Ghost in the Inferno (Ghost Exile #5) (13 page)

Morgant shook his head. 

“You have counsel to offer?” said Nasser. 

“Battles are rarely so controllable,” said Morgant. 

Dio shrugged. “Don’t give a damn. We do what we’re paid to do. You want to kidnap the emir, we’ll kidnap him. You want to kill the emir, we’ll put an arrow in his gullet.” He grinned. “So long as you pay us once the job is done. Otherwise we’ll have a disagreement.”

“Fear not,” said Nasser. “So long as the job is completed, you shall be paid on time and in full. Ask Shopur if you disbelieve me – I have employed his men in my enterprises before, and I have always paid on time.”

“Then we had best move,” said Shopur. “We can be done with this business by tonight.”

The mercenaries moved out, Caina and the others riding with them.

###

Kylon squinted at the darkening sky, the wind tugging at his horse’s mane and tail.

“What is it?” said Caina. 

“He’s missing the water, of course,” said Morgant. “Take a Kyracian out of the sea, and he’ll dry out eventually. Like a sponge.” 

Kylon ignored him, as did Caina. 

“There’s something wrong,” said Kylon.

Caina glanced around. “What is it? The mercenaries? You think they’ll turn on us?”

“No,” said Kylon. With his arcane senses, he detected flickers of emotion from the warriors around him. They were not good men, and they would happily murder him in a heartbeat. Yet both the Black Wolves and the Company of Shopur followed their own peculiar code of honor. They would kill Kylon and Caina and Nasser and all the others, but only if Kylon gave them reason or if they had been paid to do so. 

He hoped that Kuldan Cimak did not have deeper pockets than Caina and Nasser. 

“No,” said Kylon with another shake of his head. “It’s this countryside. It’s…”

“Too flat?” said Morgant. “Inadequate space for proper concealment. Give me a crowded, reeking slum any day. A man can disappear between two heartbeats if he’s clever.” The assassin grinned, his pale face and gaunt frame making him looking almost skeletal. “Or if he’s stupid enough to offend the wrong men.”

“You would know,” said Caina. 

Actually, Kylon rather liked the flat, open countryside of the Trabazon steppes. It reminded him of the open waters of the western sea, with the same flat, rolling vistas meeting his eye in all directions. On his right, to the west, stretched the brown grasses of the Trabazon steppes. On his left, to the east, the ground grew harder, barren, and emptier. 

And dustier. 

The Desert of Candles. 

The desert itself did not trouble him. 

The dust did, though. 

“A storm’s coming,” said Kylon, squinting into the wind coming from the east.

Caina shrugged. “It shouldn’t slow us down. It hasn’t rained in Istarinmul for a century and a half, or so the histories say.”

“Rain might be an improvement,” said Kylon, “compared to what is coming.”

Caina frowned. “A windstorm?”

He looked back at her. She hadn’t seen the danger yet, but to judge from his grim expression, Morgant had. Not surprising, given that he had lived in Istarinmul for two centuries. 

“No,” said Morgant. “Think it through. If gale happens to blow across the steppes, the horses get annoyed and the archers cannot fire with any accuracy. That’s bad, since it ruins our plan. But if the same wind blows across the Desert of Candles…”

Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

“A dust storm,” said Nerina. They all looked at her. “Father used to complain about them. If one came up unexpectedly, it slowed the slave caravans coming from Anshan for weeks. Or if he had special cargoes brought in from the port of Rumarah on the edge of the Desert. In fact, he had me prepare an equation to calculate exactly how much profit he lost on each day a caravan was delayed so he could garnish the wages of the teamsters for…”

“How bad are these storms?” said Kylon before Nerina could embark upon one of her mathematical tangents. 

“Depends on the wind,” said Morgant. “The good ones are over in a few hours. A bad one can last for weeks. The wind drives the dust with enough force to blind a man, to pack his nostrils and mouth and asphyxiate him, or simply to strip the skin from his flesh. Some of the tribes of the Trabazon wait for dust storms, and then tie criminals naked to wooden stakes in the desert. Once the storm settles, the criminals are either choked, buried alive, or stripped to the bone.” He offered a cheery smile. “Depends on the angle of the wind.”

Azaces grunted and pointed with a thick finger, but Kylon had already seen it. 

