6 Karim #2
Sita was dozing in the shade of the peak when he returned, Behkai curled beside her, keeping watch.
“Wake up, sena,” Karim said. “We don’t need Aya’s tribe after all. I can see the lost city. It’s south of here.”
The princess’s face lit up in a way that made Karim’s traitorous heart leap. “That’s wonderful! Let’s go!”
He hadn’t really seen it, of course. But fear had grabbed hold of him and Karim dared not speak the truth. If he and Setnakht were connected in some way, how deep did that connection go? If Karim could see the pharaoh’s memories, did that mean the monster could see his?
Karim rubbed his hand on his robes, feeling as if he had touched something foul, and together, he and Sita set off toward the Red Desert.
***
It was early evening by the time they reached the place where the sand gradually turned from gold to red. They hiked up a steep rise, pausing halfway to catch their breath.
Sita was drinking from her waterskin when she stopped and cocked her head. “Did you hear something?”
Karim listened. “Not me, sena. It’s probably another herd of addax passing through.”
They pressed on. When they finally arrived at the top, rosy-cheeked and streaming with sweat, Karim peered over the edge of the ridge and was faced with an extraordinary sight.
Below them, built at the bottom of a vast, crescent-shaped valley, was a crumbling Khetaran city.
It looked to be about the size of a large village, but in its heyday, it must have been as glorious as Thonis itself.
About a hundred mud-brick houses—many in various stages of collapse—congregated around what had once been a lengthy courtyard, which over a millennia had become a wilderness of palm trees and overgrown shrubs.
The courtyard led through several gateways, their doors long since broken and turned to dust. Beyond the final gateway was a grand, flat-topped structure supported by towering columns that still retained the shadows of once-vivid paintings. A palace, perhaps, or a temple.
Or maybe both.
Alongside the palace, Karim spied a cluster of verdant trees and ground cover surrounding a dark, telltale glitter.
An oasis! That must be the water source the man spoke of in my vision.
A massive statue stood guard to the left of the palace’s arched entrance.
Even from a distance, Karim could see the statue had suffered significant damage from the elements.
Its arm, held out in a welcoming gesture, was severed at the wrist, and one of its tall, blunted ears had fallen from its head.
Still, Karim had no trouble distinguishing who it was.
“A red desert for a red god,” he said, echoing Setnakht’s words.
Sita clasped her hands in amazement. “The House of Set,” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe we found it!”
Behkai’s tall ears perked with interest, and he sniffed the air before loping down the other side of the ridge toward the abandoned city.
“Hey!” Karim called.
Sita lifted her robes to follow, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Come on! What are you waiting for?” She dashed down the hill, leaving a cloud of red dust in her wake.
Karim shook his head in annoyance. “Oh, nothing,” he muttered to himself, trudging after them. “Nothing at all, sena. No reason to worry about traps, curses, venomous snakes…”
“Hurry up!”
“…unstable rocks, scorpions…”
It was cooler at the bottom of the valley, where the vegetation breathed moisture into the air, and the landscape shielded them from the khamsin wind. It was quiet too. Eerily quiet.
The mud-brick houses at the outskirts of Perset were the worst off—most were nothing more than a few crumbling walls, and none still had a roof.
But as they got closer to the city center, the condition of the structures improved significantly.
There, some of the homes were nearly whole and looked quite habitable.
“It’s incredible that no one has settled here,” Sita remarked. “Perhaps the remote location has allowed it to be overlooked by travelers.”
Karim was inclined to agree. “If we hadn’t been searching for it, we might have walked right by.” He gazed around in wonder. “What the Anen wouldn’t give for a place like this! A city with ready-made homes and an oasis, safe from raiders and prying eyes!”
Behkai walked with his nose to the ground, unusually alert. Then without warning, he looked up, barked, and took off between the houses at a sprint.
“Hey! Don’t run off!” Karim called, before being distracted by something on the ground ahead.
At first, he thought it was an animal, but as he got closer, Karim saw it was a brown blanket writhing in the breeze. He bent to pick it up. Confused, he asked Sita, “Does this look a thousand years old to you?”
She shook her head. “Behkai?” she called, a note of alarm in her voice. “Behkai! Come!”
Karim examined the blanket. It was soft and small, as if for a child. “Someone must have found this place before us, sena.”
