by Dorian Hart
The island continued to accelerate, probably caught in a fast-moving current far beneath the sands. It was going to pass them on a diagonal in only a couple of minutes, so they adjusted their route yet again. Now they were fleeing from it, so that it would glide by more slowly.
A sudden burst of shouts came from the island-top.
“They’ve seen us!” hissed Ernie.
It sounded like quite a commotion, dozens of men yelling to one another. What could they do? If the Black Circle cultists had noticed their arrival, the three of them might have even put Dranko’s life in jeopardy, stirring up a hornet’s nest while he was trying to hide somewhere.
The island was now quickly sliding past them, not more than fifty feet distant. A voice from above shouted, “Spread out and find him!” So was it Dranko who had the operation in an uproar? Or had the cultists seen Morningstar and her friends, which had prompted Dranko to do something rash? Either way, what could they do to help him?
She gauged the island’s speed at maybe thirty feet each second; soon it would be past them, taking Dranko with it.
“Found him!” someone roared. “He’s here!” The shout came from the rear of the island, as figured by its direction. She looked up, and even as the moving mountain swept past her, a person rappelled wildly out over its edge on a rope, then swung down and crashed hard into the rock wall. He squirmed, rotated his body, and kicked off with his left foot, sliding down another dozen feet before tightening his grip and bouncing again into the island’s side.
Morningstar squinted. “He’s there! And he’s not wearing his sand-shoes. I don’t know what he thinks he’s—”
The rope gave way, and Dranko fell. In the second before he reached the desert floor he twined the rope around his left arm, and then he vanished into the sand. The rope followed him down like a snake escaping into its hole, but a good length of it remained resting on the surface.
“Goddess! Come on, quickly!”
The three of them hurried over while the island retreated. For the moment at least, none of the cultists were inclined to follow Dranko over the edge. They probably assumed he was a dead man.
Not if Morningstar could help it. With Aravia and Ernie following, she went for where the rope lay twitching. That was good; it meant Dranko was still alive. It took the three of them a minute to work out how they could all haul on the rope at once; it involved laying out one of the sheets for them to stand upon. This was because they couldn’t apply the necessary leverage to extract Dranko from the desert without toppling over themselves. Slowly, painstakingly, they pulled on the rope, praying that Dranko wouldn’t release his grip. Ernie was the strongest; without him, she and Aravia would never have managed it. But after another minute of straining and heaving at the rope, Dranko’s arm surfaced, followed soon by his shoulder and his head. His grip was loose; Dranko’s instinct to wrap the rope around his arm was what saved him. They grabbed his unconscious body and dragged it onto the sheet.
“Is he alive?” asked Ernie anxiously. “What do we do?”
Morningstar crouched next to Dranko, wondering the same. She pried his mouth open and scooped damp sand from it with her hand, and after two handfuls an instinctive cough racked his chest. A plume of dust escaped his lungs.
“Alive,” said Aravia. “Good.”
But he didn’t regain consciousness. Aravia suggested turning him on his side and pounding his back, to get as much sand out of him as possible, but when Dranko’s coughs became less and less productive, they stopped thumping him.
“We need to drag him,” Morningstar said. “We need to get back to the first island before the sun comes up, and there’s no way to know how long he’ll be out. Come on. We’ll make the sheet into a triangle. Ernie, you and I will pull on the front corners for a start.”
Ernie looked skeptical. “I don’t know if we’ll—”
“Ernie! We don’t have a choice. I don’t like it either, but this is what the Goddess wills. Grab a corner and let’s move. We need to hurry.”
And so the three of them began a long, painful trudge eastward, hauling Dranko’s flour-sack body across the night-dark sand.
* * *
Goddess, whatever were my sins, surely you have burned them away.
It was approaching noon, and only now was the city of Sand’s Edge in sight, a blurry mirage swimming in the haze, two hours away at least. A significant part of her mind was convinced she had died and gone to the Hells, but still she shuffled her feet. One, then the other, then the other, then the other. Beside her Ernie trudged in a daze, the corner of Dranko’s sheet bunched in his sweating hands and slung over his shoulder. Behind, Aravia was wheezing or coughing with each step. But Morningstar had suffered the most. The sun had scorched her like an avenging spirit of fire, punishing her for a lifetime spent hiding from it.
