Raissa sighed, just quietly enough that Dayneth and Joth could not hear. The thoughts suddenly made Raissa feel worried, almost lost. She had not expected that this journey would be easy, or without tragedy, but she still could not shake the horror that sprang in her mind when she recalled that night out in the ocean when she was separated from her other friends, and when so many courageous men and women lost their lives.
The emptiness that she felt for the last few days grew just a little bit more as she thought about Alamor and Tridian. She missed them most of all.
Fate had been cruel to rip them away from her so shortly after reuniting with both. With Alamor, it felt as though they were finally solidifying the bond that they nearly lost after spending more than a year apart.
Then there was her brother, who she had worried about every day while he was out searching for answers to the attacks across Tordale, that they now knew were the diabolical actions of Baldaron. She had been overjoyed to see Tridian again, to have him by her side, just as he had always been throughout her life. In one night, he was gone again. So was Alamor. It was as if the universe played a callous joke on Raissa.
There was hope that she would eventually see Alamor and Tridian, but like anything else involved in their mission, it was not certain. As she explained to Dayneth and Joth, she had a means of connecting with Alamor through their respective Serenity. That provided hope. What roused the uncertainty was what she had not told her two companions earlier in the day.
If Raissa was to guide Alamor and the others to where she stood, it required more than merely her Serenity. It also required that Alamor’s Serenity was up to the task.
To forge a connection between two distant persons required that both possessed some measure of magic in the first place, even the person who was being sought after, as Alamor was. You could not link yourself with someone who did not harbor the same energies.
The act was not easy to accomplish, even if your target was nearby. When they were leagues across the continent, it was nearly impossible. Only Raissa’s tremendous Serenity allowed her such a feat. Tiroku’s magic was not great enough to perform the spell. Just the same, the Champion of Light was also not capable of sensing the magical conduit that Raissa had attempted to establish from her distant place—only Alamor, with his mighty, but unrefined Serenity had been.
Of course, the spell had been incredibly taxing on her whole being, physical and intangible, and this was what concerned her. With how far away Alamor was, it forced Raissa to exert a tremendous amount of Serenity in order to project her magic across the vast distance. This was to ensure that not only would it find Alamor, but also that he could realize it in the first place. As magic traveled, its aura became diluted. If Raissa did not project enough, Alamor might never be able to sense it, as had been the case during Raissa’s first few attempts to connect with his party.
The amount of Serenity which had been necessary to reach Alamor earlier in the day had greatly weakened her. She could not perform a spell of the same intensity many more times before it might drain her being of all energy and kill her, but she also could not leave Alamor and the rest of their companions to aimlessly wander the Arid Reaches.
That was Raissa’s quandary—she had to figure out a steady, manageable link that Alamor would be capable of detecting, and that would not gravely drain her of her life force. She and Alamor would need to cooperate their Serenity without even knowing it.
Raissa was fairly certain that she could succeed on her part, but could Alamor? Had he and his Serenity grown enough for him to accomplish this act?
She hoped, and trusted, that he would.
Raissa’s thoughts were broken when she heard a raspy growl somewhere nearby. She quickly looked up and spotted a pair of shapes standing at the cave entrance, just behind the wall of thorn bushes which Joth had set up. Raissa could not make out much detail on them, as they were concealed by the night’s murk, the swirling sands, and the branches. All that she could tell was that they were large hounds who stood on all fours, with a noticeable hunch in their backs.
Dayneth certainly heard them, too. The Aesur woman took hold of her bladed rings and rose to her feet. “Should we deal with them?” she asked aloud, never looking away from the menacing creatures.
“I’d rather we not get into a scuffle with anything that we don’t have to,” Joth answered. “Wait for just a few moments.”
Dayneth obeyed, and the three of them all watched as the hounds began to pace back and forth near the cave’s mouth.
One of the beasts eventually tried to press through the makeshift barrier, drawing back with a snarl as sharp thorns repelled it.
Still, it seemed to be enough indication for Joth that the creatures were not planning on leaving anytime soon. The man brandished his saber and a burning branch from the fire as he stood. “Stay back here,” he told Raissa and Dayneth. “The fire should scare them off.” He made his way to the cave entrance, and the beasts already started to backpedal even before he got to the wall of thorn bushes.
For a split second, Raissa got a clearer look at the creatures as Joth waved the flaming branch at them. They were ugly, wild things, with matted, ocher fur running across their gaunt bodies. Black eyes and yellow fangs gleamed in the fire’s light as the hounds barked defiantly at the flames that repulsed them.
Then, just like that, they fled beyond the torch’s glow, and they were merely dark, indistinct shapes once again within the murky night.
When they retreated into the sandstorm, far beyond sight, Joth turned and made his way back to the fire. He sat down and dropped his torch into the flames.
No one said anything. The three companions sat in silence as the fire crackled and the wind continued to howl outside the cave.
14
Joth and Dayneth were readying themselves to resume their trek when Raissa awoke the next morning. Most of their meager supplies were packed, and the fire long extinguished, leaving Raissa to do little more than lift herself from the cave’s floor before they ventured back out into the Arid Reaches.
