The wyrm stretched lazily, allowing herself to enjoy the motion of her torn muscles as they mended. She was recalling her halcyon days, flashes of memories she didn’t understand—the echoes of childhood laughter with two other shapes that seemed to be those of young girls, like herself, chasing after each other in a virgin forest, no adult, or in fact any other person, in sight. She did not remember her sisters, nor the dragon mother who left the three of them at the foot of the Great White Tree, save for a sour taste in her mouth that was pittance beside the hate she felt for the woman named Rhapsody. But she did recall the laughter, the sense of freedom, and of loneliness, from those times, and little else. Her breaming grew deeper as it grew easier. The image in her mind faded from childhood revels to the day when, as a young woman alone on a bluff overlooking the same beach where her mother had first spied her father coming off of the ocean, she saw the arrival of ships, storm-tossed and broken, landing one after another on the heels of a terrible storm. The people who debarked from those ships were like none she had ever seen—some tall and fair, some broad and sturdy, some the size of children with slender hands and enormous eyes that spoke in flowers rather than words, a panoply of mankind, their skin arrayed in all different colors; one by one, the ships unloaded their living treasure, leaving her breathless, her golden face scored with tiny lines was wet with tears for the first time in her life. My horde, she thought, then and now, the closest she had ever come to love at first sight. The other memories that loomed, threatening to displace those happy ones, she pushed away, shrinking from the pain they caused in much the same way as she had from the broken shards of metal still wedged within her. No, no, she thought hazily, banishing all other thought from her mind and returning to happier times, images of celebrations at the seaside, feasts and joyous dancing and a ceremony at the foot of the Great White Tree in which she was elevated above all and called Lady by the living treasure whose name she still could not recall. The Cymrians, the refugees of the First Fleet from the dead Island of Serendair. I want to stay asleep, she mused, stretching again, luxuriating in the memory of a time when she was honored, not despised, celebrated and sought after, not cast out and ostracized. She opened her mouth and, as before, the liquid gold of sunshine, sweet and healing, dripped within it. The fire in her, brewed by the firegems that all members of her race had in their bellies, cooled, leaving her dreamless and at rest. For the moment.
The windy silence was shattered simultaneously by the sudden squeal of the infant and the ringing slap of leather glove against flesh a split second afterward. Achmed reined his horse to a stop, the delicate nerve endings in his skin burning from the sound. “What now, Rhapsody?” he demanded, glaring over his shoulder as she opened the folds of the mist cloak, a look of consternation on her wind-stung face. “You just fed him; this demanding brat is becoming far too much of an irritation. One more sudden shriek without cause and I’m going to skewer him on a horse spike and leave him for carrion.”
“How do you know it was without cause?” Rhapsody asked, examining the baby. Achmed glanced over at Grunthor, who was rubbing his neck. “What’s the matter?”
“Somethin’ stung me,” the giant muttered.
“Probably a sand fly of some sort,” said Achmed. “They can be brutal, though one would think you’d be fairly invulnerable to them, given your Bengard skin.”
“One would think,” the giant agreed, still examining his neck, “but this was no lit’le sting. Oi got right bit. Ow. Bloody ow.”
“So did Meridion,” Rhapsody said. She plucked the stinger from a large red welt on the screeching infant’s leg and ran her finger over it, warming it gently with her fire lore to soothe the pain. At that moment Achmed became aware of the hum. He signaled to Grunthor and reined his horse to a stop, following the irritation in his skin. He draped the reins over Rhapsody’s arm and dismounted, letting the buzzing guide him over the sand, until he found the source.
Several small wells pocked the otherwise unbroken layer of sand, over which a few itinerant bees were hovering while others appeared to be burrowing into the ground near the wells. “I’ve found your assailant, Grunthor,” he said, crouching down and examining the wells, which resembled large anthills. “Do you wish me to wreak vengeance on your behalf? I could piss on them if you want. Or are we ready to move out?”
