Sword and Sorceress XXVII (24 page)

Dorsag laughed. “While we’re being
honest with each other, that old winemaker is over the moon for you.”

Zair raised an eyebrow. “You really
think I haven’t noticed?”

The corner of Dorsag’s mouth quirked up.
“Okay, good point. Still, I don’t think I’d wait around at your age.”

And she’d been doing so well... up until
the last bit. Well, her heart was in the right place.

“So,” Dorsag said, and a spark of
eagerness leaped through her indifferent calm. “What do you want to teach me
first?”

“Well, to begin,” Zair said, “there are
sixty-eight different knots for tying down thatch.”

“You’re joking.”

“You wanted to learn, didn’t you?”

By the time they broke for lunch, the
thief had already mastered two of the sixty-eight, and the roof looked better
than ever. Dorsag’s long, clever fingers were bloody from the coarse twine, but
she was grinning.

The Salt Mines

by
Dave Smeds

Dave always
sends us wonderful stories. This one features his new characters Azure and
Coil, the witch who hired them to rescue her daughter, the pirates who captured
the daughter, and the daughter who, while happy to be rescued from the pirates,
has goals of her own. Naturally, some of these overlapping sets of goals are
going to come into conflict with each other, but that’s what makes a story
interesting.

Dave
Smeds is the author of novels such as THE SORCERY WITHIN and THE SCHEMES OF
DRAGONS. His short fiction has appeared in myriad anthologies, including at
least a dozen previous volumes of SWORD & SORCERESS, and in such magazines
as
Asimov’s
SF
,
Realms of Fantasy
, and
F&SF
. “The Salt Mines”
introduces a pair of characters that Dave suspects he will feature in other
stories in the not-too-distant future.

His
most recent publication is the eBook short story collection RAIDING THE HOARD
OF ENCHANTMENT, a gathering of seven of his recent tales of high fantasy. See
www.bookviewcafe.com for details.

****

“The sunsets are beautiful in the Desert
of Fumes”
the saying went. Now Coil knew what that meant. It wasn’t that the sunsets were
more spectacular to the eye. It was that with dusk came the promise the air
would cool enough to breathe without pain.

In the canyon below, shade had been the
rule for hours. The caravan Coil and Azure had been watching was now entirely
out of the harbor gates, heading westward along the trade road, camels and
slaves resigned to plodding along through the night. Back within the village,
lamps were being lit. Stevedores were unloading the cargo of the newly-arrived
merchant vessels and filling up the soon-to-depart. They worked slowly, pausing
often to wipe sweat off brows or napes of necks. Hours would have to pass
before the temperature dropped enough to pick up the pace.

“Another caravan will leave tomorrow
night. You’ll have no trouble attaching yourself to it.” Lady Sirocco spoke in
Irsi so classic she must have spent years studying the scrolls, but with a
peculiar sort of dungburner accent that said she had come to the language as an
adult.

Coil was not looking forward to
threading through these shattered hills. Everywhere he looked he saw only
ridges and cliffs of banded, crumbling rock. No trees. Just a wisp, here and
there, of goat brush or spine weed. The route was twisted and uneven and
narrow, vulnerable to avalanche or banditry. And to think it would be the nice
part of the trip.

They retreated from the cliff edge,
moving back into the hollow in the mountain where Lady Sirocco had set up her
pavilion. The encampment was thoroughly out of sight to anyone below. It had to
be. If the Salt Pirates discovered the Witch of Sandstorms had returned to
their territory, they would send as many assassins as they could gather.

The remnant of a man hung in the center
of the camp like a fly caught in a spiderweb, ropes splaying him as far apart
as his tendons and joints would allow—and then a little more. Scorch marks
decorated his flesh here and there, puffy and livid beneath the char. A brazier
of hot coals stood in front of him. A plucked-out eye and severed parts that
had until recently defined him as male were turning to ash atop the embers. The
other eye was intact—the better to witness what the fire was claiming, Coil
supposed.

