Dunes over Danvar

^{What is a Man Worth?} Chapter One

His daddy always told him that during any kind of rush, the real coin wasn’t in the doing of a thing—at least not for most people—but in providing the supply and support for the doers.

“When a rush comes, only ten percent make any real coin,” his daddy always said. “It’s a loser’s game, boy. Don’t matter what kind of rush it is—gold, oil, salvage from the old times,” he’d say. “People die to pull up ancient panties from a quarter mile down, boy, and only ten percent or less get rich. Forty percent will lose a bunch of coin—or worse. The bottom fifty percent will get their lives took away. That’s in any rush. Any rush at all. Dyin’ ain’t to be taken lightly, boy. Dyin’ for coin is like drownin’ yourself ’cause you’re thirsty.”

The Poet’s daddy was dead now these twenty years, and he himself was pushing on into his sixties. But his daddy’s words always informed him, had always been in his ear, ever since he was a boy learning to tinker and fix dive suits.

“In a rush, the people who survive and thrive are the people sellin’ to the doers. Always. Every time. Doers’ll pay any price in a rush. Don’t you ever forget that, son. They tell you they found gold? You sell ’em shovels. They say they found Danvar? You be the one sellin’ dive gear, fixin’ regulators, makin’ their visors work, haulin’ packs, repairin’ sarfers. That’s where the solid coin is. Dependable. All of time and every grain of this sand bears witness to what I’m sayin’.”

The Poet pressed back in the haul rack, flexing his thighs, and settled himself against his gear bag. His tools pressed into his side, but he was happy to be riding and not sailing. Glad not to be working for free. His sarfing days were over, and that was part of his deal with Bolger. “I don’t sail, I ride,” was what he told the boss. Still, even though he didn’t sail a sarfer, he expected he’d still be the most important man on the team. He had to believe that. Why else would Bolger take a seasoned old vet out on the dunes? Why else did everyone want to hire the Poet?

Then the Poet’s daddy always said, “Make yourself valuable, son. Become necessary—what they used to call ‘mission critical.’ Sand diver’s the most replaceable species of man in all the world of the sand. Sand diver’s just like the sand, in fact. Their comin’ is endless, like the rush, like the sift. You kill ’em all and a thousand-thousand’ll take their places. Every boy who hates the sand wants to be up un’erneath it, lookin’ to get rich so he can buy a way to avoid the sand. Drownin’ ’cause he’s thirsty.”

So the Poet grew up with hard wisdom. And now, in his sixties, he was everyman. He was porter and tinker, supply clerk, mechanic, technician. He was an advisor to the bosses. A black-market wizard he was. A man who found out things that needed to be known, for the right price, and only to the right buyer. He was no spy, though. Spies got themselves killed just like sand divers. The Poet was on this expedition because he’d made himself irreplaceable, just like his daddy had said. Every dive team in all of Low-Pub and all the Thousand Dunes wanted to hire the Poet. Too, all the way up to Springston, they say. Expedition leaders even stopped by when he was already hired, trying to lure him away with coin or women or both. But the Poet could never be hired away once he had a job going. That was nothing but a good way to get dead. His value was increased by his loyalty. And who needed a woman anyway?

The sweat drenched his old body. He wore a dive suit up under his robes. Nobody knew this but him, and if anyone ever found out, it would make him the target of ridicule—a risk worth taking, in his eyes. So he had a full suit on, and a visor in his gear bag, too. You never know when a brigand is going to break every law of the dunes and man and use the sand as a weapon. Everyone knew the axiomatic law of the sand and humanity, but what is law to a brigand? Nothing. So the Poet wore his dive suit, and suffered the heat. No way was he going to lose his fortune because he minded the heat.

They were far up north now. Way up in the wastes. Even Springston was far behind them. This was dying land for divers, and the Poet knew it. Everyone out looking for Danvar, and a diver’s life wasn’t worth scoop out in the wastes. And the divers were everywhere. Sarfer sails in every direction, setting out willy-nilly, divers looking to become gods.

