The Seared Lands

by Deborah A. Wolf

  Only now, as they ran from the Araids and their fell priests and toward the surface lands with their surfeit of wicked creatures or wickeder men, was Maika beginning to understand that this thing of wonder was also a thing to fear. And even if they survived the road, what then? Where would her people lay their heads at night, name their babies, make their music? Would the greenlanders welcome a people with no home? Maika was a student of history; she knew the ways of queens and kings. And she thought not.

  A bit of something beside her foot caught Maika’s eye. She stooped and picked it up, glad for the distraction. Bone, she thought, though it glittered in the torchlight like mica-filled rock.

  “What is this?” she asked Akamaia, holding it up near her tutor’s face. The woman peered nearsightedly through the shadowmancers’ gloom and pursed her lips.

  “It is a proximal phalange,” she replied, wiggling her own thumbs at the young queen. “Human.” Leave me in peace, her eyes added, I am tired.

  Maika stared at the bone as she walked, trying to imagine the person to whom it had once belonged. Had it been a woman or a man? she wondered. Bandit or bard? It glittered like a precious thing; someone had sung this person’s story into their bones. Whoever this bone belonged to had been loved, then, and had died long ago when Dzirani bonesingers still walked the world. She wondered who had loved this person, whether they had a good heart or bad, and whether they might have written a book she had read or painted a mural she had seen.

  She wondered how many of the people she had led here would leave their thumb bones to lie forgotten for a thousand years, and if hers might be among them.

  Eventually she tossed the bone aside, and then rather wished she had not. Was it disrespectful to the dead, to so casually discard a piece of their body? Or would it have been worse to keep it? She would have liked to ask Akamaia, but the Illindrist had turned aside. The old woman was weary and in pain, and Maika did not want to bother her any further. She turned instead to Tamimeha.

  “Tell me, Grand Princess” she asked, “have you walked to the Edge before?” Tamimeha frowned, and the glow-paste of a high-caste warrior frowned with her.

  “No.”

  Maika waited for more, but Tamimeha strode on, glaring around them as if some mother or grandmother might suddenly decide to assassinate their queen. So Maika sighed and turned with reluctance to Amalua, the young Iponui who had brought them the Mask of Sajani. The young queen thought she would have liked the runner, but the young woman’s eyes were full of horrors and shadows, and she never smiled. Ever. Rumor had it that runners were full of salt and mischief, but this one had a face and a heart hard enough to break rocks.

  “We are drawing near the innermost boundaries of the Edge,” Maika said, eager to show this youth that her queen was not ignorant of the world. “Are we likely to be attacked?” As she said this, she fingered the hilt of a long, sharp knife Tamimeha had bidden her wear at her hip. Maika had never been armed before.

  “Perhaps,” the runner said with only the briefest of glances. “I would very much like to kill something.” Though Amalua’s face, shiny with healers’ ointments and fresh scar tissue, was half-healed from the terrible burns she had suffered, the grief in her eyes ran too deeply to ever truly mend.

  It had taken them two full moons to leave Saodan. Half of her counselors moaned that this was not enough time to gather all the people together, while the other half— notably those of the outermost bastions, most pressed by the Araid threat—shouted at them to hurry, hurry. For her part, Maika had leaned her hopes against the pillars of Tamimeha and Akamaia. She trusted that they would know what best to do, and wished that she could share their combined confidence and experience.

  Far beneath the scorched surface of the Seared Lands the people of Quarabala crawled like a thick black snake through tunnels and along the bottom of rifts that had been hewn and cobbled and worn smooth over the course of a thousand years. Woman, man, child, elder—all of the people who could walk, be carried, be pushed in a cart. There had been a few souls foolish enough to remain behind and clutch at their worldly possessions. Maika had wanted even those few rounded up and forced to march.

  “My people are my people,” she had insisted through tears, “even the stupid ones.” But Tamimeha just shook her head.

