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~1. In Which a Merchant Meets An Unexpected Guest~

The faint sounds of the desert, low wind, distant kites and an occasional insect, are enough to lull him into a false sense of security, as though he was entirely alone.

Taking a deep breath against the heat, which lingers even inside, he sips a little more of the wine, tasting it slowly. Though this is the deepest halt on their journey through the sea of sands, it's still a long way out, and further yet to anywhere you could get something comparable. He has to make it last, and he intends to. He has no plans to share.

Outside, she slinks toward his tent silently, like the ghost of a pad-pawed huntress.

Something that looks like a lioness that learned to walk upright crossed with a nude girl abruptly breaches his tent flap. For a moment his brain can't process what it's seeing, then decides with an unexpected certainty that she really is both of the above. Perhaps someone who'd spent less time scrutinizing the minutiae of worldly goods, then visiting every place and really seeing it, would be fooled by whatever illusion she's casting. He nearly spills it.

In the name of the gods! Although, some subversive corner whispers, it would be sensible not to look like one of the jinn, given the sheer ignorance of half the world.

Sand moves under her paws, and a little gets in under the flap and spoils the carpet, which is the detail that convinces him she's real. He can watch her tail, long and sweeping, in the gap between her thighs, just under her crotch-fur.

"I smell good wine," this random vision declares in unexpectedly concise and soft-spoken Arabic, sniffing at the air and incidentally baring just the part of a great many sharp teeth. "That's hard to come across out here... you wouldn't mind sharing with me, would you?"

Discretion takes the better part of valor, and this jinni has truly magnificent tits.

"Here, give it time to breathe," he suggests, and passes her the whole wine-skin instead of just the beaten copper vessel he's been sipping from. This seems like a good investment, because it'll keep her occupied for the longest, and she could get annoyed if he only gives her the cup.

She kneels with her legs folded in front of her opposite him on the carpet, for all the world like a dealer prepared to haggle and patiently taking tea, apparently not giving a damn that this pose is almost optimal in terms of exposing her indecency in every way. She tastes just a very little of the wine on her tongue, clearly delighted by it, and savors the smell some more.

It looks like she intends to eke it out for all she's worth, and doesn't seem an immediate danger.

"So, you're a good-looking young lioness... do you often invite yourself into merchant's tents?"

"Oh, I'm hardly young. Old enough to know better, but still frisky enough to do it anyway."

They sit together for a moment in companionable silence, each keeping a careful eye on the other just in case. It's hard to dislike such an attractive creature, especially when she clearly enjoys such a good vintage. She must have tracked the scent alone over some considerable stretch of sand.

Maybe, it occurs to him, she didn't realize that he could see what she was until he blurted it out in conversation, which was in hindsight foolish, but if she likewise can fool most of the people most of the time, then her intention was probably just to show up hot and naked and try to nab some of the wine with the implied seduction of her body at stake. That's impressively audacious, a gambit of the sort he can't help but warm to from a business perspective.

This the sort of, well, at least partially a woman, who deserves to be drawn in slowly with fineries and unexpected beauties. The view of her alone is enough to make it worth the wine.

"I've been digging, out in the desert, among the ruins," she explains, unprompted. "I have to keep a robe on, all the time, just to avoid fluid loss and so I don't dry out. I can resist the heat but not all the side-effects, and it's impossible to keep the water cool. You have no idea just how wonderful it was to strip off, step into the shade of your tent here, and sip something that doesn't taste like the inside of a goat's bladder!"

He nods. They've all heard the stories, as you do, of lost cities of the sands and most significantly of the other one, that ancient city, which was built not by men at all, but by things that looked like lizards. The tribal people of this area pretend to be too superstitious to discuss it, but are the very first to start spilling every detail, if you show even the slightest bit of interest. Of course, it would be impolite to one's hosts to enquire too closely about why these details are always from a friends brothers cousins uncles relative, and no-one telling the story has ever been there in person.

They drink wine companionably together for some unspecified length of time. It's surreal. She's busy taking little sips with her tongue out like the edge of a broad pink spoon, covered in waving ridges like the dunes of the desert seen from above, as she tries to get the least possible amounts spread out as widely as she can over the inside of her mouth, enjoying a precious taste for as long it can be made to last. He isn't sure what to say, so he doesn't say anything, and matches her little sips with his own copper cup.

He has a lot less wine, but she has a lot more mouth to cover, and damn those teeth, all long white and shiny, and that intelligent gaze, just like that of a feral lioness drinking from a pool or stream whilst sizing you up, deciding whether it is worth stopping to pounce, or maybe to dash away and disappear in a skerrick of dust. A more sensible man would call for his guards, but he doesn't have guards, all he has is his two useless assistants, which is what makes a quick dash for home across this remote corner of the sands a feasible option.

The cargo is low volume, low-weight, and he has more camels than staff, meaning it's practical to carry enough water for a route that was abandoned by larger frankincense caravanserai hundreds of years ago. The desert is as hostile to bandits as it is to anyone else, and he's on good terms with the local tribes, who also hate bandits. Still, he would have taken a longer safer route if his guards hadn't been poached by an offer of better pay and conditions, forcing him to improvise the last leg with a different approach. Fortune favors the bold; had the desertion not left him bereft, he would not be here sharing wine with... what, precisely? A woman, a lioness, a jinni?

The leonine creature he's eyeing over the rim of his wine-cup yawns delightedly with near-closed eyes and an epic curl of tongue, and licks her lips and mouth clean of the last few traces. She's just downed enough of a wine-skin to put down someone who wasn't much of a drinker, and is visibly yearning to polish off the rest, were she not saving it for later. It's a bit of a presumption that she's entitled to keep the whole thing, but one he's not going to argue with.

"Would you like to come and see my excavation?" she suggests. "Men always like to come and see my hole." She reaches down between her taunt thighs with her spare hand, the right one even, so she's now drinking with her left, and spreads the lips of her pussy to show the sweaty pink folds.

Her deliberate inversion of clean and unclean is not lost on him, and she still looks tight, despite the ease with which she parts herself and the softness of her doe's-hoof.

Though this one probably runs down and hunts antelope, rather than just comparing her snatch to the print left by one in the dirt, after the style of the 'romantic' poetry seen in the courts. This is a well-used pussy and it shows, which charms him irrevocably. Maybe she's even parted herself to give birth to cubs, or children, or whatever you do if you're a jinni that looks like a desert lioness.

He's not sure how you could tell. The jinn are supposed to live forever, like a smokeless flame.

Just the thought of that experienced hole stretched wide around and filled by a child of her body, however, is enough to make her irresistibly alluring. Like a dare or a damnation.

"Let's go," he suggests in turn.

~2 A Ride In The Desert Sunlight~

They take his camel. Well, technically, they ride on two of his camels, because she seems to have traversed the whole distance entirely on foot, and there are lioness tracks to prove it. Possibly she was out hunting whatever can survive under these conditions, the small hopping jerboas that live under occasional patches of deep-rooted perennial shrub, or the spiny-tailed dubh lizards which can be run down the fleet of foot. He decides not to ask.

The first camel is perfectly happy to have him hop aboard, which is after all a routine event, but if she tries to climb up too, it makes its displeasure known in that way only camels can, sidling away at the last second, making angry camel complaining noises, and generally threatening to spit with its upper lip raised menacingly. It seems to be less concerned about the fact she's a lioness, rather it seems to be behaving as though she was an excessively heavy cargo that it would not be willing to lift. Perhaps she weighs more than she looks, in the same way that a lion can bring down a man even though technically he's taller and larger.

Knowing the stubbornness of camels in these matters - they're legendary for refusing to move if even the slightest trace over-loaded, by that one back-breaking straw - he tethers his familiar ride to the saddle of another, less cherished mount and lets her lead the way from that one. There's no point going first if he doesn't know where he's going, and was this some sort of peculiar ambush, it makes sense to have her out in front.

While he's sorting out annoying technical camel issues, she's slipped back into a robe, shrugged off and ditched casually just outside his door, that almost exactly meets his expectations. It's made of a fine reddish brown wool, so as to draw a slow exhalation of cooler air upward from just above ground level, and out through the loosely bundled fibers. This one is surprisingly fine though, and has a hood with a dimly transparent veil, as well as reinforcements of fine matched leather on the elbows and shoulders, and is slit thin up to the hips. It seems to have been specifically designed to do digging and excavations in, and must have cost a fortune. A belt at the waist carries essentials such as dagger, water-skin and other equipment.

Next to the robe is a strange cylindrical object about the size of a sword, but straight and without any cross-bar, although it has a very similar grip, with a pommel on the base. The length is mostly concealed inside intricate folds of fine black fabric, but beneath he can make out slender spars of palm wood and a hint of brass pins or rivets. It's an enigmatic item and she hooks it to her belt as though it was an essential weapon, rather than some sort of tool.

Atop the camels, once they're underway and have gotten used to the swaying motion, she doesn't pull up her hood and veil, but rather draws the mysterious tool like a scimitar and flourishes it in front of her, then grasps the hilt with both hands to pull in two opposite directions, as though she was drawing it. The whole thing unexpectedly unfolds and a canopy unfurls above her head, like a ship deploying sail and suddenly having it get caught up by the wind.

He can kind of see how it would work - it's like a tent, and when you pull there, the wooden strut is forced upward and outward around the brass pins, to spread it open and create a sort of mobile sunshade you can carry with you wherever you go. Certainly her camel, formerly unhappy about the load of just her by herself, seems heartened by the unexpected shadow and appears to decide that it likes its new strange rider, but to his mind this only raises more questions.

He can't see how anyone could have conceived something so complex from scratch, for one thing. He's never seen anything like it but it clearly isn't just a one-off, so someone somewhere has spent a long time making things like this and working out the design, until they got it exactly right. And he has no idea where that place is, because this is such a useful thing, if it was anywhere remotely nearby, they'd be everywhere. It could just be an exact copy of the original design, but that would still presuppose knowing the measurements and methods.

It intrigues the merchant in him. You could definitely sell something like that, if you didn't have to underwrite inventing it all over again by trial and error.

This area isn't quite trackless dunes, but it's definitely hostile to life and there are sandy ridges in the way that make it better to pursue a winding path, heading along the cooler and more firmly-packed low points, rather than trying to take shortcuts over the rises. He has a solid idea of where they are, in the most general sense, relative to his camp and the deeply excavated sand-seep that makes it a viable place to layover and water the camels, so in a pinch he could head back directly in a straight line over the intervening ridges to sound the alarm. It wouldn't be the most noble of flights, but he's learned over the years to always have a backup plan.

What really interests him, about their path, is that he can't see how there could ever have been a city out here to begin with. A lot of the old ruins out in the desert are quite well attested, and they were once part of known trade routes until the water dried up, the wood ran out, or the endless sands spilled over them. They have navigable tracks to and from them, a tiny puddle still running into the wells, a few isolated date palms, and desert leopards which have holed up in recognizable remains of all the expected infrastructure.

But this place? It's one step away from being sabkhah, a salt flat. At best you could call it a gravel plain. At one point, perhaps, it might have been some sort of shallow lake bed, but that must have dried up unimaginable thousands of years ago, and the sand and stones have been moving in ever since. In the distance there's a very slight ridge, where one type of rock gives way to another. That a few people might once have lived on the shore of it, now that he can believe, but not a great city, or that it could have been erased so completely that nothing is left. A lot can get buried under the swelling of dunes and the flow of the sand, but this is one of the few places that are relatively sand free, not that it really helps much because there's nothing here.

Once they're out on the flat, she leads them on toward the ridge. Perhaps this was once a shallow island in the shallow lake? It still doesn't seem like it could conceal much.

