Troy Denning - The Cerulean Storm

Rikus also heard something that disturbed him more: the drone of human voices, no doubt coming from a faro plantation that lay on the other side of the butte. The words were muffled by distance and the high bluff. Still, the mul could tell that many of the farmers were yelling, some even screaming. As he listened, a loud, sonorous laugh drowned out the human voices, and he knew that something was terribly wrong at Pauper’s Hope.

Rikus took his hand away from his sword and faced the inhuman figure at his side. “Do you hear that, Magnus?”

Though Magnus called himself an elf, he did not resemble one. Born in the magical shadows of the Pristine Tower, he had been transformed into something that looked more akin to a giant gorak than an elf. He had a hulking, thick-limbed body that was covered by a knobby hide and had ivory-clawed toes and hands the size of bucklers. His face was all muzzle, with an enormous, sharp-toothed mouth and huge round eyes set on opposite sides of his head.

“The boom? It wasn’t thunder,” Magnus answered.

“It doesn’t take a windsinger to know that,” Rikus replied. “What about the voices? Use your magic to find out what’s going on.”

Magnus turned his elegantly pointed ears toward the butte and listened. After a moment, he shook his head. “The butte’s too high for me to understand their words,” he said. “Even a windsinger cannot listen through rock.”

Rikus cursed. He and Magnus were due at a meeting of the Tyrian Council of Advisors by midmorning. Normally, it would not bother him to make the council wait, but today he and Sadira were asking for a legion of warriors to take to Samarah. Being late would not put the advisors in a mood to grant his request.

A damson-colored shadow fell across the road. The mul looked up to see a cloud of ivory dust drifting over the summit of the bluff. Although the wind carried most of the undulating mass out over the dry lake, some of the powder fell toward the road like a soft rain.

Rikus held out a hand and caught a light dusting in his palm. The stuff was the color of straw, with the silky texture of finely ground flour. Rikus touched his tongue to the powder. It tasted dry and bland.

“This is faro!”

The mul held his hand out toward the windsinger.

“It looks freshly ground,” Magnus observed. “The boom we heard could have been a collapsing silo. That would explain all the excitement.”

“I don’t think so,” Rikus said, remembering the deep laugh that he had heard over the concerned voices. “We’d better have a look.”

The mul dismounted.

“Is that really necessary?” Magnus protested. “When she contacted me last night, Sadira made it clear that she wants you present when the meeting starts.”

Rikus scowled at this. “She should have thought about that before she sent us to inspect the outpost at the mine,” he growled. “She’ll just have to handle the council on her own until we arrive.”

He led his kank off the road and tethered it to a boulder.

Magnus sighed in resignation. “At least let me send word that you’ll be late.”

“After we see what’s happening,” Rikus said. “It’ll be better if we can tell her how long we’ll be.”

The mul led the way up the butte, clambering over sharp-edged rocks that had already grown hot in the morning sun. The boulder field soon gave way to a talus slope dotted with quiverlike clusters of arrow weed. Magnus grabbed whole handfuls of the yellow stalks and used them to pull himself up the steep pitch. As the canes snapped between his thick fingers, a tangy, foul-smelling odor filled the air. Rikus could only look on in envy and scramble up the loose gravel on all fours. His skin was not as tough as the windsinger’s, and the stems of the plants were lined with razor-sharp ridges.

When they reached the cliffs near the top of the butte, it was Rikus’s turn to gloat. He crawled up the vertical crags easily, while Magnus cursed and groaned with the effort of pulling his heavier body up the precipice. At times, the windsinger had to use his fist to beat a suitable handhold into the rock face.

Upon climbing onto the summit, Rikus found himself looking out over a wide, shallow canyon flanked on one side by this butte and on the other by the ashen crags of the Ringing Mountains. The orange soil was speckled by thickets of gray-green tamarisk and spindly catclaw trees, while crests of dark basalt wound across the valley floor like the shattered vestiges of some ancient and long-forgotten rampart.

The highest crest in the valley stood as tall as a small mountain and was known locally as Rasda’s Wall. Tyr’s newest relief farm, Pauper’s Hope, lay behind its bulk, completely hidden save for the green stain of a faro orchard spilling from behind the immense barrier. The field was made verdant, Rikus knew, by the waters of a deep well that the new farmers had laboriously chiseled through a hundred feet of granite bedrock.

More than a dozen figures were splashing down the shallow ditches of the faro field. Though the distance was too great for Rikus to tell the race or sex of any of the people, he could see that they were running hard, occasionally glancing over their shoulders at something hidden from view by Rasda’s Wall.

“I was right. There’s some kind of trouble.” Rikus looked down at Magnus. The windsinger was only halfway up the cliff, hanging by a single hand thrust into a narrow fissure. I’m going ahead,” the mul said. “Follow me as soon as you can.”

Without waiting for a response, the mul drew his sword and rushed down the gentle side of the butte. As before, a tumult of sounds filled his ears: gravel crunching beneath his feet, the hot wind sizzling through the brush, the alarmed hiss of a lizard scrambling for cover. Now that the high butte did not stand between him and Pauper’s Hope, the drone of the farmers’ voices came to Rikus more clearly. Some yelled for help, while others called the names of missing loved ones. Most simply screamed, their cries hoarse with terror.

Rikus heard other voices that worried him more. These were much louder than those of the farmers, with deep timbres and booming laughs like the one he had heard earlier. After dodging past half a dozen clumps of arrow weed, the mul reached the valley floor. He was close enough now to see that the fleeing farmers still wore the paupers’ rags in which they had dressed as Tyrian beggars, and they were sunburned and haggard from the struggle of adjusting to life outside the city.

From behind the fleeing paupers reverberated a sharp command, as loud as thunder: “Come back, you little vermin!”

At the shoulder of the ridge, where the crag was not as high as the rest of Rasda’s Wall, a pair of huge heads appeared above the crest. The size of small kanks, the heads had shaggy brows and greasy braids of matted hair hanging off them. They had eyes so huge that, even from an arrow’s flight away, Rikus could see that they had brown irises. Their teeth resembled long, yellow stalactites. One of the figures had a hooked nose as large as a kank mandible, while a pair of plump, bulbous lips distinguished the other’s face.

“Giants!” Rikus hissed, hardly able to believe what he saw.

Though the mul had never before seen a giant of the Silt Islands, he did not doubt that he was looking at two now. They were as tall as gatehouses and twice as broad, with huge barrel chests and limbs as thick as an ironwood. As they walked, they crushed faro trees and smashed irrigation ditches, leaving a series of small ponds behind where their feet had sunk into the ground.

Rikus didn’t understand what the giants were doing here. Their race lived near Balic, in the long estuary of dust that twined its way inland from the Sea of Silt. From what he had heard, they were an aloof people, using the dust sea to insulate their island homes from visitors. Occasionally they journeyed to the Balican peninsula to sell their hair, which made excellent ropes, or to raid caravans and farms. But he had never heard of them traveling inland as far as Tyr.