Wren Pallak's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The green shapes still glowed on the radar screen. A ring of buried guards, waiting under the sand. Wren stared at them until her eyes ached. She turned back to the shelves of brittle scrolls. Somewhere in that dead priests' writing lay the trap that would kill her if she dug wrong. She unrolled the scroll nearest the crossing point on her map. The script was thin and sharp, all hooks and slashes. She could not read a word of it. But she saw a drawing: a circle of small figures, and above them a single symbol repeated over and over. A warning. She traced it with her finger and found no answer. "Rashid." Her voice came out tight. "I can't read this. If I dig blind, I trip whatever they left." Rashid crouched beside her. He did not read the script either. But his hands moved over the scroll slow and sure, the way they moved over camel ropes. He tapped the repeated symbol, then tapped a second scroll pinned under a stone weight. The same symbol sat there too, beside a drawing of a well. "The priests marked their traps by kind," he said. "Not by words. By pictures." He laid the two scrolls side by side. "See. This mark means water. The trap drowns the digger. Sand runs like water into the hole and buries him." Wren's stomach turned. "So if I dig straight down, the walls collapse." "They collapse when you break the ring." He pointed at the circle of figures, then at a thin line curving away from it. The line ended at a small square set apart from the rest. "But look. One does not stand with the others." Wren leaned close. He was right. The drawing showed the guards evenly spaced, all but one. That single figure sat outside the ring, joined to it by the curving line. "A trigger," she breathed. "You dig near the others, the sand takes you. But that one—that's the pin. Pull it first and the ring goes dead." Rashid nodded once. "Or you guess wrong and I ride home alone." Wren pressed the two scrolls flat and copied the mark onto her map. She drew the ring, the curving line, and the lone figure outside it. Her hand shook, but the shape held. She could not read the priests' words. She did not need to. The pictures told her where to cut. She rolled the map and shoved it into her boot. "We dig the outside one first. By hand, slow. We pull the pin before we touch the rest." Rashid stood and brushed dust from his knees. He looked at her a long moment, then at the dark ridge beyond the door. "Then we start at dawn," he said. "And we bring rope for the sand." The trap no longer hid from her. Now only the digging remained.