The White Elephant
Aranthir XII
Night in the desert was as cool and dark as the days were bright and hot. The silver-white sliver of a waning moon shed faint light on a camp in the deep desert. Pavilions of silk shone softly with torchlight, rustled by a chill night breeze. Yet the breeze was appreciated by thirty men, sweating despite the cold as they grunted and groaned over their shovels in the hard, dry earth.
Above their heads towered an ancient ruin of time-worn sandstone and wind scoured bronze. The face of some long-forgotten king stared down on them as they toiled in the earth, all under the watchful eyes of Emir Khalid of Hurran, a jovial man of forty whose eager brown eyes stared down a hawk-like nose as he awaited his long-anticipated find. The emir, attended by a throng of servants, sipped impatiently from his gilded wine cup.
In the deep pit beneath him, the laborers steadily filled baskets of excavated earth and sent them up to be emptied outside the camp, slowly carving their wound in the earth deeper and deeper as their master waited and drank. Emir Khalid set aside another emptied cup and rubbed his hands together with excitement, blowing on them to keep warm in the black night. There came the sound of a shovel scraping stone, and a wave of excitement went through the onlookers. The foreman called up from the pit that they were nearly finished.
He looked around, then frowned with confusion.
"Where are my companions?" he wondered aloud, and a comely serving boy replied "The foreigners are sparring, while the witch lurks in her tent. The elf sits atop a pillar like a hawk."
Emir Khalid smiled, following the boy's outstretched hand to a leaning pillar at the edge of the camp. There, perched ten paces above the desert, was his servant Aranthir, the elven half-blood. The half-elf's emerald eyes could be seen to glitter in the weak moonlight, his short brown hair tucked under a richly dyed silk keffiyeh as he surveyed the desert. On one hip he wore a bow of horn and sinew and slightly curved steel saber, at the other a quiver of arrows and a long knife. Like a sentinel, or the regal desert eagle, he rotated his head back and forth, surveying the featureless desert that stretched many leagues toward an unseen horizon.
Khalid rose from his divan and strode to the base of the pillar, two bodyguards in gilded mail following at a distance.
"What do you hope to see from up there?" called Khalid. "The full moon is but a candle to the sun, and this moon is a candle to a full moon."
The half-elf did not answer at first, his eyes still on the desert. They caught a ray of starlight and glittered again, and not for the first time Khalid marveled at the ability of those of elven blood to see in the dark. Then his hired servant turned those beautiful fae eyes upon the emir.
"Something is out there," said Aranthir in soft, melodic tones that carried down from the tall pillar. Khalid turned to peer into the blackness with alarm. Behind him, he heard his two bodyguards shift uncomfortably, and the soft "psst" of them surreptitiously summoning more of their number.
"What do you see?" asked Khalid, moving up beside the pillar. He saw nothing in the dark desert but had come to trust the half-elf's vision.
"Nothing yet," Aranthir replied, "but the desert hides many dangers."
"Bandits?" suggested Khalid. "Or just wild beasts? Lions hunt by day, but jackals prowl the night."
"It is no lion or jackal," replied Aranthir. Looking up, Khalid noticed that the half-elf had not readied any weapon, and his hands were placed calmly on his knees. He felt his concern fade. If any threat were near, the half-elf would be wielding a bow or saber.
"Bandits will not dare to threaten us," Khalid reassured his favored servant. He looked behind him to his guards, now numbering ten, all in gilded mail and armed with bows, spears, and scimitars. This small detachment was a mere fraction of the men he had brought with him, all lavishly equipped and trained at his own expense. There was not a bandit gang in all the world that could overwhelm them. "Come down from there, the ruin is almost unearthed."
Again, Aranthir turned to look down on the emir, and this time he frowned.
"I must caution against this course of action once again," the half-elf said sternly, and the emir laughed.
"As you have done many times before. We had nothing to fear, Aranthir. You heard Carella."
"Heard but not believed. She pursues her own goals, Lordship, but sees you and I as mere pawns in her game."
"She has served me loyally for many years," the emir countered.
"Time is different to a sorcerer." Aranthir swung his legs over the edge of the pillar, preparing to descend.
"Or an elf," Khalid replied meaningfully. Aranthir nodded, then shimmied down the pillar to alight beside his employer. "Come, they will soon be ready."
They made their way back to the pit, where the emir's laborers had cleared the dirt away to reveal a floor of sandstone. In the middle of the floor was a square stone rising slightly higher than the others, which Aranthir recognized as the entrance to a well. At his side, the emir beamed.
