Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 36

With all the vegetation dead, the old road ahead became more plain, and they walked down the rocky trail toward the wide desolate valley. When Nicci inhaled, the air carried a burnt, powdery smell with a hint of rot, as if vapors stirred up by thermal currents wafted into the foothills.

They paused at a rocky switchback to look across the great basin. Nicci could discern straight lines etched across the barren lands, man-made paths that were now covered with blown dust. She could also see what had been small villages, larger towns, possibly even the ruins of a city.

Nicci said, “This was a well-traveled and inhabited area, but something sucked it all dry.”

“There are still habitable areas on the fringe of the desolation,” Nathan said, pointing to the transition zone where the green of vegetation faded into the cracked brown of death. He shaded his eyes and looked into the hazy distance, beyond the valley. “That blowing dust impairs visibility, but you can see the towering mountains off in the distance far to the east.” He pointed. “Kol Adair may be somewhere up on one of those mountain passes.”

“But how can we cross that desolation?” Bannon asked.

Nicci scanned the landscape. “We should go around, skirt the valley to the north, stick to the greener areas in the foothills.”

“In fact, I suggest we visit one of those villages,” Nathan suggested. “I’d like to learn what happened down there, if that was once a great fertile valley.” He screwed up his face in a distasteful expression. “It does not appear natural.”

Nicci bit her lower lip. “Agreed. Lord Rahl will need to know.”

“And the world may need saving, Sorceress,” Nathan said, without any obvious hint of humor. She did not respond.

As the path descended, they worked their way into the badlands, where rocks towered like monoliths, reddish sandstone eroded by wind and water. The vegetation transitioned from tall pines to gnarled scrub oak, mesquite, and spiky yucca that had survived as the terrain grew less hospitable.

In the heat of the day, Nicci packed away her traveling cloak. Her black dress was comfortable, but the rocks underfoot were hard through the soles of her boots. Bannon’s face quickly became sunburned.

Their road took the path of least resistance, following the curves of the slickrock bluffs and winding into rocky arroyos. Pebbles pattered down from above, and they saw skittering movement—lizards darting from sunny rocks into shadowy crevices.

Nicci listened to the silence punctuated by stray breezes and the rustle of twigs. She narrowed her eyes, sensing movement from something larger than a lizard. She and Nathan were instantly alert, while Bannon kept plodding, distracted by the scenery. Then he also stopped. “What is it? Are we being stalked?” He drew his sword.

“I don’t know,” Nicci said. “I heard something.” She remained motionless, extending her senses, trying to pick up on some unseen threat.

They waited in tense silence. Nathan frowned. “Actually, I don’t hear anything.”

Suddenly, they heard a burst of bright and refreshing laughter, the high voice of a child. All three looked at the rocks overhead, the smooth bluffs marred with occasional blind ledges. A young girl stood up from a hiding place above. Small-statured and elfin, she looked about eleven years old.

“Been watching you for a long time.” She placed her hands on her hips and giggled again. “I wondered how long it would take for you to notice. I was going to surprise you!”

She looked like a waif dressed in rags. She had an unruly mop of dusty brown hair that was styled more in tangles than curls. Her honey-brown eyes twinkled as she regarded them. She had caramel-colored skin and a triangular face with a narrow chin and high cheekbones. Her arms were wiry, her legs spindly beneath an uneven skirt made of patchwork cloth. Four large lizards dangled by their tails from a rope tied around her waist; the lizard heads were smashed and bloody.

“Wait for me,” she called. “I’m coming down.”

“Who are you?” Nicci said.

“And why have you been spying on us?” Nathan demanded.

Like a lizard herself, the girl scrambled down the rock wall, finding hand- and footholds that were all but invisible, but she displayed no fear of falling. Her feet were covered with moccasins made of rope, fabric, and scraps of leather. She dropped the last five feet, landing in a resilient crouch on the rocks in front of them. The lizard carcasses at her hip flopped back and forth.

“I am spying on you because you’re strangers—and because you’re interesting.” She looked up. “My name is Thistle.”

“Thistle?” Bannon asked. “That’s an odd name. Is it because you’re prickly?”

“Or maybe I’m just hard to get rid of—like a weed. I’m from the village of Verdun Springs. Is that where you’re going? I can take you there.”

