her face, and fought her way back up the stairs to the study. Three feet of sand now covered the floor. The Collector's body lay all but obscured, his treasures scattered by the wind and covered over by the same sand that was burying him. Above the din and heave of the storm, Charga heard another sound: the unmistakable whine and split of timber and rock under the weight of tons of displaced desert. There was no time. She lunged through the sand and wrested the Collector's beloved chroniclave from one hand and the precious magical ring from the other as she straightened his limbs and arranged his purple robes over the body. She cleared the staircase again in a dazzling leap as the roof fell in, a huge piece of marble covering one corner of the study, entombing Samor between it and the wall in an instant.
Making warding signs and mumbling fearful prayers to Caelus Nin and the Seven Brass gods, the bewildered people of Sumifa fled before her, making for the cliffs, their chickens and goats squawking and bleating in front of them. Porros's two small sons clung to their nurse, and his wives herded together with the villagers like lost sheep, Sumifa's royalty mingling with its commoners for the first time ever. Charga could not see anything in front of her but the bright parrots sailing overhead like windbome pennants as the villagers dashed across the cold desert night to the shelter of the Neffian caves.
The shutters broke as the wind squall hit the house full force. It took the winds only hours to fill the study with sand, only a day to bury the house and wipe any trace of the city.
The Raptor rose high above the unnatural storm he had made, climbing the thermals and dropping into sheer dives until his rage had spent itself. He pulled himself over the dunes, trying to find landmarks, his robes fluttering in the wake of the storm, eternity yawning before him, the memory of the Collector's chroniclave ticking out a faceless, nameless, hopeless time.
There was nothing to see. Sumifa lay buried under a new desert, its unmarked face stretching for miles and miles.
The sun rose over the empty, shifting sands in quiet glory, its rosy fingers creeping through the Raptor's shadowy, outstretched hand as if he were not there. His other hand twitched and grasped at the shifting sand, the shimmering grains falling from dark, bloodstained talons.
1
Sumifa. present-day
The King is dead.Hail the King of Sumifa! Long live the king of Sumifa!' The shouts of ten thousand citizens of the new city filled the hot afternoon and carried over the dunes to the old ruin. Cheyne stopped his sketching to lift his head and sort out the words. So old Thedeso had died. And his son would take his place soon. Cheyne smiled under his broad-rimmed hat and went on with his drawing, deftly capturing the hard edges of the broken walls with his charcoal, taking a measurement every now and then with a stick to maintain his accuracy. Most people thought diggers just hunted treasure. Mostly, they were right. But like his foster father, Javin, Cheyne was an archaeologist. He wanted more than treasure; he wanted answers.
Cheyne took out his hand mirror and held it along the inside of a broken edge of basalt block, checking for the rock's stability, and for the scorpions that liked to breed in those big cracks and would come rushing out by the dozens, tails poised and pincers waving, when a man put his foot unwittingly into their nest. Their sting wasn't deadly-but it surely could hurt-and many a deadly fall had been prompted by such sudden pain. Satisfied that he was safe, Cheyne lodged his boot into the crack and hoisted himself up onto the low wall for a better view down the line of ancient blocks that had housed the old city's olive press. He had finished the sides; now he would draw the top of the old barrier.
The crowds in the new city had ceased their shouts. From the top of the old press, Cheyne could see the shining walls of the fortress town, whitewashed and brilliant in the slanting sun. Tomorrow he would go back there and find the tall elf again and get his answers. He breathed on the little mirror to clean it, wiped it on his sleeve, and reluctantly held it up for inspection. No smudges. No streaks.
And, as always, no reflection.
Cheyne stared into the looking glass for a long moment, trying to see himself, trying to see past the blur that he always saw when he had to face a mirror, but like always, nothing was clear. He put the spotless mirror back into his scrip and made the measurements for the top of the wall, thinking of the tall elf, his face savagely scarred, whom he had seen in the city the last time he had gone in with Muni for supplies.
Tomorrow, I will find him, and he will tell me why he haunted my childhood dreams… and what magic it is that keeps my own image from me. He must know who I really am…
'Lift! Lift! No, no, no, forward. Again. Again.' The shouts of the foreman rang through the still desert air, directing the sweating men striving to shift a huge fallen marble slab from an upright comer. There was a room under the slab, the first on site with walls higher than a couple of feet. In a moment more, they had succeeded in sliding the chunk away from the corner, but then something besides the weight of the block halted the work.
'By the cracked face of Caelus Nin!' he swore. 'Stop and stand clear. We cannot progress.'
Muni, the foreman, waved the crew back and stood staring into the dark depth of the vault. The crew obeyed, one or two of them making signs of protection in the air as they stepped away from the opening. Muni glared at them and the gestures ceased.
'Javin, would you come over, please?' he called, his voice carefully void of excitement. A tall, brown-haired man of about forty-five, working at the other end of the twenty-foot-long block, shrouded in white robes, turned and made his way around the slab to see what Muni wanted.
'Look there,' said Muni softly, his wide mouth curling in disgust and trepidation.
Javin peered into the opening, shading his eyes to adjust to its darkness. A dozen feet down below the broken wall slab lay, not the preserved remains of the long dead man they had expected to find, but the crumpled body of a modern day Sumifan, his black eyes frozen with fright at their last sight, a pool of congealed blood on the thin layer of sand beneath his head.
Javin's gray eyes went almost as wide, and deep furrows creased his brow. 'By the seven stars! No one has removed the slab until today?' He looked at the foreman levelly.
'Yes, Javin. You may check Cheyne's drawing of the marble wall. He sketched this area late yesterday evening,' Muni replied, his face inscrutable.
Javin shook his head. 'That won't be needed.'
Javin trusted Muni more than he did himself sometimes. They had worked together for years, traversing the huge continent of Almaaz in search of Javin's burning ambition: to find the fabled Collector. Back in Argive, Javin had become convinced that old Sumifa was the final resting place of the man who had been chief mage to the ancient artificer Mishra.
The climate of this region was deadly hot and the politics treacherous. The true nature of the dig had been kept secret, Javin giving out to the Fascini, Sumifa's royals and their courtiers, only that he wished to study the architecture of old Sumifa, the ancient buried city known and shunned for its mysterious abandonment long ago. The Fascini had not cared. They never had believed there was an old city. After all, no one had ever found it before. And archaeologists were just diggers, and diggers were just treasure hunters to them, whatever their reasons. As long as they gave the standard half of what they found to the city's coffers, and didn't stir up the locals against Fascini decrees, the court turned a blind eye.
Javin had brought with him only his foster son, Cheyne, who had traveled with Javin to every site he had dug in the last ten years, and Muni, who spoke every modem language in Almaaz, even some that didn't have words, and told the truth in all of them.
Javin nodded, and Muni brought his crew around him, asking for two volunteers to go down into the room to bring up the body. Finally, Rij and Hadi stepped forward, drawing their long, curved daggers from their hips. Disdaining the ropes, they leapt into the dim chamber.
'Pay these men double today. Give those two double that. Only make sure they stay quiet. Keep everyone else on the site down by the other side of the wall. Business as usual. And ask Zu to bring Cheyne up from the eastern perimeter. I told him to sketch the olive press walls today until we opened this room,' muttered Javin.
Muni's crew had been handpicked and worked the most sensitive areas in the dig, but Javin knew that even
