Desert World Allegiances

by Lyn Gala

  “I’m not weak,” Temar said in a calmer voice, carefully controlling his emotions. “You don’t have to protect me like I’m some child who doesn’t know what happens out there in the real world.”

  Shan leaned back, his mouth pulled into a tight pucker, and now Temar felt bone weary. He might not be a child, but he wasn’t acting like a rational adult, either. He didn’t know where he was. Crazy, maybe.

  “I wish sometimes my father would have hurt me… hurt me more, anyway,” Shan said, the words coming out so fast that Temar thought, at first, that he must have misheard. However, Shan had this look of self-loathing on his face that matched the words. Temar wondered if he had some company in his insanity.

  “I didn’t know what our father was doing to Naite,” Shan went on. “I didn’t understand, and I hated that Naite was the favorite.” Shan spit the last word out as though it was a curse. “I hated it. I wanted to be the favorite, and I used to do my best to torture Naite when we were kids. I thought that if I could show our father that I was better or smarter that he’d pay more attention to me. And then Naite left, and our father starting trying to….” Shan swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I didn’t understand,” Shan repeated, this time softer. “And when I did, I felt horrible that Naite had to carry this alone, that I’d acted like a sandrat.” Shan spit the words out.

  “Would it make it any better if he’d hurt you too?”

  “I don’t know.” Shan spun the screwdriver between his fingers. “At least then I would have known. I wouldn’t have been part of the problem. I’m the priest, and until yesterday, I couldn’t even see how much pain Naite carries. Maybe if our father had—” He stopped and swallowed.

  “You can’t think Naite blames you.” Temar kept his voice soft, because right now, he wasn’t the only piece of hot glass struggling to shed heat without cracking.

  Shan seemed to think about that. “I don’t think so, but it’s not like we get along.”

  From Temar’s point of view, the brothers got along pretty damn well. Naite hadn’t hesitated to help them. True, they fought, but their arguments never got hateful. They never made the sort of insults that would cut a person to the bone.

  “I wouldn’t want Cyla hurt, not even if it meant she was nicer about all this,” Temar said. “And let’s be honest, Cyla is not going to be all that reasonable about this.”

  “Maybe she shouldn’t be,” Shan pointed out.

  Temar nodded. There was plenty of reason for getting upset about the situation. The problem was that Temar really didn’t need his sister coming in and stirring everything up, including his own feelings. “I don’t need her acting like I can’t take care of myself, and Naite doesn’t need you to feel guilty.” Temar thought maybe he’d offended Shan because the man just looked at him. Shan’s hand had been traveling over the dusty bike, but now it stopped, the fingers resting against the rusted fender.

  “Maybe you should go into the priesthood.”

  “No.” Temar quickly answered. “I’d rather work with my hands.” He felt a flash of desire as he thought about working glass, watching it grow on the end of his blowpipe. But the joy faded. Even if people believed him about Ben, Dee’eta Sun wouldn’t want to train him. She’d probably feel so guilty about sentencing him to serve Ben that she wouldn’t be able to look him in the face. Shan was having trouble with that. And other glassblowers needed the income from apprentice fees to keep their shops going. They could not afford to train someone for free.

  “Temar?” Shan’s voice was soft, almost apologetic.

  “When are we leaving?” Temar kept his voice sharp. He didn’t need apologies, and when Shan kept offering them, it stirred Temar’s emotions too much.

  Shan physically jerked back at the tone, his gaze skittering away. “It might be best if you stayed here. There’s food, and the cave hasn’t been used for years. It’s safe.”

  That was the tone of voice Cyla always used before doing something outrageously stupid. “Here?”

  “Here,” Shan said firmly.

  “Oh no. This is my fight. If you’re going, I’m going.”

  “I don’t need you to come along.”

