Sabira briefly considered offering him the bulk of his pay in the form of rocks and excrement, but then thought better of it. With her luck, he’d agree, and she’d be left to scrape his fee off the walls of bat caves while the tiny flying rodents nested in her hair. Host, but she hated the furry beasts! She still remembered the time Tilde’s pet bat had attacked her. What was that awful thing’s name, anyway? Scarwing? No, that would be too logical for Tilde, naming the creature after the jagged scar it bore on one of its wings, a remnant from some predator who unfortunately hadn’t finished the job before Tilde arrived on the scene to save the day in proper Deneith fashion. No, Shieldwing, that was it. It had happened shortly after she and Ned had become partners. Tilde hadn’t approved of her brother’s new assignment and had let Sabira know about her displeasure in no uncertain terms. Though the sorceress later claimed the bat had acted on its own, Sabira was sure the woman had set the little animal on her purposely, knowing she wouldn’t dare lift a hand against Ned’s sister’s familiar.
Funny. She’d give anything to see that stupid flying rat now, even if the damned thing was about to bite her on the cheek.
They left the sulfur deposits behind and soon reached the end of the ledge, though they were still fifty feet short of the canyon rim. Ropes dangled down from the edge, knotted at regular intervals to make climbing easier. But the warforged ignored them. Instead, one by one, they fiddled with some switches on the sleds’ control panels and the laden disks began to rise slowly toward the top of the gorge. As the sleds reached shoulder level, the warforged handlers would reach out to grab a second tether on the opposite side of the disk, then let the sled lift them up into the air, their bodies forming dangling metal Y’s beneath the crystalline circles. Sabira watched them float up into the air, almost like dandelion fluff blown by a wishful child. At the rim, unseen hands pulled the disks out of sight, presumably to unload them. Within a few moments, the only ones left on the ledge were her, Greddark, and ir’Kethras.
She reached for one of the ropes, but Brannan stopped her.
“Patience, Marshal. No need to climb when we can ride.”
Sure enough, three sleds soon came floating back down, a warforged handler guiding each, though this time from the top instead of the bottom. The trip back up the canyon wall was much quicker than she expected; the sleds rose faster now that they were no longer burdened by barrels of water and crates of food and other supplies. Sabira was glad she’d had some time to digest her breakfast beforehand. She didn’t think Brannan would find her puking over the edge of the disk particularly impressive.
A caravan of twelve camel-drawn wagons waited near the rim, sheltered in the lee of some large boulders. Several hands reached out to pull the sleds in as periodic blasts of wind screamed by thick with stinging sand. She could see now why the Lyrandar had been unwilling to bring Kupper-Nickel’s airship up this high-it would take a skilled pilot indeed to keep the vessel’s bound air elemental from heeding the siren call of its lesser, freer brethren.
As she and Greddark rejoined Guisarme, Jester, and Skraad and introduced them to ir’Kethras, Sabira noticed a drow hovering off to the side. Unlike Calyx or the Sulatar Sabira had faced, this elf bore no scars, tattoos, or war paint. His dark skin was perfectly smooth, as though it had been carved from a chunk of obsidian.
“Ah, Xujil!” Brannan said when he noticed the elf. “Come join us, and meet Donathilde’s friends! They’re the ones you’ll be guiding back down to try and rescue the poor girl.”
The elf moved forward, his black eyes taking them all in with unblinking intensity, but before he could speak, one of the warforged hurried over.
“Boss, I think we’ve got a problem. Dust storm moving in.”
Sabira looked to the north where the construct was pointing. Squinting, she realized that what she had at first glance assumed was a distant cliff was actually a towering wall of windborne dust, headed their way.
Brannan frowned.
“Back down?”
The warforged caravan master shook his head. “We could save the supplies and the party, but we’d have to leave the wagons and the camels up here, and it’ll take weeks to replace them.”
The Wayfinder’s frown deepened.
“Shelter here, then, or try for the Bones?”
“We’ll take losses here. The Bones are big enough to house the whole caravan, but we might not make it in time.”
Brannan smiled, grimly amused.
“The choice that is no choice. How apropos.” He turned to the warforged who’d clustered about, awaiting their instructions. “You heard him. Finish loading those supplies and mount up! We’ve got a storm to outrun!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mol, Barrakas 9, 998 YK
The Menechtarun Desert, Xen’drik.
The caravan was a mix of traditional wheeled wagons and artificer-created schooners with mechanical segmented legs that skittered across the sand like ungainly, cloth-covered scorpions. The wheeled wagons were drawn by three-humped camels and sported runners on the underside of their wooden beds, much like the modified soarsleds the warforged had used to bring supplies up from Zawabi’s Refuge. A good choice, Sabira supposed, for the terrain-the wheels could be used on rockier ground, and the runners for traveling across sand. A better choice would have been to outfit the entire caravan with the mechanical wagons. An even better one would have been to use earth sleds, but apparently Brannan used the considerable wealth he’d gathered through various Wayfinder Foundation expeditions for other things.
Or maybe he just couldn’t find any House Orien pilots willing to work in these conditions, Sabira thought sourly as she pulled the edge of her cloak up to cover her nose and mouth. Sand was already being whipped into a stinging frenzy by the approaching storm, tattooing every bit of exposed flesh with fine grit. She could only imagine how bad it was going to be when they were inside that towering wall-Brannan’s assurances notwithstanding, she didn’t think they had a chance in Dolurrh of outrunning it. At least the cloud of dust was beginning to obscure the sun, and the wind somewhat mitigated the ovenlike heat, drying the sweat that was already trickling down her back, even though it was barely past the seventh morning bell. Small blessings, she supposed. The only kind she was likely to get on this journey, though from which of the Sovereigns they came, she couldn’t say, and wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
Brannan directed Sabira and her group into the back of one of the multi-legged wagons at the front of the line, already having to shout to be heard over the wind. The Wayfinder hopped into a seat at the front and took the controls, Xujil at his side. The wagon lurched into motion, humming with magical energy and scrabbling across the sand much faster than Sabira had expected. The other mechanical wagons followed, and the three-humped camels were not far behind, having been specially bred not only to hold water in their third hump, but to move more quickly than their mundane counterparts. Though she had no point of reference to measure by, she’d guess they were moving as fast as an earth sled, and had both more maneuverability and a larger carrying capacity. She revised her opinion of Brannan’s parsimony; the man wasn’t cheap, he was just brutally efficient.
Inside the covered wagon, she was free of the worst of the sand’s assault, though the heat beat through the white canvas with no wind to temper it, and Sabira was soon sweating again in the close environs. Thankfully, warforged didn’t perspire, so it wasn’t like being confined to the Defenders’ barracks after a morning of tough drills. Yet. She had a feeling it wouldn’t take long for her, Greddark, and Skraad to do a fair imitation of said barracks-especially the orc, who likely didn’t make a regular habit of bathing, so would exhibit the effects of too much sweat with too little air circulation much sooner than either her or the dwarf. She felt a momentary pang of envy as she glanced over at Guisarme and Jester-warforged couldn’t smell either.