Their water had run out hours ago, despite their miserly rationing. It had been right around the time they realized the first island had wandered far enough out of their path that they’d be better off marching through the morning, sunlight be damned.
But it’s I who have been damned.
Everything hurt. Her skin was a mottled canvas of leathery white patches and angry red welts. Her muscles screamed obscenities. Her thighs cramped. Sweat soaked her clothes. She glanced back at Dranko, willing him to wake up and take a turn. He lacked sand shoes, but she’d give him hers and let him drag her sweat-damp body the rest of the way. But he was still out, and so they had to endure.
My soul is on fire, you wretched goblin pickpocket. You’d better be alive when we get to Sand’s Edge. If you die, I will hunt you through the afterlife.
How many hours had they walked since pulling Dranko out of the sand? Ten? Twelve? It felt like a month, counted out in seconds of pain and thirst.
For another hour the sand whispered its mockery while the sun bludgeoned them, but she would not let them defeat her. She would not fall, not let the desert have her withered, dehydrated body. Ernie had fallen twice, but both times he had stumbled backward onto the sheet and so had survived. Aravia walked with her face slack, eyes distant, her mind probably far away from this open-air oven. The details of the city became sharper. It was a wonder that her eyes still worked; they were hot marbles in her skull, dry and brittle.
Some people were standing on the lip of the desert, waving their arms. She hoped it was Grey Wolf and the others, but if it were a contingent of Black Circle cultists waiting for them, what was there to be done?
One step, and then another, and then another. And then…the scaffolding, and arms under her shoulders, and ropes, and she was lifted, and a water skin was put to her lips. She would have cried, but her tears had long since dried up and blown away.
* * *
She didn’t remember much after that. There was Grey Wolf, propping her up. There was Kibi with Dranko slung over his shoulder, and Tor helping Ernie and Aravia. There was a gangplank, and a ship, and a ladder, and the blessed cool of a dark hold.
Thank the Goddess for the holds of ships.
She slept for a time but was woken by the pain; her skin felt like burnt paper. She sat up and found herself seated upon a sack of grain. The ship rocked gently, her companions resting quietly nearby. Aravia was reading a book; Grey Wolf was sharpening his sword with a strop.
Five feet away, lying on a jury-rigged cot of bedrolls and packing crates, was Dranko, asleep. His chest rose and fell.
“You’re awake!” Ernie’s skin was an angry color, but there was relief in his smile.
She nodded but couldn’t stop staring at Dranko. “We’re going back to Tal Hae?”
“That’s right,” said Grey Wolf. “Cost us the last of our money. We’re lucky we had enough after paying the healers to patch up Tor and fix Tig’s hand.”
Grey Wolf’s various wounds were still wrapped in bloody bandages. He hadn’t been the beneficiary of any channeling. Morningstar would have just as happily lopped Tig’s head off once he had served his purpose, but
the Goddess only knew what Ernie would have said to that.
“What about him?” she asked.
“Not sure,” said Grey Wolf. “Been in and out of sleep. Hasn’t said anything.”
For two hours she stared at Dranko, trying to reach a state of inner peace. It was difficult with her skin on fire. It hurt where her clothing brushed it. It hurt when she moved. It hurt just from sitting there watching the goblin snore. She couldn’t decide if her pain and anger were fairly directed at him, and she didn’t much care.
Finally Dranko coughed and his eyes opened. He tried sitting up, failed twice, and gave up. “I always thought the afterlife would smell less like a bait-house,” he croaked from his back.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” said Grey Wolf. He paused while Dranko coughed some more.
“We’re on a ship,” Dranko said when he had recovered.
“Observant as ever,” said Grey Wolf.
“Last I remember, I was suffocating to death. How is it that I’m still alive?”
“Morningstar is how,” said Grey Wolf, looking at her with a grim smile. “You should start thinking now about how you’re going to thank her. She saved your life.”