“We’re not sure where we’re going,” Nicci said. “Are you all alone here?”

“Me and the lizards,” said Thistle. “And there aren’t as many lizards now because I’ve had a good hunt today.” She squatted next to them and opened a pouch on her other hip. “I don’t often see people. I’m usually the only one who goes out exploring. Everyone else in Verdun Springs works all day just to survive.”

She tugged open the pouch’s drawstring and pulled out strips of dried, grayish meat. “These are yesterday’s lizards. Do you want some? They dried all afternoon, so the meat will be just right.” She put a strip into her mouth, seized it with her front teeth, and tore it into shreds. As she chewed and swallowed, she kept holding out her other hand to extend the offering of meat.

Bannon, Nicci, and Nathan each took a small portion of dried lizard. Bannon looked at it skeptically, but the wizard munched away without hesitation. “My uncle Marcus and aunt Luna taught me about hospitality,” said Thistle. “They say we should be kind to strangers because maybe they can help us.”

“We might be able to help,” Nicci said, thinking about her broader quest. “First we need to learn what happened here. How far is your village?”

“Not far. I’ve only been out two days, and I have enough supplies for a week. Marcus and Luna won’t be expecting me back home yet.” Thistle’s grin widened. “They’ll be surprised when I bring visitors. You sure you can help us? Can you stop the Scar from growing?” She gave them a frank assessment, then sniffed. “I don’t think you’re strong enough.”

“The Scar?” Bannon asked.

“She must mean the desolation,” Nathan said. “The whole valley ahead.”

“We call it the Scar, because that’s what it looks like,” Thistle said. “I’ve heard stories of how beautiful the valley used to be when I was just a baby. Farmlands and orchards and forests—they even had flower gardens. Can you imagine?” She snorted. “Flower gardens! Wasting water, fertilizer, and good soil just to grow flowers!”

Nicci felt sad for the girl, and her innocent comment was a poignant indication of what sort of life the people in her village must be enduring as the devastation expanded.

She continued to chatter. “If you can save us, if you can break the Lifedrinker’s spell and bring the fertile lands back, how I would love to see it! All my life I’ve dreamed of making the land beautiful again.” She sprang to her feet, ready to go. She trotted off, calling over her shoulder, “Do you really think you can destroy the Lifedrinker?”

“Who is the Lifedrinker?” Nathan asked.

Nicci cautioned, “We did not promise we could do anything.”

When the girl shook her head, the tangled brown curls bobbed about like weeds. “Everyone knows about the Lifedrinker! The evil wizard at the heart of the Scar who sucks the life out of the world to feed his own emptiness.” She lowered her voice. “That’s what my uncle Marcus says. I don’t really know anything more.”

“Won’t your uncle be worried about you alone in the wilderness for days?” Nicci asked.

“I can take care of myself.” Thistle set off with a pert stride, skipping over the stones. Without slowing, she bent to snatch rocks in her right hand and kept moving down the wash, knowing that they would follow. “I’ve raised myself since my parents died when I was just a little girl. Uncle Marcus and Aunt Luna took care of me, but they didn’t have any extra food or water, so I have to feed myself most of the time, and I try to bring in enough to help them.”

Thistle jerked her head to the left, focused on a flash of movement she had spotted. Quicker than even Nicci could see, the girl hurled the rocks. They clacked, clattered, and struck their target, and she bounded ahead and squatted down to retrieve a small lizard she had just killed. Thistle held it up, pursing her lips. “Almost too tiny to be worth the effort.” Nevertheless, she tucked it among the other carcasses at her waist. “Aunt Luna says never to waste food. Food is hard enough to come by these days.”

The energetic girl led them along at a pace that Nicci had trouble matching. Nathan and Bannon started to slow down as they trudged over the rough rocks. Thistle scampered along, overjoyed to have company. “You’re very pretty,” she said to Nicci. “What is your home like? Where do you come from?”

“I am from far to the north,” Nicci said. “In the New World.”

“This is the only world I know. Are there trees where you live? And water? Flowers?”

“Yes. And cities … and even flower gardens.”

Thistle frowned. “Flower gardens? Why would you leave such a nice place to come here?”