It does sort of match the legend though, in which the lizards had a city but the land dried up and became a desert, and then their lake dried up too, and the lizards died out but were still reluctant to leave and haunted the place, in the same way the ghosts of men haunt where they once lived. It is quite enough to make you shiver, really, although why ghost lizards wandering around cooking and rinsing clothes and digging up freshwater clams should be scary is debatable. Perhaps they're just attached to the place and had trouble letting go.

It's only when they round the ridge that he finally sees her encampment.

"You know, after all that talk I really would've thought it would be bigger," are the first words out of his mouth. Mentally he was envisioning something on a much grander scale, teams of workers in vast numbers excavating dry mud and sand, gravel being passed back in buckets along human chains and poured onto spoil heaps. Really, he should have known better. No-one goes out this far into the desert if they can help it, and certainly not without a firm expectation of reward.

Her excavation seems to be just a couple of scholars or students, and a couple of attached diggers to do the moving and heavy lifting, and a few tents struck against the ridge where it affords some limited shelter. The gods alone know where the nearest water supply is; the camels, as surely they must have camels, are presumably back at some base camp beyond the lake shore.

"Oh come on now, who doesn't like a nice tight hole?" teases the lioness, determined to continue with her little joke.

~3. A Most Impressive Hole~

As soon as they get to the tent, however, she pulls him immediately inside. "You know what I wanted," she purrs aggressively. "We're not going any further until I get some."

Outside, once they know they're no longer seen, the diggers nod knowingly to one another. She's sniffed out the only fresh man in many a mile again.

In a trice she's back out of her robe, the same way she shed it like a false skin before, and helping him to get undressed, which takes a bit longer. He has time to look around her den while she's too busy admiring him and wondering exactly what her unwrapped present is going to be.

He'd like to think he's in good shape. After all, he's young, he travels a great deal, and he has even washes up with a little soap when the chance permits. Any smell from riding through the desert in the heat of the day will just have to written off as a man-scent, and may even be pleasing in her nostrils, given how far she could track the faintest trace of wine.

The tent is actually pretty empty, really, but if it's just a temporary structure that was dropped off and someone will be coming back for it later when they're done, they wouldn't waste an effort on adding the little touches the way you might in a caravanserai. There are some tables, in a sense, if you count a length of canvas stretched taunt around wooden frames as a table, but they only seem to be there for the examination of finds, and currently have nothing on them but some peculiarly chipped blades made out of stone, and a selection of reference scrolls.

Before he can look around further, she aggressively interrupts his view by sitting above his waist with her knees to either side, pinning him like he was prey but also in some way he can't define holding back just a little. All her weight is on her knees, scraping away a fine dusting of sand from the dry flat surface in two crescents. "You're supposed to be looking at me," she suggests, sinking her hips a little more for a snugger fit, so he can feel the wetness of her crotch.

He looks. The distribution of fur on her skin isn't entirely even, but finer and thinner down breast and belly, in a paler shade that's downright suggestive. Between the legs, and around her asshole and tail, it grows long and positively coarse, in a way that just invites nuzzling.

So maybe it wasn't his smell that he needed to worry about. She reeks like a cat on her season.

Since you have to start somewhere, he begins by stretching and relaxing her inner thighs with his thumbs. She looks approving, murmurs something which he takes to mean, at last, someone with experience, and so things escalate until the head of his cock is butting up aggressively under her tail and he can feel for himself the texture of that fur to either side. If he could tilt his hips up even a little, they could get down to it, but she just teases and makes free with him, inflicting slow little licking kisses all over his face and neck until she's certain he's hungry and on fire.

Pausing, she straightens up and arches her back, bountiful breasts swinging in firm motions that he'd normally expect only from a healthy young girl of marriageable age, then reaches behind her own ass where he can't see to give his balls a light painless slap, establishing fullness and firming to her own satisfaction. It only gets him harder. She smiles gratefully.

"A quick hard one first," she suggests, freeing him and prowling around on all fours, so like a lion or a housecat, to curl herself down on her side and get comfortable, looking into his eyes on equal terms. "You need it. And then we can take our time and be a bit more leisurely about it."

It's obvious what she wants, by her careful positioning, so he rolls over onto her and now he has her trapped, although not really, if you come to think about it. Under those soft-looking curves are terrifying amounts of muscle, and it makes her deeply exciting to hold. Riding a lioness was never on his list of things to do in life, but at this moment he could hardly want it more.

She shushes him for a moment, inexplicably licks her palm to leave a long, juicy trail of wet drool, then reaches down and grabs his cock, polishing the tip and lining him up with her hole. "I'm sure I'm wet enough, but there are some places you don't want to get sand," she points out.

He answers by pushing into her in one long, slow, inevitable motion as she hungrily sniffs at her used palm. "Yes, you're definitely wet enough."

Things follow as such things usually do, with much pleasant straining and grinding of hips, and a greedy kiss from the lips between her legs as they try to suck out his seed, their collision making obscene and excitingly wet noises. The harder he rides her, the more intensely she responds, until he has to pull back just a little out of caution, whereupon she demands, "No, don't stop, more!"

The final stretch of their little race gets a bit incoherent, in fact, as she makes hot excited breathe-through-her-nose sounds like, 'ahhh, yahhh, ooh yahhh!' and he growls something about 'going to breed you, you're mine!' which she doesn't seem to mind, and only turns her on all the more.

She hasn't quite come yet when he inadvertently spends, but they're both far too experienced to let that spoil the moment and so they simply keep going, his thrusts slicked even deep inside her by his own seed - can the lioness jinni get pregnant? - and then she clutches at him painfully tight and cries out, a sound that rapidly escalates into what can only be called a mating roar, both her eyes scrunched tightly closed and her jaw wide open, to reveal all those magnificent teeth around a deep pink well of tongue and jaw-folds and ridged roof-mouth.

It's an astounding experience. He'd like to fuck her forever. Failing that, a few minutes of cuddling while they get their breath back, then to fuck her forever. And he sincerely doubts he's the first or even the hundredth to think that inside her.

She's getting her breath back already. What sort of shape is this woman-feline in?

He looks down briefly to admire her, where he's been encircling her breasts up close against the ribs with thumb and forefingers for extra leverage, and is surprised to notice a wet moisture trail trickling down through the fine short velvet fur on the underhang of each one. He'd been too busy before to pay attention, or maybe just mistaken it for sweat and excitement, but this liquid is thick and white, almost slightly bluish in color, with a faintly soured scent, and he knows it's definitely not from him because he can still feel exactly where all of that went.

He touches, tastes. Yes, that's definitely milk, though not of any kind he knows.

Her eyes follow his. "Sorry, I must not have quite have expressed it all before I went hunting. You know how hard it is to always get that last bit, right?"

"You're not pregnant, are you?" he asks, swallowing, remembering his throwaway thought earlier as they were getting each other off.

"Don't be silly. Does this look pregnant?" she counters, sketching out the shape of her trim belly, with only the slightest eloquent bulge where femininity trumps leonine muscles. "And - don't let it go to your head - you're good, but you couldn't exactly knock me up instantly."

"So, how?"

"I can be in milk whenever I want. It's good for feeding the little ones when you need to, or if you can find the right ingredients, you can eat them to express them in the milk. That's why I was out hunting, making milk makes me hungry."

"So what were you making?" he asks, curious. This is a whole caravan train of thought he's never adequately explored before. Women produce milk, of course, but normally only after they've had a child and through the same slightly mysterious processes. The lioness seems to be implying that it's just some sort of al-khemi of the body which can be reproduced on demand.

The casual way in which she says the most extraordinary things!

"Eye treatment salve," she explains promptly. "Wandering around out here is enough to half-blind anyone, even if you're tough as nails and know what you're doing. The diggers are kind enough to not ask exactly where I get such fresh supplies, but they know it's not camel's milk."

She gives herself an experimental squeeze, and manages to raise a fresh creamy droplet.

"Would you like a taste? I promise it's not harmful, and I could really use some help with getting this last bit out. Otherwise I'll stink of turned milk. You gave me a drink," she encourages. "Let me return the favor."

It's not hard to be persuaded, although he has to wonder what extra ingredients are in eye salve. Still, if you can put it in your eyes without danger, a few refreshing drops aren't going to hurt, and they've already been about as intimate as a man and a lioness could get. If she wanted to hurt him she already had plenty of opportunity to do so. Possibly he's just thirsty after their encounter, but too lazy to get up and ask her to share a water-skin and it's influencing his judgment.

Either way, he responds by taking her nipple in his mouth, massaging and squeezing her firmly.

The return on reward is likely to be slim, but having her proud excited flesh against his tongue is definitely worthy, feeling the texture of those big lioness teats. He rubs her back gently to help her relax into it, which sets her to shivering with delight, and then systematically begins to suckle her more firmly and deeply, to the point at which some fair-skinned maiden would get blood-drawn deeply enough to bruise. The lioness just sprawls back and enjoys it, as though she was feeding a litter of cubs, elbows comfortably behind her head and tail flicking.

Once even the most brutal squeezing draws nothing but a small bead of clear liquid, she declares herself satisfied, then sucks him off with the same sort of aggressive tactics, proudly displaying a cupped tongue-bowl of cum before she swallows. After that, and some of the water supply which, true to her word, is abysmal, they're eventually ready for some more leisurely screwing, the sort which involves lots of touching and fingering and personal intimacy with someone else's body to convince yourself that you really do know them and you're safe together.

"So, is there a mister lioness for you back home?" he eventually thinks to ask, his more mercantile side resurfacing. It would surely not be a good idea to enrage the male of her species.

"Oh, well I do have a husband... but he's not here right now, and you are. Relax. Half the time he just calls me his girlfriend, anyway, so as not to put off young ladies he's sporting with. We don't get jealous, it's not our style to spoil each others fun."

Is she talking about herself, or the jinn generally? Well, maybe over that sort of time frame, truly holding any sort of grudge becomes impractical. Expecting total loyalty for forever seems perhaps just a little unreasonable, and if it sets her free to dazzle and amaze random strangers, then all the better. He definitely wants her, but he's pretty certain that he couldn't keep up.

Once they're both feeling suitably unwound, she retrieves a rag from a small wicker basket which seems to consist exclusively of the same, and has fun cleaning up the both of them. The water may not be the most drinkable, and sitting around in storage barrels out here on the lake flat probably doesn't help, but at least it's cool on the skin as it evaporates. She gives him brisk, impersonal and decidedly non-sexual tonguings, like a mother cat cleaning up her kittens, then buffs him off with the rag to finish before doing the same to herself. It's amazing just how much of her own body she can reach, between the length of muzzle and tongue, finishing with grooming the fur on her arms back into alignment and licking for fingers clean, all with absolutely minimal wastage.

"What? It's efficient," she objects, when she catches him looking and perhaps just a little bit of the way back to being hard. "If we weren't in a desert I'd bathe like civilized people, but here we are."

"If you can lick your own crotch, what do you need me for?"

"The same reason I'm not satisfied with my own fingers. I like some variety. Also, neck strain."

"Well, in that case, I'm happy to help."

"No more just yet. I haven't actually shown you my excavation, have I? Which was supposedly the whole reason for your visit, so you should probably learn enough to at least lie convincingly about it when asked. Plus I want to show it off, such as it is."

~4. In Which there Is A Guided Tour~

He doesn't need much time to get his clothing tidied up, line up the folds, flick off a little sand, but it seems that she has more in mind than just putting her robe back. He takes the moment to stand by and have a better look around, which he didn't really get a proper chance to before.

Down the back, at least as much as a field tent can have a back, the object of her attentions rests in a more shadowed corner, where a couple of guy lines create a fold in the fabric. It's propped up on the far end of one of the wrapped-frame tables, perhaps to keep it at a more accessible height in an emergency, or simply because it needs three corners of the frame to support it.

