The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  As the riders approached the city gates a procession of heavily laden dromedaries came slowly marching out. The travelers reined in their horses and stopped by the roadside to watch the convoy pass. Their shadows undulated, long and slender, on the hard-packed dirt of the road.

  “Glass merchants, I daresay,” said Scorpion, “bound for eastern lands.”

  When at last they rode into Ashqalêth’s royal city, Jewel gazed avidly about. Lamps were being kindled behind windows, and in metal cradles that swung from the fronds of palm trees. R’shael, her father’s village, was only a small hamlet, a dwarf in comparison with the giant that was the capital city. She welcomed the opportunity to study this large Ashqalêthan settlement, staring with interest at the silk bazaars, the wine shops, the desert horses in sage-green bridles and saddles dyed with dark vermilion, the townsfolk garbed in hues of saffron and ocher.

  The men wore flat-topped, turban-like hats, baggy leggings, and embroidered, calf-length tunics loosely belted at the waist. Sheathed scimitars and daggers hung from these belts. Many men sported finger-rings or earrings of bright yellow brass. Weathered and lean were their faces and their cardamom-colored hair was tied in a club at the nape of the neck—the tradition for men and boys in Ashqalêth. The garments of the women were long, voluminous, and flowing. Their headgear consisted of scarves, turbans, and veils, sometimes kept in place by twisted headbands of colored silks. They, too, decorated themselves with ornaments of brass: anklets, necklaces, armbands, bells, and pins that emitted a muted jingling with every movement. Amulets depended from thongs or chains about the necks of men, women, and children.

  Lizard and Scorpion helped their companions find a suitable inn, where they made themselves comfortable.

  “We go now to our own lodgings,” said Lizard, “but do not be downcast, for we shall not abandon our new friends!”

  “As long as you bide here in Jhallavad,” said Scorpion, “we shall not be far away. If you need help, we shall be pleased to provide it!” They waved in a jolly manner as they departed, trotting down the street.

  Later that evening, Jewel took Arran aside and spoke to him.

  “I cannot help but distrust those two,” she said. “They seem over-eager for our company, and that business with Scorpion slyly slipping money to innkeepers disturbs me.”

  “I am of the same mind,” said Arran.

  “Still it escapes me—where have I glimpsed Scorpion’s face before? Perhaps it was at the Fair Field. . . .” Jewel’s musings petered out. She glanced up at Arran. “What can they be about?”

  “I cannot guess, but what you say strikes a chord within me. It has not escaped my notice that they seem devious. Possibly, they are concealing something from us. The sooner we part company with them, the better.”

  Jewel burst out laughing, and said merrily, “It occurs to me that they might have the same opinion about us!”

  There was no reason to stay in Jhallavad for long. For only two nights and one day Jewel and Arran remained there, stocking up on provisions at stalls indicated to them by their self-appointed guides, who insisted on accompanying them almost everywhere.

  “We’ll show you where to find the honest merchants,” Lizard said.

  As before, the prices asked by the recommended merchants were fair, and the goods received were sound. Nonetheless, this did nothing to allay the suspicions of Jewel and Stormbringer.

  “You have been of great help to us,” said the young man courteously as he and Jewel took their leave of the Ashqalêthans early in the morning. “May rainfall bless you and your families.”

  “Ho! Sounds like a benediction of the weathermasters!” rejoined Scorpion. He smiled knowledgeably, perhaps a trifle smugly.

  “May Lords Fortune and Doom favor you,” Lizard bellowed, “may gracious Lady Ill-Fortune never cross your path, and may sublime Lady Destiny serve you well!”

  Scorpion stuck a finger in one ear as if cleaning it out. He remarked to his companion, “And may the Fates mark well the ache-head volume at which you publicly praise them, as no doubt you intended.”

