The Lost Garden (The Lost Garden Trilogy Book 1)

THE

LOST GARDEN

An Evan Knight Adventure

#1

by

K.T. TOMB

Acclaim for K.T. Tomb:

“Epic and awesome!”

—
J.T. Cross
, bestselling author of
Beneath the Deep

“Now
this
is what I call adventure.
The Lost Garden
will leave you breathless!”

—
Summer Lee
, bestselling author of
Angel Heart

“The best adventure novel I’ve read in a long time. K.T. Tomb. I can’t wait to read the sequel. Count me a fan. A
big
fan.”

—
P.J. Day
,
bestselling author of
The Sunset Prophecy

“K.T. Tomb is a wonderful new voice in adventure fiction. I was enthralled by
The Lost Garden
...and you will be, too.”

—
Aiden James
,
bestselling author of
Plague of Coins

OTHER BOOKS BY K.T. TOMB

STANDALONE ADVENTURES

The Last Crusade

The Kraken

The Adventurers

The Swashbucklers

The Tempest

Ghosts of the Titanic

The Honeymooners

Curse of the Coins

Drums Along the Hudson

THE CHYNA STONE ADVENTURES

The Minoan Mask

The Mummy Codex

The Phoenician Falcon

The Babylonian Basilisk

The Aquitaine Armor

THE EVAN KNIGHT ADVENTURES

The Lost Garden

Keepers of the Lost Garden

Destroyers of the Lost Garden

THE PHOENIX QUEST ADVENTURES

The Hammer of Thor

The Spear of Destiny

The Lair of Beowulf

The Fountain of Youth

THE CASH CASSIDY ADVENTURES

The Holy Grail

The Lost Continent

The Lost City of Gold

THE ALPHA ADVENTURES

“A” is for Amethyst

“B” is for Bullion

“C” is for Crystal

SASQUATCH SERIES

Sasquatch

Sasquatch Found

THE ISLANDS THAT TIME FORGOT

Dinosaur Island

Ape Island

Snake Island

The Lost Garden

Published by K.T. Tomb

Copyright © 2013 by K.T. Tomb

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

The author wishes to dedicate this book to the late

Louis L’Amour.

The Lost Garden

Prologue

We are lost.

From the base of a massive, rock-encrusted mountain, General Del’ada Donatte crawls up onto a sunbaked boulder. He seeks a higher vantage point to discern anything green in the expansive desert that is supposed to contain an oasis, according to his flawed maps.

The stone scorches his already-blistered hands, but he pays it little mind.

What concerns Donatte is that his last twelve men are painfully dying of thirst and sunstroke. Succumbing to the same fate, he stands shakily upon the rock and shades his eyes against the glare. There is no wind, not even at this height. He can hear his own pulse in his ears, thumping hard from the rock climb. And from age.

Heat waves shimmer off the desert floor with sparkles that mock him with a distant sea that does not exist. It is clear from the bleak surroundings that he and his men are alone in an empty wasteland. Days ago, a nomadic shepherd had warned them that this land was cursed and that caravans had long ago learned to avoid it. He had pleaded with them not to take that path and be cursed along with the ones who had gone that way but never returned. But they
had
gone that way. Donatte had led them. He had a good reason.

He doesn’t know about the land being cursed, but he does know one truth:

We will die today.

He feels sure that this path leads through what must surely be
Jahannam
on Earth, but it is the only way to get close to something that Donatte covets more than anything. He isn’t just here to fight a war. He is here to find something of which he has not spoken to anyone since he had unexpectedly learned of it. Even his wife does not know the truth.

But his secret quest of a lifetime is halted by their dire circumstances.

Donatte’s men had been ambushed. His forty warriors had fought valiantly, but in the end, he and those remaining were forced to flee even deeper into the desert. The enemy had followed them. Like a painful blessing, a
haboob
rose up and soon swallowed them whole into the bosom of its ferocious, suffocating winds and searing, stinging sand. After hours of this, they had dug themselves out into an orange sky and a fiery sun. Their pursuers were nowhere to be found.

Praise be to Allah.

Now, Donatte looks down at his men, who suffer in what little shade is afforded by the boulder. Their camels, donkeys and horses have long ago been eaten or died in the
haboob
. The last time any of them saw water was nine days ago and now their skin is dry, blistered and peeling. Yesterday, two men had died of thirst. Three today. They are left unburied, which is a disgrace and a
crime that Donatte has been unable to rectify, but they had lost the donkey carrying the shovels in the
haboob
—no one left has the strength to dig graves with bare hands. They have no cloth for shrouds, let alone water to cleanse the bodies. The men recite
the collective prayer
for the dead. It is all they can do
. Later, they talk softly, flick scorpions off each other’s sleeves and know that they, too, will die today.