It looks like an armorers frame, of the sort that would be used to hold a high-ranking warriors kit when not in use or in battle, but modified to a diagonalized design that allows it to fold flat over a camels haunches when not in use. This precludes it from supporting a rigid full cuirass, but in this case of basic shoulder-pads and leather strapping better suited to desert climates, it's by far more convenient. You could probably settle a helmet on top, assuming you didn't care about frying your own brains in the desert sun; not for nothing are the Sassanid clibanarii cavalry units named after the Greek for a bread-baking pot, or a small oven. The scribes can officially claim it means 'a neck-guard wearer' as often as they like, but the derivation is obvious.

It seems to be her intention to kit up in her full combat gear before going out to the site, perhaps simply as precaution in case of unexpected developments. He can all-too easily imagine bandits or thieves lying in wait, until some treasure has been usefully exposed through no work of their own, and then sweeping in to try and claim it. Probably she's seen it before, and is taking no chances in the matter; the law is less required, when you can chop off the grasping hands yourself.

He's intrigued by her gear though. The design is common enough, two heavy leather bands over the shoulders connected to hardened plates, which then join at a wrought metal ring in the center of the chest and back. A longer coiling loop then continues diagonally down the side, loops tightly around the waist, and ends in a descending strap to which you can attach any heavy object, be it a water-flask or a sword or both. It's a good arrangement because the motion of your body settles it into place, keeping the plates positioned firmly on your shoulders without sacrificing mobility for the effort. In lightweight gear like this you can still flex and bend, move agilely, and in her case he suspects there's also the essential consideration of working everything around her cleavage.

What's odd about this version is that she's accessorized it extensively, but seemingly to some well understood design he's not familiar with. There's a spare dagger attached to the left strap, but in its sheath and upside down, so she can draw downward from her own shoulder in even the most pressing crush. The descending belt beneath her breasts and downward across her side has had a multitude of small square leather packets of fixed size sewn atop it, so she can carry a number of smaller items, perhaps whatever she hopes to find in her excavations. What's in there currently is anyone's guess, although many of the small stone knives and arrow-heads presently on the tables would have fit, and probably arrived here that way.

The shoulder plates, though, they're strange. Normally in the desert you'd use leather and wood, soaking the one so it shrinks around the other for a tight profile and light weight, harder leather a better choice. You can get bronze or steel as well, but they're just too heavy, and absorb heat, even if you cover them with cloth. A would-be bandit leader might wear such a thing, but only if he had settled down into ruling from a fort, not while wandering around.

These, however, are made of some other metal he doesn't recognize, and they seem to have been harvested whole from one or more much larger curved pieces of the same. There are three plates, a larger one for the left shoulder to deflect scimitar swings by leaning into them, and two smaller ones on the right, overlapping each other on riveted joints, to give a better range of motion on the primary arm. Each plate is perfectly curved, not even one small irregularity across the surface as might be made by a repair hammer, despite the fact that they have an equally perfect coating, two layers of enamel, orange over red primer, which has clearly taken hits hard enough to get literally ground off the surface in places.

The patches of damage and corrosion tell their own story. There's a tiny impact crater on the left side, like a minuscule Al Hadida, a place of iron where stones have fallen from the sky to strike the desert. He's sure it was made by an arrow, but not just the sort that skitters off the edge. This one hit the plate point-first, which would have driven it clean through mere steel plate, then bounced off instead, which means she parried an arrow. With her shoulder.

A smoother shape in the middle of the convex surface, like a flare, is surely where she's rolled off the plate, muzzle tucked in against her shoulder, many times. On the other side there's a patch of wear, where the upper of the two articulated plates has brushed against the lower, each a memory of a practiced sword swing, or so he assumes.

The metal, whatever it was, seems to have been welded somehow to the flattened buckles, which then hold it to the leather. She's had to work backward, it seems, to get it all the connect.

She has a sword as well, in the foreign style, straight-edged, with no respectable curve, although all he can see is the hilt, wrapped in some blue diagonally interleaved material with visible thread like wires. It has a heavy crossbar like a crescent moon, made of a golden metal that is not gold, a grip of wire with a little wax worked in, and a large spherical counterweight on the end, made of a silvery material that is not silver. He has no words for too many of these things.

While she shrugs on the armor, moving her body lithely to settle it into place, he tries to acquire a better visual on the sword, only to have her bat his hand aside as though she could sense what he was thinking. "Don't touch," she instructs. "It doesn't like it when people try to steal it."

Well then, if her sword doesn't trust him, probably better to just leave it alone. He watches as she attaches it, still sheathed, to two mount points on the leather, one behind the right shoulder and the other at the small of her back above the tail, so she can carry the absurd length of it down her back without it getting in the way. Gear settled, she pulls the hood of her robe up over her ears, so they can slide back through the edge-stitched, embroidered slits in the top.

It appears that there will be no courtesy of asking each others names, he's come to realize. Which may perhaps be for the best, as he can claim an honest ignorance of her identity, allowing them to skip the many honorifics which would otherwise be involved. She's memorable enough without a name at all, and he's sure he could find out who she represented herself as when putting together this expedition, but would that even be the truth? She's probably assumed many lives, and many identities, over whatever length of time she's walked the earth.

Let her just be the lioness then, and he will be the merchant paying her a visit, like a game.

"The rest of my team are still over in the Ubar region," she explains as she leads him outside, tent flap raised over her shoulder to let in the brightness. "Well, Ubar, Wabar, Qabar, no-one seems to have used quite the same letters to write it. They're in what's left of Irem of the Pillars cataloging the most worthlessly heavy and immovable set of - well, I hesitate to call them treasures - that the world has ever seen, before the sand rolls over them. I persuaded a couple of the more dedicated scholars and the least superstitious diggers to come with me on a little side-trip, but so far they're not impressed. Mostly they just keep grumbling because we haven't found anything yet, although this place is by far more interesting. I mean yes, Irem has pillars, but that's just because it started off as a campsite full of vertical tent-posts and they decided to formalize the name in stone after it became a central hub for the frankincense trade. This place is far more fun."

She starts her little tour by, counter-intuitively, leading him a short distance away from the site of the actual digging to the place he noticed before, where two different layers of rock meet, rising as a shallow ridge on one side where, presumably, one is harder than other. Peering down the length of it into the desert glare, he can see what might be another hole in the distance, revealed by fresh unvarnished stone at the edges that has yet to be weathered down or filled in.

"So, if you're familiar with the myth, the ancient city is supposed to be associated with some rock fill and low stone-work on the edges of the lake, because that's where you'd build it if you were a water-loving lizard of the long-ago, yes? And that's where we started, but it turns out the building on the shoreline is purely human work. Very primitive and very old, yes, but no lizards. There are supposed to be these long narrow tunnels that lead down into the ground somewhere nearby, but we couldn't find any of them. They were either collapsed or buried so well we couldn't find them."

Her ears flick high with enthusiasm, and she's clearly enjoying having the opportunity to explain her mission to someone else who hasn't heard it already. The thrill may have worn for the diggers, but he's a fresh audience to let her marshal her thoughts into formation.

"But then I had an idea. I realized that we weren't looking for tunnels, we were looking for - well, there is a word in your language for it, it just doesn't have quite the same connotations - conduits. You know how in a large city, where they have rivers and fresh water, they channel it to make sure that it goes where they want it to?"

"I've been places. Latrines, aqueducts, sewers, that sort of thing, right?"

"Yes! So what they often do, in places like that, is they build a long narrow tunnel under the floor, just large enough that you can crawl along it, and put lengths of piping along it. That way if a pipe breaks, or clogs up, someone can go down there and put a new section in without having to dig up the whole thing all over again. That long narrow tunnel is called a conduit, and it's what the story was describing. There must have been a row of them exposed near the shoreline once."

"The lizards had plumbing?"

"The lizards were normal-sized and quite clever. The myth always emphasizes these little narrow tunnels, but do humans always build a door exactly the same size as they are? Of course not, there are huge city gates, and tiny little access hatches, and everything in-between. So what we needed to be looking for was conduits, not tunnels, and we could do that by exploring out across the lake in the same layer of rock, using this," she pats the ridge in the rock as though it was the knobbled spine of an elderly pet dog, "as a marker. Because it was once briefly a lake, the surface is exposed and you can see the best places to dig. I did a rough scout of it first, and we're moving along from point to point, making more detailed observations as we go."

This, it seems, explains the somewhat improvised nature of the tents and shelters. They're being dragged along and anchored to the ridge as required to provide mobile cover, while the scholars inspect for significant traces, perhaps squared-off edges or such, and their diggers excavate down along the cracks in the rock at the indicated point, in a process that sounds more like mining than just shoveling dirt and sand. It must be brutal, and he's not surprised that she was able to round up only a very few volunteers, who must surely be looking at some sort of significant bonus when they return. He had to promise his own useless assistants extra to get them to come.

Having gotten down the broader sweep of the thing, she prowls back toward the main site, with her arm around his shoulders and nuzzling up against him to show him off, under the excuse that this will keep both of them in the circular shadow of her personal palm tree, or at least that's how he thinks of it. She hasn't explained what it's called, but it seems to use palm wood and unfold like a set of cooling fronds, so that's close enough for him, in the same way that a camel is a ship of the desert to an importunate poet. Some things you don't ask, you wait for them to be told, because if you ask they'll never tell you. He suspects his new lioness friend is entirely like that.

The dig proper is basically just the largest possible conveniently mobile canvas awning, propped upward and outward over another hole in the ground, identical to the one he saw in the distance before. As blocks of stone are slowly and laboriously levered out, lifted and removed, they finally get dropped behind the awning to help counter-balance it, or added to each side, to make the hole more sheltered and keep out blown sand. It's like a giant children's fort.

"We're doing quite well with this one," she exclaims, the wind having picked up slightly. "The rock is quite fractured here, so we can lift it out in lots of moderately sized pieces, without too much of the chiseling and hewing it'd otherwise require. If we get much deeper I might call it and move on in fact. I bought ropes but not fixed ladders, so each ledge has to be no more than half man-height high, and at least an arm-length wide. Plus, I only have two diggers - well, you're a merchant, you can do the math at least as well as I can."

He can indeed. The deeper it gets, the wider it gets, and the more unnecessary rock is removed to accomplish the required depth. Even if she were to enlist the two scholars and get them to assist on both top ledges moving rocks, creating a continuous chain at the cost of annoying them no end, it can't get deeper than two man-heights without dropping to half-speed, and the wasted effort is likely to be equal to the useful one by the time they're one and a half man-heights down, which is the point at which he would decide to cut his losses.

One could in fact look at it as being convenient, in a way. The lack of manpower imposes a strict limit on just how far a potentially futile exercise can go, and on how much money can get wasted. The lioness must be astoundingly rich, or have incredibly powerful backers, to indulge in this mad scheme, which makes her very definitely a woman after his own heart and someone he would like to get to know just as fully and intimately as possible.

~5. A Startling Collapse!~

"Shit, it's shifting!"

"Son of a donkey-fucking camel!"

As the lioness inexplicably tries to help both of the diggers up and out of the hole, grasping them around the legs and body to not so much lift as launch them to safety, so they scramble up and out over the intervening ledges without really grabbing them like some street-fair trick with a hidden rope, the floor suddenly collapses out from under them. In an inexplicable moment of confusion, suddenly they both weigh nothing and all the surrounding stones seem to rise up and float about them, but it only lasts a heartbeat or two before they hit something and go sliding and those same rocks are raining perilously in all directions.