  Relieved to be parted from the Ashqalêthans at last, Jewel and Arran swung up into their saddles and set off, following the highway’s meanderings. After riding through the gates of Jhallavad they passed through irrigated groves of olives and figs. In glaucous puddles of shade, small children frolicked. The rising desert sun was a flaming cartwheel, iron-rimmed. Its rays reflected from a multitude of irrigation channels, chipping sparks from the water. Nodding palm fronds were stamped out in fine detail against the sky. As the breeze swung around, the travelers glanced back over their shoulders to catch a last view of the city. Thousands of flower-petal windmills were revolving, their directional vanes rotating them all to face south. After this brief glimpse, Jewel and Arran hastened on.

  A band of weary riders approached from the other direction, plodding along the road toward Jewel and her companion. Dourly, they nodded acknowledgment as they went past, before disappearing in the direction of Jhallavad.

  “Probably Grïmnørslanders,” said Arran.

  The farther they journeyed from the city, the more fantastic the landscape became. All was brick-red, sage-green, or duck-egg blue: the gravelly ground and the rocks, the faded foliage, the blistering sky. Across the plain, wind-eroded rock formations thrust up here and there like carvings sculpted by lunatics. Vast sweeps of sand piled high against unseen obstacles, their slopes etched with elongated rows of wavy lines. The wind lifted soft powdery veils. It plucked at the soft contours of tall sand-mountains, ceaselessly shifting them, uncovering the half-buried ruins of cities, bones of alabaster, slim spirals of horn, or the broken knees of gigantic statues, before concealing them again, conceivably for millennia. In these parts the sifting dusts sometimes covered the route. Only the tall monoliths, placed at intervals along the roadside, marked its course.

  In the distance tall translucent funnels arose into the air, drilled their way along the ground, and subsided.

  “What are they?” asked Jewel, pointing out these frenzied phenomena. “What causes them? Are they dangerous?”

  “They are dust devils, sometimes called sand augers,” said Arran. “They are born when a bubble of sun-warmed air rises rapidly in the vicinity of some preexisting vorticity, such as the wind whipping about a rock. The rotating column of air picks up dust, leaves, feathers, and other debris, thus becoming visible.”

  “But are they dangerous?” Jewel repeated.

  “Dust devils are only the infants of the tornado family. Typically, they last a very short span before dissipating, and do no damage, but the rare, larger ones can be destructive.”

  Scanning their surroundings, Jewel said, “Can they be seen, even if they do not collect dust?”

  “I can perceive them, though you may not. Weathermasters can see differences in air pressure, although it is not really ‘seeing,’ but I have no other description for it.”

  “Look!” Jewel stood up in her stirrups. “There is one fast approaching down the road behind us, as we speak!”

  Glancing back, Arran said, “That is no dust devil. The sand is being kicked up by the hooves of galloping horses. We are being pursued.”

  “Whyfor? Should we try to elude them?”

  “Unless we jettison our saddlebags they will undoubtedly overtake us. In any case, where could we run? No. We can only wait. There may be no harm in whatever follows us, after all.” His tone, nonetheless, was not convincing.

  The shapes of two horsemen became outlined in the center of the fast-moving dust cloud. When they caught up with the travelers they resolved themselves into the robed forms of Scorpion and Lizard.

  “Curses upon them,” said Arran under his breath. “Why the haste?” he said aloud as the Ashqalêthans trotted up, their small desert horses snorting and glistening with sweat.

  Lizard waved his hand cheerily. “Good morrow, friends!”

  “Wayfarers from Grïmnørsland came into town this morning,” sh
outed Scorpion. “They brought news. It seems there is a chance of work for us in Trøndelheim; therefore we intend to proceed there forthwith. We deemed we might as well travel in pleasant company.”

  Jewel and Arran exchanged a quick glance, steeped with meaning.

  “Greetings,” Arran said, formally and without warmth.

  The Ashqalêthans appeared oblivious of the stolidness of their reception. After allowing their horses a shallow drink from their waterbags, they fell in beside the weathermaster and the damsel and rode on, chattering like mynahbirds.

  In the simmering heat of noon, whenever the Ashqalêthans took their customary midday nap beneath some rubicund rock formation or skeletal desert bush, Jewel and Arran would consult together in muted tones.