Dranko attempted again to sit, and this time he succeeded, though it precipitated another long hacking fit. She looked at him, at his hideous scarred face, and said nothing.
There aren’t enough thanks in the world.
Dranko looked back at her. “She did, huh?”
Morningstar shrugged, and her shoulders burned. Goddess, but it hurt even to shrug.
“I remember falling into the desert. How could you possibly have found me, let alone dug me up? The moon had set, and the sky was clouding up, so there wasn’t even that much star-shine.”
Morningstar sighed. “I see in the dark, remember?”
“The rest of us couldn’t see anything,” said Ernie. “But Morningstar saw your flying leap, and your rope come loose, and your fall into the sand.”
“How did you get me out?” asked Dranko. “I must have fallen in twenty feet at least.”
“More like ten,” said Morningstar. “But you helped save yourself, wrapping your rope around your arm like that. I saw the rope sticking out of the sand, and we used it to pull you out.”
“I did? I don’t remember doing that, but it’s the sort of clever thing I’d have thought of.”
“The hardest part was getting you back to Sand’s Edge,” said Ernie. “You were out cold the entire time, and barely breathing. We rigged up a litter using the sheet from Morningstar’s kit, and the three of us each took a corner and hauled you along the surface of the desert.”
Aravia looked up from her book. “And that wasn’t the worst part. The first island had drifted too far away from the straightest-line path back to Sand’s Edge. We ended up dragging you for fourteen hours, and more than half of that was after sunrise.”
Could Dranko understand what that desert march had done to her? The Mouth of Nahalm had breathed its relentless light and heat over her, the sun searing its mark on her like a flaming brand. What Ellish part of her could have survived? Was the Goddess punishing her, just as She had punished her with her hair and her name and her skin? Dranko had made the argument that Ell must have a higher purpose in store for her, but what if this constant punishment was the purpose?
She stared into Dranko’s eyes, showing him her pain, and he closed his own.
“Look,” he said, “I’m beyond grateful that you came to rescue me. And I don’t doubt that hauling me across the desert was about as fun as sticking your head in a forge. There were about three different times out there I thought I was a dead man, but here I am, thanks to you, with nothing more than sand in my lungs.”
Morningstar listened as Dranko told his tale, the goblin pausing every minute or two to cough and gulp down more water. When the story reached the moment where Dranko had been lowered into the main vault, he stopped. Grey Wolf leaned in, impatient. “What? What did you see?”
“I don’t know exactly. It was a statue. A big statue of a…I don’t know, a demon, maybe? About ten feet tall, wings, claws, fangs, the works. All made out of red-orange marble. But it was more than that. It was…horrible. The whole time I was in there with it, I got the sense that it was about to come to life and tear me apart. A literal sense. This was real. That statue is magical, a bad, bad thing, and now bad people have it. We have to tell Abernathy.”
Abernathy. Oh, how Morningstar hated him right now. If not for the wizard’s meddling, she’d have walked out on this collection of misfits and not looked back. Instead, she had been backed into this accursed sunlit corner. But the practical bit of her mind still had some say, and she agreed that Abernathy might know what the statue was and what it portended.
“Dranko, let me see if I understand you.” Grey Wolf’s voice brimmed with contempt. “You were down in the vault with this…thing. And you thought it was dangerous. And you were about to flee for your life. Couldn’t you have tried to smash it or something?”
Dranko coughed out a harsh laugh. “I forgot to borrow Kibi’s hammer and chisel. And no, I couldn’t have. I could barely make myself look at it. If I had dared lift a finger against it, it would have…would have…I don’t know. Something awful.”
“It was a statue,” said Grey Wolf. “Did it show any actual signs of coming to life, or were you just afraid that it would? Dammit, Dranko, we’ll have put two weeks into this trip, not to mention all the blood and the sweat and having to sleep in a Gods-damned ship’s hold, and all we’ve gotten from it is that you discovered they were hauling out a statue from a floating rock?”
Dranko opened his mouth to protest, but Grey Wolf wasn’t finished.
