Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 23

Paulo and I had been on the desert road for seven days before he allowed himself to go completely to sleep. As he was so much taller, stronger, and more experienced, it was gratifying that he took my capabilities so seriously. I wasn't bothered by the lack of conversation as the white-tipped mountains and the last pale swathes of green slipped farther beyond the horizon with each day's journey. I already knew he wasn't a particularly talkative person, and I had a lot to think about.

Lady Seriana had agreed to get a letter to my father for me. I didn't want him to worry that I was embarked on a journey of vengeance. Discovery was a far better word. Sometime in the past days I'd begun searching— not willingly, not without diversion, not without error— for truth instead of evidence. Papa would like that. A Speaker lived for truth. But I didn't like changes going on inside me without my direction. I wished I had time to talk to him about them, but time was precious. Paulo and I had set out within a few hours of Lady Seriana's command.

For a thousand years the road to Zhev'Na had been hidden, masked by the power of the Lords so that one could wander the trackless desert for a lifetime without happening upon it. After the fall of the Lords, Geographers had found the remnants of the fortress within a few days. By Paulo's reckoning it should take us a little less than three weeks to get there.

A portal would have been very nice. But, even believing the Lords were dead and their lair in ruins, no one had felt comfortable opening a permanent portal between Avonar and Zhev'Na; a thousand years of terror could not be discounted overnight. And, now that the Zhid were on the attack again, no one would dare risk it, nor would anyone be fool enough to expend so much power on an uncertain mission. Portal-making, while not one of the Hundred Talents, and thus theoretically possible for any Dar'Nethi, was the province of those with exceptional power and a special knack for it, something like those who can mind-speak or those who have a bent for geometry. Aimee had said that the few people she knew who had power enough had already gone off to serve the prince or Je'Reint. So Paulo and I were left to cross the barrens on horseback and on foot.

Had we been on a mere riding adventure, I would have relished the journey. The Wastes were changing. Beyond the last green outpost of the Gardeners, the land remained a desolation of stark red cliffs amid stretches of shifting dunes, dry, cracked lake beds, and a mix of hard-packed dirt and rock. But where once only a few kibbazi and an occasional lizard had survived, we saw numerous hints of renewal: a small herd of oryx, pockets of tough grayish grass, an occasional fox. Day after day we saw thornbushes blooming—ordinarily the tiny white flowers were visible only on the one day in five hundred that rain came to the desert. The sun was still voracious, but not as severe as in the days of my captivity. Wispy clouds drifted overhead. The cool of morning lasted a bit longer, and the afternoon heat waned earlier. On one or two days I caught the scent of rain on the evening wind, and saw the gray rain-veils hanging over the horizon behind us. But the moisture did not touch the ground.

Paulo pushed us hard. I knew why. The bloody gloves were very much in my thoughts, too. But finding myself in the desert with five dead horses and a hostile man was not something to anticipate with any pleasure, either. So I kept yelling at him to slow down to spare the beasts.

But I learned very quickly that horses would do whatever Paulo asked of them.

One morning just after sunrise, when the heat was already murderous, and the beasts and I were flagging after a long night's traveling, Paulo stroked his horse's neck and bent forward, whispering something that made the horse lift his head and step smartly up the hard-baked trail. The simple marvel of it made me break our usual silence. "I wish you would tell me whatever you're telling him. I could use a bit of encouragement right now."

"Nothing special. Only things as a horse likes to hear."

I shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. My backside felt like raw meat. Pounded raw meat. "I would think that knowing what a horse likes to hear is fairly special in itself. How did you come by such knowledge?"

"Had it since I can remember."

He wasn't going to make this easy.

"I'm not going to kill him," I said, grimacing as I urged my horse upward until we were alongside him.

"No. You're not."

This was clearly a statement of incontrovertible fact, having nothing to do with my intent. I found that most annoying.

"What if you had evidence that he'd turned—that he was one of the Lords again and you were the only one to prevent him having his way? What would you do then?"

Paulo's glance could have split granite. "I had evidence once. Evidence from my own eyes. If things had been different by five heartbeats, I would have killed him, and you would still be wearing your collar—or you'd be dead. The evidence was wrong. He will never be one of them again. Never. And the one that touches him without his leave—anyone—will pay for it."

"How does one earn such love?"

"You give everything," he said. "No matter what the cost."

