Джефф Мариотт - City Under the Sand

“I’m sure I can spare you sometimes, Mazzax.”

“Very well, then.”

“But if Ruhm gets the shop,” Amoni asked, “then what of you, Aric?”

“I don’t know that the city has suffered from my absence,” Aric said. “And with Ruhm and Mazzax working together, there’ll still be a smith of uncommon skills. So …”

He didn’t finish the sentence, because he didn’t know what the end of it was. His journey had been hard, dangerous, but he’d caught a taste for travel—like Amoni’s, for freedom, he supposed. He had nothing in particular to hold him in Nibenay, and plenty of reasons to leave, like the memories spawned by so many street corners and buildings and neighborhoods. He could always return; he had the closest thing to a family now that he had ever known. The knowledge that they would always take him back gave him the courage to leave them behind.

The barmaid put a mug before him and he drank deep, thankful for the excuse not to speak. He had no idea where he would go. Athas was a big world, full of perils but also splashes of great beauty, and there might be a place in it for a half-elf with an affinity for steel.

He would have to find where that place was.

Searching for it?

Now, that would be an adventure.

JEFF MARIOTTEis the award-winning author of more than forty novels, including the Age of Conan: Marauders trilogy, horror trilogy Missing White Girl, River Runs Red , and Cold Black Hearts , (all as Jeffrey J. Mariotte), The Slab , the Witch Season teen horror quartet, and others, as well as dozens of comic books, notably Desperadoes and Zombie Cop . He’s a co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, and lives in southeastern Arizona on the Flying M Ranch. For more about him, please visit www.jeffmariotte.com.