A brief flash of desert sun from the hole above, as it crumbles in on itself, illuminates an inclined surface, not that steep, maybe only one-in-ten, but more than enough to channel them downward with the force of their fall and all those little fragments that made it down first. Visibility rapidly decreases as they get further from the descending rays and tons of loosely interspersed stone, as though it was somehow falling very slowly, begins to block its path, but he makes out a brief clear glimpse of an oddly-precise, cleanly cut stone opening before them and suddenly lioness arms are wrapped around him as she bounds left, drops him for a moment, bounds right, catches him again and finally somehow manages to drag him into a full embrace as they hurtle head-first or inverted down the conduit, ah yes it's one of those, and then the enormous volume of falling rubble barely one step behind them chokes the opening right behind them and everything goes dark.

A few spiteful pebbles, thwarted, bounce off his boot.

It wasn't exactly the finest few seconds of his life, and he's definitely not looking to repeat it.

He finally stops screaming when she says, "You're hurting my ears."

While this is a situation entirely reminiscent of being in a coffin, it could be worse. They seem to have air, due to the loosely packed rocks at one end and unknown depths at the other, and they're the right way round, should they need to go crawling down further. He really does not fancy backing downward into the unknown, waiting for his ass to get bitten by serpents or something. The conduit does not appear to be in any imminent danger of further collapse, though how would he know, and there may even be another way out.

Downside - no light, limited food even assuming she has something in her personal kit, only one canteen of water, and, oh yes, the thousands and thousands of tons of rubble that, he decides with an inexplicable certainly, are personally hungry to crush him. His death was heading right at him and then she snatched him out of the way, just like she did those two diggers.

He makes the interesting discovery that your eyes can't adapt to low light conditions if there is in fact no light whatsoever. Further shouting achieves nothing.

"Well, we might as well fuck to kill the time while we wait," she eventually suggests. "I'm sure the diggers will get us out of here eventually."

After several fucks have been given, however, there is still no sign of rescue. She's feeling quite relaxed and leaking, and he can't complain, but it looks as though they'll have to find another way out. Getting disentangled and the right way up is something of a challenge, but not logistically any more difficult than mating from a similar position, and so with patience they eventually manage to get themselves lined up. The lioness goes in front, 'because I have the sword' she claims, but he knows full well that it's the wrong way up and far too long to be rotated even across the diagonal of a space this small. She might be able to bash something with the blunt end, perhaps.

"I'm about to show you something," she suggests from the darkness. "Please don't be upset. It's usually the women who get most alarmed when I do this, and then start plotting my removal as a potential threat - men just upgrade the threat estimation, as you do for warlords, or bandit chiefs who are unusually well supplied. Keep in mind just what I am."

A tiny pinpoint of flame ignites in the cup of her palmed hand, whoosh, but consuming no air. "It seems like only yesterday that I was doing this off the coast of Melhua while the world ended," she reminisces. There's just enough light to see her by.

He's never heard of a place called Melhua, but that is of course less important than the fact which he briefly let himself forget whilst coupling with her, namely that she's a jinni and not just some wealthy woman interested in ancient ruins, so naturally she can create smokeless flame. It seems she's been holding back to try and avoid scaring him, but that's good, because if she has magic, it's not impossible that they might be able to escape.

"Follow me," she indicates, "and stay close, so you can see. We might have to crawl a longish sort of distance, to get to an actual tunnel or cellar or whatever this connects to. That's what I had the ropes for - I was envisioning a sort of little cart thing with tiny wheels attached to a loop of rope, so we could get in and out quickly with everyone pulling. Not an option anymore, regrettably."

She somehow positions the flame pinpoint between her ears and just above her forehead, and it stays there, tracking the motions of her head and without even a slightest hint of scorched fur. She looks uncannily... divine, with an aura of light glowing around her head like that.

"Now you can enjoy looking at my asshole while we go," she jokes, tugging up her robe to fasten it around her waist and free up her tail, which cracks the glaze on that one.

It turns out that a lioness is, unsurprisingly, superlatively adapted to prowling down very narrow conduits in a way that a human is not. Although they are of similar proportions, different jointing and the way she carries her weight provide a definite advantage, whilst he's forced to crawl along on hands and knees at a slow and uncomfortable plod. The view is inspiring, as her tail sensually traces the tunnel roof as though looking for something, but keeping it in view is hard on the joints and he manages to bang his head slightly several times.

At least the whole thing is slightly downhill. As they crawl onward, they get to chatting.

"I've been in places like this before," she explains.

"What, in other parts of the desert?"

"In other parts of the world. There's at least one off India, but that's mostly sunk now, and there's another one the other continent across the Atlantic from the west of here. Rumors of a few others in hard-to-reach locations, usually remote islands, or way up north where the water freezes to ice. There's not much left after all this time. They built unimaginably well, that there's anything left."

"Who?"

"The lizards. Well, you know about the lizards, right?"

"I always thought that was just a story. Isn't this just the remains of some really ancient city?"

"So old it would scare you. It's from before there were any people. And by people I mean anything that's a mammal, has fur, or feeds its young by that method you enjoyed so much."

"What, it's pre-diluvian?"

"I was there for that diluvianing. That was mere moments ago in comparison."

This, oddly enough, makes him hesitate as he realizes just how much older she is. He likes older women, the tough ones with a little bit of wear on them, and it doesn't harm if they still have well used tits from milk and mothering. He knows intellectually that a jinni would have been around since the start of creation, but he hadn't appreciated it more viscerally. The turn of her ankles and her battered, flattened paw-pads in the sand made him slightly hard when she burst the awnings of his tent and demanded wine like tribute to one of the old gods, but this conflicts him between a slight fear and being even more excited.

"Look at it this way," she suggests, hearing hesitation. "Every tribe has their own legends, but the popular one around here has a creator god, and he makes the world in seven days, right?"

"I've heard lots of versions, yes?"

"What they fail to mention is that each day is two thousand, one hundred forty-three and a half years long, and that it's still under construction. And lots of things happened before they'd even cleared the site to get started. The world is like a house that is still being built, and if they finish on schedule, we'll rest and have one hell of a party."

"Well, if the world is a house, what's this then?"

"This is one of the rocks sticking up into the foundation. Climb down into the old cellar and you'll find all sorts of things. People tend to build a new house in the same place as the old one."

~6. A Great Many Hours Later~

The further they go, the weirder it gets.

Reaching the end of the conduit section only took a couple of hours, they weren't exactly making lightning speed, but that just dumped them a couple of feet further down into a seemingly endless series of more conventionally sized places. It's not even a maze or something looking to be solved, just the sprawling remains of the underlying infrastructure of a enormous city, interconnected in random ways now by a long-gone dissolution of everything other than rock that might otherwise have been obstructing the intervening spaces. Being underwater for a few thousand years in the immediate past has probably not helped any. Strange holes where rivets were tapped, or screws once sunk, have outlasted the fitments and filled up with different minerals that contrast to their original surroundings.

"I thought there was supposed to be stuff down here," he points out after a while. "The myth says that there are supposed to be glass-fronted bookcases, books, preserved lizards and stuff."

"I wouldn't get your hopes up," she smiles radiantly, still with the flame-spark drifting above her head, although she's breathed just a little more life into it to get it to put out more illumination for their broader surroundings. "I suspect that the people who lived on the lake shore once might've found this to be a handy place to stash the loot. If you could get in and out quickly, like with one of those little cart things on a rope I suggested, it would be a good place to hide. A freshwater lake in the middle of an uninhabitable desert? This must have been an exciting place to be. I'd build me a nice unstealable bookcase out of stolen glass too, and import a few of those Egyptian crocodiles to impress foolish people. You know, the dried ones."

It's kind of plausible, really. After all it's difficult to rationalize aquatic lizards having a preference for wooden bookshelves. Even if you choose to be the one madman in every bazaar who speaks to unseen things and writes them poetry, and argue that what's onshore is some sort of high and dry lizard mausoleum for special purposes, the rest of the city is all indisputably here, and the lizards must have had some sort of furniture, so where is it? Not a shelf is to be seen.

"If there's no treasure though, what's the point? I mean I thought the whole purpose of doing this was to find valuable ancient stuff. Why spend huge sums of money to dig up, well, this?"

"Comprehensiveness," she answers elusively. "There's something I need to make sure of."

She won't explain further, so they keep going, looking for an exit.

It turns out she does have some survival food in her harness, but it's odd. He's familiar with more commonly used products of the type, mainly ba-theeth, the preserve made of parched flour, dried-out dates and samn butter warmed up and kneaded together. It keeps just about forever and costs next to nothing, but she seems to have customized her version with finely ground dried meat, and some sort of powdered nut mixture, heavy on the walnuts. She refers to it using a term he's never heard before, pemmican, and tries to describe to him a society of primitive hunters who use stone tipped spears and arrows to try and hunt things that sound like big aggressive oxen, across a vast grassy plain that is moist and fertile but just as empty, on average, as any desert.

He's grateful for the imagery, which helps him to forget the huge volumes of cold stone overhead, by transporting him instead to a place that sounds like his idea of paradise. She claims the people there possess only copper, not even bronze, and so have not a sword or dagger to their names.

That, he thinks, is a good thing. It sounds like somewhere you could buy and sell in peace without always needing eyes in the back of your head. He asks her about that, curious what sorts of trade goods they exchange, and she describes bows made by connecting together the recurved horns of rams, bales of leaves that you can burn to breathe the intoxicating smoke, and exotic feathers that are carried on foot across a continent with no horses or camels at all.

It all sounds heavenly, but he would still miss his camels.

~7. Beware Of Flammable Liquids~

The tunnels bend up and down in peculiar ways, either side of their downward slope. "They were flat when they made them, it's the rock that's got bent," she explains, and he believes her.

The city as a whole tilts consistently in the direction they're going at about one in ten, making it easy to proceed and painful to backtrack, but the folds in it, like ripples in a bolt of cloth or length of hide, seem to be literally several miles long. Truly, some great destruction was visited on this place in ancient times. He tries to imagine something similar happening to one of the larger cities he's seen, perhaps Ctesiphon or Samarkand, and draws a mental blank.

Looking for exits is an arduous process, as they proceed sideways, then head back uphill looking for possible ways out, only to constantly find them filled with sand and rubble. The further they go, the deeper they have to get to continue farther afield, and the longer the paths back up.

There have to be ways out. After all, the legend wouldn't have arisen without people being able to get down here, but of course the sands shift with time, and openings that were once accessible may now be blocked, and vice versa.

It's a whole city, or at least its cellars. There has to be something somewhere.

She catches him looking repeatedly at his water-bottle, wondering how long it will last. Sloshing it slightly makes a reassuring noise that reminds him to observe economies and drink as little as he can, and that it's cooler down here compared to the heat of the scorching sands above, but that won't help much once there's none left.

"Don't be such a wuss. You're a bold desert traveler, remember? A resolute merchant opening up new frontiers of trade and exploration."

"I have multiple camels laden with barrels of water. The water weighs more than my entire cargo. I would not have come out here without a serious plan to get home alive and_make money."_

"If we get deep enough there may be water," she points out. "That lake that used to be right above us took thousands on thousands of years to drain, so there's probably some of it left in the deeper parts of the city. Those undulations in the rock you noticed? Water goes down. The deeper ones'll act like a bowl, and if the bowl doesn't have too many cracks, there'll still be some in there."

"What if it's not drinkable? It might have been freshwater once, but that doesn't mean it still is."

"Then I'll clean it for you using that method you enjoyed so much earlier. I'll drink until I'm fat as a pregnant camel, make very light milk for you that's almost water, and piss out all the dissolved salts. It won't be much good for my kidneys, but you won't be dying down here any sooner than I will. I take good care of my guests, and it's indirectly my fault that you're stuck here."