In the distance, Behkai yelped.
Karim and Sita froze.
When the dog didn’t return, Sita whispered, “I think they’re still here.”
Karim dropped the blanket with a curse and tore off after Behkai. If anyone’s hurt that fool dog, I’ll kill them myself…
Sita trailed behind him, hurling quiet recriminations at his back. “Will you slow down? You told me I was being reckless, and now you’re running straight into a trap!”
Karim didn’t slow but was forced to stop at a crossroads. Half a dozen tumbledown houses were tightly clustered around a courtyard that was littered with scrub bushes and fallen rocks. Behkai could have gone in any direction.
“You check over there, and I’ll go—” Karim started, but when he turned to face the princess, she wasn’t there. “Sita?”
Nothing.
“Sita!”
His heart raced. Someone was picking them off one by one. He stood at the center of the courtyard, turning in circles, attempting to catch sight of what hunted them before it got him too.
He heard a soft rustling to his left. A shadow moved. He whirled but saw no one. The sound came again, behind him this time. He turned, feeling like a cornered beast.
“I have gold, priceless artifacts,” he said to the empty courtyard. “Release the girl and the dog, and they’ll be yours. Or else—”
Something shot out of the shadows and struck him behind his knees, sending Karim crashing to the ground.
When he looked up, a tall middle-aged woman stood before him, the shaft of a spear gripped in her hand.
She was barefoot and wore a short gray schenti and sleeveless tunic.
A single braid of silver hair hung over one shoulder, and her weathered, olive-skinned face regarded him with the calm passivity of a hunter.
Between the color of her hair and the strange lightness of her eyes, she reminded Karim of a ghost.
“Or else what?” a man’s voice said.
Karim scrambled to his feet. A moment later, an older portly man with a thick beard and dark hair stepped out from behind one of the houses. He was unarmed, but his glare was weapon enough.
“Or else I won’t stop until you’ve paid for what you’ve done,” Karim said grimly.
Suddenly, others materialized from a dozen hiding places: from behind boulders, from atop half-caved roofs, from inside ancient homes. They were mostly men, but there were a few women too. Karim was surrounded.
“All of us?” the old man asked.
Anger—and that new uncanny energy inside him—made Karim brave. “I’ll fight until my last breath,” he declared.
The old man narrowed his eyes, then loosed a dry chuckle. “This shrub has thorns, does he not?” Some of the others tittered in response. “Put away your prickles, sen. The girl and pup are alive and well.”
A young man emerged from the crowd, dragging a furious Sita along with him. She was bound and gagged, but otherwise unharmed. A woman led Behkai by a rope looped around his neck. The dog, unlike the princess, looked utterly carefree.
“Why didn’t you bark?” Karim huffed at the dog.
“I gave him a big piece of meat,” the woman answered.
Karim sighed. He was relieved, but still uncertain about the situation they’d bungled into. Who are these people? he wondered. The lilt in their voices was familiar, as was the expression the old man had used.
Put away your prickles, sen.
“You’re Red Landers, aren’t you?” he said.
The old man crossed his arms.
Karim took that as a yes. “But no tribe settles this far east. The Anen would have heard of you. I would have known—”
“No, you wouldn’t,” the old man broke in. “We’ve lived in this city a long, long time, sen. And we’ve gone to great pains to erase ourselves from memory.”
Much like Setnakht, Karim thought. I wonder if they know anything about him… “But why? Why would you want to be forgotten?”
The question brought forth a wave of bitter muttering from the crowd.
“Why?” the old man repeated. “Because our ancestors grew tired of the raids, the uncertainty, the constant fear of death. So they journeyed across the Iteru and beyond the reach of the river people and happened upon this place. We never went back. No one returned to the Red Lands to tell the other tribes what became of us. Perhaps they thought we perished in the desert.”
A name bobbed to the surface of Karim’s mind. “You’re the Hudjefa, aren’t you? I’ve only ever heard of you in the old stories.”
“All the better for us,” the old man said with a hard smile. “We left the outer edges of the city empty, reserving the homes at the center for ourselves. That way, our sentries have time to alert us to any intruders who might stumble in. Although you two are the first in many years.”
“What happened to the other intruders?”