To the south, the sky was growing visibly darker. Had they been upon the water, Kylon would have assumed they were sailing into a storm. But the dark clouds were far too low to be thunderheads. Kylon realized he was looking at massive quantities of dust blown up by the wind. 

Ahead one of the horsemen shouted, and both the Black Wolves and the Company of Shopur came to a halt. 

“Looks like Nasser has seen it,” said Caina. “We’d better decide what to do next.” 

She tugged her reins and steered her horse forward. Kylon shrugged and followed her, and Morgant fell in alongside him, Nerina and Azaces following. Nasser had reined up, and was conferring with Shopur, Dio, Laertes, and Kazravid. 

“What in the hell is that?” said Dio.

“A dust storm, Captain Dio,” said Nasser. “Quite dangerous to the unprepared.”

Dio grunted. “Never had those troubles in the eastern Empire.”

“No,” said Caina, and the mercenary captain looked at her. “Though if you had stayed in the eastern Empire, you’d have been drafted into the Umbarian army by now.”

“I’ll take my chances with the dust storm,” said Dio. 

“It’s a bad one,” said Shopur.

“Agreed,” said Nasser. 

A burst of frustration went through Caina’s emotional sense. “And Cimak and his caravan are right into the middle of it.”

“It would seem so,” said Nasser. “Immortals on foot, burdened with heavy wagons and the emir’s palanquin chair…no, they would not have been able to move fast enough to avoid the storm. The khalmir of the Immortals would have been clever enough to take cover, though, and they would have brought provisions to ensure they could shelter against a dust storm.”

“Then we wait out the dust storm and attack,” said Caina. 

“That could take days,” said Nasser. “I suspect…”

“Unfortunately,” said Morgant, “it’s not an option.”

“Why not?” said Caina. “I think you of all people would be eager to reach our goal in haste.”

“I have spent too long trying to reach that goal to get myself killed in a burst of childish impatience,” said Morgant. He stuck one finger into his mouth and then lifted it up, feeling the direction of the wind. “Also, the wind is coming out of the southeast. The storm is moving northwest. If we stay here and wait…”

“We shall be right in the path of the storm,” said Dio. “Damnation.” 

“Then we circle around the storm,” said Caina. “West or east?”

Nasser shook his head. “Not west. That would take us deeper into the Trabazon steppes and closer to the Kaltari Highlands.”

Kazravid snorted. “I thought you had friends among the Kaltari barbarians.” 

“I do,” said Nasser, “but there are more raiding parties than those of the Kaltari upon the steppes. Better instead, I think, to head east into the Desert of Candles.”

Caina’s expression did not change, but a jolt of emotion went through her at the words, a peculiar mixture of dread and curiosity. Kylon wondered what significance the Desert had for her. Callatas had burned Iramis there. Perhaps she saw the Desert as a warning of what would happen to Istarinmul if Callatas was not defeated. 

Shopur made a displeased noise. “I do not approve. The Desert is both cursed and haunted.” 

“Is it?” said Morgant. “That must make it crowded. Do the curses and the haunts fight each other for supremacy.”

Shopur pointed at Morgant. “Your smart tongue will earn you a beating someday, old man.”

“Probably,” said Morgant. 

“The Desert has that reputation,” said Nasser, “but I can assure you that it is not cursed. As for a haunting…it is only haunted by the memory of Grand Master Callatas’s many victims, nothing more. Consequently it has an evil reputation, and we can cross it without encountering any foes.”

“Callatas has men in the desert,” said Caina. “Searching the ancient Iramisian ruins for treasure.”

“Those locations are known to me,” said Nasser. “We can avoid them easily enough. I rather doubt the slaves or their guards will wander off from the ruins. We can pass through the hills on the southern edge of the Desert, circle past the storm, and resume the pursuit. In fact, depending upon how long the storm lasts, we might reach the Vale of Fallen Stars before Cimak, and can take him from ambush rather than from a chase.”

“Ah,” said Shopur, white teeth flashing in his black beard. “I like that thought. I prefer not to fight fairly whenever possible.”

“Wise words,” said Caina. 

“Then we are agreed?” said Nasser. “Our best course of action is to circle around the storm through the Desert?”

No one argued. Kylon could think of any number of things that might go wrong, but that was true of any plan. He supposed the worst outcome was if Cimak broke free of the storm and reached the Inferno before they could catch him. If that happened, Caina would simply have to devise a new plan to enter the Inferno. 

“Very well, then,” said Nasser. “Let us proceed.”

