Sword and Sorceress XXVII (26 page)

No more inn. No more flute playing and
dancing. They had found the soft way in. All they had to do was wait until late
afternoon. They slept in shifts while the hours passed.

The sentries at the tower service portal
were wilted and sluggish of attention in the late afternoon when Coil and Azure
rolled the water cart up to the grate wearing the livery of tower servants,
cowls shading their faces. The men raised the grate and waved them through.
Even a brief check would have revealed the pair were not the same tandem that
had left a short while earlier to fetch the load from the caves.

They were likewise ignored as they
turned down a passageway, guided by the scrape marks of thousands of such
deliveries, and came to the hoist. No one noticed that Coil and Azure neglected
to transfer their cargo. They stepped onto the platform bringing only a
backpack and the short staff Coil had hidden between the barrels.

They tugged hard on the pulley ropes.
Meant for raising much heavier loads than the two of them, the elevator raced
upward—faster even than they could have run up the stairs.

At the first landing, they saw larder
supplies and heard the banging of pots and clatter of knives on chopping
boards. An appetizing odor wafted toward them. They did not pause in their
ascent.

Thirty heartbeats later the hoist
reached the uppermost landing. A guard was lounging on the floor beside his
bench, sucking on a pipe as long as curved as a cobra contemplating a strike.
The stench of fivefold leaf, sweet as new manure, pervaded the chamber.

The guard opened his eyes. Coil burst
from the lift. He got to the man before he could rise. The pipe had barely
fallen out of the way when Coil plunged his dagger beneath the man’s chin and
twisted the blade.

Azure rushed past, her own knife held
ready. She stopped at the threshold of the next room, glance darting right and
left.

“Clear,” she whispered.

Coil grabbed his short staff from the
lift platform. He took the lead again.

As expected, they found these upper
reaches of the tower, the intimate domain of the pirate lord, were mostly
empty. They ran into no further delays on their way to the baths.

Their destination was not hard to
locate. The passageways virtually sang out that somewhere nearby, water was
caressing air. All they had to do was trust that feeling. Two floors down Coil
turned a corner and spotted an ornate double door. In front of it, a eunuch
guard and a harem matron were conversing.

The guard chose the wrong move. He
pulled out his scimitar. That gave Coil the chance to charge forward and plunge
the end of his staff into the man’s sternum. The eunuch’s lungs emptied, ended
his chance to shout.

Unfortunately, the matron had the sense
to scream. The noise lasted only a moment before Azure body-slammed into her
midsection, but it was
loud
. As was the sound of her skull hitting the
door behind her.

Coil didn’t even take the time to curse.
Speed was the only cure. Coil knocked aside the scimitar. The eunuch, though
breathless, parried Coil’s first swipe at his head, but not the second. An
instant later the fellow slumped over the matron’s limp form.

Coil and Azure flung the doors open and
burst into a gloriously appointed chamber. Sunken, tile-lined pools took up
both of the far corners. Light through stained-glass windows illuminated the
chamber’s only occupant. She was standing thigh deep in the larger pool.

The girl had less nomad blood in her,
but no one who had ever seen Lady Sirocco would doubt that this was her
daughter. The difference was Lady Sirocco wore a mantle that said Step Back.
This gracile beauty wore one that said Join Me.

She did not seem startled to see them.

“I’m Coil,” said Coil. He almost
stammered. “This is Azure. We’re here to rescue you. We have to move quickly.”

He tossed her the washcloth from the
pool’s edge. It was the only item in the whole chamber other than the girl
herself. There were no towels in Salt Town.

The girl waded up the ledges of the
pool, shook the excess moisture from her feet, and gestured for them to lead
on.

#

Almost all of the tower sentries were
stationed at the bottom. So Coil headed up, sprinting. The girl was right at
his heels. Azure was slow only in the sense that she spared occasional glances
behind to check for pursuers.

None yet.

She heard Coil shout as he reached the
lookout platform. She leaped up the last few steps two at a time and found her
milk brother squared off against a single sentry.

The defender ignored Azure, naturally
assuming that Coil was the threat. He did not expect Azure’s knife throw. Her
blade sank deep into the side of his neck.

Reflex made the man pull the knife out.
Wrong move. Blood poured from the wound. His eyes glazed over. He fell back.

The twitching was soon done. Azure
retrieved her knife from the dead man’s loose grip.

“Let me.”

To Azure’s surprise, the girl wiped the
blood off Azure’s blade with the washcloth. After making sure she had rubbed
away every trace of crimson, she handed the weapon back to Azure and tossed the
washcloth onto the corpse.

“I’m Zephyr,” she said.

Azure blinked. “Puh-pleased to meet you,”
she stammered, composure ruined precisely because she was striving so hard to
retain it.

“Please tell me you have my mother’s
flying carpet.”

Coil pulled off his backpack. He and
Azure pulled out the requested item and spread it out on the bricks, careful
not to let the edge slip into the spreading blood.

The carpet was silk. Thin. It was
clearly not meant as something to tread upon. Its lightness and lack of bulk
meant it could be—and indeed had been—folded many times and made compact.
Unfurled, it was twice as long as Coil was tall, and nearly as great in width.
Its designs were lavish and intricate.

“Your mother said you would know how to
make it work,” Coil said.

Zephyr knelt near the center. “Sit
beside me,” she instructed.

No sooner had she uttered the words that
the sound of heavy footfalls began reverberating ever more loudly up the
stairs. Coil and Azure took their places.

Zephyr caressed the fabric just in front
of her knees, her fingers tracing the outline of a roc flying over a wasteland
of high dunes. “To my mother, wherever she is. Go!”

