I heard my name mentioned more than once as the sisters discussed the calamity in low voices behind me, Tarelle sharing the story of my bravery in the face of stampeding camels, and Lila reminding her sisters that my warning had saved them all. If I hadn’t been stuck outside in tribesman robes that stank of camel and itched my sunburn into a misery I might have felt quite pleased with myself.
The sheik, together with his sons and guards, had gone out amid the dunes to hunt down his precious cargo and the beasts it was tied onto. I couldn’t imagine how they could track the camels in the night, or how they hoped to find their way back to us either with or without them, but that seemed to be firmly the sheik’s problem and not mine.
I stood, leaning into the wind, eyes slitted against the fine grit it bore. During the whole day’s journey a light breeze had blown in across us from the west, but now the wind had turned toward the explosion, as if answering a summons, and strengthened into something that might easily become a sandstorm. The fire in the south had gone, leaving only darkness and questions.
After half an hour I gave up standing guard and started to sit guard instead, hollowing the sand to make it more comfortable for my bruised arse. I watched the sheik’s more able-bodied retainers salvaging additional tents and putting them back up as best they could. And I listened to the daughters, occasionally twirling a length of broken tent pole I’d picked up in lieu of a sword. I even started humming: it takes more than a Builders’ Sun exploding to take the gloss off a man’s first night in the living world after what seemed an eternity in Hell. I’d made it through the first two verses of The Charge of the Iron Lance when an unexplained stillness made me sit up straight and look around. Straining through the gloom I could make out the nearest of the men, standing motionless around a half-erected tent. I wondered why they’d stopped work. The real question struck me a few moments later. Why could I barely see them? It had become darker – much darker – and all within the space of a few minutes. I looked up. No stars. No moon. Which had to mean cloud. And that simply didn’t happen in the Sahar. Certainly not during the year I’d spent in Hamada.
The first drop of rain hit me square between the eyes. The second hit me in the right eye. The third hit the back of my throat as I made to complain. Within the space of ten heartbeats three drops had grown into a deluge that had me backing into the tent awning for shelter. Slim hands reached out for my shoulders and drew me in through the flaps.
‘Rain!’ Tarelle, her face in shadow, the light of a single lamp hinting at the curve of her cheekbone, her brow, the line of her nose.
‘How can it be raining?’ Mina, fearful yet excited.
‘I…’ I didn’t know. ‘The Builders’ Sun must have done it.’ Could a fire make it rain? A fire that big might change the weather … certainly the flames reached high enough to lick the very roof of the sky.
‘I heard that after the Day of a Thousand Suns there was a hundred years of winter. The winter of the north where water turns to stone and falls from the sky in flakes,’ Danelle said, her face at my shoulder, voice rich and commanding thrills down my spine.
‘I’m scared.’ Lila pressed closer as the rain began to hammer on the tent roof above us. I doubted we’d be dry for long – tents in Liba are intended to keep out the sun and the wind: they rarely have to contend with the wet.
A crack of thunder broke ridiculously close and suddenly Prince Jal was the filling in a four-girl sandwich. The boom paralysed me with terror for a moment and left my ears ringing, so it took me a short while to appreciate my position. Not even thirty-six yards of thobe could entirely disguise the sisters’ charms at this proximity. Moments later, though, a new fear surfaced to chase off any thoughts of taking advantage.
‘Your father made some very specific threats, ladies, concerning your virtue and I really—’
‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that.’ A husky voice close enough to my ear to make me shiver.
‘Father says all manner of things.’ Softly spoken by a girl with her head against my chest. ‘And nobody will move until the rain stops.’
‘I can’t remember a time when we weren’t being watched over by Father, or our brothers, or his men.’ Another pressed soft against my shoulder.
‘And we do so need protecting…’ Behind me. Mina? Danelle? Whoever it was her hands were moving over my hips in a most unvirtuous way.
‘But the sheik—’
‘Gold plating?’ A tinkling laugh as the fourth sister started to push me down. ‘Did you really believe that?’
