The Land Below the Sunset

Prologue

He was on foot because his horse had gone lame and he'd had to leave it back in the desert. Each footfall crunched on the flat salt-caked ground and was swallowed in the desolate silence. His breath was a thin inaudible wheeze between cracked lips. The chill of night still clung to the wastes, but he saw the pallor in the east and knew that if daybreak caught him in the open then his bones would lie here forever. Despite the pain in his leg he quickened his pace.

Sun burst along the far rim of the world like a crack in a furnace door. The high buttes of fused brown glass caught the first rays and blazed darkly against the stark white landscape. A wave of heat crept inexorably across the land.

That's it, he thought. Here's where it ends.

He stopped and gazed down at the parcel in his hands - a thing wrapped inside layers of rough gauze like something snatched from a grave. It was his last trophy. He started to unwrap it, but fear crept like rigor mortis into his fingers. He had already had one look at the thing. That was quite enough for one lifetime.

He raised his eyes to the horizon where sunrise lofted a banner of gold above the distant hills. They might be ten miles off, or fifty. It was impossible to tell. It didn't matter anyway. With his injured leg the sun would bake him out there on the plain like a crippled bug.

Then something caught his eye. He had long since forgotten how to pray, but he mumbled an oath as he squinted against the glare of dawn. There - under the dark hump of the hills. The wine coloured gleam reflecting from the buttes dimly sketched an outline. He hobbled nearer. The cracked shell of a ruined fort lay at the end of its own long shadow, like a creature that had crawled across the white dust to die.

A man stepped from the broken walls and stood in silhouette against the lightening sky, long robes fluttering in the breeze. "Quondam," he said. "Do you have it?"

Quondam didn't bother to answer, just grunted and held up the parcel for the other to see. He stepped over the collapsed masonry into the fort. The remains of a fire glimmered in the middle of the dust-covered floor. Beside it sat two men whose names he had never bothered to learn. Their hard faces showed that for them, like Quondam, greed and gold were everything that mattered in the world. His eyes caught a furtive scurrying movement beyond the crumbling internal wall. It was the dwarf, Thurible. Quondam looked forward to killing him.

The robed man entered and the dwarf, emboldened by his master's presence, crept a little way into the room. "Thurible," spoke a rich clear voice, "relieve our friend of his burden."

Quondam turned with a look of lazy insolence. "Forget it, Profugus. I'm keeping this till I see some more of that Ancient gold."

The man called Profugus came forward into a shaft of sunlight. A diadem encircled his long lank hair and under arched eyebrows his eyes shone palely like amethysts. Against the bone whiteness of his skin, a faint lavender-pink hue limned the high cheekbones and the amused curve of the lips.

"Have you forgotten?" he murmured. "You have already been paid."

Quondam shook his head. "I was paid to snatch this beauty while you set up a diversion. I wasn't paid to take a honker arrow in my leg or to trudge halfway across the desert."

"You did not gaze on it?" Profugus stared with eager fascination at the bundle in Quondam's hand.

"You said not to, didn't you?" He tossed the bundle down and Thurible jumped back away from it as though it contained a rattlesnake.

"So what about it?" said one of the other men, rising to his feet.

"Yeah," said the other. "We could use a few more coins if there are some going." His flat dangerous tone belied the smile. Thurible backed off behind a tumble of bricks.