His knee moved ever so slightly against his horse's flank, and I was soon looking at his sweat-soaked back again. But I couldn't think of anything else to say anyway.

We'd come more than a hundred and fifty leagues from Avonar. Our maps said we were within a night or two of the ruined fortress. When the sun was halfway to its zenith, we found a bleak outcropping of barren rock and stretched out our square of lapaine for shade, spreading our blankets on the sand and pretending we were sleeping through the worst of the heat. I tried to arrange my limbs so that no part of my body had to touch any other. The sweat still dribbled off of me, tickling and itching, stinging the places where the saddle had rubbed me raw.

A hot wind billowed the strong, gauzy lapaine. We had tied the fabric high enough to let the air move underneath. Tired and drowsy, I held perfectly still with some vague hope that the breeze would bring some relief.

Odd. Even when the lapaine shelter fell limp, I heard a soft, purposeful rustling somewhere beyond my feet. Paulo's hard hand crept over my own, and I brushed his thumb to let him know I was awake. While my right hand moved carefully toward my dagger, he poked three fingers firmly into my open palm. Then he tapped one finger, two fingers. . . .

As his three fingers struck my palm, we rolled in opposite directions and leaped to our feet. Sunlight glinted on metal just beyond our patch of shade, and I yelled, "To your right!" Paulo leaped onto a bent, dusty figure as it scurried out of our tent. Keeping my back to the rock pile, I shifted left, holding my knife ready and scanning the shady shelter and the sunny strip beyond its border for other lurkers.

Though a great noisy clanging accompanied the combat, Paulo seemed to have no trouble with the invader. Only moments elapsed before he dragged a bundle of brown rags into the shade. He dropped his captive onto the sand and stood there breathing hard, bent over with his hands on his knees, sapped more by the oppressive heat, I guessed, than the ferocity of his opponent. His sunburned face was beaded with sweat. "Others?" he said harshly.

"No sign of any."

"Scavenger." He waved his hand tiredly at the sand beyond our shelter. "Half a kitchen spread over that dune out there, including our cups and pots and who knows what all. Other junk, too: bits of chain, harness, broken blades . . ."

The heap of rags on the earth before us quivered as if it were freezing instead of baking. I had yet to see just which portion of the dusty mound had a mouth that might answer a question or two.

"We won't harm you," I said. "Tell us who you are."

The heap's quivering subsided a little.

"Do you need water?"

The quivering took a distinctively negative turn. Good enough.

"You're hunting for metal. Why?"

A pair of dark eyes peeked out of a totally unlikely spot, and one knob of rags was revealed to be a tangled mass of brown hair. A dusty voice said, "Shan t'sai. " .

"Ghost metal?" I wasn't sure I'd heard it properly.

"The demon lords return to the dark fortress. The metal is to bind them."

Paulo and I glanced at each other, for once sharing a common sentiment—profound disquiet.

"The demon lords . . . you mean the Lords of Zhev'Na?" I said carefully. "The Lords have been dead for five years. Who's telling you they've come again?"

The heap of rags and hair had slowly resolved itself into the figure of a toothless woman, withered to leather and bone. Not as old as she looked by a long way. No gray in her mat of hair.

"They've come with their legions. We've seen their death fire. We find metal for the kaminar, hoping she will return and forge chains for binding the demons."

"A fire spirit?"

Kaminars were creatures from our creation stories. Legend said that Vasrin Creator had brought forth beings of flame to cleanse the world of imperfections— chaos, ugliness, and skewed, misshapen, or corrupted matter—before Vasrin Shaper formed the earth and the sky and those of us who peopled it. Many believed that the detritus from this cleansing had collected in the Breach when it was formed after the Catastrophe. Storytellers always included kaminars in their tales, ensuring their visions were replete with color and light, fire, glory, and innocent frights.

"When we freed the kaminar from the demons' prison, she promised to protect us always. We brought her offerings, and once she returned to us in her garments of blue fire to thank us. But now we've seen the demons and the Worships. We're so afraid, and she's not come again."

"Worships," I said, wishing our tale could be as innocent and hopeful as a creation story. "Were you a Drudge then?"

The Drudges were servants or laborers long descended from those who had wandered by accident into Gondai from the mundane world, back in the days before the Catastrophe when there were many portals between. The Lords had used the Drudges for mindless, menial tasks, breeding away curiosity, initiative, and intelligence. Only Drudges called the Zhid "Worships."

