Once during the night he saw streamers of light in the sky that illuminated people he had once known: his mother, customers from her stall in the marketplace, children he had played with, even Rieve and her grandfather. They were huge, spread across the sky from horizon to horizon, and he was walking toward them. It wasn’t until Ruhm slapped him and shook him into consciousness that he realized he had been hallucinating.
He touched the scar in his eyebrow, but his hand and face were both numb, so he didn’t feel it. “Why did you hit me?”
Ruhm pointed toward the others, off in the distance, silhouetted against starlight on the top of a low ridge. “We’re over there. You were wandering off by yourself.”
Aric pointed toward the sky, but the streamers were gone, and so were the people. “I was … I was seeing things, I think. My mother was there. Rieve. Other people I’ve known. I was walking toward them.”
“Walking toward the dead,” Ruhm said.
“Rieve’s not dead!” Aric protested.
“You would be if I hadn’t noticed you weren’t following behind.”
Aric understood his point. He would have become hopelessly separated. They never would have found him in the dark, and by morning his trail might have been erased. If they spent time looking, they all might have been caught by Kadya’s soldiers. “Thank you, Ruhm,” he said. “It’s … it’s just so cold out here. I don’t know if I can go on.”
“Must,” Ruhm said simply. He led Aric to the rest. They huddled together for a few minutes, sharing body heat none of them had to spare, and then continued.
He didn’t think he had ever been so happy to see the sun rise.
3
After sunrise, they risked sleeping for a couple of hours. Then they started out again. They killed a greater boneclaw that day, providing them sustenance, although they could not make use of its carapace and had to leave it behind.
Every time they reached a high point, they stopped and checked their back trail. If Kadya had sent pursuers, they were not yet in view. They didn’t dare follow the path they’d taken to Akrankhot from Nibenay, because Kadya and her party would doubtless take that same route home.
Late in the day, they narrowly escaped notice by a monstrous sand worm, watching covertly as it slithered and burrowed and humped its way across the desert. Ruhm wanted to tackle it, but the others argued that they couldn’t carry its meat, tasty though it might be, in addition to that of the boneclaw they already had. And a sandworm was a far deadlier foe than a boneclaw. Should the five of them engage it, every likelihood existed that some would perish in the trying.
So the days went. Walking, always walking, under a sun that pounded down without mercy. After that first night, no one even suggested continuing to hike in the darkness. Their route took them through vast, sand-filled valleys and over the rocky ridges intersecting them. The creatures of the desert were either predators or prey. They fought when they had to or when hunger spurred them on, and hid when necessary. The journey was neither glamorous nor the stuff of heroic ballads. It was long and arduous, but it had to be done.
Amoni, Aric noticed, seemed out of sorts. When they fought the boneclaw she was right there with them, even delivering the killing blow. But at other times, when making camp for the night or deciding on a route, she was quiet, doing what someone told her but taking no initiative. Once when Aric and Myrana were filling skins at a spring they had found, high up on a narrow shelf of rock, Amoni stood nearby watching but didn’t offer to hold any of the skins even when they threatened to fall over the side. Finally, Aric said, “Amoni, could you grab these before they fall?”
“Of course,” Amoni said. She picked them up, but seemed not to be aware that she could have simply done so, rather than waiting to be told.
That evening, he took her aside and mentioned it.
“You’re right,” she said. She looked away from him, at the streaks in the olive sky where the setting crimson sun painted it. “I am accustomed to doing what I’m told.”
“But you’re nobody’s slave now. You’re free.”
“That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”
“Only you have to act free. Aren’t you pleased to be owned by no one but yourself?”
She picked up a pebble, turned it over in her fingers, gazing at it as if it held secrets only she could detect. “It frightens me.”
“Why?”
“You’ve never been a slave, Aric. I can’t expect you to understand. I’ve lived their life according to someone else’s rules. It’s terrifying to realize that suddenly the only rules are my own. I … I am trying to accept my freedom. But at the same time, as long as you’re all here with me, often it’s easiest to just let old habits take over. I know you don’t own me. And I’m not saying that you act as if you do. It’s only me … acting as if you do. Acting as if I need you to tell me where I should stand or sit, what I should look at or not look at, what I should think.”
“They tell you what to think?”
“They try. That rarely works.”
“Well, you’re free now. Don’t forget it, and don’t let us spoil it for you.”
The next morning, Aric rose at dawn, starving. It had been days since they’d killed any prey, and their food stores had depleted severely. They had tracked a lirr pack for hours the evening before, but when darkness came and they lost the trail, they’d had to give up. Aric sat up, shoved off the skins he slept beneath. Ruhm, Sellis and Myrana were in camp, Myrana sleeping still, but Amoni was gone. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Gone when I awoke,” Ruhm said. “Hour, little less.”
“Are there tracks?”
Ruhm pointed to some, shallow depressions already being filled by blowing sand. They led away from camp and into the distance, but not in the direction they had been traveling. Not toward Nibenay.
“Would she simply leave us behind?” Myrana asked, sitting and rubbing her eyes.
“I … I don’t know.”