At least two of the girls were busy unwinding their thobes with swift and practised hands. Amid the shadows thrown by so many bodies I could see very little, but what I could see I liked. A lot.
All four of them pushed me down now, a tangled mass of smooth limbs and long hair, hands roaming.
‘Gold’s so expensive.’ Tarelle, climbing atop me, still half-wrapped.
‘That would be silly.’ Danelle, pressed to my side, deliciously soft, her tongue doing wonderful things to my ear. ‘He always uses silver…’
I tried to get up at that point, but there were too many of them, and things had got out of hand – except for the things that were now in hands … and, dammit, I’d been in Hell long enough, it was time for a spot of paradise.
There’s a saying in Liba: The last yard of the thobe is the best.
…or if there isn’t, there should be!
‘Arrrrgh!’
I’ve found that there are few things more effective at making a man’s ardour grow softer than cold water. When the tent roof, weakened by earlier traumas, gave without warning and released several gallons of icy rainwater over my back I jumped up sharply, scattering al’Hameed women and no doubt teaching them a whole new set of foreign curse words.
One thing that became clear as the water dripped off me was that very little more was dripping in to replace it.
‘Sshhh!’ I raised my voice over the last of their shrieking – they’d enjoyed the soaking no more than I had. ‘It’s stopped raining!’
‘عشيقة، هل أنت خخير؟’ A man just outside the tent, jabbering away in the heathen tongue, others joining him. They must have heard the screams. How much longer the fear of what the sheik would do to them if they burst in on his daughters would outweigh the fear of what the sheik would do to them if they failed to protect his daughters, I couldn’t say.
‘Cover yourselves!’ I shouted, moving to defend the entrance.
I heard smirking behind me, but they moved, presumably not expecting to emerge unscathed if reports of ‘frolicking’ reached their father.
Outside someone took hold of the tent flap. I’d not even laced it! With a yelp I flung myself down to grab the bottom of it. ‘Hurry for Christ’s sake! And blow out the lamp!’
That set them giggling again. I grabbed the lamp and pre-empted any attempt at entry by bursting out, setting the foremost of the sheik’s retainers on his backside in the wet sand.
‘They’re all fine!’ I straightened up and waved an arm back toward the tent. ‘The roof gave way under the rain … water everywhere.’ I did my best to mime the last part in case none of them had the Empire tongue. I don’t think the idiots got it because they stood there staring at me as if I’d asked a riddle. I strode purposefully away from the tent, beckoning the three men with me. ‘Look! It’ll all be clearer over here.’ I sincerely hoped those thobes went back on as quickly as they came off. Two of the sheik’s men were bringing over one of the sisters’ maids, urging her on despite her injuries.
‘What’s that over there?’ I said it mainly to distract everyone. As I looked in the direction I was pointing though … there was something. ‘Over there!’ I gesticulated more fiercely. Moonlight had started to pierce the shredding clouds overhead and something seemed to be emerging from the dune that I’d selected at random. Not cresting it, or stepping from its shadow, but struggling through the damp crust of sand.
Others started to see it n
ow, their voices rising in confusion. From the broken sand something rose, a figure, impossibly slim, bone-pale.
‘Damn it all…’ I’d escaped from Hell and now Hell seemed to be following me. The dune had disgorged a skeleton, the bones connected by nothing but memory of their previous association. Another skeleton seemed to be fighting its way from the damp sand beside the first, constructing itself from assorted pieces as it came.
All around me people started to cry out in alarm, cursing, calling on Allah, or just plain screaming. They began to fall back. I retreated with them. Not long ago the sight would have had me sprinting in the direction that best carried me away from the two horrors before us, but I’d seen my share of dead, both in and out of Hell, and I kept the panic to just below boiling point.
‘Where did they come from? What are the odds we camped right where a couple of travellers died?’ It hardly seemed fair.
