A Day In The Siwathi Desert

A Day in the Siwathi Desert
Shimmering heat, visible waves seeming to come from the ground itself, made seeing difficult for Khamal, not that there was anything to see. Golden sand, outcrops of yellow stone, dirty gravel- and nothing. He stumbled on, remembering what his bapu told him about keeping the sun on his left… or was it his right? Damned featureless hell-hole. In Wathisia they at least tried to cultivate the dunes, made an effort. It was as though these Siwathi didn’t want to make their land better, like they kept it barren for a reason! Hadn’t they heard of magic? They supposedly had magicians, one heard stories…

Gods, it was hot. Khamal was tempted to rip off the burnoose he wore, get the sweaty hood off of his suffering head, but again, his bapu’s lessons kept him from doing so. Perhaps if his bapu had been there at that cursed meeting with the smugglers, things might not have come to pass so. Siwath didn’t have much that the rest of the world wanted, maybe that was why the sand-blasted zendiqi were left it. All Khamal wanted was a few desert relics, they were always digging them up from the dunes- and they were alamut relics, Deist artifacts for Tomas’ sake! The northerners in Dal’malus were crazy for war-pieces of any kind… a pitted blade with a mark from the Twenty-Seven would fetch top dollar, Khamal could claim he took it from the quivering hand of a zendiqi mahlana and the gold- but that was all in the sandpit, now. Seven Blixian Money-guarders to keep an eye on a ragged pack of Buktu steel-sniffers, everything would have gone well if the numistian fools wouldn’t have taken the bowshots at that miser-jackal, that jittering scavenger… But how were they to know it was the lead of a hunting pack for an anpur noble?

Khamal shook his hand at the sky, at the sun just past its zenith, on a long, slow slide into afternoon. He still carried his waterskin, and, stubbornly, the sack of Meynoni gold that was to have been the smugglers’ due. The laughter of the guards, the horrified looks of the smugglers, who scattered to their camels… the anpur came over the ridge into the supposedly-hidden dry riverbed in a wave, jackal-headed warriors with slings and strange blades preceding some sort of sand-sled pulled by an enormous blue-black beetle. Like out of some story even his bapu would not have heard in his tent-bed! While his guards fell, their sand and coins falling into the dust like they were always there, Khamal had side-mounted his fine Keshite mare and sped into the desert like Rajuk himself had asked him to dance…

The horse had died two hours after dawn, and that was two hours ago, by Khamal’s reckoning. Now he knew why his ancestors had fled to the Calinsur Mountains, had chased goat and tumble oxen and lived in huts rather than remain in proud exile in this forsaken place plentiful only in sand and things that want to kill you in interesting ways. But Khamal knew he was almost to the river, the Oliti which flows from the Great Sunbright Glacier, Father to lakes and rivers and oceans and oceans of cool water… And water there was. A lovely little pool, situated in the shade of a few worn rocks. People must forage here, for a few cacti stood nearby, and what looked like a crude
hitching post. And… Toma be praised, is that a bird? A noble eagle, like which flies over the Lake of Coins! Khamal stumbled on blistered feet to the shining, improbable pooland it may have been that he tried to drink the substance of the shimmering, oozelike organism that squeezed the life, and the water from him. The coins that sprinkled from his ruptured bag were not lost upon the two zendiqi nomads
that rested in their tent, a dun color so similar to the sands they might be made of it. They would take the water of his body, laid out by the mutarga, the mirage menace, with their dip-poles, and lure it out to take the northerner’s gold.

It would pass the cool of the evening, before they rode on to the Tent City of the Grand Wazir, due in these parts any day now, if the anpur were quiet.

OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a - All text is Open Game Content.