###

As the sun began to set two days later, Caina saw the first candle. 

Water was scarce on the Trabazon steppes, so the mercenary companies had prepared an ample supply for their journey. That was just as well, because water was nonexistent within the Desert of Candles. The ground was dry, hard-packed dirt covered by a layer of ever-present dust. From time to time the wind moaned and whistled past them, blowing up flurries and curtains of dust, and soon Caina had a fine coating of grit upon her face and clothes. She didn’t complain, though, as it was nothing compared to the massive dark curtain of the storm to the south. As Morgant had predicted, the storm was drifting northwest, out of the Desert and onto the steppes. They had gone far out of their way to avoid it, but the loss of time did not trouble Caina. The Desert was flat, broken up with occasional hills, and once the damned storm ended they could make good time on the hard-packed earth. 

“This is good soil,” said Kylon, squinting at the ground from the back of his horse. “With a little irrigation, this could produce quite a crop.”

“And you know about farmland, do you?” said Morgant. “An odd thing for a Kyracian nobleman to know.”

“Not really,” said Kylon. “House…”

Caina gave him a look, and then cast her eyes over the nearby mercenaries. He caught the hint.

“My family owned estates outside the walls of the city and near some of our colonies,” said Kylon. “Some were productive, and some were not.” 

“I suppose the matter could be mathematically quantified,” said Nerina. “It should be possible to devise a formula to factor average rainfall, soil quality, local weather, crop type, and other such variables. Then we could predict with perfect accuracy the yield of any individual acre of land.” 

“Unlikely,” said Morgant. “There are always too many variables. The world is too complex to quantify with your chalkboard scribbling.”

Nerina gave a vigorous shake of her head. “Inaccurate. That simply means we need a better equation…”

Caina ignored the argument, trying to find the cause of the peculiar unease she felt. Some of it was the cold. The sun still blazed overhead, but the Desert of Candles was cold, far colder than the surrounding steppes. Some of it was the eerie sense of familiarity. She had never visited the Desert of Candles in the flesh, but she had seen it many times in her dreams. Samnirdamnus took her to the Desert in her dreams to offer cryptic riddles and warnings. There was something else, too, something that brushed the edges of her awareness.

Suddenly her stomach clenched, and a wave of pins and needles rolled up and down her arms. 

Caina whispered a curse. She had been able to feel the presence of sorcery ever since she had been wounded by a necromancer as a child, and the sensitivity had only sharpened as she grew older. Right now she felt sorcery ahead, powerful sorcery…

“What’s wrong?” said Nerina. 

Caina turned in the saddle, saw Kylon’s face turn grim, his hand falling to his sword hilt.

“You, too?” said Caina. 

“I don’t know what it is,” said Kylon, drawing his sword with a steely hiss. “It’s powerful, though. Extremely powerful.”

“What are we talking about?” said Nerina, blinking at the sword in Kylon’s hand. Azaces scowled and drew his weapon. The nearby mercenaries, seeing something amiss, drew their own blades or strung their bows. 

“Sorcery,” said Caina and Kylon in unison.

They looked at each other, and then Caina turned towards the front of the column. “We had better warn Nasser and the captains…”

“No need,” said Morgant, urging his horse forward. “There’s no cause for alarm, beyond the overall insanity of our enterprise, but you’re about to see why this wasteland is called the Desert of Candles.” 

Caina frowned. She already knew why the desert had gotten its name. The candles were the jagged crystalline pillars she saw in her dreams. Was she about to see one of them with her waking eyes? 

Curiosity overcame her alarm, and she rode forward, Kylon and Morgant following. Nasser and the captains rode at the head of the column, speaking in low voices. In the distance, as the sun sank to the west, Caina glimpsed a pale blue glow. 

“What the devil is that light?” said Dio. 

“Do not worry, captain,” said Nasser with glacial calm. “The light is neither a curse, nor a spirit, nor a sorcerous spell.”

“What is it, then?” said Shopur.

“A candle,” said Nasser, glancing back. “Ah. Ciaran, Exile. I thought you might be the first to notice. Come with me, if you please. I think you shall find this interesting.” 

He spurred his horse forward, and Caina and Kylon followed. No one had invited Morgant to follow, but he came anyway. He had been there, Caina remembered, on the day Callatas had burned Iramis and created the Desert of Candles. She looked at Nasser and wondered if he had been there, too.