‘More than a couple.’ A timid voice behind me. I spun around to see four bethobed figures outside the women’s tent. ‘Over there!’ The speaker, the shortest so probably Mina, the youngest, pointed to my left. The sand in the lee of the dune had begun to heave and bony hands had emerged like a nightmare crop of weeds.
‘There was a city here once.’ The tallest … Danelle? ‘The desert ate it two hundred years ago. The desert has covered many such.’ She sounded calm: probably in shock.
The sheik’s retainers began to back in a new direction, retreating from both threats. The original two skeletons now seemed to sight us with their empty sockets and came on at a flat run, silent, their pace deadly, slowed only by the softness of the sand. That brought my panic to the boil. Before I could take to my heels though, a lone Ha’tari sprinted past me, having come through the camp. The sheik must have left one to patrol out among the dunes.
‘No sword!’ I held my empty hands up in excuse and let my retreat bring me among the four daughters. We stood together and watched the Ha’tari intercept the first of the skeletons. He hacked at its neck with his curved blade. Hearteningly, bone shattered beneath the blow, the skull flew clear and the rest of the skeleton collided with him, bouncing off to fall in a disarticulated heap on the sand.
The second skeleton rushed the warrior and he ran it through.
‘Idiot!’ I shouted, perhaps unreasonably because he’d acted on instinct and his reflexes were well honed.
Unfortunately sticking your blade through the chest of a skeleton is less of an inconvenience to the thing than it would have been back in the days when its bones were covered in flesh and guarded a lung. The skeleton ran into the thrust and clawed at the warrior’s face with bone fingers. The man fell back yelling, leaving his sword trapped between its ribs.
I saw now, as the last tatters of cloud departed and the moon washed across the scene, that the skeleton was not as unconnected as I had thought. The silver light illuminated a grey misty substance that wrapped each bone and linked it, albeit insubstantially, to the next, as if the phantom of their previous owner still hung about the bones and sought to keep them united. Where the first attacker had collapsed and scattered, the mist, or smoke, had stained the ground, and as the stain sank away the desert floor writhed, nightmare faces appearing in the sand, mouths opening in silent screams before they lost form and collapsed in turn.
The Ha’tari warrior continued to back away, bent double, both hands clutching his face. The skeleton rotated its skull toward us and started to run again, the sword trapped in its ribcage clattering as it came on.
‘This way!’ I turned to do some running of my own, only to see that skeletons were closing on the camp from all directions, gleaming white in the moonlight. ‘Hell!’
The sheik’s men had nothing better than daggers to defend themselves with, and I hadn’t even filched a knife from the evening meal.
‘There!’ Danelle caught my shoulder and pointed at the closest of several lamp stands that had been set between the tents, each a shaft of mahogany a good six foot tall and standing on a splayed base, the brass lamp cradled at the top.
‘That’s no damn use!’ I grabbed it anyway, letting the lamp fall and hefting the stand up with a grunt.
With nowhere to run I waited for the first of our attackers and timed my swing to its arrival. The lamp stand smashed through the skeleton’s ribcage, shattering it like matchwood and breaking its spinal column into a shower of loose vertebrae. The dead thing fell into a hundred pieces, and the phantom that had wrapped them sank slowly toward the fragments, a grey mist descending.
The momentum of my swing turned me right around and the daughters had to be quick on their feet to avoid being hit. I found myself with my back to my original foe and facing two more with no time to swing again. I jabbed the stand’s base into the breastbone of the foremost skeleton. Lacking flesh, the thing had little weight and the impact halted its charge, breaking bones and lifting it from its feet. The next skeleton reached me a moment later but I was able to smash the shaft of the stand into its neck like a quarterstaff then carry it down to the sand where my weight parted its skull from its body before its bony claws could reach me.
This left me on all fours amid the ruin of my last enemy but with half a dozen more racing my way, the closest just a few yards off. Still more were tearing into the sheik’s people, both the injured and the healthy.