The Poet breathed through his ker and looked around. This team wasn’t any better. There was nothing scientific about the search or the searchers. Like everyone else, when word came that Danvar was found, this crew got plugged together from whoever could do the job. Mix and match. Whoever was around and had a reputation for work. Except the divers. Divers are like the sand, and there’s always plenty of them looking to be the one to find Danvar. To be a god. Everyone on this team was expendable. Except the Poet, he told himself. Bolger was the boss man, and when he had come for the Poet, Bolger had made sure that everyone knew that this man wasn’t expendable. The team needed him if they wanted to survive. He wasn’t like the sand at all. He was like the air between the sand. Precious, and surrounded by expendables.

^{Expendable and Alone} Chapter Two

Peary’s sarfer was buffeted by the wind and almost toppled over as he crested a dune, but he was able to keep it from tumbling by the intense application of toned muscles, experience, and will. Maybe there was some luck, too. He didn’t know what luck might be made of—what ingredients outside of intelligence and will could ever cause something to happen—but he took whatever he could get.

He brought the craft safely down into a deep trough between the largest dunes in the area and came to a full stop. Lowering the sails, dropping the mast, and tying everything off was just a matter of rote muscle memory. He didn’t have to think. Besides his mind was on the dive.

They say that only a fool dives alone. He’d heard that one all his life, but with the things he’d seen in just the past year Peary was now convinced that the smart divers only went out alone. Fifty miles south he’d seen dozens of sarfer sails scattering to the winds like drone bees looking for a new home, but for the past twenty he’d been all alone in the dunes. Finding the right low spot served a few purposes. It meant he could hide his sarfer and perhaps not attract attention from brigands, scofflaws, or other divers (and many times, all of those terms described the same set of people). Also, finding a hollow like this meant he already had a fifty- to seventy-five-foot lead on his dive. Maybe even a hundred. Of course, finding a low spot to dive didn’t mean there’d be anything down there to find. He wasn’t diving here because he knew he’d find Danvar here. He was diving here because Danvar just as well could be here. Other divers used science, or scraps of old maps, or the stars in their courses, but Peary had tried all of those ways—and he’d paid plenty for the privilege of proving the old adage about a fool and his coin.

Some divers had a knack for salvage, and others just hoped to get lucky. Peary was of the latter sort, and he was wary of the former. There was a fine line between having a knack, and getting noticed. Only a few divers got famous without getting killed soon after, because a rich diver who didn’t retire became a nice target. Some even achieved levels of fame that bordered on legend. But fame wasn’t for Peary. Better to keep your head down and just dive.

He checked his dive suit and extra batteries, and when he saw that they were all fully charged, he unplugged them from the wind generator at the aft end of the sarfer. He grabbed a reinforced plastic gear box from the hauler, disconnected the wind generator, and stowed it in the box.

Time to secure his stuff. He’d brought a supply of parts, some extra air tanks—not just extra for the dive, but extra even over and above what he planned on taking down with him—and two more canteens of water. Those last had cost him time and coin—coin he’d borrowed from Marisa—but you can never be too careful. And there was an extra dive suit and visor, too. All of these he’d bury on the other side of the dune as soon as he was suited up. If someone stole his sarfer, he wanted to have at least an outside chance of living to dive another day. Burying gear nearby wouldn’t thwart an experienced and professional band of brigands, but most dune thieves were opportunists and not professionals.

Peary took a quick sand bath, rubbing the hot silica over his body, drying up some of the sweat, and then he started to suit up. The dive suit was hot and the soft rubber felt like it was burning his skin. This part of diving always made him work faster. It made him long for the cool chill of depth. He shouldered the twin tanks and dragged the two extras behind him, pulled on his visor and did a thorough check, even while his body was crying for the relief of the deep. The two tanks on his back pulled downward—toward Danvar, he hoped.