  “All along the way I have pondered,” said the young man one day. “We must get rid of them before we reach Saadiah, but I cannot work out how to do it.”

  The edges of consciousness were chipped by the irritating drone of a single fly and the incessant, creaky tootsie cheer of a pair of chirruping wedgebills.

  Jewel scooped up a fallen strip of bark and fanned the heat from her face. “I, too, am nonplussed,” said she. “They are rogues, I am certain. We cannot have them following us to Saadiah, asking questions. I wish I could recall where I have seen Scorpion before . . . but perchance I have mistaken him for another. . . .”

  On the third night, she came up with a suggestion. “We must pass the turn-off to Saadiah, wait until they are asleep one night, then slip away and double back. Darkness offers some slight chance of escaping unobserved.”

  Since he could advance no superior idea, Arran agreed.

  Six days out from Jhallavad, the opportunity arose to execute their plan. That day they had bypassed the intersection whose left fork was the by-way leading to Saadiah. It was but one of several such forks, each one marked by a runeetched stone to point the way. Early evening stretched out across the glimmering desert like a panther’s shadow, and a quarter moon was rising behind the western ranges. The travelers were camped in a dry gulch that became a riverbed on the infrequent occasions when torrential downpours deluged the desert. Paleboled river-eucalypts thrust skyward from the creamy gravel, their roots delving deep. Blue and green parrots, no bigger than a girl’s hand, were nesting in the trees’ woody hollows. The Ashqalêthans snored on their couches of riversand. Their young companions apparently rested with them.

  There was a faint, high-pitched shrilling, as of insects. A delicate bat flitted overhead, and a shadow momentarily crossed the faces of the two sleeping men. Next instant, the damsel and the young man were gone.

  Serene shafts of moonlight glazed the sere watercourse and stood silently between the trees.

  Quietly Jewel and Arran led the horses away. When they estimated they were out of earshot they remounted and began to canter back toward Jhallavad. About half an hour had passed when Arran chanced to look behind. A cloud of dust was moving along the road, and he knew Scorpion and Lizard were coming after them.

  “They are following us,” the young man called out. “They must have guessed we are hiding a secret. If they catch up, they will ask us why we were running away.”

  “Then we must urge our steeds to go faster!” cried Jewel.

  “On the contrary!” Instead of bidding his horse to break into a gallop, Arran reined in. Following his example, Jewel also brought her mount to a halt. She asked no questions, only rested her quizzical azure gaze upon the young man.

  With his weathermaster’s senses, Arran reached out into his surroundings. He perceived the interplay of pressure gradients, and variations in temperature. His nerves felt the stirrings of the air, their directions, their velocities.

  Nimbly he sprang from his saddle and crouched beside a stone whose flat surface had trapped the fierce heat of the sun that day and was still searingly hot to the touch. It was lying next to a wind-chiseled boulder almost the height of a man. Arran wove a pattern with his hands, and Jewel heard him speak.

  Excitement coursed through the damsel, as it always did when she watched weathermasters employing the words of power, the strange and potent language of the brí.

  She saw a kind of shimmer arise from the stone, perhaps a heat haze. Mean while, the young man was muttering other words, making different gestures, and the corners of his striped surcoat began to move, fluttering out and away from the boulder. His attention was fixed on the flat stone. Then she caught a faint glimpse of it, a low spiral of dust twirling on the ground like a dog chasing its tail.

  The conditions were almost right, in any case. He was not so much forcing a change as relocating and strengthening an existing state. So the young weathermaster told himself, as once again he defied the laws of Ellenhall for the sake of Jewel and her quest.

  He stepped back. As the heated air rose through layers of cooler gases, its strong buoyancy enhanced the convergence. The air pressure at ground level dropped. Warm air rushing to fill the vacancy spiraled in a corkscrew motion. The effect was similar to that produced by a dancer who increases the speed of his pirouette by pulling his arms closer to his body. A curved current of air whipped from around the side of the boulder, making the air rotate even faster.