“From what I have learned from this one,
you will have time enough to do things right,” the sorceress said. “But not
much more time than that. The lord of the pirates is keeping my daughter for
his own use for now, but he will ultimately send her to the pens for his
lackeys to enjoy. He will do it no matter how sweet he finds her to be, because
he knows it will cause me anguish. My daughter is strong-willed, but a day or
two in the pens will break her. See that you rescue her before she is removed
from the tower.”

“We will,” Azure said. Coil was glad it
was she who answered. When he did it, sometimes his confidence came across as
boasting. Her soft voice transformed it to prophecy.

“Go, then,” the sorceress commanded. “I
will be waiting.”

She put the smithy gloves back on her
hands and picked up the tongs she had left on the coals.

Coil and Azure headed off down the
shepherd path that would take them to the harbor. They hiked as fast as the
fading light would allow. Even so the screaming began before they could pass
out of hearing range.

“I really wish we could turn this job
down,” Coil said.

“I know how you feel,” his milk sister
replied.

#

About all it took to join the next night’s
caravan was to stride into the caravanserai, locate the underseer of supplies,
and announce they were entertainers willing to work in Salt Town. The underseer
did not even ask what their talents were. For the sake of form, the two sides
spent half an hour bargaining about the rate at which the mine scrip would be
redeemed when they got back, and how much the underseer’s bribe should be. As
usual, Azure handled the negotiations, but her persuasive skills were not
needed. By the third cup of tea, the underseer was offering terms as good as if
she had agreed to slip into the back room and serve as his wife of the hour.

All too easy. Azure didn’t like it. Had
they actually been entertainers going to Salt Town for no other reason than to
earn a living, she would have backed out then and there. But soon the underseer
was stamping his master’s mark on a scrap of papyrus to confirm the rate. Coil
placed the contract in his money belt.

The underseer beamed, as if pleased that
his shift had included the diversion of hiring them. “If you have any silver on
you now, it won’t do you any good in Salt Town,” he added with what seemed to
be honest good will. “Buy extra water.
That
will be of value.”

They did as he said, though it meant
renting an extra camel. They made sure to mark their skins and kegs well, for
there were a great many camels carrying the same sort of load. Just as salt was
the only export out of Salt Town, water was the main import.

Water. And slaves.

A single long train of naked men was
herded into the staging yard. Coil estimated there were forty of the wretches,
wrists bound behind their backs, connected to each other by chains and ankle
shackles. They shuffled along, backs and buttocks and sometimes faces adorned
with lash marks, reeking from a voyage spent having to sleep in their own
filth. They were a mix of peoples, some bearing the slavers’ brands, which
implied they had been acquired at auction. Most of the rest looked to be
sailors from ships the Salt Pirates had captured.

One of the handlers stalked down the
line with a pole, swinging at testicles, evaluating how vigorously the owners
twisted or dodged to avoid a direct hit. One poor skeleton of a fellow didn’t
dodge at all, just took it and then tried feebly to breathe. The handler gutted
him and moved on to the next in the line. After the fallen man was done
twitching, the handler’s two juvenile assistants sawed off his foot to free it
from the shackle and dragged the remains to the sty to fatten the pigs.

Coil muttered something under his
breath. Azure’s knife hand twitched.

Fortunately the worst was already over.
The handlers, having apparently satisfied themselves that the remaining slaves
might have a chance of surviving the two-day walk to Salt Town, unbound the
wrists of their charges and threw down what appeared to be piles of dirty rags
at their feet.

“Put them on,” the handler growled.

The slaves stared at the piles as if
unsure they were hearing correctly. But as whips cracked, they picked up what
proved to be cowls and cloaks of rude handspun.

Azure was surprised. Providing slaves
with clothing was an expense. She decided the investment must be worth it. No
doubt even the dark-skinned natives of the Steaming Lands would not survive in
open salt pits without coverings of some sort. The pale antlermen at the end of
the line might not last a day.

A chain of a dozen women was prodded
into a corner of the yard. Intended for indoor labor, they were left naked.
Both groups of slaves, though, were given gourds of water and millet porridge
served atop banana leaves. Every individual eagerly seized his or her portion,
but some of the former sailors chewed as if they had forgotten what it was like
to have food between their teeth.

Azure had been thinking of having some
millet porridge. She ate some yoghurt and dates instead.