He’d never even attempted to dive more than two fifty. Never once. Hadn’t even wanted to. Around two hundred meters was always his personal limit. Today, he’d go deeper. He didn’t yet know how much deeper. He needed to pay Marisa back. At least the coin she’d lent him; the rest he could never repay. The love and care she gave him were priceless. How she continued to love him despite his folly, he’d never know. Sweet Marisa. Wearing herself out under a haulpole day after day so that he could dive salvage.

Where does love come from, and who made it? That was a question for rich, retired divers to ponder. It wasn’t for him, wasn’t for now.

Peary would leave spare tanks along the way down. Crutches, the daring divers would say. Training wheels. He wasn’t one of the legends who could go three hundred or more on a single tank and get back, and he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to. This wasn’t about personal feats or challenging himself. He wasn’t looking to have his name on the lips of divers and brigands throughout the Thousand Dunes or in the bars and whorehouses of Low-Pub or Springston. This was about Danvar, and the coin that would go along with it. This was the time when divers would be getting rich. Why couldn’t it be him? He’d rather be lucky than good

He pulled on his fins and fitted the regulator. It was diving time. That moment when all conceivable results were still plausible and, according to some nonsense he’d heard from divers who liked to talk, even existed out there at the same time. Wealth? Maybe. Death? Maybe that. He turned on his homing beacon and set it down, pushing it just under the sand. Time to concentrate.

He heard a dune-hawk overhead and wondered if it was a sign. Maybe. The hum started in his inner man and he started to move the sand. He took his first deep breath of canned life, and then the sand received him.

^{Ain’t No Coin in Gettin’ There} Chapter Three

Bolger wasn’t a bad man, all told. Bad men kill and steal things of value. That’s how you know they’re bad. Sure, the Poet had seen Bolger kill divers—through intentional neglect, abandonment, or just straightforward murder—but divers were expendable, and the Poet knew that in any corporate concern there would be collateral damage. Acceptable risks. No one cried for lost divers.

Bolger was a good boss because he kept the bottom line in view. He did what had to be done to make sure the crew ended up on the salvage. And by “on the salvage,” he meant literally on top of it. In reach of it. In the case of this expedition, the goal was Danvar, so success was far from automatic. No one had found Danvar yet—not in untold hundreds of years—unless the most recent rumors were to be believed. But there had always been rumors, and always would be. The rumors had sparked this latest rush. Someone said Brock was the man whose team had found Danvar.

Brock. He was the brigand and crew leader who now claimed the northern wastes. They weren’t his, but he liked to say they were. Claiming the wastes was like claiming the stars in the heavens, and you could—if you wanted to fight to hold them. The Poet had worked for the man before. Brock wasn’t to be trusted; not because he wasn’t after the coin and the goods—he lusted after coin as much as the next brigand—but because there was something else going on there. Some story under the surface. Like he was working for the Lords, or the gods from the before, or some powerful man who never showed his face. “Never trust a man with ideas,” the Poet’s daddy used to say.

The Poet watched his man expertly work the sails and draft in behind Bolger’s sarfer. Yep, the Poet thought, Bolger is a good boss. Don’t get his good men killed, which is the least you can ask from a clan leader. Better working for him than Brock. You can trust a man who cares only for coin.

Crew bosses that started speculating, gambling, or getting emotionally involved usually got everyone killed—and not just divers. Brigandage was fine with the Poet, but not stupid brigandage. The sand wasn’t the place for the compassionate kind. If God, or the gods of the before, or the Lords, or whoever made this world, wanted men to love one another, he (or they) wouldn’t have covered it with sand, or even water for that matter. The Poet had heard myths and legends about oceans, but had never met anyone who’d seen one. And if they did exist, they didn’t care a drop about a man’s life any more than the dunes did. That’s what his daddy always said. “Sand and water don’t care, boy.” His daddy would point out at the dunes and then kick some of the drift that might have gathered by his sandal. “If ever there was proof that man don’t matter, it’s right there.”

