The desert was called Shunkare in the tongue of the merchants—one I did not yet know, and was unlikely to learn, traveling alone except for my horse—and it was made of dust, fine as silk and permeable as water. Save for the few days of the year when the rains came, the air burned to breathe and carried dust into the lungs, slaying the unwise and unmasked slowly and painfully while it painted the sky in streaks of violet with each rising and setting of the sun. As I set out from the oasis, I could see for miles: endless drifts of fine sand, carved by flooding and dried in place, like a frozen white sea.
Islands jutted up toward the blinding sky out of that sea. Pillars of white rock, etched sharp as spears in the wind, glinted in the sun. Each possessed a wide base, buried under the sand, or so the merchants told me. I would travel from spire to spire, crossing the dust only by daylight and only when the sky was clear, my eyes fixed on the distant horizon to watch for floods. If I was vigilant, and the gods of that treacherous expanse were merciful, I would take a long route around the deepest basin and avoid sinking into the sand, buried alive and unmourned. Traveling light, I would reach the sea by spring.
Other villages stood upon the rim of the basin, and on the brilliant, clear morning I left the oasis, I could see two of them, several days away. The first was a waystation, built around a single deep well, and the imperious, veiled woman in command accepted some of my gold in exchange for two skins of water that tasted of stone. The next was a mine carved out of the wind-scarred rock, as deep and wide as the mine of Phyreios, but they dug for water and not for iron.
Two weeks into my journey, I had a fair supply of water and had thus far avoided any floods. The season of dust loomed as a haze on the horizon, but I had cloth to cover my face and Bran’s, and a shelter that would keep out the worst of the night winds. The desert was a stern teacher, I found, but it was not my enemy. I believed I would reach the coast ahead of the time allotted.
Within another three days, I was lost.
The dust arrived, and the air and the sky turned dull white. The sun was a distant beacon in the fog, small and dim. It was all I had by which to navigate the pale void. My tent wasn’t large enough for both Bran and me to sleep comfortably, and even its fine weave couldn’t keep out all the sand. It was in my clothes, between my teeth, in the water and each dwindling ration of food. When the itching quelled enough for me to finally sleep, a persistent cough woke me each hour until dawn. Bran fared a little better, but he drank water faster than I did, and our stores would soon run dry.
Setting my course by the dim lamp of the sun, I expected to find the next waystation before evening. I had seen it the day before, a dark silhouette of rounded tents and thin, wind-battered trees, but now the dust had swallowed it. I pushed on, back bent against the storm, sand stinging my eyes and hands, the only parts left uncovered by necessity. Bran’s shape grew indistinct, even as he walked no farther than the reach of my arm.
Evening fell, and there was no sign of the waystation, nor of the end of the storm. The shelter shook and buckled, and a trickle of sand entered at three different corners. Neither Bran nor I would sleep well that night, but he was as accustomed to hardship as I. We kept watch together as dust blew over our shelter.
A blessed clear sky greeted us the next morning. The shelter was half-buried, and I considered leaving it behind, but the thought of another storm without some kind of defense drove me through the sweltering task of digging it out. By midday, my arms were burned, and I had drunk more than my share of water. A haze of pale dust settled over the earth. Its colorless expanse stretched out from horizon to horizon; to the very ends of the earth. The waystation was no longer there.
I quelled the panic rising at the loss of my only landmark. I still had the sun, and I could not have wandered too far from my path in the storm, as slow as I had gone. I set the shelter on top of the sand to wait for the worst of the day’s heat to pass, and set out again toward the sinking sun.
The shimmering images of the rocks at the edge of the basin swam into view, and I turned toward their limited shelter. As the sky turned from dusty blue to a deep, bloody purple, I heard a voice upon the wind, high and keening, in a language I did not recognize.
Or, perhaps, it wasn’t a language at all. The wind sang between blades and fingers of rock, and moaned across the dust basin. I had been warned that I could not trust my eyes, with the same being implied about my ears. As I pressed on, the voice grew louder, and its cries formed a few words I recognized: desert and full moon, sandstorm and devourer—the last a term that Kelebek had used to describe the tempest we had encountered in the southern ocean.
I crossed a stretch of coarse sand to the next formation of rock, a spire like a chimney three times my height. At the level of my eyes, an iron hook had been driven into the stone, and attached to it was a length of dusty rope.
