The Horned Scarab

Underbelly Brigands

Orfur plunged his hands into the basin and watched the water turn red. A man's heart burned in a brazier. The smell of roasting meat filled Orfur's chamber. He rubbed a pinch of powder between his fingers, sprinkling it over the fire. The flames shimmered green and the heart turned black. He fixed his gaze on a jade eye. Orfur inhaled the smoke. It weighed heavy on his lungs. His heart beat faster, stronger. It resounded in his ears. The deep pounding of war drums. Then it subsided. Only a taste of exultation.

A whimper from across the chamber. A man bound and gagged to a stone slab. He glared to a similar slab where a body lay still. Its ribs splayed. Orfur loomed over the man, raised his dagger, and plunged it deep into the man's chest.

Ghorad-Gha was his city, and it was rotting from the bottom up.

In a time long before Orfur, Ghorad-Gha had housed a million souls. Less than half that number now worried the streets. Clay and stone cracked, wood splintered and moldered. The River Rund lapped at the ancient foundation pillars. The city had lost its heart.

In the belly of Ghorad-Gha were the lawless. They held it on their shoulders and kept it from falling into the Rund. The industry in Ghorad-Gha—bronzesmiths and smelters, tanners and tailors, carpenters and craftsmen—fed the Tarr. The lawless fed Ghorad-Gha.

The governor, masters, and ministries all knew it, even as they left it unspoken. Orfur planned on showing them who truly owned the city.

****

Arn leaned on his whalebone staff and stared at the River Rund curving between the peaks and forests of the Tarrlands before it disappeared over the horizon. It shimmered in the noonday's sun, taking on a fiery glow. The river reminded him of his childhood home on the Northern coasts and how he'd once watched the sea in much the same way as he watched the river now.

He gripped the seastone beads around his wrist. A prayer teased the back of his throat, but he forced it to subside.

A heavy hand touched his shoulder. "We should not keep him waiting," Rohqim said. The Akui removed his stone hand and hefted a two-handed bronze mace onto his shoulder. Rohqim had a hawkish nose, a barrel chest, and the white marble skin characteristic of all Akui. Standing still, he seemed a statue.

Arn turned from the docks and faced the Rundian temple, a thick pillar of stone that rose six stories into the sky and pierced the foundations of Ghorad-Gha through the depths of the Rund.

Arn knocked on the wooden door with his staff.

The door opened to reveal a short, round man in red robes tied with a hemp rope belt, his skin the same dark brown as Arn's. But where Arn's tightly coiled hair and beard was short and black, this man's salt-and-pepper hair grew in a cloud around the balding crown of his head.

"Hello, Kancey."

Kancey quickly glanced over Arn's shoulder to the docks beyond and then back into the temple.

"Come," he said.

Kancey led Arn and Rohqim through the Rundian temple. They passed a hall where river water cascaded from the roof, and another with a large pool in its center. Monks in red robes knelt before the pool with their foreheads touching the water. Their narrow corridor ended at a descending set of stairs, and after two more flights Kancey finally showed them into a small room.

A resounding booming and slurping filled the unadorned room as the River Rund lapped against the stone walls. No one would be able to hear them speaking down here. Arn guessed that they were below Ghorad-Gha. Rohqim fought to conceal a shiver.

"Were you followed?"

"I don't think so. What's happened Kancey?"

Kancey ran a hand over his head and nearly jumped as a wave crashed against the stone walls. "I think I've done something terrible. Depths, I may have signed my own death warrant."