The woman nodded, and I offered her a waterskin. "What's your name?"

"Nim."

"Tell us about the kaminar, Nim, and about the demons and the Worships."

"Many turns of the moon since we found the kaminar …"

After the fall of the Lords, most Drudges had chosen to stay on their desolate farms or to continue working the mines in the Wastes under the more benevolent direction of Dar'Nethi supervisors. But some had wandered away into the desert, scrabbling for a living as they could.

Nim said that she and several companions lived in the ragged ridge of red cliffs that lay between us and the hard-baked plains where the ruined fortress and the deserted war camps lay. While scavenging in the ruins, they had come upon a stone vault with a broken hasp. They had thought the vault might hold treasure, as it was buried deep beneath the fallen stones, but to their amazement they had found a woman sleeping there in the darkness, not dead, though she wore the very likeness of death.

". . . and when we touched her, she woke and broke Mut's arm with her wildness and burned Dila with her eyes. She kept saying not to kill her, please not to kill her; she was sorry, sorry, sorry. We offered water and food, but all she wanted was metal. To bind the demons, she said. To give her power that was lost. When at last we made her not afraid of us, she said she was a kaminar, and if we would bring her all the metal we could find, she would use it to bind the demons so they could not harm us ever again."

"And you did so?"

Nim sipped from the waterskin. "Three turnings of the moon she stayed, living as poorly as we do until we found her the metal she wanted. It made us sick to touch it. Fal went blind from it. Kyrd burned for three turnings of the sun and died in madness. Cith went screaming into the desert, and we could not find her. But the kaminar said the sickness was caused by demons that didn't want her to have it. She took the bits of metal, and when she had enough, she went away. But she said that someday she would return to comfort us."

I described D'Sanya to the woman and asked if she could be the one they called kaminar.

Nim's sunken eyes were filled with wonder. "You've seen her, too, then, with her noon-sun hair and eyes like sky-waters. She came back to us one night in blue fire so that we knew she was a fire spirit, and she blessed us with food and wine and water. But now the demons have come to the fortress. Mayhap if we gather more metal for her, she'll come back again and chase them away. Perhaps if you see her, you could tell her of our gathering and she'll come."

The story seemed clear enough, though Nim's time estimates did not fit. She insisted that two full "star cycles"—two years—had passed since they had first found D'Sanya and that she had stayed with them exactly three turnings of the moon. But the Lady had wandered out of the desert only eight months ago. Even Princess D'Sanya's power could not have kept her alive in the desert for more than a year; sorcery could not produce food or water, either one. But of more importance to our current mission, we gathered that the hauntings at the ruins, the return of the "demons," had begun just about the time the young Lord had disappeared from the hospice.

"I just can't believe the Lady D'Sanya could be in league with the Zhid, " I said to Paulo, once we'd traded some strips of dried meat and dried fruit for the return of our pots and cups and Nim's promise to return at nightfall. "She is D'Arnath's daughter. She's healed hundreds of the Zhid, and she cares for the sick and restores the land. None of this makes any sense."

"He said she had secrets," said Paulo, twisting the thongs that held the panniers closed until I thought he would shred the leather. "He said she couldn't have lived in Zhev'Na as long as she did and not have been changed by it. When the Prince had him search his memories of the Lords, he figured out that somebody must have a device called an avantir to be making the Zhid work together and power enough to work it"—Paulo paused, shaking his head firmly, his jaw set, his lips a firm line—"but he didn't think it was her running the Zhid. Even that night. He said she'd been a prisoner, not one of the Lords like him. If I'd not been so beat and fallen asleep on him, maybe he'd have told me more. But I know that if he'd thought it was her, it would have half killed him."

I didn't mention that from the cry I'd heard the next morning and the blood I'd found, it might have done exactly that. He knew it.

Just after sunset Nim returned as promised with one of her comrades—a bent, dusty man named Rab, thin as a stick. The two of them were terrified when we said we wanted to go into the ruined fortress. But we promised to give them food and water and whatever metal we could spare—I made an initial payment with three metal buttons from my jacket—and we swore to let them turn back if things got too dangerous.