They continue ever onward, deeper and deeper. The total distance they've walked is approaching numbers so remarkable it wouldn't be believed, even if he told someone about it. That far, on foot, in the middle of the Rub El-Khali? No, it is a fable, if a most remarkable lie.

At one point, her tiny speck of flame suddenly goes out, and he is plunged into absolute darkness, a pitch black that stretches out forever.

It seems like a sweating eternity, but is only a few moments until he hears her voice, still at where she last was, a short way in front of him. "We need to back-track," she insists. "Follow the sound of my voice and try not to breathe too deeply."

He's barely breathing anyway, as the weight of the dark presses down on him, so it's not too hard to do. It's like she's following some sort of map inside her head, retracing the path purely by touch and feel, guessing distances by the number of steps. She seems absolutely certain exactly where it is she's going, despite the fact that there is no light whatsoever, meaning that even her eyes can't be seeing anything in all this infinite black.

As the go, she talks to keep him on track and following her. "Sorry I had to put it out abruptly like that, but I think there might be black oil down here somewhere, in that direction. Same stuff they once used to make asphalt and bitumen. I could sort of taste-smell it a little bit, there was a faint haze in the air that made me think of road-building projects. Where was I? Oh yes, anyway, it gives off a light gas, a flammable vapour that rises. Like the steam from rain hitting the sands. And also you can't breathe it, it'll kill you before you realize what's happening. There might be pockets of it where the tunnels rise upward. You know how I said that the water sinks, and collects in the low points? Well, the reverse is true for this stuff, it rises and gets trapped under the high points. Sort of like the milk in my boobs, when I'm lying on my back. I just hope it hasn't mixed with the water table where the two have crossed paths, it would be a challenge even to my body to clean that lot up. Anyway, if one of those gas pockets ignites, it'll blow us all to hell. Well, you at least, it won't be the flames that kill me, more a total lack of air and being slammed into a wall and having about a thousand tons of rock fall on me. And then my boyfriend would be sad. These tunnels are ancient, they're still strong but not up to getting blown to pieces from the inside out. Whatever it is that keeps them together is mostly gone."

Her voice stops moving and he nearly collides with her.

"Right, I think we've gone back far enough to be safe. Deep breaths again."

The tiny flame ignites suddenly over her head again, the world comes back, and nothing specially bad happens, not that he expected it would, or it would have happened already. Still, he has never been so happy to see someones face, even if that face has whiskers and lovingly bared teeth as she smiles at him. "See? We're gonna be fine."

Although the detour has put them off track, she's navigated them somehow in complete darkness to the last major fork they didn't take, which is in fact right behind her when the flame reappears. They set off again, through ancient sewers long washed clean, and confusingly empty tunnels, and interconnecting cellars and the remains of the substructures of unidentifiable buildings.

He's just starting to get exhausted, and seriously concerned, when she claims she smells water. A sense that has influenced the outcome of their journey twice now, it seems only appropriate that it should be invoked a third time, like in the tales of storytellers, to complete the set.

Gently sniffing at the air, she wanders casually, drafting a breeze through her whiskers by casting her muzzle about, and then leads him unerringly slightly off their intended path to an aperture in the ground, barely wider than the circular shape he could make between the thumbs and fingers of both hands. It seems to have been drilled down into the depths at some point, reinforced with whatever keeps the main tunnels stable, and somehow hasn't closed up with time.

Even he can smell the water at the mouth of the pipe, when he crouches down, but it is far below. The real question is how to get at it, a problem that they eventually solve by pouring together the half-contents of his canteen and hers, sharing a small sip of the overflow in a kiss that wets each others lips, then tying the empty one to a length of coarse but sturdy twine she's stashed coiled in one of her pockets. It has little red droplets of solid something congealed through the fibers every foot or so, and seems to be for measuring things, but serves equally well to lower the empty flask down through a space barely wide enough for it until, nearly at the end of its extension, they hear the sound of it hitting water.

They hastily, but carefully, haul it up and he lets her taste-test, mainly because she's far less likely to drop dead if it turns out to be less than drinkable. "Quite good really," she concludes. "Faint hint of freshwater snails and small molluscs, which is a pretty good sign. Some of the things that lived in the lake must still be alive down there, keeping it clean."

He's drunk worse at just about every oasis, many of which are barely worth their name. Some are bad enough that you have to filter the water through a fine cloth, then boil it in a pot to make a tea that will mask the taste. This will do fine.

They draw up multiple canteens worth, slowly and carefully, with the end of the string tied to her belt in a sailors knot she learned on a distant ocean somewhere. Once their bellies are sloshing in fullness, a mutual decision is made to call a halt for the day, in a not-too-distant space featuring a convenient low point in the far corner. That way, once the water has finished doing its job, it won't contaminate their new supply.

She holds him as they fall asleep, robes around each other as best they can, a reassurance he'll be safe once the lights go out. She's noticed, of course, that he's scared of the dark down here, you'd have to be oblivious not to, but is kind enough not to say anything, just to make herself present. It would be different if they were up on the surface, under the stars, the same sort of thing he hoped they'd be doing about now, but down here it's different. The gods are not here.

He worries how long the useless assistants will remain faithful. They have water from the seep in the ground, and neither they nor the camels will go thirsty, but it's hard to estimate the trade-offs between the gain they'd make by acquiring his cargo, versus how much trouble they'll get in if it turns out that he isn't dead and they ran off with it. He probably has a couple of days before they find a way to rationalize abandoning him for dead, and he has to go chase them down.

On the upside, he has lioness boobies. Big, firm, fine ones pressed right up against him, which she doesn't mind him hanging onto, provided she gets the same latitude for keeping her hands warm on various parts of him, which she seems to take equal joy in just holding and sharing touch.

Honestly, if he wasn't so tired, the things they'd so. As it is, he traces the long hairs near her pussy until they both fall asleep, steady hot cat-breath faithfully upon him.

~8. The Great Seal Of Solomon~

Once neither of them can finally hold it all in any longer, they eventually agree to get up and keep going. She startles him by pissing standing upright, with her nether-lips spread between two long clawed fingers, while he squats and goes about it more discreetly, as a man should.

He'd heard that foreign barbarians did it that way, but he wouldn't have thought that included the women too. She shakes herself off tidily and gestures for him to finish up and follow her.

This morning, whatever time it really is, is more successful and after a breakfast of more carefully portioned ba-theeth, and drinking as much water as possible and refilling both canteens, they set off again. Relatively soon they come to a different sort of area, where the rooms are bigger and the stone is somehow whiter and cleaner, as though it has been reinforced to an even higher standard than the rest of the city and hasn't suffered the same level of erosion. There are many clean, open drill holes in the floors where large objects must have been bolted down, but nothing at all is left after so much time, filling and draining of the lake having washed away whatever might have been left in the case of everything but the stone.

In the main, central, biggest room of all, which so vast she has to increase the output of her flame to even hint at the ceiling above, he finally makes out something instead of nothing, a circular area slightly depressed into the floor, that reminds him of nothing so much as a long sealed well, minus the capstan and bucket. Inset into the floor is a huge disk of silvery metal, engraved very precisely with raised characters and a complex geometric pattern, that catches the light from the lionesses fires in an unexpected way, almost as though deliberately indicating its significance, inviting him over to interact with it in some way.

What he is immediately reminded of, however, is a completely different legend, the one about the sorceror-king Solomon, he of the seal, who was said to be able to summon demons and command them absolutely to his will using his vast depths of knowledge. There are a great many worryingly specific yet oddly familiar details in there, from the vast temple of impossible proportions built by higher powers rather than by man, to the seal itself, used on vessels of brass and copper, secured by lead, to prevent their demons from escaping, and even the long narrow waterways to the sea in which these were placed, to carry them out into the depths for their permanent disposal.

That legend is the origin of the silly tale, perpetuated in marketplaces, that a jinni can be trapped inside a lamp, smoking-vessel, or perfume bottle, in fact in just about any container that could be rendered airtight with a little creativity and some wax. He always thought it was kind of a stupid story, since the myth is very clear on what a jinni is, and it accords more with his new firey lioness companion than some half-vaporous, turban-wearing dweller in a bottle. But this enormous seal is quite large enough that it could easily have any manner of things under it.

He really hopes his new friend isn't here to unleash the fallen, or something equally alarming. It's positively unreasonable that someone with such superb tits could be up to no good, and it's not really likely he could stop her. She could probably break him in two, which is part of what makes her so incredibly damn desirable to begin with.

He notices a sort of splatter on the floor nearby, something red, and goes to touch his fingers to it so he can taste to try and identify the source.

She bats his hand away hastily.

"Under that cap, or some sources call it a seal, there is a liquid that looks like blood. It's not blood though, it's something else. It's used exclusively in necromancy, for raising dead things."

She casts about, for all the world like a cat hunting and searching for spoor, the tiny marks, tracks and traces that any animal makes as it passes. "They would have had crates, probably full of jars, the same sort you use to transport oil or wine. They dropped one, and the jar at the corner broke, which is why there are all these little fragments of porous clay lying about."

After sniffing one of the fragments, then very carefully tasting, perhaps to seek the provenance as some connoisseur of wine jars, she bounds around to get a different angle and he finds himself all caught up her excitement. Solving even an obvious puzzle is better than this vast, inexplicable, too alien place that leaves everything he knows at the level of a game being played by children in the ruins of a once-great civilization.

"After they'd filled up all the jars and put the cap back, they must have loaded them for transport. But the damaged crate must have been hit harder than they thought, one of the vessels must have had a crack in it, despite looking fully intact. This isn't a blood trace, it's a tiny spatter of what was in that jar, fallen after they thought they'd already cleaned up."

"Well if that's the case, doesn't it mean we could follow this back to the entrance?" he points out, stating the obvious out of a desire to contribute. "They clearly didn't notice it, and if it was a slow enough leak, it could get us out of here. Or at least much closer to a possible exit."

She smiles happily with a predatory look on her face, perhaps calculating spill rates and volumes for common wine jars using the same sort of tabulation she'd normally apply to wounded prey. If you know how much blood is in it and how fast it's losing it, you can tell exactly how far it'll get by the space between the spatter. Handily, a wine jar can't die on you before it leads you to its lair, as animals and enemy combatants are prone to doing.

"I like the way you think, merchant. Let's do this."

It's not as easy as he'd initially hoped, because the distance between the drips is long, following the initial pattern, and because they were probably on a cart or sled and moving slowly, there's no real directional hint in many cases. Where the path branches into multiple directions, they have to work outward from the last choke point to systematically eliminate paths by going along them until the absence of a marking becomes undeniable. The upside is that they can write off any path which would be unnavigable, which eliminates a lot of the smaller conduits and vertical routes.

He suggests that they split up to cover more ground, but she dead refuses. "I'm the only source of light we have down here, unless you start setting clothes on fire," she points out. "And splitting up is what gets you killed, in situations like this. We cover each others asses."

He's never heard an expression phrased quite like that before. It might be a tell, something from her homeland, or wherever she lives, but without anything to compare it against it's not useful for any practical purposes. So he defers to her judgment on this. Doing what she says has gone rather well for him thus far, if you exclude the whole 'trapped in an underground city' part of things.

It takes a long time, and they have to pause to fish for more water with the canteens a couple of times. The carefully rationed-out trail mix of hammered dates and unidentifiable dried meat from her gear is enough to take the edge off hunger, but there is only the one block of it, carefully sized to fit in one of the small square leather pouches on the harness. The trace of walnuts and clarified butter makes it edible enough, but it's hardly a proper meal.