Thankfully, the sandstorm from the night before was a distant memory. A much more tender breeze strolled through the desert that morning, and it carried no threat of the dust clouds that assailed them the previous day. Raissa actually found the breeze to be very welcome as it tempered the region’s balmy air. The mornings in the Arid Reaches were far more comfortable than the sweltering afternoons, but they were still hotter than the sunniest of summer days out on the Plains of Oston.
Although Joth had hoped to cover as much ground as possible while the heat was less of a burden, the sand found a new way to impede their progress. Like a fresh snowfall, it lay in a thick, dense carpet after the storm the night before, burying the region in its gritty, dusty reach. The sand was difficult to walk through in many parts of the desert while they marched that morning, their feet often sinking into its grip.
The terrain slowly rose beneath their footfalls as they progressed. It was not quite noon when the Arid Reaches’ floor broke the surface of the sand and began to rise into a long chain of ridges that ran like a spine of mountains across the desert. Joth considered navigating around the ridges, but with how far they spread over the desert in all directions, he surmised that it would take far longer than it would to simply traverse them.
As they made their way up the rising terrain, they soon learned that there was more than a steep climb that would test them. After the sandstorm the night before, the ridges were covered by a layer of loose sand that sat like a blanket of icy gravel. The sand turned the coarse surface of the ridge’s rock into a slippery hazard, like a glassy sheet that attempted to disrupt Raissa and her companions’ every step. Not only that, but the sand was deep enough in some spots that it disguised the numerous crevices and inclines over the ridges.
Raissa learned the danger of this when she stepped down where the sand hid a short slope from view. When her foot touched down on it, the loose sand fell away and nearly caus
ed her to stumble down the slant.
She only avoided the fall because Joth reached out in time and took hold of her. “Careful, your Highness,” the man said as he pulled Raissa up. “We haven’t come this far to have a silly little fall do you in.”
Raissa grinned. As always, Joth remained upbeat in the middle of their trying journey, and he seemed intent to spread his cheer to her and Dayneth. “I never thought sand could be so much trouble,” Raissa admitted as they resumed walking across the ridges.
“Neither did I,” Dayneth added. “It’s a much greater nuisance than just the way it gets in all of your clothes and hair.”
Raissa barely contained a giggle. “Or, for some, the way it gets in all of their feathers.”
Joth’s head fell back with a loud laugh. Even Dayneth could not refrain from chuckling at Raissa’s quip.
“It’s not the realm for everyone,” Joth said. “Much like the sand, the Arid Reaches is quite deceiving. Everyone has a general idea of what it’s like, but when you experience it firsthand, you quickly learn that there is much more to it than you could have ever imagined.”
Not a moment after he finished, Joth lost his footing and staggered. Raissa felt her heart drop for an instant as she and Dayneth instinctively leapt at Joth and captured him by the arms to keep him from falling. Once he had steadied himself, they all glanced down at where he had stepped. Following his footfall, the sand began to slide away, revealing a sharp incline on the ridge that it had managed to conceal. If he had taken another step, or if Raissa and Dayneth had not caught him in time, Joth would have tumbled down a steep slope that fell a considerable distance down the ridge.
He looked back at Raissa and Dayneth with a sheepish grin. “Perhaps I need to listen to my own advice a little better,” he said.
“Please do,” Dayneth advised, with only a faint smile as obvious concern joined her words. “Without you, we don’t stand a chance of making it another day across this desert, never mind all the way to the Sandstone Mausoleum.”
Joth did not seem to share the same worry that the Aesur woman did, despite just narrowly avoiding a precarious fall. He veered away from the slope and began to take them across a different path over the ridges, treading just slightly more cautiously than he did before. “Well, luckily for us, we’re not far from the Azure Sands Outpost,” Joth said. “Based on that sandstorm last night, I’d say we’ll probably arrive there sometime tomorrow afternoon.”
Although Raissa found some relief in hearing that they would finally come to a human settlement soon, she was more curious by how Joth claimed to know it. “How do you know that because of the sandstorm?” she asked.
“Sandstorms happen because of the air currents that move onto the continent from the ocean,” Joth explained. “As those air currents hit the heart of the Arid Reaches, where the land is at its absolute driest, that’s when they pick up all of the dust and dirt. The heart of the Arid Reaches is mostly flat country. It was once fertile fields that ran for as far as the eye could see. It’s ringed by areas like what we’re making our way through now, these chains of rocky hills and ridges. Before Scourge spread, that flat country was farmland, where the harvests were said to be the most bountiful in all of Tordale. These rockier regions couldn’t hold crops as well, but people mined them for stone and other metals. Much of Tordale’s iron supply once came from here. But after Scourge ravaged the land, not even those resources could escape its destruction. The stone became coarse and brittle, and the metals corroded by that terrible energy. It withered this whole region, until a simple breeze could lift away what gravel and dust remained.”
Joth paused, taking a moment to gaze far into the distance. “So, then, as the air currents from the ocean wanes the further it moves inland, and the terrain becomes more stable, that wall of sand like what we walked through dies down. Seeing as how there’s not even a sign of that sandstorm anymore, we must be getting closer to the outer rim of the Arid Reaches, where the Azure Sands Outpost lies. That sandstorm last night was probably just the tail end of something far worse.”