"I pray to the gods that this is the right ruin," he said excitedly.
"It is," replied a woman, and both Aranthir and the emir turned to regard her. Emerging from the torch-lit sea of tents was a pale woman with piercing sky-blue eyes. Her gown's hood was thrown back so that her long, lustrous hair framed her face, dark in the night's gloom but glowing a deep, rich brown in the torchlight. She was beautiful, with full lips and a flawless chest framed in her bodice of dark blue. She strode confidently to join them, looking down into the pit and plucking anxiously at her thick lips with a delicate hand studded with jeweled rings of gold.
As she neared them, Aranthir smelled a strong scent of perfume mixed with indigo spice.
"You are sure," Aranthir said evenly, and the sorceress nodded. "You have been wrong before." He did not relish the memory of their last attempt to find the prize she so obsessively sought.
"As were you," she countered, stopping at the emir's side. She turned to Khalid. "We should descend into the ruin at once."
"Patience, my dear Carella," the emir replied with a gentle smile. "It has lain undisturbed for millennia, as you say. Another half hour won't hurt."
Khalid called for the rest of his guards, along with rope and lanterns for those who would descend into the ruin. His laborers bent to lift the heavy stone door, and Aranthir caught the emir by the arm.
"Tomb-robbing is a grave crime against the gods and the buried dead alike," the half-elf cautioned. Khalid smiled and made to reply, but Carella cut him off.
"It is no tomb," the sorceress informed them haughtily. "This is a place of binding, not a place of rest."
"Binding of what?" Aranthir asked, now even more concerned than before. "Of your djinn?"
"It is unimportant," Carella replied, but Aranthir remained unconvinced.
"It is important to those who will be going down there, like myself."
"And myself." She turned to look at Aranthir and laughed. "You are surprised? I would not spend years on this hunt to let someone else take the last steps. I will share the perils with you, half-elf."
"Very well," Aranthir conceded, "but the dangers still bear some thought. If this is a prison, have you given any thought to what we might release by going inside it? Or even by simply opening the door?"
He looked into the pit again, where the laborers, heedless of the argument above, had pried the door stone loose and lifted it out of the well. Now a great black eye in the sandstone floor stared up at him and Aranthir sighed.
"Perhaps nothing," Carella said breezily, throwing back her cloak to show the arcane implements she had hung from her belt--and the lovely white chest, Aranthir noted. "Or perhaps the bound soul of a long-dead sorcerer king will come rushing forth, hurling curses and spells of utter ruin. The tomes were old and incomplete; this may be the prison of the wizard who first cast the Black Sun."
She turned a teasing smile on Aranthir, then busied herself with her book of spells, terminating the conversation. Aranthir choked back a bitter retort, then turned as a group of the emir's guards arrived by the edge of the pit. The first two were tall, broad-shouldered men in mail over their long robes. They looked alike enough to be cousins, or even brothers, both sporting close-cut beards, shoulder-length golden hair, bossed round shields quartered in two colors, and straight, double edged blades on their belts.
These men were Leifr and Gulstuf, two Svigan mercenaries hired by the emir for their bravery in delving desert ruins where the locals, hearts weakened by old wives' tales, feared to tread.
Third was Janguld, Aranthir's fellow mercenary and traveling companion. He too wore his red hair to the shoulders, along with a bushy mustache. He wore the dress of the local desert dwellers, along with a cuirass and mail skirt. At his hip, he carried a wheellock pistol and a broadsword. In his boot, Aranthir spied the familiar hilt of a knife, for Janguld was a veteran mercenary and never had enough weapons within reach.
The three men marched to the edge of the spit and stared down. Janguld let out a low whistle, then stretched his arms and spit into the dirt. He had been sparring with the Svigans, and judging by the marks on their armor, getting the better of them.
"This is it?" he asked, and Carella nodded absently.
"Make yourselves ready to enter," Emir Khalid ordered amiably, then snapped his fingers to his servants. Two youths stepped forward and offered a bundle of weapons to Aranthir. The half-elf traded his bow and saber for two pistols and his trusted longsword--weapons he misliked in the wide-open desert but expected would prove useful in the close confines of the ruin below. Next they dressed him in a jack coat and mail skirt, topped off with a domed helm adorned with a gilded spike. Now as armored as any of the emir's guards, he dismissed the pages with a wave, checked his weapons, and took a deep breath.