“They were scoundrels and brigands, their only intent to kidnap, steal, and destroy. We dealt with them in the only language they understood.” He eyed Karim meaningfully. “Why are you here, sen?”
Karim raised his palms in a gesture of peace. “We came only to explore this place, hey? To search for information about the people who built it. If you give us a few hours to look around, we promise to leave and never return.”
The old man glanced at Karim’s pack, bursting with treasures. “Those don’t look like the possessions of a simple explorer, sen. Those look like the spoils of a thief.”
Karim opened his mouth to deny the claims, but he couldn’t because they were true.
A hairy brute with a scar across his cheek stepped forward, a stone mace gripped in one hand. “Enough talk, Elyas. Don’t give the sheep a name, lest you pity them when it comes time for slaughter.”
Sita shouted into the gag, struggling in her captor’s arms.
“Wait a minute,” Karim said, his pulse racing once more. “I thought you said we were safe here!”
Elyas looked pained.
“They’re no different from the others,” the brute said to the old man. “It doesn’t matter that he’s a Red Lander, nor that the other one’s a woman. They both have mouths to speak. Either one of them could condemn us all.”
“That’s not true!” Karim protested. “I swear on my life we won’t speak a word to anyone!”
“Elyas…” the brute urged.
The old man sighed. “Zev is right,” he said. “All it would take is one slip of the tongue, and you could bring destruction upon our heads. I am responsible for the lives of these people, and I cannot allow that to happen.”
The crowd drew back, seeming to not want to be a part of what was coming.
Karim couldn’t believe his ears. “You wouldn’t kill us in cold blood. You wouldn’t!”
Elyas gazed at Karim with regret. “You should never have come.”
The brute with the mace approached him, and another man came up behind Karim, tied his wrists behind his back, and forced him to his knees.
“Please, sen,” Karim begged. “Don’t do this. Can’t you see that we are all brothers?”
Elyas looked away.
Behkai began to bark, straining at the rope around his neck, and the shadow of the mace fell over Karim’s face as it was lifted high in the air.
“Wait!”
A small figure pushed through the crowd and appeared at Elyas’s side. “Wait,” she said again. “Sabba, tell Zev to stop!”
Karim squinted at the girl. “Aya?”
Elyas wrapped a protective arm around the girl’s shoulders. “How do you know my granddaughter’s name?”
Zev, the brute with the mace, hesitated. Elyas gestured for him to stand down while he waited for Karim to answer.
“We came across the girl in the desert,” Karim said hurriedly.
“She was alone. She wouldn’t say what she was doing, but we guessed that she’d run away from home.
Not long after we found her, we were caught in a powerful sandstorm, and if it wasn’t for her”—he nodded at Sita—“your granddaughter would have been lost.”
Elyas’s brow furrowed. “Is this true, Aya?” he asked the girl.
Aya dropped her head and nodded.
“You told me you were out exploring. Why would you run away?”
The girl didn’t reply.
Elyas grumbled into his beard, clearly disconcerted by this new development.
“Elyas?” Zev said impatiently. “What say you?”
All eyes turned to the old man. After a long moment, he shook his head. “I cannot condemn those who have delivered my beloved from the jaws of death. The mark on my soul—on all our souls—would never be erased. We shall not be defined by such an act. They will be spared.”
The crowd seemed to exhale with relief. While his wrists were unbound, Karim sent thanks to whatever gods happened to be listening.
Sita tore the gag from her mouth the moment she was released and ran to him.
For an instant, Karim thought she might embrace him—but she stopped short, awkwardly patting him on the shoulder.
“I’m…glad to see you’re all right,” she said.
Karim regarded her—filthy, windblown, breathless. She was so different from the prim woman cloaked in black whom he’d met at the Thonis market not so long ago. He felt a burning desire to touch her, to wrap his arms around her waist and pull her close. “You too, sena,” he said instead.
“But what will we do if they return west and tell everyone about us?” Zev shouted over the chatter. “What if they come for us with an army? What then? Are their lives so much worthier than ours?”
Elyas held up a hand for quiet. “I said their lives were spared. I did not say they were free.”
Sita turned to the old man. “What do you mean, not free?”
“I mean, dear girl, whomsoever comes to this city stays here. You’re one of us now. Today and for the rest of your days.”