“You are so Gods-damned worthless!” he raged. “You’re a coward, a drunkard, and the one time we really needed you, you sat there like a drooling idiot while Mrs. Horn bled to death. At least she found herbs to help Morningstar while you were laughing off her pain and telling us you were saving your miraculous channeling for something more serious. Remember that, goblin? It should have been you with your Gods-damned neck bitten.”
As much as Morningstar hated Dranko right now, she was shocked at Grey Wolf’s venom. Dranko stared back at him. “Are you done?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Have you screwed anything else up that you haven’t told us about?”
“Grey Wolf, go easy on him, will you?” said Ernie, his voice crackling like he was about to cry. “I…I believe him about the statue. It was certainly the whole point of these cultists being out there in the first place! It could be valuable just to know about it.”
Ernie would bend over backward to see the best in just about anyone, which was a charming but not particularly useful trait.
“What about Eyes of Moirel?” Morningstar asked. “Abernathy thought they might have found one. Did you see anything that looked like a magical gemstone?”
“No, just the statue. I might have snooped around some more, but I kind of ran out of time.” Dranko smiled bitterly at Grey Wolf. “My good friend Mr. Wolf here can think what he wants, but I wasn’t ‘about to flee.’ While I was down in the vault, that fourth guy you saw back at Sand’s Edge showed up. He must have found the carnage we left in the recruitment office and force-marched himself out to the island to warn Lapis. Who’s a wizard, by the way. She nearly blasted my head off with some kind of…whatever it is that Aravia does. Arcing.”
“I’m glad you’re alive,” said Ernie.
“Me too,” said Dranko.
“Still wasn’t worth it,” said Grey Wolf. “You saw what they were up to, but now they know someone’s on to them.”
“Oh, come on, Grey Wolf.” Dranko had finally cleared his lungs out. “They already knew. It was Praska who outed them. If anything, these Black Circle people should be pissed off at Mokad now. Especially after I told Lapis that Mokad was holding out on her about an Eye of Moirel.”
Dranko lay back down and closed his eyes.
/> * * *
That night, asleep in a makeshift hammock that rocked to the ocean’s sway, Morningstar dreamed a Seer-dream that made no sense.
She floats high above the ground. Below her are seven giants arrayed in a circle, their arms locked together. They are massive, steady creatures, disinclined to move. But they are weeping, their tears falling silently to the dust.
Morningstar descends to see more clearly. The giants mourn for seven dead mice, their bodies lying broken and still in the center of their circle. She senses the giants’ immeasurable sadness as they stand their silent vigil.
All at once a brilliant white light shines from the giants’ eyes, and Morningstar does not flinch. The seven mice spring to life and run in a little circle of their own, a circle within a circle. The giants rejoice, but a minute later their eyes flash again and the mice drop dead, dead a second time, and this time their bodies become dust. The giants close their eyes and turn to stone, their watch ended at last.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ERNIE FOUND A large wooden crate waiting for him at the Greenhouse.
“I bet it’s from my parents. They promised me care packages once I got settled in.”
Not that he was feeling very settled. He had been nervous enough on that first day, when Abernathy had summoned him. But the things that had happened since…Pikon’s pancakes, but it had all been so horrible. Poor Mrs. Horn, dying in a pool of blood, and all the dead bodies in Verdshane. The terrifying fight against the cultists in Sand’s Edge. And then, almost as awful as Mrs. Horn’s death, there was Morningstar’s decision to mutilate a prisoner to get information. He had been standing right there! If he closed his eyes, he could hear the sound of Tig’s finger bones breaking.
And Morningstar hadn’t shown any remorse, even afterward! She considered it just part of the business of saving the world, and maybe she was right, but it made Ernie squirm to think about. They were the Heroes, and torture was the practice of Villains. But Grey Wolf and Dranko, they didn’t have any problem with it, and neither did Tor and Aravia, not really. Sure, it made them uncomfortable, but they were happy to let Morningstar be the heavy. Among his companions, only Kibi properly shared his distress. Not that the stonecutter had made a big deal out of it. Kibi was quiet and tended to keep his opinions to himself. But Ernie had seen the shock in his eyes, the color draining from his face, when Morningstar had brought down her mace.