  “They would only slow us down,” she had said as gently as she was able, “and we must make haste. Three more runners have come in with reports of Araid incursions.” The warrior had not wanted to bring along those people who could not walk on their own, viewing their lives as an acceptable sacrifice to speed, but Maika had invoked her privilege as queen.

  “We will not bring the prisoners,” Tamimeha had insisted, “and that is within my authority to decide. Those who have broken the queen’s law have forfeited the queen’s protection.”

  “Besides,” Akamaia had added—sweet, gentle Akamaia who wept when she fed moths to her o’oraid—“they will slow the reavers down, when our pursuers break through the walls and into the city.” Akamaia’s favorite husband had been murdered, years and years ago. She had no pity in her heart for criminals.

  The black snake rattled with wagon wheels and hand carts. It wept with the voices of children and scolded with the voices of mothers. But mostly it sang the song of Quarabala, the Seared Lands—of love and regret, of leavings and homecomings, of weariness and wonder and hope. This song sustained Maika as no food or drink ever could; it kept her moving forward after her second pair of sandals fell apart and she grew so tired of spitting red sand that she just gave up and let it cake upon her lips and teeth.

  * * *

  If I make it through this alive, Maika promised herself for the thousandth time, I will never take another walk as long as I live. I will remain at home in a palace, eating sweetmeats, and growing fat upon my throne. I will change my clothes twice a day, and take twice as many baths. Pshew, I stink!

  She had hoped that once the people were convinced to leave they might have finished their journey in a moons’ time. But it had been a full two-moon since they had left Saodan and they were just now coming to the innermost boundaries of the Edge, those lawless lands where the strong preyed upon the weak and the sky was so close you could see it. She had walked through three pairs of sturdy sandals, lost a great deal of weight, and lost more than a few of her people too as they slipped away by twos and threes and whole families during each midday rest, preferring the possibility of reavers and Araids to the very real struggles of walking day after day after miserable day.

  Four times during that two-moon span, Maika was called upon to give her blessings over the body of someone whose spirit had chosen to take the Lonely Road instead. The third was an infant who had been born too soon and whose grieving mother refused to look her queen in the eye. Maika had returned to her travel tent after that one and had cried until she threw up. The bodies were burned, as there was no time to bury them properly and nobody wanted to leave them for the reavers.

  For the first time in her short life, Maika knew despair. This journey seemed as wretched as any tale she could remember hearing about the Night of Sorrows, and they had not even made it to the surface yet, nor faced the enemy from which they fled. How, then, did she dare hope that any of them would survive the shadowed road?

  The great black snake made of people had wound its slow way through the greater and lesser towns of the Quarabala—Oloulou, Ameha, and Leakala, Ehana, Ia’u, and Ni’ipau—past the empty merchants’ stalls and alleyways thick with vermin. It grew bloated as stragglers joined the whole, more than making up for those who fell away. They slept through the heat of day and every night traveled under the glow of lanterns and starslight and the carved faces of the ancestors, until finally they had reached the border between the civilized lands of Quarabala and the Edge, marked by the Starfell Gates.

  Fashioned in days of old by the Hammerfall Smiths, forged of stars-fallen metal and precious gems, the gate glittered like the heavens above, reminding the people of Qua
rabala of the ancestors’ promise: that some sweet day in the far-off, they would once more walk beneath the night sky and the day, with water and sand beneath their feet, and the wide sky overhead.

  Today is that day, Maika thought, and her heart pounded hard against her ribs. I am not afraid. Yet her hands shook as she walked forward on trembling legs to hand the queen’s key to the gatekeeper. This gate had not been opened since the Night of Sorrows, and on that night—

  No, Maika told herself firmly. I will not invite black luck into the night by entertaining such thoughts. She breathed deep to banish the trembling from her limbs, the trepidation in her spirit, and forced a smile as she handed over the heavy, cold key. On this night of all nights, her people needed her to be strong.