The convoy was heading north. Farther out into the wastes than they’d been before. Rumor had it that Danvar might be dead north of Springston, and that was a rumor the salvage world was taking as fact right now. But the sarfer surge had been thinning exponentially over the last dozen miles. Before long, Bolger’s team would be alone in the wastes, and the Poet was all right with that.

Sooner we get there, the sooner I earn my coin, he thought. “Ain’t no coin in the gettin’ there,” his daddy used to say.

The wind whipped his thin gray hair, and as the sift bombarded his goggles and his ker, and stung the exposed parts of his face like microscopic bullets, the Poet counted his blessings. Actually, he counted his coin. Same thing. By being smart and focusing on his reputation and his value, time had made him rich. Not that anyone else knew it. He didn’t flaunt his coin. To do so would be stupid and dangerous. He lived like a pauper when he was out in the open and only lived like a king in private. Dead men spend no coin. He’d seen too many divers out flashing their earnings only to disappear into the maw of the dunes within a fortnight. Not smart. Stupid, actually.

The miles shifted fast, and though he had his sand legs—always did—he was ready for camp. Decades ago he would have been longing for a tent and the feel of a woman, but now he just wanted the tent. A woman—even a camp woman—was just a hole into which a foolish man threw coin. Not everyone agreed, obviously, but the wisdom of the Poet didn’t sit right with every man.

Women divers though, that was another thing altogether. There weren’t many, but the ones he’d met were better than any man. Male divers thought with their sex and treated diving like it was a competition. A woman diver did her work, made her coin, and didn’t treat it like a game. She’d live longer than any boy. That’s why the mortality rate was so high among boys who ventured under the dunes. Near on a hundred percent, he figured, if you stretch out the timeline long enough.

He’d had a woman of his own once. Petra was her name. He’d even called her wife. But that was long ago, back when he was passionate and dumb. Maybe he even loved her. Maybe he still did. Hard to say. Can’t spend love, he always said. He’d take her back if she weren’t long dead from the cough. The sand got her, too, in the end, because she was stupid and refused to wear a ker out in the dunes. Rebellious, she was, and thought she’d live forever. Cough got her just like it did anyone who thought the sand cared enough to spare you. The sand don’t care, not one whit. That was the main thing.

The Poet had seen men die in ways he’d never thought possible back when he was a boy spending his days running errands and polishing his daddy’s sarfer. Back when he was learning the ways of the sand. He released the rope he was holding for a second and knocked the matte from his hair. Some of it fell down into the top of his ker, working its way into the corners of his mouth and beard, but the rest went back home to join the swells of particulate that—as far as he knew—covered the whole earth but for the distant mountaintops out west.

Topping a dune up ahead of him, Bolger shouted, and as the Poet came up behind him he saw him pointing toward a disruption on the horizon. Maybe an oasis, or maybe a copse of treetops jutting up from the sand. Likely to be water either way. His man kept on his draft and the convoy headed for the feature on the horizon. Sun was up full now and hot. Water would be necessary if Bolger planned to push them farther north.

^{The Depths} Chapter Four

At first only the oranges filled Peary’s visor, but as he stretched and pushed downward he could see the farther-off purples and tinges of blue and aqua. He kicked against what he’d hardened behind himself and felt the looser sand that flowed around his visor and chest give way to his motion. He was dragging the two spare tanks, but going down he didn’t feel them.

The aqua color down there—down at the fringes of his vision, now giving way to darker purple—reminded him of Marisa, and the polished rocks, turquoise and green, she’d bought from a trader once with precious coin. He loved her for that, too, even if he didn’t get it and thought it was wasteful. There was no sorting it. A woman loved what she loved, and who could figure it?

As he descended, the cool came, and he felt it through his suit, and welcomed it. He sipped on his tank and stretched for the deep. He’d forgotten to count, which was more of a habit than a rule, but his visor showed him at fifty meters and he was just starting to feel the press in his chest. Not tight yet, but firm and good. He liked the feel of fifty to a hundred, and maybe another twenty or thirty after that, but then the real pushback came, and he didn’t like that so much.