  A vortex evolved. As the air spun more rapidly, the pressure in the center of the whirlwind dropped lower. More hot air was drawn within the cone, the tiny tornado feeding on itself, sucking up dirt and debris until it became clearly visible to Jewel. The funnel of twisting air grew tall enough to touch the top of a nearby mallee eucalypt, shaking the foliage. Then, with the sound of canvas being torn, the dust devil ran sideways across the ground, centering itself in the middle of the highway.

  The garments of Jewel and Arran were blowing, flapping wildly now. Stormbringer leaped onto his horse’s back and after one last long measuring stare at the phenomenon he had called into being, he cried out to Jewel, pulled around his horse’s head, and sent it galloping down the road toward Jhallavad. The damsel followed closely in his wake.

  Three times Arran slowed his steed and wheeled about to face the distant whirlwind, dropping the reins and sketching hieroglyphs in the air. His companion heard him speak and understood he was influencing the dust devil’s eccentric ramblings, continually bringing it back to the road and ensuring it remained stationed between themselves and those who followed after.

  On they galloped. Eventually, when the horses tired, they slowed to a walk.

  “What will happen?” the damsel asked, peering over her shoulder. Her pulse stampeded; her sinews burned like cables of flame. At their backs the spiral, now full-grown, could be seen towering against the stars as it danced erratically through the desert. In front of them, rising majestically like some theatrical curtain, the night sky was peppered with a fantastic ice-storm of constellations.

  “Dust devils eventually burn themselves out when the air pressure within the cone rises to equal the pressure of the surroundings. That one might last for one hour or several. At the very least, it will cover our tracks, drive our pursuers back, and prevent them from following us.”

  “It is a marvel,” breathed Jewel.

  Her companion fell silent, brooding. He seemed displeased with himself—she did not understand why.

  Many miles later they reached the turn-off. By morning they were well along the by-way to Saadiah.

  Without halting to rest they traveled on until the sun had reached its zenith. The heat poured down like boiling honey. At length, mindful of the well-being of the horses, they left the road and made camp in the shadow of a mighty dune, as tawny as a basking lion. They made certain they could not be seen from the road, in case they were being followed; there were not many places to which travelers might be heading in this part of the desert, and once the dust devil had subsided, the Ashqalêthans might have been able to work out their destination. The afternoon brought the now-familiar hot wind from the baking regions of the south, the Fyrflaume from the Stone Deserts, that ensured Ashqalêth remained in its arid cond
ition. Finely granulated sheets of sand were blowing horizontally from the dune’s uppermost ridge. Nearby, some beetles were burrowing beneath the ground to keep cool. In that place the travelers slept, while the sun swam lazily overhead and heat hazes quivered against the horizon, and the horses stood with drooping heads, and some insane insect trilled a monotonous opera.

  The afternoon was already waning when Jewel and Arran awoke and scrutinized the landscape for evidence of Lizard and Scorpion. There was no sign of the pair, nor any overtaking hoofprints in the sand, so after taking some refreshment they moved on. Climbing steeply, the by-way was leading them toward the long range of mountains in the west. In the evening the setting sun was impaled upon the peaks; each hour those peaks loomed a little higher above the plain. The desert lay to the leeward side of the range, but Saadiah lay on the windward, seaward slopes, and travelers must cross through the mountains to reach it. This was usually achieved by means of the Khashayar Tunnel.

  This vast underground traverse was an empty watercourse, the horizontal channel of an old underground river that had once pierced the mountain range from one side to the other. These days the river was dry, due to some ancient shiftings of the ground that had diverted the flow. It was a great arched passageway, worn through rock and soil by the action of the current over aeons. Naturally vaulted, it was high, wide, and airy, and haunted by whistling winds. Mining wights could be heard at work in the walls, sometimes undercurrented by the drone and whirr of eldritch spinning wheels. Three miles long was this subterranean highway, and a safe road for humankind to travel during daylight hours, as long as they kept moving. It was perilous to stand still, more perilous to be in there at night.