  The gatekeeper, a woman as broad and strong-backed and possibly as old as the gate itself, bowed to Maika and pressed the key to her reverent sunken mouth. Her starsilk robes flowed about her thick ankles as she made her slow way up the last steps, thrust the key home, and turned once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  For a moment nothing happened, and Maika wondered if perhaps the gate had died of dust and hopelessness. Then came a coruscation of tiny, glittering lights as a thousand miniature spiders, cunningly crafted of silvery metal and each set with a single precious stone, dropped from holes concealed all along the top of the gate like stars falling from the heavens. They darted this way and that across the face of the gate trailing strands of precious magesilver, each a wonder of color, so that within moments the gate was veiled in an intricate weaving of light and magic.

  Their task finished, the spiders scurried back up the webs and into their holes again, for all the world like living things.

  Brilliance rippled across the gate, glowing brighter with each wave, until Maika’s eyes watered to look upon it. She raised a hand to shield her face from the glare, but the gate gave one final, massive burst of brilliance.

  Then winked out.

  Maika sighed, and the people sighed with her, in the absence of beauty. She opened her mouth to ask the gatekeeper to turn the key again and bring back the light, but a soft glow began to emanate from the gate, and this was not so kind. A great spiders’ web glowed blue and cold. At each meeting of strands hung a silvery globe as big as a man’s fist, and each of these held the image of a different face. Dark faces and fair, women and men, slaves and queens, alike only in their expressions of agony—these were the enemies of Quarabala, caught in the moments of death, a warning to those who would oppose her queens.

  A warning to my enemies, Maika realized. It was a frightening thought… and satisfying. Each of these screaming, dying people had been a threat to the ancestors of her line, to the people whom she had been bred and born to lead, and she was glad—suddenly, fiercely glad—that they had suffered.

  A hand settled warm and heavy on her shoulder; Maika started and nearly yelped out loud.

  “Do not be afraid.” It was only Tamimeha, looking down at her with grave concern. Maika rolled her eyes and shrugged off the warrior’s hand.

  “I am not afraid,” she insisted. “I am a queen.”

  “So you are.” The old warrior’s lips twitched into a rare smile. She inclined her head. The dreadful web flared bright as moonslight, then a darkness fell upon them so swift and terrible that it hurt their eyes, and the Starfell Gates swung outward.

  “It is time,” Akamaia whispered. “Time for us to leave our home. Have courage, my child.”

  Maika did not need to be told twice—nor, she realized, did she need courage. She simply needed to do her duty. She tilted her face upward, let the pride of her ancestors fall upon her like stardust. Then she led her people through the Starfell Gates and out of Quarabala forever.

  EIGHT

  They were no more than a half-day’s slow walk into the Edge when a commotion near the front of the line brought them all to a standstill. Warriors’ spears bristled round Maika and she strained to peer over them, to see what was happening.

  There was a runner, an Iponui who was almost as short as Maika herself. The runner was followed by a man. A raggedy, rough, low-caste man with missing teeth, brought into the presence of his queen. This was the first Edgelander Maika had ever seen, and she could not help but feel a twinge of disappointment. She half expected to see a giant, wild-eyed and with his teeth filed for tearing at human flesh; instead she found herself entirely too close to a low-caste ragtag who smelled of piss and whose unkempt mop of hair made her itch just looking at it.

  The Iponui dropped to one knee, bowing so low her nose almost touched her thigh. “Your Magnificence,” she said through a veil of spears and hard-faced warriors. “This man begs audience of his queen. He would ask—”

  “Makune does not beg,” the man said. “Especially some little buta thinks she queen, eh?” A low hiss ran through the warriors, but he just laughed, showing a mouth full of rot. “Makune demands.”

  He probably thinks himself brave, Maika thought. But I think he is just stupid. Tamimeha is ready to knock his head off. Indeed, the older woman’s eyes narrowed with hard contempt.

  “Demands.” Tamimeha frowned. “You make demands of your queen?”

  “Not my queen,” the man said, setting his feet shoulder-width apart and throwing his chest out in a belligerent manner. “I am Edgelander, and this is my kingdom.”

