52 The Great Desert

Once Imir had retired as the soldan-shah, the soft life in the Olabar palace no longer appealed to him. The desert called to him now: the sands, the heat, the bright yellow sun, and winds so dry they made his skin crackle. He liked being in the settlement at the edge of the dunes, sleeping in a fabric-walled shelter not far from the sand coracles that had recently returned from the Nunghal lands.

Today, though, the balloon-borne ships would not embark on a trade voyage. Instead, they were going to war.

For most of his rule, the despicable bandits had plagued the soldanate of Missinia, and now Imir would finally hunt down and eradicate the vermin, once and for all. He drew a deep, hot breath and grinned with anticipation.

A squad of mounted soldiers had ridden down from the Missinian capital of Arikara on sturdy desert horses, ready for the follow-up assault across the barren dunes. Two of the sand coracles had been repaired, their wicker baskets reinforced with thin sheets of metal to protect against any high-flying arrows.

Imir dressed himself in a buffalo leather jerkin and went out to stand beside Soldan Xivir, who stared upward with a hard expression. Fires inflated the silken balloon sacks, and the coracles strained against the thick ropes and wooden stakes that held them to the ground.

Xivir sat astride a restless black horse. He wore loose, pale desert garb and a dusty white olba wrapped about his head, with the end of the cloth trailing as a scarf he could tuck around his mouth and nose. He didn't look at all like his sister, whom Imir had taken as his First Wife long ago. The only good thing he could say about Lithio was that she had given him Omra as a son… and that was a good thing indeed.

“Today will be a good day,” Xivir said.

“Not for the bandits.” Anxious to get aboard, the former soldan-shah swung himself into the basket of the coracle that he would be guiding. Three Missinian archers were already there.

With great care, two nervous camp workers lifted aboard a basket of hollowed-out gourds, each one filled with explosive firepowder. “Please keep these far from the burning coals in the brazier, my Lord.”

Imir chuckled. “I'm the one who showed you the precautions.”

In the saddle, Soldan Xivir wrapped the reins around his hand. “My horsemen are mounted and ready. Scouts have marked the direction of tracks where the desert bandits have made raiding forays.”

“Burilo and I will find them from the air and direct you. I intend to start dropping our firepowder bombs as soon as we see the camp, but your men on the ground can mop up any stragglers.”

“So long as we get Norgo himself, I'll be satisfied.” Xivir's black horse stamped restlessly. The rest of the desert cavalry squad had mounted up, ready to race off into the wasteland after the bandits.

“Hah, you think too small! We will eliminate them all. I'm tired of waiting for the sand dervishes to get them.” Inside the basket, Imir called over to Omra's cousin, who had climbed into the second coracle. “Ho, Burilo!”

The other man called back to Xivir, “We'll save some for you, Father! The men need to keep in practice, after all. Let's be off while the morning breezes are still strong.” Burilo signaled for the ground crews to loose the tether ropes.

The two coracles sprang into the air, climbing higher and catching the invisible currents. When Burilo's coracle drifted off to the east, he and Imir used polished metal mirrors to signal each other with a code they had developed for the purpose. On the ground, Soldan Xivir and his horsemen followed along the untracked sand dunes, keeping the bright coracles in sight.

After three hours of slow travel above the hypnotic sandy landscape, a glint from the scout mirror in Burilo's coracle attracted Imir's attention. “They've found something.” He turned to one of the archers. “Drop down to find a westerly air current—we have to get ourselves over there.” As the archer covered the heat from the central brazier, Imir felt as anxious as a child, leaning over the edge of the basket to scan the ground. “Look there, trampled paths. We're close.”

Both balloons approached the bandit encampment. In a sandy depression lined with protruding rocks, he spotted a cluster of tents, tethered horses, and a small water seep surrounded by hardy vegetation. It was a pathetic place. Imir had hoped for a more worthy target, a sturdy fortress rather than this squalid collection of tents and dung-burning campfires. Regardless, Norgo and his bandits were vermin and they would die as such.

The men below had seen the balloons high in the sky. Defiant, they gathered their weapons, shook their spears with impotent threats, and shot arrows as high as they could, though the arrows fell well short. Only one of the shafts struck with a weak-sounding thump on the bottom of Imir's basket.

“Archers, indulge yourselves.” With a gleam in his eye, the former soldan-shah watched the Missinian fighters shoot back, raining death upon the scurrying men below. Some of the panicked raiders threw themselves onto their horses and fled out into the sands, scattering like beetles from beneath an overturned rock.

“Time for something more impressive.” Imir grabbed one of the powder-filled gourds, twisted the thin cloth fuse, and touched it to the coals of the brazier. He tossed the smoking bomb over the side of the basket and watched it tumble through the air. Two of the bandits looked up to see what it might be.

The gourd exploded only a few feet from the ground, spreading fire, smoke, and shrapnel in a bright burst that bowled the men over. From the second coracle, Burilo's soldiers also began throwing explosives. Thunderous eruptions blasted craters in the ground, destroyed the encampment, and split the rock spring, spilling water out into the churned sand.

The bandits' horses screamed and plunged at their tether lines; some broke away and galloped pell-mell into the dunes. Terrified men provided good target practice for the archers; soon, many bandits sprawled facedown.

In hindsight, Imir realized he should have restrained himself so that Soldan Xivir could retrieve the stolen property, but he was so infuriated by these parasites that he did not try to check his anger. He used every one of his explosive gourds and wished he had more, though there was nothing left to wreck. What had been a camp now looked like the cratered face of the moon. Bodies lay strewn about, and only a few of the bandits had escaped. His grin was so broad that it made his face ache. “This was most enjoyable.”

As smoke continued to curl into the sky and shouts faded into dying moans, Soldan Xivir and his horsemen finally reached the site of the carnage, but saw little left for them to do.

When the bodies were counted, there was no way to identify which one might be the infamous and violent leader, but Imir didn't care. They would launch the coracles again until they had hunted down all the illicit camps, and they would obliterate each one just as they had the first. Within a week, there would be no more desert bandits left in Uraba.