“She’s a slave, right?” Sellis reminded them.
Aric remembered her lack of initiative. She was accustomed to taking orders, not to doing for herself. The entire time they had been on the trip, he didn’t remember her ever coming up with an original idea. She was good at battle, good at self-preservation. She was strong and could carry great weights, in spite of her back injury. But when it came to making her own decisions, she had no experience. She had never had to do it. “She is. But she hoped to be free, and to live that way the rest of her life.”
“Apparently she’s free now,” Sellis said.
“She was free the minute we walked away from Akrankhot!” Aric snapped. “At least as far as I was concerned.”
“Perhaps she didn’t feel free, then.”
“Well, I wish her good fortune.”
“I wish she hadn’t abandoned us. We may yet have need of her.”
“I wish it too,” Myrana said. “I like her company.”
“As do I,” Aric said. He crossed his arms over his chest, but his momentary anger was made less dramatic by the loud rumbling of his stomach.
“Today we find game,” Ruhm said.
“We had better,” Aric agreed. They turned to the business of packing up their things.
But just as they were ready to depart, a figure appeared on the horizon, something with what appeared to be a massive head and shoulders on a body so slender it seemed it couldn’t support all the weight there.
It took another ten minutes before they were able to recognize Amoni, longer still before they could make out what she carried across her shoulders. It was a gray-skinned lizard with a colorful tail and a bright membrane around its neck—a lirr that must have weighed at least two hundred pounds.
“There are more,” Amoni said when she reached camp. “But I could only carry the one.” She ducked her head and heaved it from her shoulders into the dirt.
“You went off by yourself?” Aric said.
“I knew they were out there. We were
hungry.”
“You saved our lives!” He went to Amoni and hugged her, hoping someone else would start cleaning and cooking the lirr while he did. Luckily, that thought had occurred to Sellis, and he was already busy. “I am so hungry.”
“I know we’re in a hurry,” Myrana said. “But next time we’re running low on food perhaps we should devote ourselves to finding more before we’re out completely.”
“There’s so much here that perhaps we won’t run out again,” Aric said. He knew even as he spoke the words that they were overly optimistic.
“We’ll run out,” Sellis said. He glanced at Ruhm, but he didn’t need to point out how much the goliath consumed on any given day.
“I suppose,” Aric said. He could cover the distance to Nibenay faster alone—faster even than the trip out, with the mekillots pulling the wagons at their slow but steady pace. Although only half-elf, he had still inherited some of the elven ability to run fast and with great endurance. Ruhm, with his long legs, could keep up with him for a while, but Aric would outpace him over any distance. And Myrana slowed the group down considerably.
But alone and on foot, the likelihood that Aric would survive the trip lessened considerably. It was not, he supposed, impossible for a solo journeyer to travel from point to point on Athas. But it was risky, and all the more so for someone who had not, until recently, ever left his native city.
No, his best hope was in staying with the others, praying that their head start meant they would reach Nibenay before the demon-possessed templar did.
If they didn’t, then they might never return to Nibenay at all. Aric had no way to know what Tallik, unbound and possessing a practitioner of defiling magic might do, but he imagined it would be violent and destructive. He had, in fact, wondered if the vision he had believed to be of the distant past had also showed the future. Although the Athas he knew was nowhere near as lush and serene as the one that had apparently once existed, it could still be unsettled, its institutions overthrown, whatever fragile peace existed shattered in an instant.
And from the sensations he had felt—when Tallik had tried to enter his own mind, and when he had touched Kadya’s—he had no doubt that the demon’s essence was the purest evil.
Evil, and a savage hunger, left to fester beneath Akrankhot for centuries.
4
It sounds as if you’ve been everywhere, Myrana.”
They were lounging around a campfire. It was the night of Amoni’s kill, and their bellies were full. The day’s progress had been hampered by a wrab attack, three of the bloodsucking winged serpents hunting together, and although the comrades had defeated the creatures, most of them had suffered at least one bite. In the late afternoon they had spotted an oasis in the distance, and they had pushed on through the gathering dusk until they reached it and ascertained that it was safe to stop at. Filling themselves and their skins with fresh water, they made camp a short distance away. A fire, fed by downed branches and fronds from oasis trees, held off the night’s cold.
Myrana and Aric sat close together, and she had been telling him of her travels with her family’s trading caravan. “Not really,” she said. “I have seen much of the Tablelands, it’s true. But nothing beyond those, and there is much else to the world.”
“I suppose. It’s just that when you’ve never been anywhere, like me, even a few journeys seem like a lot.”
“You’ll find more adventure, Aric.”
“Do you think so?”
“I sense a need in you. Perhaps one that’s just been awakened, but a powerful one just the same. You have spent your life in one place, but now that you’ve tasted the outside world I don’t think you’ll stop exploring it.”
“You might be right.” That simple fact meant more to him than she could have known. He had his small circle of acquaintances in Nibenay, but most strangers he met were off-putting, distrustful of half-elves. For someone to accept him so readily—and not just accept him but seemingly to understand him—was a rare occurrence indeed.