  “A charming kingdom it is, too,” Maika said in the chilliest voice she could muster. She did not like the way this man stared at Tamimeha’s tits, even though the warrior could beat him to death using nothing more than her sandals. “You wish to speak with me? Speak. Do so quickly, before I have my buta poke you full of holes and let all the shit out.”

  The Seared Lands fell into a shocked silence.

  Well, Maika thought, that was effective.

  The coarse man burst into coarse laughter. “Ah! Ah! You got balls, little buta. Maybe you are queen after all? Maybe after you grow some mamouleh.” He cupped both hands over his chest and leered. “You want to be part of my nag?”

  Maika opened her mouth to answer, but Amalua stepped in front of her, somehow making that a gesture of respect for her queen, contempt for the man facing them, and a threat, all in one smooth movement.

  “Speak to my queen like that one more time,” she said softly, “and you die.” A promise, not a threat.

  The man’s smile faded, and he shrugged. “Just talk,” he said in a petulant voice. “Just man talk is all.”

  Maika pursed her lips and waited. Her first meeting with an Edgelander was proving disappointing. She very much wanted to ask the man why he had come, then she wanted him gone.

  Be patient, she told herself, taking a long, slow breath. She knew that the first to speak in a parley ceded power to the other. Be patient. In the end, the low-caste man spoke first, and Maika felt as if she had a victory.

  “We have built a barricade,” he said, puffing his chest out again. “You cannot pass.”

  Maika breathed through flared nostrils, refusing to speak or bite her lips or clench her fists, any of these things her body urged her to do. The man went on in a petulant voice, obviously frustrated by her lack of reaction.

  “You cannot pass unless you pay.”

  “And what is your price?” Akamaia demanded, coming up behind Maika and sounding badly out of breath. This journey had been hard on the Illindrist, not least because she had insisted on bringing with her every book in the Queens’ Library. “What price for safe passage by your queen through her own lands?” Her voice was hard and clenched as a fist.

  “Her lands.” The man laughed. “The Edge is no man’s land, no girl’s neither. This land”—he spat—“is for those who are strong enough to take it. You strong enough, girl?”

  Maika strove to ignore the man’s taunts, and the threat that lurked behind his words. Were they strong enough? Every Illindrist would be needed if they hoped to provide what shade and safety they could to the evacuees; they could not afford a battle, not n
ow. This journey would stretch the sorcerers to their breaking point, some to the point of death, and every moment wasted was a moment more than they could spare. She judged that they were strong enough to take this land, and that doing so would be the end of them all.

  “We are strong enough to take this land,” she assured the Edgelander, “but we do not want it. We seek merely to pass through these parts unhindered. Pass through, and never return.”

  “Never return, hey.” The man’s eyes flashed in the gloom. “Saodan is empty?” he craned his neck and looked down the river of people.

  “We have left Saodan,” she said. The memory of those few who had been left behind was a stone dragging at her heart. Honor bid her add, “But it is not safe for you to go there. The Araids come, with their Arachnists and hordes of reavers. You should follow us, those who may, lest your lands are overrun as well.”

  “Safe.” The man stared at her for a moment, lip twisted upward in an ugly sneer. “Safe is for queens. Not for the likes of us out here, living on the Edge.” He spat. “Not for the likes of us.”

  “Then what is your price?” She repeated Akamaia’s question. “I will not ask again. Tell me what it will cost for us to pass through this—kingdom—of yours unmolested, or we will raise spears against you and take what is mine to begin with. You say this is the Edge, and that these lands are yours. I say this is Quarabala, and these lands are mine. But in the interest of making haste, I will listen to you, and I will decide whether to play your silly game.” She pulled herself up to her full, if unimpressive, height, mustering all the dignity she could. “Or to have my spears thrust through your stupid bellies and leave you for reaver food.”

  Tamimeha grunted surprise. Amalua thumped her spear down once, twice, three times in respect, and in the next moment the ground was shaking as warriors drummed their approval of this fierce young queen.