Sanctuary

Shobbat immediately set a team of scholars to translating the tablet. It wasn’t easy. The text was written in hieratic Istarian, a difficult, priestly script reserved for the theocratic elite of that lost land, but working in three teams of two, the six scholars completed the translation in a dozen days. Shobbat collected the translations, found they agreed, then had the scholars slain.

He regretted having to order their deaths, as he respected learning, but he could not risk anyone finding out what they had discovered. He’d seen to it their deaths were quick and painless—Scholars were always thirsty. To celebrate the completion of their work, he sent each of them a special vintage, doctored with arsenic. It slaked their thirsts, permanently. The deaths were attributed to cultists and soon forgotten.

In secrecy, the prince made plans. He sent trusted men to the Grand Souks to find a desert guide. Wapah was the result. Mirror-eyed nomads had a reputation as peerless navigators of the sands.

The nomad did not question why a pampered prince wished to travel to an obscure point more than two days’ ride northwest of the city. For ten fine steel swords and a like number of stallions, handpicked from the Khan’s own herd, Wapah would have guided Prince Shobbat to the bottom of the Blood Sea.

“Hard edges,” the guide repeated. “They make men strong and straight, allow them to see clear and to know what dwellers in green lands never know.”

Shobbat obligingly asked what that might be.

“The will of Those on High.”

Shobbat hid a smile, not wanting to antagonize a man on whom his life depended. Alone among all the peoples of the world, the desert nomads had never stopped worshiping their old gods. Sahim-Khan always said this was because the unfettered sun boiled away their few wits. Shobbat’s father sneered at the nomads because he feared them. Nine times in the violent history of Khur the reigning khan had been slain in battles against his own desert-dwelling subjects. Sahim-Khan had no intention of being the tenth.

“The laddad came here from the green lands,” Shobbat said. “It is written they drew forth the first life from the land, and their mages can make stone itself blossom.”

“They do not make this land green.”

Wapah’s phrasing was ambiguous, but Shobbat did not ask him to explain. Their horses had topped a long, high dune sculpted by wind into the shape of a great curling wave, and a blast of southwesterly air flung grit in their faces. The prince coughed and spat, but his saliva never reached the ground. The dry air swallowed it.

Wapah cautioned him not to waste precious water. The nomad kicked the flanks of his short-legged pony and started down the windward face of the dune. Shobbat glared after him. He reached back and gave a reassuring pat to the skins of water lashed to the saddle under his gauzy cloak. The old nomad was just trying to frighten him. If they reached their destination in the time promised, they had plenty of water.

Wind rapidly erased Wapah’s tracks in the soft sand. Shobbat urged his mount on. If he lost his guide, he was doomed.

The desert would swallow him as completely as it had his spit.

They had entered an area of sand dunes broken at intervals by intrusions of ancient rock. The rock was layered horizontally in shades of brown and tan. Shobbat grimaced. What a harsh, ugly land. He missed the teeming streets of Khuri-Khan, thick with the scents of cinnamon and cardamom, of sandalwood, and yes, of unwashed humanity. The emptiness of the desert made him feel small and unimportant. He was unaccustomed to such thoughts, and they frightened him. Fear made him angry.

Wapah had drawn a loosely woven scrap of cloth across his face to keep out the blowing dust. He returned to his earlier theme, explaining how the hard edges of the desert taught his people about truth and made them spiritually superior to outsiders. It was unclear whether he meant only those from outside Khur, or city-dwellers like the prince as well.

“We did not fear when the Vanishing came,” the nomad declared. “Our gods were not points of light in the sky, but beings immortal and unchanging. They never left us. They guard us still.”

Blown sand stung the exposed flesh of Shobbat’s cheeks like a thousand shards of glass. He turned his face away. “Was everyone else in the world wrong when they thought the gods departed?” he asked testily.

Wapah shrugged one shoulder. “Who knows what godless barbarians think?”

On they rode, the nomad talking, the prince of Khur riding in uncomfortable silence. In spite of Wapah’s talk of the desert’s hard edges, the land had begun to look molten and soft to Shobbat. The terrific heat smelted the air itself, causing everything to shimmer and blur. Both horses grunted deep in their chests, resenting the task they were obliged to perform. Every two hundred steps, the duo paused for water. Two swallows for each beast and one for each man, as Wapah prescribed.