Return of the Guardian-King by Karen Hancock

Author:Karen Hancock
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

21

Abramm lay belly down on the crest of a dune overlooking the oasis where the Fermikians’ caravan had arrived yesterday. With swift and practiced ease they’d unpacked their camels and thrown up the black-and-white goatskin tents that now scattered the grassy floor of the palm grove. At their midst gleamed a spring-fed pond fringed with cattails. A hand-cranked waterwheel lifted the water into a series of troughs for the camels, while a smaller secondary trough served the slaves.

With free roam of the oasis and virtually ignored by their masters, the hundred or so captives now sprawled about the grass, resting in the shade of the trees, the tents, and even the camels. Smoke from the fire pits wafted from ventilation holes in the tops of the tents, but the pale blue clouds that hung waist-high around the doorways were from the fermikia pipes. A number of the turbaned Fermikians lay up against the bases of the palms, conscious but stupefied. Those within the tents would be no better, and it was the same every day.

He understood now why that route was called the Road of the Unchained. The captives walked unbound because there was no need to chain them. Surrounded by seas of forbidding dunes and endless sunbaked gravel playas, it would take but moments for one unfamiliar with the area to get lost. Even if one knew the way, the sun and the rocks, the frigid nights, and the bone-dry air could and did claim weaker men. As in the Kolki Pass, the bones of those who’d gone before lined the shoulders of the ancient route.

Lifting his eyes from the shining water and the deep purple shade of the trees, Abramm turned to squint westward, where a ridge of hazy blue mountains floated above the sea of undulating dunes that now entirely surrounded him. Those mountains were his point of reference, and every day they grew smaller and fainter while he grew more impatient to win his people free before they pressed any deeper into the wretched sand sea. Already they’d been in it a week, which was far longer than he’d ever intended.

Back in Ru’geruk, townspeople had suggested no one could cross this wasteland and live, but obviously people did. For there lay the road directly ahead of him, its faded gray and iron-red tiles rising from the oasis on the far side and plunging eastward between curving slopes of sand.

He returned his gaze to the gleaming water and licked chapped lips with a dry tongue, looking forward impatiently to Cedric’s return with the water bags.

Rolland crept up beside him. “They’re at the upper end—there by th’ cattails.”

Abramm looked in that direction, but with all the captives robed and turbaned like the Fermikians, it was impossible to tell them apart. “Did you show yourself?”

“Aye. But I dunno if they’ll cooperate. The road’s influence doesn’t seem to have lifted much.”

Abramm glanced at his friend. The big man, like everyone else, wore the desert men’s robes and turbans that they removed from some of the fresher corpses they’d encountered at the start of their journey.

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