“We didn’t know we were coming here. We’re on a long journey.”

“I’m glad you came,” Thistle said. “You can fight the Lifedrinker. You’ll find a way to restore the valley and the whole world.”

Nicci felt a chill as she recalled Red’s words. “Maybe that’s why we’re here.”

“We will do exactly that, child,” Nathan said, “if it’s within our power.”

They worked their way along the widening arroyo and around the bluffs to where the last line of trees had died and the creeks had long since dried up. Thistle gestured proudly ahead. “This is my village.”

Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon stopped to look. They were not impressed.

Verdun Springs had obviously been a much larger town once, thriving at the intersection of imperial roads, forest paths, and commercial routes that led into the fertile farmland and trading villages deep in the valley. But the cluster of low mud-brick buildings had retracted into a squalid settlement, as if the population had dried up as well as the landscape.

Dust skirled along the streets. Rocks had been dumped in piles next to a building. A cart with a broken wheel—and no horse to draw it—leaned against the rubble mound. Countless empty buildings were covered with dust, some of them falling apart.

Nicci counted no more than twenty people toiling under the harsh sunlight. They wore frayed clothes and floppy hats woven from dry grass. Several men were working around the town’s well. One man lowered himself by a rope down into the stone-walled shaft. “Keep digging! If we go deep enough, we’re sure to find clear water again.” Others tugged on a second rope attached to a pulley, drawing up a bucket that held only mud and dirt.

To announce their arrival, Thistle let out a loud, shrill whistle. The man at the well looked up, and the other haggard people stopped to stare. Thistle called out, “This is my uncle Marcus—I told you about him. Uncle, this woman is a sorceress, and the old man is a wizard, but he doesn’t have any magic.”

“I still have my magic,” Nathan corrected. “It’s just not accessible at the moment.”

“The other one is named Bannon,” Thistle continued. “I don’t know what he can do.” The young man frowned in annoyance.

Marcus was a skinny man with dark brown hair going to gray and a bristly beard. His shirt was splattered with mud from helping at the well; he wore a faded, scuffed leather vest. “I welcome you to Verdun Springs, strangers, but I have little hospitality to offer. None of us does.”

“I brought lizards!” Thistle said.

“Why, then we can have a feast.” Marcus smiled. “You always bring more than your share, Thistle. Our family will eat well tonight—and so will our guests.”

Aunt Luna also introduced herself, a dark-skinned woman in a drab skirt with a scarf of rags tied around her head. Though faded now, the scarf had once been bright red. In front of her home Luna had been tending large clay planters, turning rich, dark dirt fertilized with human night soil. Each planter held a splash of green vegetables. Luna wiped her hands on her skirts and tousled the girl’s mop of hair. “We may even find some vegetables that are ready. Better to eat them as soon as they’re ripe than let the Lifedrinker have them.”

Thistle sniffed. “As long as the vegetables are in the pots, the Lifedrinker can’t touch them. He can’t reach through the planters.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t try hard enough,” said her aunt, adjusting the drab red head scarf.

The villagers muttered. The Lifedrinker’s name seemed to fill them with dread.

“We’re glad you could come,” said Marcus, leading them down the main street. “If you visited any of the other towns nearby, you’d find them all empty. Verdun Springs is all that remains. The rest of the people went away, or just … disappeared. We don’t know.” He wiped dust from his forehead.

“Why didn’t you pack up and leave?” Nathan asked, gesturing around at the desolation of the village, the drying well, the dusty streets. “Surely you could find a better place to live than this.”

“Someday this will be a lush valley again, as it was a decade ago. We know how beautiful it can be,” Luna said, and the few villagers next to her nodded.

Thistle beamed. “I can only imagine it.”

Luna said, “I’ve urged my husband to pack up and go into the mountains. We hear there may be other towns up and over the ridge, even an ocean if you walk far enough west.” She heaved a great sigh. “An ocean! I can’t remember so much water. At the time when Thistle was born, there was a lake in the valley, before the Scar spread that far.”

“We won’t leave.” Marcus brushed dried mud from his leather vest. “We will eke out our existence day by day.” He squared his shoulders and added with great pride, “We are hardy people.”

“Hardy?” Nicci raised her eyebrows, thinking that “foolhardy” was a better description.