Rare, and wonderful.
He was about to say something else when a distant rumbling sound caught his attention. “What’s that?”
“Sounds like a storm,” Sellis said.
“A rainstorm?”
Sellis and Amoni were on their feet, peering into the darkness. “That’s what it sounds like.”
Aric sprang up and gripped Myrana’s hand, helping her stand. Real rainstorms, like true friends, were so uncommon that he remembered every one he had experienced.
“Do you think it’ll reach us?”
“It seems to be headed this way.”
Aric still had Myrana’s hand clutched in his. She squeezed. “Ready to get wet, Aric?”
“I can’t wait.”
He didn’t have to wait long. The storm still sounded as if it was some distance away, but without warning, drenching water flooded down from above. The campfire guttered and went out. Aric and the others were instantly soaked, head to foot. For a few moments, the water was refreshing. Aric tilted his head toward the sky and opened his mouth, letting it run down his throat. But soon, with the sun having long since set and the night’s chill settled in, the combination of the fire’s absence and wet skin and clothing left him freezing.
At the same time, his body seemed to be rebelling from within, as if all the moisture inside him was trying to push out through his flesh. Already dimpled from the cold and wet, he saw his veins swell his skin, pores opening, liquid starting to seep out.
“It’s not a storm!” Sellis cried. “It’s a beast!”
“What manner of beast?” Aric yelled. He had to scream to be heard over the pounding downpour.
“A rain paraelemental beast!” Myrana shouted back.
The rain, or what had seemed at first like rain, passed on, but that only meant that the beast itself had reached them. It rose in the moonlight to a height of almost twenty feet, looking like a mobile, sentient waterfall, spray curling where it touched the ground.
But an ordinary waterfall didn’t have a sinister purpose, or roam about the desert. A rain paraelemental sucked up whatever moisture it could find. It had to have been summoned by a worshipper, then escaped his control, been released, or destroyed its summoner. The beast skirted around them and went to the oasis, giving the traveler’s a moment’s respite. Aric was shivering uncontrollably. They all were, he saw. At least his skin was no longer oozing, for the moment.
“It’ll be back,” Sellis said. “As soon as it drains the oasis.”
“How do we fight it?”
“I don’t know that we can.”
Ruhm grabbed up his club without waiting for the thing to come back. They had camped far enough from the oasis to allow other creatures who might want its water to approach it without having to go through them, but near enough to make use of its pool in the morning before they moved on. Ruhm ran toward it, and when he reached the traveling waterfall, he swung his huge weapon at it.
Aric, Amoni, Sellis and Myrana followed Ruhm, and Aric had almost reached him when the club struck the water. The water buckled under the blow, but then straightened again. A jet shot out, hitting Ruhm with enough force to knock him back a dozen feet and flatten him against the ground. Most men, Aric knew, would have been crushed. Only the goliath’s great strength allowed him to survive it.
He didn’t know that a half-elf would. But he had a big metal broadsword, and the beast had hurt his friend. He swung the sword in a wide, flat arc. It sliced through the water, and he thought he heard a change in the pitch of its liquid voice, as if he had caused it pain.
The creature turned a jet of water against him, as it had Ruhm. He reeled under its force, shoved back, collided with Myrana. As the pair fell, he managed to turn so that he landed on her face down, arms and legs spread out around her, shielding her from the worst of the water’s impact and taking it on his back instead of his chest and face.
The beast might kill him, but if he could, he would keep it from ki
lling Myrana too.
5
Aric heard his companions shouting and fighting, and then he heard another sound, one he didn’t know. It sounded vaguely like a giant sheet of fabric being torn, or perhaps hundreds tearing at once. He couldn’t even guess at what it was.
When it ended, the force of the water smashing against his back was gone. He raised his head from where it nestled next to Myrana’s. “Are you hurt?”
She blinked, droplets clinging to her eyelashes, and offered him a tentative smile. “I won’t be, if you get off me.”
“Sorry,” he said. He went to hands and knees, careful not to put any of them on her, and moved away, then rose unsteadily to his feet. He was bruised, felt as if he had been dragged behind runaway kanks for several leagues, but he didn’t think anything was broken.
When he turned, the beast was gone. The oasis pool was almost dry, with only puddles remaining, and even the trees looked as if a fire had passed by, evaporating any moisture from them. Bits of green remained at the ends of their leaves, but in the soft moonlight that was barely visible.
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know,” Amoni said. She was just now sitting up. “It knocked me down, same as it did you. With the water rushing into my face I couldn’t see a thing.”
“I guess you all weakened it enough,” Sellis said. “When I struck, it dissipated almost at once.”
“Lucky,” Ruhm said. “All lucky to be alive.”
“You’re right, Ruhm,” Aric said. “And thank you, Sellis. However you defeated it, we all owe you.”
“No, Ruhm’s correct, I got lucky too.”
“We should s-s-see if we can g-get a fire lit again,” Aric stammered. With the adrenalin and violent motion of the fight behind them, they were left wet and cold. In minutes, the water would freeze, and the beast would have killed them anyway.
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