The sun sank. The shadow of the high
ridges stretched eastward and met the sea. Eventually the dust of the inland
trade road cooled enough that lizards crept out of their dens and began
reconnoitering the piles of camel dung in search of insects. The master of the
caravan blew his ram’s horn and the company set out.

The port they were leaving was called
Titan’s Crack. Azure considered it well named. The rockfaces on either side of
the road were rough and pitted. No ancient river had made this canyon. The
caravan was journeying along a crack in the very body of the continent. The
plateau had somehow split apart.

To her astonishment, Azure smelled wet
rock. Whatever moisture the formation possessed emerged down here in the depths
of the fissure. Azure spotted a second and then a third place where the lower
cliffsides were veined with seepage. She now knew what filled the natural
cistern beneath the walls of the harbor—the supply of drinking water that
sustained not only Titan’s Crack, but Salt Town as well.

She saw no true waterfalls. And as the
camels plodded onward into the night, the impression of humidity vanished.

#

Before midnight, they smelled brimstone.
By the time the caravan paused a couple of hours later to cast away a slave who
had not been strong enough for the journey after all, Coil’s nostrils were raw
from the stench. He had mocked Azure when she had taken out a handkerchief,
soaked it in perfume, and made it into a veil for her lower face, but when she
prepared another for him, he took it and thanked her humbly.

“The wind will change soon,” said the
nearest camel drover as he rubbed liniment on the abraded ribs of one of his
beasts. “That will help. A little.”

The drover, a leathery, whip-thin
Rhirzadi of the Ibex Hills, had laughed and called the dead slave vulture meat
when he had fallen, but he seemed well-disposed toward Coil and Azure. Coil
welcomed his insights. He and his milk sister had seen a thousand places in
their travels, but this was as out of their element as they had ever been.

The drover was correct. Eventually the
temperature of the continent dropped low enough to draw marine air inland. Soon
the breeze was carrying away the worst of the acidic miasma.

Dawn was purpling the horizon behind
them but stars still shone in the west when the ram’s horn blew again,
signalling a halt. To Coil, this seemed premature. He had expected the caravan
to push on at least until sunrise, if not an hour or two into the day.

“Last good spot to camp,” the drover
explained.

The handlers goaded the male slaves down
a channel to the right. Coil and Azure stayed with the camels and the female
slaves, seeking their shelter off to the left. They soon came to a natural
hollow surrounded on three sides by rock outcroppings. It was a place where
there would be shade available during every part of the day as long as they
rearranged themselves from time to time.

The sun was up but the air still
tolerable when Coil and Azure climbed to the top of one of the outcroppings.
Out to the west spread the terrain through which they were to travel the next
day.

Here was the heart of the Desert of
Fumes.

The trade road snaked between one
hellish feature after another, bleached bones of camels and humans delineating
the route. Vapors rose from the cracked landscape. Magma glowed in a pair of
fissures off to the south. To the north a dozen hotsprings throbbed, the oily
contents never lying still. The nearest pools were dense turquoise. Farther
away they were the shade of emeralds lit from within. Both types were crusted
at the edges with mineral mats—their hues of orange, blood rose, and pus yellow
too vibrant to seem natural. Hardened-lava ridges thrust up out of the sands as
though the mummified corpse of a giant crocodile lurked below, leaving only the
sunburnt ridges of its back revealed to the surface world.

Beyond the jumbled terrain, the land
descended into a vast basin. Coil was good enough at judging elevations that he
knew its rim was at the same level as the tideline back at Titan’s Crack.
Twelve hours earlier he had stood at the gates of the caravanserai and looked
east and seen the ocean—an endless expanse of water. Now he was viewing a place
so dry its sea had evaporated.

Somewhere down at the bottom of the
basin, lost in the sulfurous haze, was Salt Town.

#

The next night was the longest Azure
could recall experiencing in her one-and-twenty years. The moonlight crafted
baleful shadows out of the macabre landscape. Coarse bits of lava crunched
uncomfortably beneath her sandals, the desert winds having blown them onto what
should have been a track worn benign by centuries of caravan traffic.