He's lost track, but she thinks they're approaching the opposite shoreline of the lake, or the other side of the ridge beyond it. "I should've searched there," she blames herself, "but the area with the surface ruins was a bust, and it seemed so much more likely that we'd be able to find something out on the lake bed. Trying to find hidden entrances in the desert without some sort of marker is damn near impossible - the Royal Necropolis in Khem, sorry, everyone calls it Egypt now, still has tombs no-one has been ever able to find and it's barely a couple of miles long."

"We're heading for an exit," he reassures her, "and there might even be some treasure after all, if your idea about the people who lived on the lake hiding stuff there is correct. I'd say we're doing pretty well, really, under the circumstances."

"Damn, you sound so much like my husband when you say things like that," she sighs, chewing at her lower lip gently with big canines. "I think he'd probably like you."

Uncertain of the correct response to this, he says nothing. Betrayed husbands aren't supposed to like you, they're supposed to come at you with a knife to reinstate their social standing, so he has no applicable social conventions for even imagining a reply.

When they come to a doorway, or at least he guesses it was a double doorway at some point, with a curtain across it, he's certain that it must indicate they're at the exit. After all, you don't go hang drapes throughout random parts of an ancient city, unless they're to block off the portion that you use from the unfathomable and appallingly empty depths.

A door would, in a way, be more alarming if you lived in the outermost section of this place. You'd lock it, but then forever find yourself wondering just what exactly was behind it, whereas curtains imply, as with a tent, that the area outside, although it may contain hazards, is known. And if your tent door should move unexpectedly, say to admit a wine-seeking lioness, then you are ready and prepared to assess the situation.

The lioness in question eyes the curtain far more skeptically. The design is simple and gives away little, with a wooden crossbar, support rings woven out of a fibrous material that looks like what you'd make a basket out of, and a sheet of an opaque fabric that might be linen. In dry conditions, with no possibility of molds or mildews growing in, it could have been put there last week or last century, maybe even longer ago.

"There's a cult," she tells him in an undertone, "who do things like this. They'd probably be deadly keen to get their hands on a reliable supply of earth's-blood, but I have no way of telling from any of this how long ago the last collection was, or how often they do it. I can't smell anyone out there, or see any trace of body heat, but it may be best to assume that there's some sort of threat outside just on the off-chance. Please try to stay back, and avoid getting between me and anything else. I'd be really sad if we got this far and you caught a case of friendly stab."

The jackal profits when lions squabble. He quietly backs up and positions himself at a sharp right angle just aside of the doorway, so he can see what's going on, and be behind anything that might come bursting out. Discreetly, he draws his knife out very slowly, so it won't make a sound, to take up a readiness pose shown to him by a caravan guard more reliable than the last lot.

~9. Attack of The Leaping Lizards!~

The lioness literally blazes her way through the curtain, hitting it at speed like a soldier trying to force a door with his shoulder-plate, and letting her fire-power instantly incinerate the linen so it can't trip her up, or obstruct her vision. Her fangs are bared to a fiercely heroic snarl, and yet the ensuing collision sets off a peculiar chain of events, which she has to explain to him later in some detail before he grasps exactly what happened.

In summary -

On the far side of the curtain there is a wire or very fine chain, which was laid up close against it. To spot such a thing you'd need to be a most talented thief, the sort who runs a thin blade ever so gently along the inside of the seam to test for traps, because pulling aside the curtain would also almost certainly have tripped it.

The wire leads to a container shaped sort of like an amphorae, with a pointed base, balanced ever so carefully into a small notch on the angled top surface of a limestone plinth nearby. Pulling the wire in any direction causes the base of the amphorae to become displaced, sliding off the plinth and hurtling downward to the floor below.

Just beside the plinth is an ancient opening in the ground, circular, going down, down, down with the ancient freshwater of a lake still somewhere below. The drop of the amphorae and its shape, in combination with those two stubby little curved grips shaped like wings, causes it to plummet neatly into the depths with a sound exactly like 'glop!' almost precisely one second later.

Why a sound like a rock falling into a deep cistern could be the harbinger of very, very bad things is something he does not have time to question before the lioness dashes back out through a new open space where the curtain used to be, drawing her sword and adjusting her shoulder-plates. It appears that she intends to hold the doorway against something, but there's not the slightest hint of noise or movement, or anything else coming out following her.

"You wanted lizards? It appears we're about to have lizards. They must've found some fossilized remains. Maybe an ancient murder-basement or something. Gods, I would be so pissed off if some bastard woke me up sixty-five million years after I got murdered."

He can only follow part of this but the intent is clear. Angry ghost lizards are incoming, and they will probably not be interested in discussing mitigating circumstances. His usual tactic of patience and sharing sweet tea until a deal can be reached is not likely to be that effective.

In the irregular light of her flames, they crawl up out of the well, with appalling speed.

The best description for the lizards he can come up with is tattered. They seem incomplete, as if they've been put back together from mismatched and imperfect pieces, and there are rifts in the flesh, which is still growing, that close and re-open as they move, dripping small amounts of red not-blood that doesn't spill but is somehow drawn back in to continue its futile repairs. The bones that can be seen are sort of black and stony, not white at all in the way bones are supposed to be.

The jaws are what he'd imagine from a crocodile, sort of folded over with some sharp protruding straggler-points, but their eyes are much bigger and wider than he would have imagined and look almost forward, liquid in a way that suggests a terrible pain. If for nothing else, then based on that expression alone he'd vote to have them put down again.

One of them roars in horror, them spots the lioness and begins to shamble toward her, flailing all desperately with its claws as though removing the intruder might fix what's so dreadfully, terribly wrong with the world it's been dragged back into.

She braces and then, so very precisely it might be a whisper, slides her extended sword outward in a point-first motion to slither between two exposed vertebrae in the first lizards neck, severing the recreated spinal column and dropping it like a stone. She then slices precisely downward and he sees what look like steel wires, burnished briefly to spark-flashes across their cut edges as she removes the lizards head entirely, stopping a breath short of gashing the floor, then carefully kicks it far enough away from the remains that the two pieces won't be getting back together sort of her careful intervention. The jaws of the severed skull keep moving and the eyes blinking, in a sort of general defiance of the known consequences of capital punishment.

The cultists must have braided the more disorderly remnants back together, to ensure that all the required pieces would be available when the time came. There's something terribly cruel about it, the way they seem to have thought of the dead only as a weapon. With enough time the separated pieces will dry out and become dead again, but for the moment she seems to be intent on putting them down as efficiently as possible.

The lionesses look is not one of fury as he would have expected, but infinitely sad. "The very best preserved one I ever saw spoke to me," she explains, as though just a casual conversation, even as she ducks and weaves under a series of frantic claw flails, then delivers a return strike aiming at a spinal column, which misses when it deflects off hardened stone in a way it wouldn't from bone. "It couldn't remember a damn thing, but it was able to figure out a language from first principles. That's just so wrong, deliberately waking up something like that."

She counter-kicks to drive one of them away for a moment, hisses as she catches just the edges of stone claws across the side of her lower ribcage as they slice cleanly through her best desert robe, leaving slashes in the material, then turns away abruptly to put the tip of the blade up under the chin of the one closing on her from behind. As it sags, she steps sideways then grasps the back of its neck to direct its fall, by throwing it into the path of the one in front, which has just recovered from the momentary distraction of being knocked off balance.

They go down in a heap and she executes a whole sequence of temporary joint stabs to separate nerves and tissue, so she has enough time to remove heads from bodies and ensure that none will have the chance to recombine their efforts in any viable combination.

It's not quite over yet, though.

The freshwater well seems to have been loaded with the remains of whatever lizards the cultists found on site, in addition to a few surprises bought in just to make trouble. Transporting a living thing through the desert is a challenge, but sometimes already dead is much more convenient, as no water or food is required.

As half a lizard, intact only in the upper torso, claws its way up and out of the well last, because it has no legs and it took longer, there is a sort of bursting of wings like startled pigeons, only larger, and a small flight of undead falcons explode out of the well shrieking and clawing. Flashes of pale copper suggest that wiring a dead falcon together is more fiddly, but that the lack of terribly much birdy intelligence to begin with and the fresher remains make it a no-brainer in terms of targeting someone in a confined space. An enraged falcon is a remorseless pecking and clawing machine at all times, even on days when it isn't already furious at being dead, and more importantly it can fly up out of a well, which would have limited the options available for the trap.

The merchant has a short-lived mental image of faceless men arguing among each other, as they unpack various skeletal familiars and decide who has to give up what. Do you normally have wire like that with you anyway, if you're a necromancer? Did they all have to pool their spare reserves and throw in a couple of bits of carters wire, when there wasn't enough? Nonetheless, he decides to be offended on behalf of the falcons as raising them is a hobby of some of the wealthier patrons he consorts with from time to time. They are fierce, proud, touchy creatures, and beautiful despite being stupid as a rock with wings as they sit bobbing up and down on the falconers gauntlet.

The falcons are probably supposed to be a distraction, so that someone already fighting several of the undying lizards is taken off balance and gets mauled from every side, but given the lioness has already dispatched the three complete lizards, the plan, such as it is, has been knocked on its ass.

Predatory instincts kicking in the lioness jinni begins hunting the falcons around the room, giving chase as they swoop and fly constantly out of the way, perching occasionally to experience a few moments of avian confusion at being dead before becoming re-enraged and winging back in there to squawk and flap some more. She has several deep bloody gashes around face and eyes already where claws or pecking beaks have found their marks, but her sword gives her extra range on the freaky feathered things and regenerating plumage flies all over the place.

Because she herself is the only light source, the shadows of the participants dance around madly, doing a whole platonic nature of truth thing, but he notices that the remaining half-a-lizard left is patiently and quite silently pulling itself out toward the middle of the room, perhaps hoping she'll trip over it and then it can do something about this whole no-lower-body fiasco.

Realizing to his embarrassment that he has, thus far, let the lioness fight everything and not even involved himself, something he follows swiftly with a chaser that, well, he's a merchant not a hero and letting caravan guards fight things is how he's normally expected to handle stuff, he resolves to stop the half-a-lizard in its tracks, or palm-prints or whatever. Surely he can handle something that's missing all its bits below the rib-cage?

The answer, sadly, is not quite. He gets distracted ducking swooping shrieking falcons, it grabs at him by the leg and he falls over on top of it, and there is an enormous amount of stabbing with his backup dagger that achieves almost nothing, before the flat of a miraculously shiny sword blade slides right past his face into the lizards neck, he can see his reflection in it, and he realizes that all has gone silent again and the lizard has mostly stopped moving.

She hauls him up off the thing, then decapitates it swiftly before the nerves can reconnect.

"Thanks for the distraction," she compliments him. "It gave me an opportunity to kill the damned falcons. Noisy bloody things, aren't they?"

He decides to pretend that yes, that was what he was going for all along. Of course there's a fair to middling chance that she already knows he was mostly just blundering about, and she's given him an opening intended to soothe wounded male pride by allowing him a better place in the story.

She's still really fucking hot, all covered in blood and scratches and sweat, packing with her blade out hard like the action hero in a story. Forget pride, this must be how girls feel when they squeal with excitement at getting that glimpse of a prince, or some noted warrior. It just seems natural to hang off her neck submissively and give her her a kiss on the front of the muzzle, at that little high point in the middle, which she eagerly and fiercely reciprocates. With tongue.

They take a few moments to get it out of their systems.

Before they proceed, she insists on placing the heads and bodies at opposite corners of the room and as far away from the water as possible, whispering apologies to the heads and caressing their scaly ridges with her palms as she moves them away from where they fell. They're still twitching, ever so slightly, but the eyes have closed and they seem to be unconscious again without a body to support them. She says something about 'dream your way back to death in peace.'

The heads are really quite heavy, weighing in at about ten standard_minas_, or a fifth of a talent, he estimates, wanting to take one with them as a souvenir, but he doubts she'd be willing to allow it. Besides, they haven't found the real exit quite yet, and there may be more practical treasure there than a head which won't die properly if kept moist under a cloth, like it was bread dough.

