and legs kicking, wriggled up into the dark niche. Amber protested, but his dirty feet disappeared.
Seconds later, his face hung over the edge and said, 'Hand me your noose.'
Amber sighed and flipped the thief her rope's end. Leaving the three torches stacked in a pyramid, the two friends shinnied up the rope and peeked over the edge.
The tiny room was barely head high and only six feet on a side. The walls were rough cut blocks, the roof sloppy slabs. Contrasting with the rude walls, the floor was gorgeous pink-white marble squares so polished they saw their reflections in it. One square had been removed and the floor broken through. The missing tile was still here, stacked on its brother. Sand had leaked in, so Amber concluded this stone hut was at least partly underground.
Light leaked in, too. From a crack in the ceiling peeked a pale light that touched the only furniture, a blunt pedestal topped by a glowing orb.
Drawn as if hypnotized, the young woman stared. The orb was milk white, perfectly round, polished until it glowed, and the size of Amber's fists. It sat nestled in folds of black cloth.
'That can't be sunlight,' frowned Hakiim. 'We saw the sun set.'
'Moonlight,' Reiver offered as he squinted at the orb. 'Myths of Mystra, I'd almost swear this isn't glass but a single jewel!'
'That can't be. Jewels don't come the size of ostrich eggs,' Hakiim argued. 'Can we take it? It's lost treasure, doesn't belong to anyone. So it's ours, right?'
Strangely, their roles had reversed. Avarice made the normally cautious Hakiim reckless, while the rash Reiver pulled his hand back.
'Queer how it glows in such a tiny moonbeam,' the thief observed, 'collecting the light like a mirror.'
Reiver raised his hand to block the light but the orb glowed on.
'Ah,' Reiver said. 'Better not touch it. It's en-'
Unnoticed, mesmerized, Amber reached with both hands and clasped the moonlit globe.
'Amber!' yelled both friends, who then froze at the sound of a whisper.
A hiss issued from the close rock walls. Whistles joined in, until the adventurers looked for a thousand cobras. Within seconds, the hissing rose to a piping keen like a banshee's wail, then a hurricane's roar.
Reiver yelled, 'Jump!'
Too late. The world exploded in wind, sand, and noise. Stone roof slabs blew off like palm fronds. Sand boiled around the hut's walls, whipped into dust devils by cyclone winds. The three hunkered in a corner, covering their eyes with their scarves and arms lest they be blinded.
The walls melted as hundredweight blocks were snatched loose and whisked into sandy darkness. Massive thuds resounded as boulders banged like dice. The sandstorm intensified until the crouching companions' knotted headscarves lifted, and their hair was tugged by the roots. They might have cowered at the eye of a hurricane while primeval winds thundered around them like wrathful giants. Over the howling din they heard a sizzling, screaming roar as tons and tons of sand, an entire desert's worth, were scoured from the ground around the moonstone.
Amber and her friends breathed through their sleeves, gasping as the very air seemed pulled into the sky. They heard crashes, booms, thumps, and above all the fiery swirl of shifting sand. Rumbles shook the earth until the searchers feared the floor would collapse and bury them alive. Sand stung and spat like hail, threatening to smother them as it filled their clothes, filtered down their necks, sailed into their nostrils and ears and hair and eyes. The blistering winds puffed, pounded, blew, and buffeted, rocking them where they sat encircled by whipping sand. Beaten, breathless, and terrified, the three Memnonites clung together and curled into balls of misery that gradually grew numb before the storm's fury.
An eternity later, Amber shook her head awake. Sand spilled from her headscarf. Her eyes and lips were gummed shut, her cheeks and forehead chapped and raw. Picking at her face with filthy fingernails, she gradually leaked enough tears to uncrust her eyes and open them.
Darkness. For a second she feared blindness; then a light peeked from low on the horizon. Sister Moon, full, round, and white, was near setting. Amber guessed they'd sheltered for hours while the storm raged, passed out or sleeping. Stiff from tying herself in a knot, she found Reiver wedged between her knees like a lapdog and Hakiim mashing her left armpit. Groaning, the daughter of pirates shoved the stunned companions aside and reached for a wall to help her rise.
The block walls were gone. Everything was gone, except for the black square hole, pedestal, and orb. The globe in its nest of black cloth, Amber noted numbly, no longer glowed. It had reverted to plain glass like a big drop of water.
Keeling over backward, Amber untangled her legs, rolled over, and crawled to her feet. Rising, she forgot to breathe as she turned a slow circle.
The polished floor of pink-white marble tiles, a portion of which they'd seen in the stone hut, was revealed as an immense circle hundreds of feet across. Encircling the vast circle lay a moat filled with jumbled blocks of stone as big as oxcarts, and encircling the moat stood a city.
Amber stood on a slight rise in the valley's exact center. From here she could see two or three miles in all directions. Every inch of the valley was laden with ruins. Not far off squatted a two-story complex with tumbledown walls and collapsed roofs. Yonder reared a pair of low ziggurats with rubble between. More buildings crouched around, some intact, some mere outlines. Far off Amber saw a depression that must have been a dry lake. Archways still marked some streets while others were broken. Staggered farther out were square apartments and cottages. Rising up the valley sides were stone walls and terraces and the hollow shells of mansions. In parks, dried trees and grape arbors hunched like tired skeletons.
The night air was dead calm. The ghostly city glowed white. Every inch had been bleached by sun and scoured by wind until neither paint nor smoke soot lingered. Amber smelled nothing, not even death, just the salt rankness of clean sand.
Awestricken, she trekked across the vast round floor to the very lip above the dry moat. Once wide as a marketplace, the moat was filled with broken blocks, smashed columns, and crushed roof tiles. Wall sections were painted with delicate frescoes now shattered. The phoenix, a mythical bird rising from fire to live again, occurred many times above the heads of the happy painted people. Seeing the brilliant colors and artwork, recalling the golden emblem on the doors, Amber knew this palace had once possessed a breathtaking beauty.
Belatedly, as if waking, Amber realized this ruined Palace of the Phoenix was not rectangular, as they'd assumed from the glyph, but round as the sun or the moon. The round palace had sported cylindrical columns above a circular moat at the center of a dish-shaped valley, recurring circles that invoked the moon herself.
This fabulous building had been deliberately destroyed, its roof and walls and columns systematically broken and hurled into the once water-filled moat.
'Oghma take my eyes, that I ever saw such devastation,' Amber whispered to the moon. 'Why? Why was this beautiful palace demolished? Who could do such a thing?'
Glowing ghost white in moonlight, the dead city stood mute. Nothing lived here, Amber knew, but three misfit children too far from home.
Far beneath Amber's feet, a door creaked.
No, not a door, but the lid of an oblong box.
The tall box was tilted against the wall of a dark niche.
The sarcophagus lid had once been brightly painted with an effigy of the occupant, but time and dust had besmirched the image until nothing showed but the vague outline of a human form. Inside the coffin stirred that form.
Resin that had sealed the coffin cracked and crumbled off. The hands that pushed the lid were wrapped in bandages, each shrunken digit carefully defined in rough linen. Lacquered resin and sprinkled herbs trickled into dust as the hands flexed and shoved.
Blocking the coffin's foot were heaps of bones and brown rags. With ancient and petrified strength, the undead being pushed from within. Bones clicked and skittered, then the heavy cedar lid toppled free, slamming on the stone floor with a ponderous boom. No one alive heard the sound.
The creature in the sarcophagus was swaddled head to toe in linen bandages, its only decoration a painted mask and double chain of tarnished silver. Suspended on the being's breast was a vivid jewel the startling color of blood.
