“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 offbetween 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 meIwas 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. Hewhirled 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.
