Clayton Emery - Star of Cursrah

Whooping, crying, keening, laughing, people caught coins, juggled them, reveled in their fatty cold feel, showed their comrades, stuffed pockets and pouches, and drooled over exotic jewelry and artifacts. Amber noted even the White Flame seemed pleased. With her head held high, and her veil in place, she might have been a queen.

"Go ahead, my faithful ones," the bandit leader exclaimed. "Take it all! It's yours!"

Even Amber marveled at the cascade of wealth. She'd glimpsed treasures in her tiara's visions, but dim pictures couldn't compare with this tumbling haystack of gold, precious stones, and ancient gifts. Hakiim and Reiver were breathless.

The thief muttered, "There's more than they can haul away. This tribe would need ten trips to steal a fraction of it."

"And it's only one chamber," gushed Hakiim. "Amber said there were dozens of chambers like it, and none of this is even stealing… I mean, it's free for the taking. Everyone who's ever even heard of this city is dead."

Except the mummy, thought Amber, who's partly alive, or undead, or hung in some awful limbo between.

Nomads dug deep. Out came antique jewelry, gem-studded books, a gilded bird cage, a hand-carved staff topped with ivory, an ornamental helmet. Even non-precious items, such as a turquoise jar stippled with black marks that Amber recognized. Standing on the floor and buried in coins was a queer framework bristling with tin horns and flutes and tubes to conduct water. Not understanding the latter contraption, the nomads twisted off the instruments and bladders to dig out the gems beneath.

"What's that thing?" asked Hakiim.

"The clepsydra. Part of it." To puzzled glances, Amber explained, "The wonderful music-making engine I told you about. When it's all together, you pour water into the top, and I don't know, bladders squeeze so horns and flutes play tunes."

Both men shook their heads, and Hakiim asked, "How could the ancient ones build incredible engines that we don't comprehend? How did our ancestors forget such valuable knowledge?"

"No one wrote it down," stated Amber, "so the knowledge vanished. Like the whole history of Cursrah… lost to the wind."

If I get out of here alive, Amber silently vowed, I'll write Cursrah's history and see it's not lost.

Amber saw Reiver flick his eyes in two directions. The bandits had clearly forgotten their prisoners. The three could have slunk away if the White Flame hadn't stood beside.

Taking a deep breath, Amber asked humbly, "Qayadin, we've found you treasure. May we go?"

"Go?" Whirling, the White Flame doffed her veil, a tactic to shock her audience, and said, "Are you mad? Think me a scatterbrain? This cannot be all the empire's treasure. You'll uncover the rest, or I'll flog the skin off your back!"

Amber was tired of ingratitude, dire threats and torment, and for being punished when she'd done nothing to this woman. Still, she curbed her tongue, saying only, "A dozen more vaults line this corridor, Great Chief-"

"I need magicks!" The Flame's rasp was as dry and scratchy as an adder's belly. "Gold will buy the army I need, but my enemies employ sorcerers who erect mighty shields and wards. I need ancient magic, powerful and unknown, to crush the stinking carcasses of my enemies into paste!"

She rattled on while nomads scooped loot and Amber and her friends feigned interest. All Amber could think was to get to the mummy and learn its otherworldly purpose-and its identity.

How to escape…?

Her eyes fell on the blueware jar streaked with black marks and before she'd fully thought out a plan, she blurted, "That's powerful magic. A genie jar! I saw it introduced at the princess's ball."

"Genie? By the pate of the Pretender! Hand it hither, quickly, you fools."

Transformed by promises of revenge, the White Flame's hands shook as she squatted over the jar and attacked the beeswax seal with her dagger.

"A genie," the White Flame muttered. "If but one of these is entrapped-"

At the first leak of fresh air, the jar's lid blew off and shattered against the ceiling. In the blink of an eye the corridor was obscured as a howling dervish boiled from the jar like a monstrous swarm of wasps.

At the first hiss, Amber spun and grabbed hold of Hakiim and Reiver; she alone knew the fury about to be unleashed.

Trapped in a narrow tunnel, at full power, with no sphere of protection to contain it, the wind walker raged like a tornado. Boiling upward in a tower of terror, the elemental struck the ceiling, mushroomed sideways and bounced off the walls, billowed downward and ricocheted off the floor, and so on, growing all the time. To those who slit their eyes enough to see, the whirling cloud seemed like a thousand rearing, hissing, spitting, angry cobras.

Each time the collective elemental hit a surface, a hundred counterparts spun off. The hundred hundred smaller billows engorged themselves on raw energy until they struck yet another surface and split and grew again. The roaring dervish threatened to flood all the tunnels below Cursrah before finding an exit.

To the humans cowering and clutching the stone floor, being trapped inside the elemental's storm was like being shaken in a bottle. Amber and her friends were whip-stung in a hundred places as the zephyrs picked up sand and pebbles and hurled it like hail. Their skin was peppered raw, their hair and clothes were filled with sand, their clothing was drummed until fibers unraveled and leather abraded.

The furious pace increased as each new portion of the elemental storm set its neighbors spinning faster. In seconds the tornado doubled, redoubled, and quadrupled. Noise was a howling, screaming, shrieking tumult so loud the listeners' skulls felt full of jangling metal. They discovered the air really was full of flying metal, as the whirlwind whisked up heavy gold coins and flung them everywhere. A silver coin dinged Amber's knuckles and drew blood. The walls were rapped a thousand times by metal hail, until Amber feared the living storm would flay them to bones.

She couldn't see, didn't dare unscrunch her eyes lest she be blinded. Calling to her friends was useless, for she couldn't outshout a hurricane. Even thumping on their backs didn't send a message, for they assumed it was abuse from the storm.

Finally Amber just grabbed cloth and pulled, tugging her friends along bodily. Eager to go, they crawled. Reiver kept his shoulder pressed against the stone wall as a guide. Hakiim hung back to pull Amber along, but she punched him to get moving.

Together, like a hail-hammered, six-legged turtle, they crawled toward freedom. Winds whipped their bodies, stole their breath, chipped their skin, and yanked at their clothing until they were choked and tangled. The creeping journey seemed to take forever, and yet they made no progress. Amber ached from fighting even to remain on her hands and knees.

Suppose, she fretted, suppose I've unleashed too much? Suppose the wind walker expands to fill the tunnels, then bursts free of the ground? Could it fill the entire valley of Cursrah, whipping and whirling and screaming until the very stones and bedrock were ground to powder? Was such a thing possible, even for magic? She hoped not, because she and her friends would be atoms of blood and bone long before it happened.

Dragging herself along the wall, Amber bumped into Hakiim. He'd stopped, worn down, desperate for rest. They'd die if they stopped, Amber was sure. With bleeding hands, she clutched Hakiim's collar, then thought to check Reiver ahead. He'd stopped too, huddled like a whipped dog, hugging the floor. Unable to see or hear, and barely able to feel the pounding hurricane, Amber dragged both young men after her, around and around the endless spiral. Many times her straining hands slipped free, but always she caught cloth and tugged them on. By willpower more than strength, she got her friends moving again, staggering as they crawled, blundering down seeming miles of stone floor, with the whirlwind shrieking at them every inch.