I followed that rope to its other end. On a stretch of flat stone knelt a hunched human figure, dressed in a loose, tattered robe, with one bony wrist encircled in rope. Thin hair clung to a skull-like head, facing away from me toward the basin. Between their emaciated figure and their loose white robe, threadbare and stained with dust, I could not tell their sex; their keening voice was thin and high as the wind. They must have been young, heat and malnutrition aging them before their time.
The rope was loose enough to allow one skeletal hand to slip through, but the figure remained upon the rock, the wind tearing at their hair and clothing. How long had they sat here in the heat? Now, night approached on swift wings, bringing with it a dry, winter cold. If the sun hadn’t slain this poor soul yet, the lack of shelter and water surely would before morning came again. I had seen cruelty in my time, but this was beyond imagining: to starve a young person and leave them to the elements for a slow, painful death. It would have been kinder to kill them outright. I did not wonder why they had not left the rock. There was nowhere else to go.
I approached with one hand on Bran’s halter, uncovering my face and holding my free hand away from my weapons. “Stranger,” I called out, hoping that at least a little of my sailor’s cant could be understood, “I’ll set you free. My shelter is small, but you may share it.”
The wailing song stopped as I came nearer, and the figure turned to me with a look of bewilderment in their sunken eyes. Moving slowly, I drew the knife from my belt and cut the rope. If my words weren’t understood, I thought, surely this gesture would carry my meaning across.
Their eyes widened. “What are you doing?”
I looked over my shoulder, expecting this person’s captors to appear from behind the rocks, but there was nothing but sand and sky. “Who did this to you?” I asked.
A shake of the head was their only reply, and they turned back toward the dust basin, peering out into the encroaching dark. After another moment, their song began again,
Perhaps I was not the rescue they had expected. While I was there, however, I would make myself useful. I set about laying down my burdens and removing Bran’s, building a small fire, and dividing out two portions of barley cakes and dates, one of packed scrub grass and dry leaves, and three of water. The stranger’s share I set out within the reach of their arm before retreating back to the other side of the fire.
There was something strange about their eyes, following me as I moved about the camp. Besides sitting too deep within the unduly weathered skull, they were red-rimmed and moving from side to side with a strange, dull lethargy, pupils huge and dark even as my fire cast a bright red halo upon the tower of stone.
Bran and I ate, and I put up the tent, and neither rescuer nor captor appeared. The sky turned ink-black and glittered with stars; if my luck held, there would be no dust storm tonight. I weighted Bran’s tether with a stone. He was happy for a night outdoors, having been confined so long.
My strange companion had tired of singing. “You can shelter with me, if you wish,” I said, gesturing to the tent. “You’ll die of cold out here.”
Despite the dullness in their eyes, they looked at me with a fury sharp and cold as a spear-point. “You’ve ruined everything,” was their reply.
“What?” was all I could say. The realization that we could, in fact, communicate diminished in the face of my sheer confusion. I had offered food, water, and shelter to a stranger in the desert, as I had been taught was right to do. To have it refused was one thing—this was quite another.
The stranger turned away, as though too disgusted by my ignorance to bear looking at me. “Begone from here, unbeliever,” they said.
My tent was already pitched, my fire built, and beyond the reach of its light lay only darkness. I wasn’t going anywhere. “Eat,” I said. “Drink some water. Then you can tell me what’s wrong.”
They said nothing, and they made no move to approach the offered food. I wasn’t about to sleep with an angry stranger just outside my door, so I set about mending a hole I had torn in my protective robe. The poor light made for clumsy stitches, but it was unlikely that any but me would see them.
At last, the stranger picked at the food with bony fingers, and picked up the small clay cup of water, the taut skin on their face twisting at the taste of it. “The great serpent was to be here at sunset.”
I waited for further explanation, but none was forthcoming. “I didn’t know there was a serpent in the desert,” I said. None of the travelers I had met had mentioned it. I hoped that their hospitality would have extended to warning me, and not sending me to be devoured unawares.
“Of course you didn’t,” the stranger said. “You’re an outsider. An unbeliever.”
“Well, I believe you. I’ve seen great serpents before, and even a dragon, and I know they don’t always adhere to a schedule. It might still come.” Nothing stirred on the plain of dust that I could see. “What happens when it gets here?”
I received a derisive snort in reply. “It will eat me, of course. And the great kingdom of Svilsara will prosper for another year.”
Back to Chapter XXIX: Caravanserai
Forward to Chapter XXXI: Black Desert Night
I’m returning to this story’s Conan-esque roots for this plotline. Stop by soon to find out more! And as always, thanks for reading.
Space Whales Press 
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