Raissa was shocked to hear Joth dismiss the severity of the squall that they had been caught in. “They can actually be worse than that?”
Joth glanced back at her and nodded. He appeared to withhold a smile. “A lot worse,” he confirmed. “The strongest storms have so much dust and sand in them that you can’t even see your own hand in front of you, and they usually last for an entire day, not just a few hours like the one last night did. If we had been overtaken by a storm at its absolute worst, we probably would not have survived the night.
“Have you ever had to travel through a storm that powerful?”
“Yes, but only once.” Joth bent his gaze upward. He seemed to have to recall more of the experience. “It was about twenty years ago, if I’m remembering it correctly. It was during a trek I took with a scouting party to map out some of the inner desert. Thankfully, we were dressed properly to keep from being blinded and suffocated by all of that blowing grit, and we were able to find shelter rather quickly. A good thing we did, too. If you don’t get out of those storms in time, it’s not uncommon that you end up being buried alive when it’s all over.” Joth let his eyes settle on the horizon, as if he peered longingly at something unseen in the distance. “Yes, I’m definitely glad that part of the desert is far behind us. I promise that once we get to the Azure Sands Outpost, we won’t have to worry about those sandstorms anymore. They rarely move into that region, and even when they do, they’re a lot easier to endure when you have a sturdy house to sit inside of.”
“How much further do you think we have until we arrive there?” Dayneth asked.
“It’s not very far now,” Joth answered. “After these ridges, it’ll be flat desert once again, so we’ll make better time. Even if we stop and rest for the night, we should come to the outpost tomorrow afternoon. We may even arrive earlier if—”
Joth suddenly went silent. He came to a complete halt at the top of a rise on the ridge. Just as Raissa and Dayneth joined him at the crest, the man threw his outstretched arm at them to keep them from proceeding any further.
“Don’t move,” Joth said in a hoarse whisper. He was totally still, his eyes focused on something ahead of them along the rock masses.
Apprehensive to speak, Raissa looked in the same direction that Joth did, hoping to spot whatever he already had.
She noticed the hulking beast immediately. It stood on all fours as it ambled across a flat overhang no more than a hundred yards off. It was longer than a warhorse, and its thickly muscled body was covered in copper red scales that looked like armor. A short, stocky tail flopped about as the creature sniffed the overhang’s sandy floor, searching for a scent. Its head resembled a bull’s, with a long snout and a big, flat forehead, but it sported two very unique features. A pair of indigo tusks protruded from behind its lower jaw, the boney weapons curving like scimitars as they ran past the length of its snout. Three bloated, tentacle-like appendages dangled from each side of its huge head.
“What is that thing?” Dayneth dared to ask, keeping her volume to a whisper just as Joth had.
“A Kaivu,” Joth answered, never taking his eyes off the beast. “They’re alpha predators, something I was hoping we wouldn’t stumble upon out here.” Joth let his hand slowly creep behind his back, where his fingers began to wrap about his saber’s hilt. “Back away slowly,” he urged. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”
Raissa and Dayneth heeded his command. They backpedaled cautiously, careful to be as quiet and as discreet as possible.
They took no more than five steps before the Kaivu lifted its head and looked up at them. Raissa felt her feet become pinned to the ground as the creature stared in their direction. Even with the distance between one another, Raissa still could see its snout twitch, and she thought she could hear a low, menacing growl that sounded like it came from the lowest depths of the beast’s throat.
The Kaivu lifted a clawed foot an
d placed it forward, beginning a slow, deliberate advance toward them.
Joth no longer whispered. “Run!”
Raissa did not require his urgent tone to be spurred onward. She turned and sped across the ridges back the same way that they came. Dayneth followed right behind her. Raissa knew that her sworn guardian could easily have passed her while they ran in a desperate escape, but Dayneth ran purposefully slow to act as a barrier between Raissa and the approaching predator.
Joth ran behind both of them, his saber and shield now drawn. He constantly looked over his shoulder while they ran, keeping a close eye on the Kaivu to gauge how close it came to overtaking them.
“Follow the same path that we took before!” Joth called out.
Raissa quickly spotted the tracks they had made in the sand from earlier and began to follow them. At first, she wondered the reasoning behind running along that exact path, but she soon found that it allowed her to move considerably faster than before. Their previous march had left plenty of deep footprints in the sand, and by running through those, their feet were not ensnared quite as much when they first traversed it. Not only that, but it also showed them a safe path that did not have any threat of hidden crevices or ledges that they could accidentally plummet over. Confident that she had solid ground beneath her feet, Raissa ran across the ridges as fast as her tired legs would let her.
She eventually spared a glance behind her, hoping that by some chance they had outrun the Kaivu and that it had given up.
A terrified gasp got caught in Raissa’s throat from what she actually saw. The Kaivu had already closed the distance between them, charging just ten yards or so behind Joth as it relentlessly pursued them. Despite its great size and girth, the beast moved like a cat, bounding over the sandy carpet and the rocky terrain with none of the difficulty that its intended quarry did.
A Gleaming Path Page 18