I got to my knees, empty handed, and found myself facing a skeleton just about to dive onto me. The scream hadn’t managed to leave my mouth when a curved sword flashed above my head, shattering the skull about to hit my face. The rest of the horror bounced off me, falling into pieces, leaving a cold grey mist hanging in the air. I stepped up sharpish, shaking my hands as the phantom tried to leach into me through my skin.
‘Here!’ Tarelle had swung the sword and now pressed it into my grip. The Ha’tari’s blade – she must have recovered it from the remains of the first skeleton I put down.
‘Shit!’ I sidestepped the next attacker and took the head off the one behind.
Five or six more were charging in a tight knot. I briefly weighed surrender in the balance against digging a hole. Neither offered much hope. Before I had time to consider any other options a huge shape barrelled through the undead, bones shattering with brittle retorts. A Ha’tari on camelback brushed past me, swinging his saif, more following in his wake.
Within moments the sheik and his sons were dismounting around us, shouting orders and waving swords.
‘Leave the tents!’ Sheik Malik yelled. ‘This way!’ And he pointed up along the valley snaking between the dune crests that bracketed us.
Before long a column of men and women were limping their way behind the mounted sheik, flanked by his sons and his own armed tribesmen while the Ha’tari fought a rear-guard action against the bone hordes still being vomited forth from the damp sand.
A half mile on and we joined the rest of the sheik’s riders, standing guard around the laden camels they’d recovered from the surrounding desert.
‘We’ll press on through the night.’ The sheik stood in his stirrups atop his ghost-white camel to address us. ‘No stopping. Any who fall behind will be left.’
I looked over at Jahmeen, watching his father with strained intensity.
‘The Ha’tari will deal with the dead, won’t they?’ I couldn’t see mounted warriors being in too much danger from damp skeletons.
Jahmeen glanced my way. ‘When the bones rest uneasy it means the djinn are coming – from the empty places.’
‘Djinn?’ Stories of magic lamps, jolly fellows in silk pantaloons, and the granting of three wishes sprung to mind. ‘Are they really as bad as the dead trying to eat us?’
‘Worse.’ Jahmeen looked away, seeming less an angry young man and more a scared boy. ‘Much, much worse.’
3
‘So, about these djinn…’ We’d travelled no more than two miles and somehow it was daytime among the dunes, scorching hot, blinding, miserable as always. As we left the time-river rather than hasten into the next day
we seemed to slip back into the one we’d escaped. The sun actually rose in the west in a reversal of the sunset we’d witnessed many hours before. The feeling was decidedly unsettling, and given my recent experiences ‘unsettling’ is no gentle word! ‘Tell me more.’ I didn’t really want to know any more about the djinn, but if the Dead King was sending more servants after the key I should at least know what I was running away from.
‘Creatures of invisible scorching fire,’ Mahood said on my right.
‘They will be drawn to the Builders’ Sun.’ Jahmeen on my left. They had bracketed me the whole journey, presumably to stop me talking to their sisters.
‘God made three creatures with the power of thought,’ Sheik Malik called back to us. ‘The angels, men, and djinn. The greatest of all the djinn, Shaytan, defied Allah and was cast down.’ The sheik slowed his mount to draw closer. ‘There are many djinn that dance in the desert but these are the lesser kind. In this part of the Sahar there is just one grand djinn. Him we should fear.’
‘You’re telling me Satan is coming for us?’ I scanned the dune tops.
‘No.’ Sheik Malik flashed a white line of teeth. ‘He lives in the deep Sahar where men cannot abide.’
I slumped in my saddle at that.
‘This is just a cousin of his.’ And with that the sheik urged his camel on toward the Ha’tari riding point.
The ragged caravan continued on, winding its way through the dunes, limited to the pace of the walking wounded, variously burned by the light of the Builders’ Sun, broken by the blast that reached us minutes later, and torn by the bones of men long dead, emerging from the sands.
I hunched over my malodorous steed, swaying with the motion, sweating in my robes and willing away the miles between us and the safety of Hamada’s walls. Somehow I knew we wouldn’t make it. Perhaps just speaking about the djinn had sealed our fate. Speak of the devil, as it were.