The falcons she is less merciful to, turning them to scorched patches on the white stone with fire. He has a nasty feeling that she could've let loose with similar powers at any time but was holding back, perhaps to try and prevent his accidental incineration, in which case he is suitably grateful. But still, living with this lioness fire-jinni must be a terrifying affair, and her husband, if not a jinn himself, must be an exceedingly brave man. If he'd understood fully what she was when they first met, well, he'd still have accepted her invitation but fled as soon as tactful excuses allowed, as you normally do when dealing with killers and kings.

The actual exit is not too far distant, although it still takes them a while to find it, tracking similar faint traces of blood which are less easily located. The room with the trap in it seems to be the last location with any water, admittedly at some considerable depth, that you have to pass through on the way out, explaining both why it was set there, and how this place has come to be forgotten by history and the original dwellers on the ancient freshwater lake. At hours inward to get water and hours outward to get any food, this isn't a place you could live anymore, only visit.

He knows they're there when he spots the bookcases, and yes, just as per the story they are built out of small squares of cut glass, framed in lead and enclosed in wooden cabinetry. Which means they're somewhere inside the ridge, above the ancient water-level of the dry lake, well on the way to getting out! Just knowing that there's so much less rock over their heads is heartening.

There are indeed crocodiles, limited in their maximum size by the dimensions of the conduit, but impeccably spliced and grafted to resemble the lizards they saw in the trap room, then placed in a pair of air tight glass boxes roughly the size of coffins. They must have used the legs and forearms from a much bigger animal. The resulting votive representations, long dried and oddly colourless, are dressed carefully in the dried remains of faded regalia that must once have looked impressive, but now seem almost primitive, the necklaces of crumbling oxidized copper.

They appear serene, resting for eternity laid out atop the bookshelves, in the same position they would have floated when alive. Someone must have imported them, because there's no other way a crocodile could have reached a rainfall lake in the middle of a desert. Still, when you fall short of dead gods, you have to do what you can to make up the numbers. Perhaps somewhere there are a set of more elite cases, now empty and looted by the cultists for a sacrilegious resurrection. These ones are safe from looters, mainly due to their entirely junk jewellery.

Behind the bookshelves, in the exposed spaces that reveal parts of the walls, the faint tracing of a fantastic mural is still visible, depicting the imagined lives of the lizards in their lush lake valley, in some long lost time of prior rainfall. The pigments do not seem to be adhering to the wall though, not in quite the same way you'd expect, as if only habit holds them in place. Perhaps whatever it is that has kept the tunnels from crumbling across thousands of years also rejects infiltration by any other materials, which might explain its disturbing resilience.

The books and scrolls are mostly in ancient languages he doesn't recognize, but the lioness does, and she makes a small careful selection, as well as setting aside some for him that have especially nice decorative features, gold leaf on the pages, or elaborate leather covers with stitchery or inset gems. "These are harmless," she explains. "You could sell them without getting in any trouble, and they're the most valuable thing in this entire room." She names an astronomical figure, and he has to take her at her word, mainly because he can't read most of the ones written down.

Still, books are good. They have weight-to-value ratio that dovetails nicely with his existing cargo capacity, minus a few skins of very good wine that were more than worth the investment.

The rest of the room is, well, predictable. There are little oil-burning dish-lamps, of the sort that produce no smoke and so are safe to use underground in a well-ventilated location, and a tiny jar of lamp oil which is going a bit crusty around the seal but seems to be good inside, so he fills them and gets her to ignite their wicks. Light springs up and it's a homely light, like being indoors after sunset, not a strange illumination of the jinn fire she's been patiently radiating as they explored, and he feels something relax inside his chest at great long last.

The cult seem to have used this as a forward base for their collecting expeditions, however often those have occurred, and the bookcase as a sort of lending library for material banned enough to need hiding, or valuable enough to keep distant from theft. Her selection is from the first part of that, whilst his is entirely from the second. Over in one corner there's a rudimentary mattress set of aged dry straw, light enough to be carried by and edible to a camel, and as far away as possible in the other corner is an equally dried-out shit-pot, showing signs of ancient use but not a trace of any detectable scent, evidence which might perhaps allow the more sensitive nose of a lioness to deduce exactly how long it has been since anyone was here.

She gleefully insists on making use of it, in a kind of territorial marking behavior with raised-tail crouch that would be familiar to any cat owner. All your dirty secret places belong to me.

Once the room smells faintly of lioness, she persuades him, without too much difficulty, that they should take a rest on the nice comfortable mattress. Using their clothes as blankets, of course, not wearing them, now that the option is available. That would just be silly.

~10. Preemptive Threat Removal~

The cultists forward operating base is far more, well, he's tempted to say civilized, but goes with human instead, than the ancient places beneath the stone. The distantly expired lizards must have been so very civilized that the thought of it crushes all human aspiration.

She jerks him off gently once they've rested to wake him up, licks him off clean with pink tongue, and then kisses him unexpectedly in the center of the forehead and nuzzles up next to his cheek.

"I needed that," she explains, "but I wasn't sure if you were all up to it last night. This seemed like a more sensitive way to get your attention."

He can't disagree. She has the most velvety, silken fur on the sides of her muzzle, just below the eyes, where the scent glands would be on a house-cat, and though she's not one, it feels like she's being especially intimate with him now, claiming him as a possession. Knowing him, in case they should run into one another again on some distant street, recalling his scent and rubbing her own off on him. And while the lure of the tempting spaces below her tail is by far the more intense, it is this that he would wish to remember the most.

They breathe together, until they're both fully awake and they've mentally braced themselves for one last chore, which is crawling all the way out again. If there was a rope pulley once, the cultists have untied it behind them to make this place all the more inaccessible, and so just like whatever expendable neophyte got sent in first with a cord and a crossbar, they'll have to crawl all the way back out, this time uphill.

Just before they're about to start, a strange thing happens. He feels a distinct cool breeze, and can sense a flow of air outward from the depths of the city, being drawn into the conduit. In the room, the flow is slight, but putting his hand down low proves that yes,

"Cave breathing!" exclaims the lioness delightedly. "It must be dawn out there. The sun heats the air and makes it rise, and it gets drawn up out of the cooler places underground."

It matches one of the myths he's heard, in which the ghostly traces of the lizards come forth from the depths to repeat the actions of their living experiences, then flow back down again later. But it seems they got it backwards, since he's sure they're supposed to come forth at night and carry the unwary travelers who encounter them back down with them at the following dawn.

She goes first again, teasing him with her promised holes to keep him inspired, but he just keeps on wondering if the cultists have piled loose rocks over the other end of the conduit, to keep the secret extra safe. It couldn't be too many rocks though, right? Or else they'd make more of a mess moving them every time, to the point where it would make the location less secret. And maybe if there aren't too many, they can move them, or more accurately the lioness can move them or burn them or something. Can you burn a rock, or does it melt? The existence of coal would seem to ask for the former, whereas volcanoes would seem to demand the later.

Her voice carries back as they go. "You're aware that we're going to have to lie to my crew, if they are still there, right? They'd insist on crawling back down here to get the rest of the books, many of which are banned beyond belief, and then they'd be tempted to explore the city, and before you know it they'd be setting up block and tackle to break the seal. You've seen why they shouldn't do that, but they wouldn't listen. Or they would, and they'd try it, and before you could say 'initiation ritual' the cult would know all about it and have several new members."

"They might notice that you are dragging a large block of books behind you on a string," he points out quite reasonably. It took them a while to figure out how to work this, until she had the idea of taking off her whole robe, wrapping the books in it, then tying that to the measuring string so she could drag their loot along behind her. The leather elbow pads are protecting the corners, and she is sweating up a storm pulling the bundle, but the rest of the armor still fits about her naked furry form well enough, since all the pieces in contact with her skin are smooth. He wouldn't put it past her, having seen her hungers in action, to have allowed for wearing of it this way as an important factor in the original design.

He feels a little bad that she's pulling the whole thing, but she's demonstrably stronger than him by at least several times. The cool breathing of the narrow tunnel, and all that exposed skin, must be helping to offset the perspiration of her exertions.

"We'll swing by your tent first," she plans optimistically. "You can remind the 'idiot assistants' not to wander off without you, drop off your share, and lend me a carry bag which contains a 'gift'."

It seems she has overhead several choice phrases, addressed entirely to himself under his breath, regarding the limited competence of his journeyman traders on this venture. He doesn't make any move to contradict her though - he'd still have all his guards on side, had it not been for a number of comments made at a caravanserai on the way in. As it is, he will have to move decisively on the way out until he can pick up a small escort force from the next suitable fort.

"You still haven't sworn not to tell," she prompts, as he lets it drop and doesn't respond, sensing a potential reduction in future commercial opportunities. Never burn your bridges until you're sure someone is paying plenty for it, is the phrase he'd use if pressed. But she is, sort of, assuming the valuation she gave for the non-proscribed portion of the collection is correct. "Come on."

"I swear in the name of the Ram and the Tree," he concedes eventually, which seems to satisfy her. It's a choice prompted by her waggling tail, but the implications of it are fairly obvious, regardless of ones own personal affiliations. "I will do everything I can to keep this a secret."

"Great, because there's one more act. I'll let you stay and watch if you're good. That means you'll get to spend another night with me, of course."

Now she's speaking his language. That's an equation of profit and loss he can understand.

There are, as he feared, rocks at the end of the tunnel, but they've just been casually stacked, and she's able to push them aside so they tumble. It doesn't take that much material to pile up a slope which will loosely conceal an opening barely two trayas tall.

The exit is in a cave that's barely worth the name, just an overhung creasing in the rock of a valley wall, slightly above ground level. You could walk past and never know it was there, if you weren't already aware of approximately where to look. She holds him back from following her a moment, quite sensibly, to let their eyes adjust to the glaze of the desert light, then plucks the tiny point of flame from her forehead and snaps her fingers to vanish it, like a magic trick with actual magic.

"The finger-snapping is a mind thing," she notes, suspecting his curiosity. "Until I do it, I know in the back of my head that the flame should keep going, so it doesn't just vanish out of existence if I get distracted. I used to have to concentrate all the time to do stuff like that."

It leaves him, as ever, with more questions than answers.

Once she has her robe back on, and has split the parcel of books between them, they set off back across the sabkhah on foot, in the direction of his camp. Her sense of direction is almost unerring, seemingly informed by almost everything in the environment about her.

The distance is considerable, but it's flat, and almost a straight line. They have just enough water to get there, perhaps a little more if they'd waited until nightfall, but he's glad they emerged in the daytime. Escaping all that darkness, only to discover it in the sky as well, would be too much.

From there, it all goes surprisingly close to plan. The two assistants are both alive and well, have not been killed by unexpected bandits, and are still arguing over just how long they should wait in this ferocious environment for him to return. The discussion has, unsurprisingly, been lubricated by the not-so-good-wine in carefully excusable quantities. Neither of them seems to see anything other than an attractive blonde foreigner when they look at the lioness.

He had been prepared for the possibility that they'd run off, of course. They could have extracted water from the seep, hidden the books, and faced a monumental walk all they way back to the dig site later after night fell, but fortunately he has, at the moment, more camels than people and can free up two more for the return journey. It's a shame they don't have her portable palm tree thing, but it is in all likelihood now well and truly buried in the same place they almost were.

They repeat, almost exactly to the detail, their ride back to the main dig site.

He watches the lioness skillfully shape a narrative in which the cracks led to a long slender series of interconnected caves, running all the way across the former lakebed. They had to walk, to crawl and in places swim across the gaps, which is why they aren't dead of thirst, but there was nothing down there to reward the venture. They'll all be heading back to Irem again soon, after she checks out just the one last thing, as you always have to do for something like this.

