personality.
Ages of slow cogitation had been required to reach that one conclusion. The fabulous beast had begun to nibble round the edges of the notion that it might do something itself to alter its condition, but that concept had not yet solidified.
Meanwhile, it remained a tool and was not happy about that. And it was bored.
Nothing had changed since the time of the Nawami Crusades.
Its rider urged it into a downward turn to the right, headed farther to the northwest. The horse soon saw the vultures its rider had spied already.
…
The tiny ancient dismounted. He revealed nothing but was irked. He had failed to mark his useful fool Megelin so he could be found easily, so he had had to spend days hunting. And here lay the price of laziness. He was just hours too late.
The vultures danced amongst the scattered stones and bones and bluffed a willingness to fight for the little that was left. He swung the Horn off his back, spoke to it, touched it, tapped out a one-hand tune on a battery of seven valves. The carrion birds experienced something neither man nor mount felt. They shrieked and took to the sky so suddenly that there were several feather-shedding collisions.
Swarms of flies fled with them. Ants of a dozen breeds broke off harvesting and skirmishing and headed home to defend the nest.
The Star Rider strolled around playing his mystic Horn. There was evidence enough in the recollections of the air and stones and scrubby brush to sketch out what had happened. “Uhm.” A dozen donkeys had left here headed northeast, an unusual direction to travel. Real safety lay closer directly to the west. Maybe the killer felt more comfortable headed northeast. He might be a smuggler or someone who had hidden in the Kapenrungs during the Royalist exile.
The ancient contemplated one incompletely demolished cairn. Once again cruel misfortune, stupidity, and human fallibility had conspired to deprive him of an asset. Never a prime asset, to be sure, but the best in his dwindling arsenal.
It had not been a good year.
Next year might be worse.
He sensed a threat being born. Specifics had not yet proclaimed themselves. No foe had been so bold as to declare himself. But there were signs and shadows and blank spaces out there. That meant just one thing.
Clever death was snuffling along his back trail. It might be lying in wait up ahead, too.
The wizard Varthlokkur would be involved, somewhere. The aftershocks of his activity in Al Rhemish had led to this.
Emotion paled with the ages. Angry and unhappy though he was, the Star Rider set aside his inclination to exact revenge or deliver punishment.
He took to the air, searching for the murderer.
The man could become a useful tool himself, though never so useful as a king.
…
The ruins of el Aswad were so far from Fangdred that there was no communicating between the two directly. Scalza, guided by his mother, fearlessly carried his scrying bowl through a portal to an Imperial border post southwest of Throyes. There he paced the crude rampart, stared at an adobe compound manned by Invincibles. The desert warriors were a tripwire meant to warn of a renewed Throyen effort to occupy the coast of the Sea of Kotsum.
Scalza’s mother was waiting on her lifeguards. The boy did not understand the complexity of her relationship with them. He did understand that she was making a special effort to keep them happy. He wondered why but did not ask.
He was near being a universe unto himself, open only to his sister and, marginally, his cousin. His mother had brought him along because she considered his emotional jeopardy to be greater than the physical risks of the operation.
Though Scalza pretended boredom he was excited. This was his first ever real adventure.
Mist’s lifeguards arrived. Soon afterward Scalza was hunched over his bowl, executing simple sorceries meant to inform his uncle-by-marriage that his immediate attention was needed.
Mist said, “I want him here instead of back at Fangdred. That will save him several days.”
Scalza nodded, then decided that a verbal response was needed. “I will do that, Mother.”
He liked her idea. He would get to stay here longer. The adventure would not end the day it began.
The wizard took longer to arrive than Mist anticipated. He did not look good and was not happy when he did. She asked, “I caught you at a bad time?”
“Any time seems to be a bad time to have Radeachar carry me over the Jebal.”