  That stung. Part of Temar wanted to curl away from those sharp words, and the flash of guilt on Shan’s face suggested that Shan hadn’t meant to be quite so harsh. However, Temar wasn’t a child. He didn’t back away from a little discomfort. Or even a lot of discomfort. He would like to figure out which of his feelings were real, and there was a tiny voice at the back of his mind that said he could do that more easily if he had some distance from Shan, but they didn’t have time for that.

  “You need someone to watch your back while you do this finding out, and if I don’t go, you won’t have anyone.”

  “I won’t get caught.”

  Temar snorted. “The last time I heard that, it was Cyla saying it about going into Landowner Young’s field. Or maybe it was Ben. Ben’s pretty damn sure he’s never going to get caught. Both got caught.” Temar frowned as he realized that wasn’t quite true. “Cyla got caught, and Ben is more in the process of getting caught, but no one can be that confident. You need someone to watch your back.”

  Shan left the bike, taking two steps toward Temar. “If they catch you….” He stopped, but the truth hung in the air between them. Ben would kill Temar. No question. He’d kill Cyla too, only Temar trusted Naite to keep her safe.

  “And they’ll kill you,” Temar answered. He watched as Shan’s fingers twitched open and closed.

  “I can tell them some story. I don’t know who shot at me, but I walked off the desert.”

  “All the way to the relay?”

  That made Shan flinch. The story had so many holes that it wouldn’t even carry stones, much less sand. And the truth was much finer than sand, as the saying went. “It would make them think twice. They don’t know that I have any information.”

  There was this strange inflection on the word “information” that made the hair on the back of Temar’s neck stand up. It was like feeling the air from the kiln wash over him. “What do you know?” he asked.

  Concern flickered on Shan’s face. “About the water Ben’s diverting.” He said that too fast. Temar took a step forward and studied Shan’s face.

  “Are priests supposed to lie?”

  Shan almost smiled. “I thought we already established that I’m not the best priest.”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Turning his back, Shan rested his fingers against the bike again. The silence grew heavy between them, and Temar could feel his rising discomfort. Two months ago, he would have retreated, but he had a whole new definition of and tolerance for discomfort these days.

  “Ista Songwind had circuits,” Shan admitted. From the way he said it, slow and soft, he hadn’t wanted to offer up that bit of information, but Temar couldn’t figure out why Songwind shouldn’t have circuits. She specialized in cleaning and restoring them. If she had a motherboard circuit, that would fit with the idea they thought to make a grab for more land, but they’d talked about that possibility. No, there wasn’t enough land. However, without more water, trying to terraform more land would be idiotic. Even if they did steal enough water to get the land going, all the other valleys would find a way to make them pay for a theft of that scale.

  “What haven’t you told me?”

  Shan’s hand, which had gone back to stroking the sand bike, now curled into a fist. “The big master circuit boards that are used for valley doors….”

  Temar waited for more of an explanation. Eventually Shan seemed to sag as he turned around and leaned back on the bike. “There was more than one or two. There aren’t more than a dozen of those on the whole world, and they’re all carefully protected. At least, that’s what Holmes told me when I apprenticed with him, and he was a master mechanic who would have known. But she had a dozen of them, and she had your sister cleaning them. An apprentice. A new apprentice.”

  “But why have a ne
w apprentice—?”

  “An apprentice so new that she wouldn’t know what she was looking at or ask too many questions,” Shan cut him off. “I thought maybe some sand devil had forced Red Plains to pull all their circuits, but Tom said the weather’s been quiet. So where did all those circuits come from? Why do they need so many? She had more there than Landing’s Valley, and that’s the largest growing valley on Livre. I don’t understand it, but none of this is adding up.”

  “We already knew most of this. Even if you think you’re wrong about the valley, we have to check at the relay. Why should I stay here?” Temar didn’t understand what had changed.

  Shan looked at him with honest pain in his expression. “If they find you, they’ll kill you.”

  “They’ll kill you just as quickly. They already have tried to kill you!” Temar protested. He remembered the cold guilt when he thought that Shan was dead because Temar had sent him off on some chase. He remembered that guilt, and he wouldn’t live with it again. “I will go with you.”

