The Dragon Hunter and the Mage (25 page)

“Leth!” Clea warned, fists clenched.

“Alright, alright,” Leth surrendered.

“I don’t want you to support me against your will,” Aric said.

“Nah,” Leth dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “You’re fine, I suppose.”

Aric looked at the others. To his great satisfaction, no one had chosen Ashur beside Jullion and Prion. Trissa hadn’t done too badly either. Both Irenya and Dothea were standing behind her. Everyone else had chosen Nahir, which meant poor Tharius was left alone.

Ouch,
Aric thought. 

“Tharius,” Ashur sneered, “the one-man-Company.”

Jullion and Prion chuckled.

Calmly, Saruk neared Tharius and spoke in a low voice. “You may forfeit your candidacy if you like, recruit.”

“I would rather not, instructor.”

“Are you sure? This is no easy mission. Certainly not for a single person.”

“I’ll be alright, instructor.”

Saruk nodded. “Good for you, recruit.” With a twist of his heel, Saruk turned to rest of the Company and raised his voice. “The rules are simple. First team back to the fortress wins. Last team loses.”

Aric raised his hand. “What exactly do we lose, instructor?”

“The chance to become Captain,” Saruk replied. “The leader of the losing team has to drop out of the race.”

That wasn’t so bad. Aric wasn’t even sure he really wanted to be the Captain.

“And what do we win, exactly?” Trissa asked.

Saruk smirked. “The support of the losing team, of course.”

No matter how many twisting dune tops they crossed, the mountains stretching across the horizon simply refused to get any bigger.

“That Saruk is a tyrant,” Leth said. “And a sadist. He’s a tyrant-sadist with an insatiable thirst for our misery.”

Ahead of him, Aric looked through his binoculars. “There’s no point in complaining. We just have to finish the mission as quickly as possible.”

“What if Ashur wins?” Leth insisted. “We can’t control how fast a Dragon will smell his stinking armpits.”

“Then all we can do is make sure we don’t finish last,” Clea told him as she scanned the horizon.

“We can’t control that either,” Leth replied. “This is pointless.” He fell to his knees and Aric sat beside him.

The torrid sun had turned their dirt stiff clothes into cooking pans, draining their bodies with every step. With a leathery throat, Aric opened his canteen, only to close it right away. They would have to make their water supply last.

“We should keep going,” Aric said. “I’m sure it was a Dragon.”

“How can you be sure?” Clea asked, dropping her backpack in the sand and sitting down beside the two boys.”

Aric looked through his binoculars again and searched the horizon. “It was a Dragon. Had to be. Besides, those mountains are probably Dragon territory. They’re tall and wide.”

“We don’t need to find a Dragon’s lair,” Clea said. “Just the Dragon, remember?”

“What we need is to get out of the sand,” Leth said. “Sand is death. For all we know there’s a desert lion following our tracks.” He stood back up and circled, searching their surroundings. “We should find a rock formation. Rocks might mean a cave, a cave might mean water.”

“Over there!” Aric said, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “Rocks.”

Leth borrowed the goggles and looked through them. There was a set of outcroppings, brown boulders, each taller than a large house, huddled together amid the dunes.

“Great!” Leth celebrated. “We should head there.”

“Yeah, you should,” Aric said. He took off his backpack and handed it to Leth. “Here, hold this for me. I’ll travel faster without it.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Clea asked.

“I’m going to keep walking south for two more hours, try to get a glimpse of that Dragon,” Aric replied. “The two of you find shelter and rest. That way we’ll conserve water.” Aric fastened his Tracker-Seeker onto his belt and the bow across his back.

“Wait,” Clea said. “Here, switch with me, mine is fuller.” She handed Aric her canteen, then stuck a hand into her backpack. She fiddled inside for a moment and picked up a small pouch. “Take the biscuits too. You don’t want to get too weak to get back.”

“I’m not going to get weak,” Aric said, accepting the biscuits. “Anyway, I should be back shortly after sundown. Try to get some rest.”

“Best idea ever.” Leth adjusted Aric’s backpack over his shoulder, next to his own, with a huge smile. “See. I knew you’d make a great Captain.”

“Shut up,” Clea told him. She turned to Aric. “We’ll have some dinner waiting for you.
Be careful
.”

The wind had picked up and flying sand was polishing Aric’s cheeks, the only part of his face left exposed. He used his hand to cover his eyes and looked up at the mountain range to the south.

The peaks had finally started to look bigger. Or at least, so it seemed. The Dragon, however, was still nowhere to be found. Aric had first noticed its shape shortly after midday, and despite Leth’s insistence that it was just a hawk, Aric had followed it south for most of the afternoon, until the waving silhouette had become a tiny speck in the immense, blue glass sky, and finally disappeared.

Had it really been a Dragon? What if Leth had been right along?

A stronger gust of wind sent grains of sand into his eyes and he wiped them away with vigorous rubs. As he turned around, eyes watering, the mountains in the south seemed to shift.