They led us up the eastern slopes of the red crags, a wide well trampled roadway. Bones lay scattered along the way. This was the slave road. I tried to keep my mind focused on the route so we could get our business done and leave this cursed place.

Halfway to the summit, Nim led us away from the road and onto a path that climbed steeply through the broken slabs of rock. About the time the trail started looking too risky for goats, we found a niche with a mostly level floor, a gray stubble of grass, and a few thornbushes. "Beasts stay here," said Nim. "Too steep ahead."

Rab stayed behind with strict instructions as to which of our possessions could be touched and which could not. I started a little fire with a snap of my fingers, and the two Drudges dropped to their knees and put their heads on the ground. Misusing what little power I had to frighten them made me feel unclean. But I believed they would obey me.

Paulo and I each shouldered a rucksack loaded with two days' supply of food and water, and we set off with Nim toward the top of the ridge. Dry wind gusts whipped through the jagged pinnacles. The moon shone swollen and misshapen through the swirling dust. Paulo's shirt flapped about his lean body.

I dismissed the upheaval in my stomach that worsened as we neared the place of my captivity, calling myself a fool, though I took every opportunity to brush my fingers against my neck, breathing in relief each time I felt flesh rather than choking iron. As we approached the top of the ridge, the wind sighed and moaned, gnawing the gritty rocks into ragged, grotesque shapes that loomed fearfully in the night. I trod lightly, as nearly soundlessly as I could, though I could not have said why.

Paulo was doing the same. When Nim held up her leathery hand and pointed, trembling, to a last steep pitch across a flat boulder, we crept up it on our bellies like snakes.

Uttermost dismay stilled my heart as I gazed down on the plains of Ce Uroth. From my companion came a single whispered curse expelled on a breath of disbelief. Stretching to the farthest horizon, the plains teemed with warriors. As numerous as maggots on a dead beast, the legions of the Zhid marched past glowing campfires, surged against each other in mock battle lines that stretched for leagues into the darkness, built earthen fortifications, waved swords, and pumped bellows that flared the monstrous orange flames of their forges. The smell of blood was on the wind, and the acrid stench of coal and molten steel, and the stink of fear. It wasn't until Paulo laid his hand on mine that I realized I was shaking.

In the center of the crawling expanse was a huge, dark mound. As we watched, Zhid warriors threw torches all around its base, setting the mound afire. The black smoke coiled and billowed in the bilious moonlight. Flesh . . . burning flesh . . . the reeking death fog of Zhev'Na rising to blot out the stars. And in the towering blackness appeared a monstrous face straight from nightmare, gross and swollen, covering half the sky. Its eyes flamed red, and its bloated tongue licked cruel lips.

But even the sight of such horror did not sicken me as did the stench of burning slaves. Too often I'd smelled it and thought of my brothers, wondering if it was they who burned, or my father, or when it would be my turn. And the cries that rose from it . . . Not all the bodies in the mounds were dead. I buried my head in my arms, laying my face against the lingering warmth of the rough stone, trying to block out the foul smoke.

Nim whimpered in terror. Paulo tugged on my arms, trying to drag me down the sloping rock face. "It's looking this way," he whispered. "It's coming. We've got to get out of here."

"No! Wait!" Something was very odd. In the moment I had hidden my face, the screams and wails and drumbeats had fallen silent, and I could hear only the wind, and smell only my own stink and the hard, sandy warmth of the rock. I glanced up quickly, and all was as before: the eye of flame looming above us, the gross nostrils flaring as the red demon eyes hunted us, the surging warriors, the burning … I buried my face again, and all was silent.

What was the truth? This time I looked more carefully at the sights on the plain. The campfires and torches burned steadily, not a flicker or a bend in the wild wind. The endless movements of the warriors had no purpose. . . .

"Look away," I said. "Turn your back. It's not there."

Paulo did look away … to stare at me as if I were a lunatic. But as he did so, a streak of wary curiosity crossed his face. I was right. He flicked his gaze back and forth from me to the monster I could no longer see or hear, then he turned his back on Ce Uroth, sat up, and grinned. "Cripes!"

Nim was sure we were driven mad by the demon, but I grabbed her hand before she could crawl away. "It's all right," I said, pulling her to her feet and holding on firmly. "We can protect you from this particular demon. My power is quite sufficient."

I hefted my pack and led the way down the rocky path onto the plains of Ce Uroth.