Donatte knows there will be no one to bury him, either.

He has a wife that he has not seen since this campaign began seven months ago. She had been with child, their first, and would be ready to give birth by now. He reaches down and runs his fingers along the silver chain that he wears around his wrist. It was a gift from Atasa, his beautiful wife, whom they had thought was barren for the past twenty years until that one drop of oil had changed everything.

She had begged him not to go, but he was a general, a warrior, and he had been summoned to duty. There was little he could do. He imagines her bustling about their airy whitewashed house, making ready for the child whom the astrologer said would be a boy—and for his homecoming, which would not happen now. His heart feels a pang at that loss.

As he inhales, he feels his sand-slaked lungs tighten. He wishes he’d followed his instincts and claimed he was too old for such a rigorous overland campaign. He had served well these past twenty-five years. He would have been granted leave for this campaign had he pleaded his advanced age. As Donatte scans the horizon again, he almost chuckles when he admits to himself that he would rather kill for a living than help raise a newborn baby. He had held one once, and it had reeked of feces in the swaddling clothes. Moreover, it had pulled his beard and wailed at him.

Unable to doze in the searing heat and in the stench of his own dried sweat, to his surprise, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye. With his men all sitting with their backs to the boulder in the scant shade, Donatte is sure he is hallucinating due to extreme heat exhaustion and perhaps sun blindness. He turns sharply to his right and looks up the slope of the rocky mountain. The sky is so blue that it looks like the gleam of a sapphire. Against that blue, about a hundred cubits up, a figure clad in a black robe ducks behind another boulder.

Am I seeing a ghost?
thinks Donatte.
Could this be the ghost that will come to steal my soul away from my dried-up husk of a lifeless body?

He hears the sound of a small rock tumbling down the slope from where the figure had disappeared.

Ghosts don’t disturb gravel.

He looks down at his men. They sit with their backs against the shaded boulder, talking about their families—mostly, of their fathers and their sons. Donatte speaks rapidly in Arabic. Some of his words are coherent, others are dried whispers. He licks his lips, but his tongue feels coated with the grit of sand.

He is filled with false hope and he knows it, but says anyway, “Look up! Someone is above us. We are saved!”

The men look up. At first, following his lead, some stand and shout with joy, but one of them points a finger past Donatte and shouts a sharp warning as he points at their weapons being drawn. Donatte immediately reaches for his scimitar.

Weapon in hand, Donatte frowns and turns.

One last fight.

Suddenly, he welcomes the battle. Anything is better than this slow roast toward a death from mad thirst.

Descending rapidly down the mountain are many impossibly tall, black-robed figures wearing hoods. They brandish unusual-looking spears, with the ends curving away like their own swords.

Thieves
, thinks Donatte. He can hardly believe it. They have no food, no water. Only weapons. Ah, but bandits had killed for less than the fine weapons they carried.

“Let us fight with honor!” he cries to his men.

He knows it is their last battle. They all know.

He brandishes his own scimitar with as much might as he can muster, just as the first of the black-clad figures drops down from above. The figure moves fast and lands amid Donatte’s men. Donatte is amazed at the skill with which the figure uses the weapon. He is also surprised by the single warrior’s brazenness in taking on so many warriors at once.

More thieves appear from above as a flash of metal barely misses the general’s head. He ducks and falls backward onto the hot boulder. A figure joins him on the rock, moving as if he had been born on this mountain. The figure swings his weapon. Donatte blocks the attack with his own scimitar. Metal rings against metal as he and his men make their last stand and fight with warrior hearts that would rather die than beg to be taken prisoner for a drink of water.

Through his own combat sounds, he hears his men’s cries of aggression that become cries of suffering and then, death cries.

Donatte stumbles and falls in the loose gravel. He loses his scimitar, which falls to the ground. He looks shocked as he sees that all of his men are now dead and that he is on their level, sprawled in the dirt among their bodies.

The last man alive.

The thieves have made quick work of his soldiers and now, it will be his turn.

He thinks he can likely ransom himself out of here, but no.
Never.
He is not a coward.

The general looks back as the leader’s figure approaches him. A strong wind is now rising for the first time in many days, not since the
haboob
. Though it is a hot wind, the welcome breeze chills his dehydrated body. As he unexpectedly shivers, the wind blows back the hood of his attacker.

Donatte’s heart freezes.

It is a beautiful black-haired woman with a burning hatred in her eyes. She has a streak of silver in her hair.

“No, this cannot be,” says Donatte. “Not a mere
woman
.”

To his surprise, the woman answers in Arabic, “I’m afraid so. Though I would argue the word, ‘mere.’”

Her single movement is swift and merciful. Donatte’s head is severed from his neck in one clean swipe.

“That’s the last of them,” says another female warrior.

“More will come,” answers the raven-haired woman.