“What are bees doin’ out ’ere in the desert?” the giant Bolg wondered aloud. “Nothin’ for them ta eat, no flowers, vegetation. No real water. Strange.”
Achmed mounted again and took the reins back. He clicked to the horse and they returned to a smooth canter, riding the rising and falling dunes and drumlins with alacrity, heading east as the distant mountains seemed to grow closer, their red and purple hues gleaming at the horizon like a promise of shelter that would not be reached before the coming of night. The light had already begun to fade as the red sun made its way down the welkin of the sky; the wind picked up, sweeping the sand across the cracked earth in great spinning devils of dust. They had not gone very far when Achmed yanked his horse to a stop again, this time making a grab for Rhapsody to keep her from falling forward. Grunthor stopped a few seconds later, a few strides ahead of him, staring, as he did, into the east.
“Criton,” the Bolg commander murmured. “Whaddaya make o’ that?”
“Gods,” Rhapsody whispered, drawing the mist cloak closer to her to calm the baby. Achmed said nothing but stared with mismatched eyes at the sight before them. Jutting from the seemingly endless desert was a broken tower, a minaret, tilted on its side. It seemed to appear from nowhere, emerging from the red sand in which little to no vegetation or in fact any sign of life had been seen for days.
Around it were similar ruins, remnants of domes and walls, uprooted from the sand as if they had been pulled and tossed aside like weeds. The scale of the rains was enormous, as if the original occupants of whatever city they had once been part of had been giants, or perhaps it was just that the city itself had been mammoth. The sun overhead beat down on the detritus, which shone eerily in the light with an almost translucent radiance. “Did we not come through this place before, years ago, when we were returning to Ylorc with the slave children of the Raven’s Guild in Yarim?” Rhapsody asked. “I don’t remember seeing ruins then.”
“They were not here,” Achmed agreed. He continued to stare at the husks of what had once been walls, now little more than building blocks scattered in the hot sand. Somewhere nearby the hum he had heard from the ground-nesting bees had grown stronger. “These ruins appear to have been evicted from the sand. I suppose that happens from time to time, especially if there has been an earthquake or other disturbance of the strata of the earth. The ground here is riven—there are rifts and cracks in the clay.” He pointed to a great fissure where the sunbaked ground had been rent apart north of them, which the wind was beginning to fill in with sand.
“I don’t remember feelin’ any tremors lately,” Grunthor said seriously. He dragged back on his reins again and dismounted; the sand atop the red clay sprayed in all directions as he thudded to the ground. “That looks pretty recent.” He knelt down and rested his hand on the ground. “Somethin’s wrong ’ere; everything’s all jumbled up, distressed-like. As if this place had been asleep, or dead, even before we left the world, and then was suddenly shocked awake.” Rhapsody and Achmed exchanged a glance; the earth lore that Grunthor had absorbed, like the two of them, when passing through the fire at the Earth’s core, was never wrong. Rhapsody rocked the baby, gentling him back into sleep again, as Achmed scanned the horizon. The wind picked up; Rhapsody pulled the hood of the mist cloak lower and Achmed raised the veil on his face over his eyes against the sting of the sand. “Even our patrols at the northernmost edge of our borders are days from here,” he said finally. “I’ve no idea what this is, or was, but another sandstorm appears to be brewing. Either we ride full out and see if we can find shelter over those hills, or we may be forced to take it here. Whatever this is, I am not certain I want to be trapped in this place in another dust devil,” Grunthor shrugged. “Might be as good a place as any, sir,” he said, surveying the towering fragments of walls sprouting from the sand before them. “Looks pretty solid—that wreckage ain’t goin’ nowhere. Should provide decent cover if you think another storm’s comin’. There’s nowhere else we could make it to before nightfall.” He looked over to where Rhapsody had been standing, then tapped Achmed’s shoulder and pointed. The Bolg king turned back to look as well.