  “It’ll be—”

  “Don’t,” Temar interrupted. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. Don’t take away my choice, here.” Temar swallowed. He hadn’t meant to say that much—reveal that much.

  Shan looked at him, a dozen expressions flitting across his strong features, and Temar couldn’t understand any of them.

  “If you get yourself killed, my soul is going to implode from the weight of the guilt,” Shan warned seriously.

  Temar grinned. “I don’t plan to. I’m the cautious one, so I fully intend to watch your back from a very safe position.”

  “If this conspiracy is as far spread as I suspect, I’m not sure where that safe position might be.” Shan didn’t even try to hide his worry. However, Temar had grown up worrying about his father, his farm, his sister’s growing recklessness, and his own increasingly dismal future. Worrying was an old friend. As long as he didn’t get left behind like some child, he could handle whatever got thrown at them.

  “The only danger I can’t handle right now is the danger that you’re going to leave me here to worry and feel useless. Shan, I really can’t handle that. Everything we do is one more step toward making Ben Gratu pay for everything he did to me. I need that,” Temar said firmly. Shan studied his face, and Temar could feel the emotions shift between them.

  “I’m a priest. I should counsel you against seeking revenge.”

  “You don’t even believe that,” Temar said. Shan didn’t disagree. He did spend a lot of time studying Temar, and Temar bridled under the tacit judgment.

  “I’d welcome the help,” Shan finally said. Reaching out, he patted Temar on the shoulder, just as he probably had a dozen times before when Temar visited the church. This time, Temar jerked away, and Shan froze, his face a mask of horror.

  He could handle it as long as no one touched him, Temar mentally added. “So, when do we leave?” he asked.

  “As soon as we get supplies together?” Shan asked, looking to Temar for approval. Temar knew Shan was probably doing that simply to avoid making Temar feel helpless again, rather than out of any uncertainty. He still appreciated the gesture.

  “Sounds good.”

  Chapter 20

  THE sand bike started slipping down the dune face, and Temar’s breath caught in his throat as he clung to Shan. The man leaned back, his weight added to Temar’s on the back of the cycle, and Temar had a flash of panic as he felt trapped, pinned by Shan’s weight.

  Then the bike shifted, and Shan moved forward, gunning the engine so that it whined, and then they both lurched forward. Temar barely avoided decorating the back of Shan’s neck with vomit. Finally they headed down a long trough between two of the slow moving dunes, and Temar could feel his stomach unknot at the long, straight path ahead of them. Before this, Temar hadn’t really understood how Shan could have survived, riding a sand bike through a canyon while people shot at him. However, Shan controlled the bike with a confidence that allowed him to make impossible turns.

  Shan leaned forward, and because Temar held on, he was pulled down so that he was almost lying on Shan’s back as they sped across the white sands. Temar had watched Shan pace the front of the church many times, but until this moment, he’d never felt the power. He’d never noticed Shan as a sexual being. However, pressed up close while Shan’s strong body shifted with the bike, Temar could think of little else.

  Temar’s sexual experiences were limited to two boys from school that he’d played with. Each time, they’d pretended to understand their own bodies and each other’s bodies, even though the lie was comically transparent. They’d fumbled, pulled too hard, put knees in awkward places. They’d gotten as far as fingers up the backside before pulling back, each sure that nothing bigger than a finger would ever get up that hole. Back then, sex had been exciting and confusing and fumbling. Now that Temar had seen Shan controlling a sand bike, he figured Shan wasn’t someone who’d ever fumbled.

  The way Shan moved was closer to Ben. What Ben had done to him wasn’t sex. Temar couldn’t think of it that way. It’d been payment… fear… it’d been survival. But Ben’s body moved with a confidence and surety that reminded Temar of Shan’s movements. They understood themselves and their world, and they moved into it with strength. Before being slaved to him, Temar always thought Ben had a quiet strength, but now he could see that described Shan, not Ben. Ben liked to show off his power. He just kept that preference behind closed doors. Even behind closed doors, even drunk, Shan didn’t use his strength.