“What the…?”

Aric wiped his eyes again, making sure there were no grains of sand or tears left to impair his vision, then focused on the distant brown peaks.

That’s no mountain! Those are clouds. Low hanging clouds.

He took two steps forward as if it could somehow help him see any better.

Yup, those were not mountains. They were dancing and shifting at the top, dissolving into the blue sky.

They’re really dark, too. Could it be rain?

If it was, Aric was about to witness a moment of a lifetime. According to Saruk, it only rained every fifty to sixty years in the Mahar. There were records of entire centuries without a single drop of rain in the desert.

“Well, I guess my water problem is solved…” he muttered to himself.

The problem was, so was every other desert creature’s. According to the Guild’s records, there would be a flash flood. Nothing dangerous, but it would bring out every living creature in the desert. Predators would have a field day, especially Dragons.

I should get back.

Turning his back on the looming darkness, Aric felt the wind push him forward. At least, from this direction, there was no need to cover his eyes from the sand. His robes flapped wildly and he saw huge pockets of sand billowing ahead of him. Were desert rains supposed to be like storms?

Storms!?

“Oh, crap!”

The realization made his heart sink through his stomach. Those weren’t rain clouds. That was a sandstorm.

He quickly remembered Saruk’s survival instructions. “Soak your mouth cover,” he repeated to himself.

Obeying his own instructions, he scrambled for his canteen. The rush made him spill far more water than he would have liked.

“Find cover,” he continued. He needed a hole or a cave to protect himself, or at the very least, a boulder he could hide behind, otherwise he could end up buried beneath the relentless sand. And he had to find it quick, before he was caught by the storm and lost his sight.

Using the binoculars, Aric searched in every direction but found nothing except for dunes and more dunes.

I could try to run back to where I left Clea and Leth…

No, that was a terrible idea. No one could ever outrun a sandstorm. Instead, he ran along the sand crests and climbed the tallest dune around him. He scanned the distance with his binoculars again. The sand hurtling towards him was becoming almost painful. If it wasn’t for the scarf around his mouth and nose he would have swallowed a bucket of sand by now.  

He looked, and looked, and looked until… there! He saw something! A small mesa, crowned by a curving rock that looked like an archway. There seemed to be an opening of some sort on its side.

“Thank the Goddess!”

The only problem was, the mesa was in the same direction as that of the lumbering sand wall, so either Aric would get there first, or the storm would. There was no time to lose.

Aric dashed away, his feet burying in the sand as he raced up and down the dunes. He didn’t even give himself enough time to figure a way atop the crests, but as if running through the sand wasn’t tiring enough, some dunes were so steep that Aric was out of breath by the second one.

Can’t stop. Can’t stop.

Lungs burning, legs shaking, Aric pushed forward. The massive wall of sand kept rolling like a colossal brown wave, swallowing everything in its path. He leapt onto the solid surface of the rock as the deafening sound of rattling sand engulfed him. If he wasn’t inside the storm yet, he sure would be very soon.

The small cave opening stood several feet above the ground. Aric grabbed onto the rock and heaved himself up to an outcropping. It would have been as easy as climbing a flight of stairs if it wasn’t for the gusts of wind tossing him around, not to mention the rock outcroppings stopped about five feet away from the cave opening.

He didn’t even think about it, he just jumped sideways and grabbed onto the ledge, heaving himself up into the cave, and just in time too. The moment he found himself up there a thundering roar flooded the cave, and a thick cloud of brown dust covered the world.

“Sweet mother Ava…” Aric said.

Panting heavily, he removed his scarf. The furious wind played tricks with the cave’s entrance, howling and… barking?

Aric figured he had to be imagining things until he heard it again. It was a strange, high pitched bark. Wind wouldn’t sound like that, no matter how much it twirled inside a cavern.

He stepped closer to the opening, his hands not leaving the ragged, stone wall. A turmoil of flying sand made Aric cover his eyes again as he peeked outside. At first, the sight made him jump backwards. Then, when he peeked again, he saw a large cat trying to jump up to the cave. It was panicking, barking and whining as his paws scratched the wall uselessly. The cave was just too high for him.

Well, that’s a first…

Aric had never seen a barking cat. And certainly not one that was this big.

He laid on the floor, belly down, and grabbed onto the cat’s neck, timing his move to coincide with one of the animal’s nervous jumps. The cat really was huge, and heavy. Aric heaved with all his strength. It must have scared the poor thing even further because he scratched Aric’s arms furiously until its paws finally found the ledge and the necessary purchase to jump inside.

Aric rolled away, getting out of the blinding swirl from the storm, and found himself staring at a set of really long, sharp teeth.

“Whoa, there!” Slowly, Aric stood back up.

The cat hissed. It wasn’t really a cat. More like a lynx, with very large, pointy ears and wide, hazelnut eyes.

“I didn’t just save you so you could eat me, alright?”

The cat didn’t like that Aric was getting taller. It hissed and pawed the air.