There are predictable grumbles, even as he is forced to acknowledge, if only inside his own head, that she is a masterful liar. It's fortunate for him she's being generous with her affections for the moment, for whatever mysterious reasons, given that if he had to negotiate for her company, he'd probably be the one getting screwed first and wouldn't even mind.

Once she has everyone packing up, she explains her plan, which leaves him wondering what she's really up to. According to her tall tale, at one point they saw light coming down from above, over a section of the supposed cave that was putatively flooded. This means that somewhere out there is a potential well, and if they can find it and take some measurements from the nearest landmarks, future travelers will bless their names, and maybe even avoid certain death.

Finding a previously unknown water source, along with the interesting assortment of stone tools she's found, won't quite justify but may well be enough to excuse this futile diversion of resources from the main Irem expedition. But he knows it's a lie, because they never saw a single glimpse of daylight in the whole time they were down there. There is water, but it's deep down below a solid layer of rock that's many, many, many times the height of a man.

The mobile tent is folded up, and he generously agrees to assist in its transport with the excess of camels they're currently enjoying. Is he not, after all, a wealthy and generous man who gives gifts of books to strange and attractive lady explorers? Once everything is packed down, he can help to take it back to wherever they need to go, probably the nearest serious water supply, as distinct to the pitiful seep he's currently encamped at. He had noticed some signs of recent digging to keep it clear when they first arrived, which he'd assumed was just the local nomads securing their water supply, but in hindsight was probably the digging team using it as a staging point as they dropped off their equipment and then took their mounts back to somewhere more hospitable.

Once they're ready, which he knows from experience always takes longer than planned, the jinni lioness takes the lead, then skillfully urges her camel into motion, pursuing some dead reckoning that leads straight out into the middle of the dried up lake bed. Her hips sway eloquently in a sexy allegiance with the motion of the much-burdened dromedary.

They end up way, way out on the salt flat, in an area that looks just like any other to him, but then when he dismounts to go with her, she motions him back, in fact all of them.

"You should stay here," she insists. "The rock could be fractured, and I wouldn't want anyone else to fall. Could you get me a lamp, the littlest one on a chain, so I can see what I'm doing? I might be able to get a reflection off the water, if I shade my eyes carefully and then move it about."

She doesn't need a lamp, she can summon flames at will. But of course she hasn't told them that.

Once she has the lamp, she walks on a considerable distance, to the point where it's a bit difficult to make out what she's doing. She crouches down, flips her hood over her head for shade with her ears sticking out, then stares intently at the rocks just below her feet as though she was searching for something. He's just starting to get bored when she begins fiddling with the lamp, as though in search of just the right angle between flint and sparkstone to ignite the wick.

Light flickers briefly at a point, then suddenly there's a vast rumbling sound somewhere far deep beneath their feet, and suddenly she is not crouching any more but running, straight back toward them, hood snagged back on her ears she's sprinting so fast. There's another moment like falling, exactly like when they tumbled through the lowest point of the excavation into the depths, but the rocks don't crumble underfoot this time, they simply compact and the ground stabilizes again at a slightly lower level than it was before.

He loses sight of her, but by the time he manages to get eyes on again, he realizes that was simply because the terrain dropped further where she was. As she continues toward them she bounds up a sort of stair of progressively less fractured rock, gaining height a little at a time, but what really has his attention is the enormous fountain of blazing fire that is spraying up out of the ground.

The flames sort of seethe and billow, not like a lamp, or even the blaze out of the narrow space in an oven where the logs are pushed in. This is more like an accident with a cooking pot full of deep frying oil igniting, only on an immensely vaster scale and burning and dripping everywhere, filthy black smoke rising in a huge and rapidly ascending cloud to the heavens. Burning liquid sprays up out of the earth, then falls back downward in random arcs to continue the cycle of ignition.

His camel is smarter than he is and makes the loudest, most demanding camel-noise a camel has ever made in his presence, tugs the reins, then decides he is an idiot and it should run away with him in tow if necessary, rather than the other way around. He barely has presence of mind to haul himself aboard and let the animal do the work for him as it flees.

"Run!" the lioness screams emphatically as she somehow starts to catch up with them. He's heard it claimed that a fast man can outrun a horse or a camel over a short distance, never seen it done.

Once everyone is safely distant and has come to a staggering halt, the air ringing with the further complaints of disgruntled camels, she completes her lie. Far behind them, a vertical black column of smoke rises in a solid pillar to the skies, like a signal fire.

"There must have been an oil seep down there!" she pants, as if she didn't know. "I saw a little bit of rainbow colour on the water when we were down there, but I didn't realize what it meant... and of course, we didn't try to drink from that part of it... thank goodness we were trying to save fuel, and we put the torch out when we saw sunlight coming down. We could've been inside that when it caught fire! What an awful way to die. I could smell it faintly, when I was lighting the wick, but I didn't figure it out until a moment too late!"

She oversells it, in his opinion, by flinging herself into his arms, but he can't object to the chance to feel her up a bit in front of an audience. How many of them can see her tail? And what do their minds tell them is happening in that slit down the back of her robe, or when he's kissing the tip of her muzzle, far further out than it would be for a human face? More mysteries and magic.

The scholars, being scholars, insist on unpacking ink and parchment, doing sketches of the rising fire and speculating on its behaviors, for precisely as long as the wind is blowing the smoke away from their position. It doesn't take that long for the lioness to wrangle them into leaving, the very instant that it looks like the wind might turn and they start to catch a hint of it themselves.

To keep it simple, they go back to his camp first, again, and sort out the camels once and for all, as well as making sure that everyone has their own possessions on their own mount, so nothing will be found to be missing hundreds of leagues later, after it's too late to go back and get it.

His two assistants, having finally grasped the virtue of keeping one's mouth shut after a couple of days alone in one of the least hospitable locations in the world, say nothing about the books. They may not be completely useless, as it appears that they can be trained in a rudimentary manner by letting them suffer the consequences of their own actions. They're still not quite as useful as the camels, but to be fair, the camels do have more experience.

Once all has been sorted and his little pavilion collapsed and stowed, a small indulgence but one that is expected to make it clear just how prosperous and successful he is, they all head together back to the staging point at which this little splinter off the Irem expedition has stashed their own camels and equipment, along with a couple of further staff to look after them and keep them safe. It's a better place, not green by any means, but with sparse desert plants, hardy palms of a variety which doesn't grow dates so is tax-exempt, and a steady water supply from a natural rock cistern with only a moderate degree of hauling rope. He feels a lot safer here, knowing that though he still has no guards, the lioness could probably fend off a small army, and sets the assistants to topping up all of the water barrels, making sure they're clean and the seams are tight.

After this, they are going to have to go their separate ways, many questions still unanswered. But he resolves to enjoy that one last night with her she's promised him.

~11. Some Things You Don't Tell Your Wife~

Eventually he makes his way to the factor expecting his delivery, which is the part where you get paid, and so is near and dear to his heart. He picks up a couple of guards from the pool, deducting their hire from his profit, drops off the spare camels with their handler, and does a little shopping, during which he contrives to visit several bookshops and a wine merchant.

Letting them sell the volumes off one at a time, for a commission, will gradually enhance his cash flow without any troublesome questions being asked. Let them think that he is selling off some of his more expensive possessions to cover losses or fund a venture, it'll mislead his competitors.

Once he's certain he has done everything he needed to, and has then stayed overnight in case that one inevitable thing that's eluded him might suddenly come back to call, he rents a horse from the stables and finally turns his face toward home, the small village of Hsred, just outside the city but distant enough to be away from its troubles. The name is a play on words, meaning 'in now' as in get inside, like a mother ordering her children in from play. Supposedly, in India, the same sounds mean 'a ring road' which is also accurate, as the paths to the city loop to either side to allow traffic to pass by without getting into conflicts in the narrow central square.

As he rides, he warms himself with memories of the mysterious lioness on the last night they had together. She was even more passionate than usual, clawing and scratching, biting and nuzzling, rubbing her face against him as though to mark him as personal property with her scent. At one point she got completely carried away, biting him so hard either side of the collarbone that her teeth punctured the skin, although he barely noticed until later, when she was licking them off in healing, quite possibly enjoying the taste. He can feel these half-knitted punctures pulling slightly beneath his robes with the unfamiliar movement of the horse, a motion different from the sway of the camels he always becomes adapted to on every journey.

His daughters are very excited when he gets back, and receive the small gifts they've expressed a preference for before he left, their choices slightly obsolete by now as always. He left the lioness a gift as well, a small glass jar of the most expensive type of honey, the sort that has little flaked gold leaves floating in it. "To sweeten your wine as you sweetened my memories," read the note he had carved into the hardened beeswax of the stopper; he'd felt moved to poetry, she'd already drank all of the good wine, seemingly impervious to the effects of al-kohl, so he had no more left to give her. He worries the wax might melt or something, effacing the inscription, but if it's come through the hottest desert on earth intact, it seems unlikely to lose its message now. He wasn't there when she found it, obviously, so he can't judge whether she ultimately approved or not, but the scent of the wax probably drew her attention eventually; it's laced with a tiny trace of desert rose, and it's the same thing you'd use to hide and preserve valuables, a ring, perhaps.

He was troubled, though, by her private warning when they parted. "Please remember to tell no-one about this," she'd murmured, as though some casual aside. "If the cult was to learn you were in some way involved, they wouldn't hesitate have you disappeared, possibly openly and in public. I would hate to bring misfortune upon you, by our association."

He's sure it will be fine though. Who would know, and who could tell? Though, after seeing things like that, he finds that his world view is not quite the same, and cannot be. Things that have been lying dead for eternity should stay that way, not get up again and walk around.

Still, he's back with his family now, where it's safe. He swears to himself never to get drawn into anything involving underground spaces ever again. Deserts and bandits are quite enough hazards for one lifetime. At least he hopes it'll only be one lifetime.

Later, when he's upstairs with his wife, she surveys all his scrapes and scratches, as she is wont to do, making sure that her investment is in good condition.

"What are these?" she demands accusingly, spotting the imperfectly healed bites on his shoulder.

...think fast!

"You've caught me out. I have no choice but to confess. I have had a gorgeous blonde girl nibbling on me, she was completely naked and incredibly hot. In fact no I tell a lie, it was several girls, all of them blonde and attractive. Like an entire brothel full of girls. It was practically an orgy."

"Now I know you're just playing with me, husband. You're way too cheap for that."

"They were incredibly hot and fierce and sort of feline, with cute little bitey teeth for nibbling and some of them had pointy ears just like a cat. Oh, and they had little claws with which they kept on scratching me out of sheer passionate excitement."

"Get on with it please," she sulks.

"One of my clients owns a lioness and the lioness had cubs. He insisted on introducing me to the happy family, which were impeccably trained, the result of which was that I was only bitten once. Well, it was more like affectionate lioness shoulder gnawing. I could hardly say no, could I? I mean it would make me look like a coward and no-one is going to trust a merchant who scares easily. So I said yes and had to spend several hours allowing lion cubs to climb over me with their claws out in the presence of their easily offended mother. She was quite the experienced looking lioness, big teats, worn paws, very patient with her kittens. Fortunately I had wine to pass the time."

His wife looks skeptical, but has to admit to herself that the spacing of the bites is far too wide to have been produced by even the most ferocious of human jaws.

"What about my big teats, husband? You know I expect a certain amount of... care and attention, whenever you get back from the road."

"We'll see if you can outdo the lioness. Also, I got you some more of your favorite makeup."

"Get to bed, husband. I'm eager to see if this... lioness, has taught you any new skills."