  Before riding on the bike, Temar hadn’t known that Shan had such strong arms under the robes. He’d lost weight from his time in the desert, but his muscles gathered under his skin as he moved with the sand bike, holding its weight as they skittered down the side of a dune or slid down a dune face.

  Temar leaned into that body and closed his eyes as his mouth went dry. The feel of another’s heat pressing into him was too familiar. The sound of another’s heart beating frightened him. But he’d never wrapped his arms around Ben. This was Shan. The bike tilted as they started climbing the side of a dune, sand crumbling under them and cascading down to the bottom of the valley. But Shan leaned into the dune, his knee creating a gash in the sand mountain as they climbed.

  “Almost there,” Shan shouted. Temar didn’t know if he meant that they were almost to the top of the dune or almost to the relay. His stomach rolled, either way. One meant enemies ready to kill them. The other meant having to go sailing down a dune face on an out-of-control bike. Temar figured he’d spend more time freaking out about being this close to another human being if he wasn’t busy being terrified in general. If Shan was right, this conspiracy went way beyond stealing water from his father. Circuit boards and water were two of the most vital resources on Livre, and hoarding either was an offense that could get a person exiled.

  They crested the dune, and the Livre Communications Relay was laid out in front of them, a long, silver snake set into a stone canyon so narrow that a decent-sized house would touch each side.

  “Won’t they see us?” Temar shouted over the wind that whistled past. He would be afraid of someone in the valley hearing his shout, only the bike engine rumbled, and a storm was starting to make dust devils swirl into the air. The wind hit the rocky canyon on either side of the relay’s small canyon and whistled loudly.

  “That’s the original landing site,” Shan shouted over his shoulder. “No wind-safe glass. They used solid ship sheeting. They won’t hear or see anything.”

  Temar didn’t answer. He pressed closely to Shan’s back and held on as Shan fishtailed the bike down a steep slope toward where the canyon petered out to sand. Large crags of rock rose up from the sand, like icebergs Temar had seen on old vids from Earth. Shan pointed the bike right at the field of rock, and Temar sucked in a breath and hung on more tightly. They were going to end up splatted on the side of a crag, their broken bodies food for sandrats.

  The bike turned so sharply that it thre
w up a curtain of sand, and then they slid to the side before Shan leaned back, and the bike lunged forward, right between two of the largest rocks. A small cry slipped out before Temar could stop it, and the bike’s engine powered down with a low, rumbling hum.

  “You okay?” Shan asked as they threaded through the rocks at a much slower speed.

  “Not really, no. I think I just peed myself,” Temar said, and he was only eighty percent sure that was a joke.

  “These things don’t have effective brakes. I can lose some speed fishtailing it, but if I try to actually slow the wheel rotation, I’m going to lose all control.”

  “It felt like you did lose control,” Temar pointed out. He had to order his arms to loosen up before he squeezed the life out of Shan.

  Looking over his shoulder, Shan grinned. “I haven’t wrecked a bike since I was a kid.”

  “I thought you drove your last one over a cliff.”

  “Someone shot at me. That’s not the same.” Shan guided the bike into the shadow of a long, flat rock taller than a house and powered the engine down. The machine shuddered and then fell silent. “I should check the fuel lines. Old bikes like this get temperamental.”

  “Tell me it isn’t going to break and leave us stranded out here.”

  Shan patted the part of the bike where the handles went into the frame. “This old girl is built to last. She’ll be around long after us.”

  “Hopefully you’re trying to compliment the bike and not suggest that our life expectancy is growing shorter by the minute.”

  Shan gave him another of those worried looks.

  “Just a joke,” Temar said with the best smile he could muster. It didn’t convince Shan.

  “You could stay here with the bike.”

  “If you get killed in there, my chances of riding out are about the same as your chances of trying to blow a serviceable bowl the first time you pick up a blow pipe.”