The carpet lifted them as if it were as
solid as a ship deck. They glided smoothly out from beneath the cap of the
toadstool, heading northeast.

No sooner had they emerged into sunlight
than guards poured onto the tower platform. They shouted as they spotted the
carpet and its passengers.

Two of them were carrying bows.

“Make it go faster!” Coil said.

Zephyr winced. “It always starts slow.”

Coil grabbed the girl and flung her
sideways with him. An arrow sped through the place where they had been, opening
a slice in one of his sleeves. Azure pulled them the other way just in time to
avoid the second shot.

The archers nocked again and fired. This
time the arrows fell short. A pair of antlermen with their longbows would have
had a chance, but the guards of Salt Town had only the short bows of the
deserts, meant for firing from the backs of horses or camels.

In the streets below, other guards
spotted them. One or two rushed to find bows of their own, but by the time they
reached their armories, Azure and Coil and the stormwitch’s waif were well past
the edges of the outpost.

“You’re safe now,” Coil told the girl.

For the first time, the youngster
trembled. She curled up against Coil. He instinctively wrapped his arms around
her. It worked. Azure saw the girl’s breathing ease.

Slow though the acceleration was, the
carpet’s speed increased at a steady rate until they were hurtling over the
landscape at a rate that would humble any migratory bird. The wind of their
passage whipped at their clothes—that is to say, at Coil’s and Azure’s clothes—mitigating
the sun’s fierce kiss. Azure lay down to keep her hair from whipping around her
face. She studied the way her milk brother was nestling Zephyr. She studied
Zephyr being nestled.

It was the strangest thing. She didn’t
know which one she envied more.

#

The sun had been low in the sky when
they made their escape. But so fast did they travel, the orb had barely dropped
below the horizon when they passed over the eastern rim of the great basin.
Below sprawled the convoluted heart of the Desert of Fumes.

That landscape, fully visible in the
glow of early twilight, was
changing
.

A rumble grew. It was a sound deeper
than any Coil had ever heard. His ears were not sufficient to perceive it. It
smote like a thundercrack but lasted far longer. It grabbed him by the skull
and spine and shook him.

Suddenly the carpet shot straight up, pummeled
by a blast of air. Its magic kept it stable and none of the riders fell off,
but it felt as though a Titan had swatted them. The girl screamed and pressed
even harder against Coil.

“Can this be happening?” Azure squeaked.

Belatedly Coil saw what she had, and no,
it did not seem possible—the plateau was tearing asunder right along the route
the caravan had taken. The northern side of the canyon heaved upward, then
downward, then both sides separated.

They separated all the way from the
coast to the rim of the basin. Sea water rushed into the gap, heading west.

“It’s my mother’s doing,” the girl
moaned.

“She’s strong enough to
split the
earth
?” Coil blurted. “How does a sorceress get power like that?”

“She lay with a djinn.”

“In that case,” Azure commented, “she
must have been
very
good in bed.”

#

The devastation played out at a tortoise
pace, if only because the scale was so tremendous. The surge of ocean water
reached the basin and diffused into an ever-widening flood. Within hours it
would reach the lowest point—Salt Town—and would begin restoring the sea that
eons of evaporation had stolen. As yet, the denizens of the outpost might not
even be aware yet of their doom, though certainly they must have felt the
quake. But even if they knew, they could not save themselves—not without some
fantastical means such as the carpet. No camel or man would be able to flee all
the way to the rim before the water would catch up. Well before midnight this
very night, the only spot in Salt Town left above the waves would be the top
part of the tower. Azure could already see in her mind the desperate men
storming the entrances, guards just as desperately fighting to deny them entry.

Would the pirate prince wait to be
thrown from the top? Would he jump of his own volition? Or if his defenses
held, would he simply wait until the waters inevitably closed over his head?

Azure struggled to feel sorrow for the
soon-to-be victims. The closest she could come was pity for the slaves, but she
believed every one of their number would welcome a quick end to their misery.
The truth was she was not sorry they would die. She was angry that
someone
had killed them
.

Coil met her glance. The light was
dimming, but she read his eyes as well as she ever had, from the time they had
suckled at opposite breasts to now. His thoughts were a mirror of hers:

They were part of this, but they could
not fix it.

The remainder of the journey through the
flight was uncomfortably quiet. Neither she nor Coil felt like speaking. After
the carpet had carried them beyond the clouds of dust and steam thrown up by
the upheaval, she expected Zephyr to bubble over with expressions of gratitude,
or at least to sob with relief. But the girl stayed tucked against Coil, her
eyes closed, brow deeply furrowed.

The carpet took them north. Only when
they were well beyond the region affected by the devastation did their speed
drop. Finally they were deposited gently on a moonlit stretch of sand beside a
riverbed. A riparian stand of woolwood trees showed how different an area this
was. Sand and stone predominated and the river had no water at the moment, but
clearly rain blessed the place often enough that trees could persist.

Tucked among the woolwoods was the
stormwitch’s pavilion. The flaps parted and the sorceress herself emerged.

Coil helped Zephyr to stand. He had to
nudge her to get her to take a few steps forward. Azure helped her milk brother
fold up the carpet while Lady Sirocco completed her approach.

She took her daughter’s chin in her
hand, tilted her head right and left, checked her backside for lash marks. Made
sure her mouth still had teeth.

“I warned you they might catch you,” she
scolded.

“You did,” Zephyr mumbled.

“I will speak to you later. Go dress
yourself,” the sorceress commanded, jerking her chin at the pavilion.

Head down, the girl did as she was bid.