The air from his tanks was nice and sweet, but he had a tiny stream of gunk making its way into his goggles. Nothing tragic, but not ideal. He concentrated on moving the sand and flowing it smoothly around himself. No blips on his visor yet. He didn’t expect to see the sandscrapers of Danvar yet—those were said to be a mile down, and even if they were half that he wouldn’t see them on this dive—but depth and distance were odd out in the shifting dunes. He’d often found salvage at less than one fifty, and had hit hard ground at less than two hundred before. And this time he was going deeper.

At one hundred and fifty he felt the press and he dropped his first tank. He watched it disappear behind him, glowing bright red in his visor with orange at the edges. With his twin tanks, he was good down past two hundred meters and could still make it back without a spare. If he was careful with his breathing, two fifty was doable. Beyond that and he’d have to rely on the spares—and he’d be well past his deep.

Peary stretched out and tried to slow his breathing even more, felt his muscles strain, and his mind too. He tried to keep himself going straight vertical, and focused on keeping the sand closest to his upper body as loose as possible. The pushback was strong; he could feel the tightness around his neck, and his lungs had to work to push outward with each breath. And to think that people—mere human divers—had gone down half a mile or more? Or so the rumors went.

Then he could see it. Not through his visor, but in his mind’s eye. His own body trapped in the sand. He immediately pushed that thought away, because that was the thought that would kill you. He’d almost coffined like that before, at a much shallower depth. A lapse like that and everything around him would turn hard as stonesand and his next breath would never come. Even with the tank and whatever precious oxygen remained in it, his lungs would never expand again, because the sand would crush in on him and thwart his inhale. So he put his thoughts on Marisa, and he pictured himself telling her he loved her and how much he appreciated her.

Past two hundred meters. The death zone. Hard to tell now because the reading in his visor was starting to fade. Losing all contact with the surface. He stopped and looked around, concentrated on keeping the sand soft around himself. He looked down, and when he calmed himself, he saw the first dot of orange, and then red, and it surprised him. As if this whole dive had been an exercise and he’d never really hoped to find anything. He moved again. The dot grew until he knew he was looking at a something. Angular. Solid and manmade. Straight lines heading down and away from a point that was changing from orange to red and then a deeper red. The lines moving away disappeared into greens and shades of blue.

He pushed down, the sand behind him becoming harder than stone, the pushback growing with each meter. And then the yellow appeared. Two forms, clinging to the red structure with orange where the two colors met. And he knew what they were, the two shapes in yellow.

They were men. Divers just like him.

And they were dead.

^{No One Really Knows War in the Wastes} Chapter Five

Two of Bolger’s divers were down under the sand. Down there with large jars and water skins, searching for the underground spring or river that once wetted the trees whose tops now served as leaning posts for the rest of the crew. Everyone just waited in the sun and drained their own canteens so that they would be empty and prepared for more. Water was the other truth of the world, water and sand. Only, a man could live without sand.

The Poet licked his lips, even though he knew better. Waste of water, and it made them dry out faster. His daddy used to smack him when he licked his lips out in the dunes under the relentless sun. He would say, “Go on and cut your wrists, boy, it’ll be faster!”

The sand near where the divers had disappeared didn’t stir, and all the men were watching, waiting for one of the divers to break the surface, to hold up those precious containers of liquid life. Someone told an awful joke, and everyone laughed, even the other divers, even though the joke was about how divers dying down there was just something to be expected.

That’s when the first man died. He was in mid-laugh when it happened. He was a diver too, laughing about divers dying, and a spear went through his throat and pinned him to the gnarly gray-black treetop that arrogantly dared poke its way up through the sand.

Then the arrows and spears rained down and one nearly took off the top of the Poet’s head, too. Knocked him right down into the sand, and he saw the blood flow down, mixing with the silica and grit. His own blood, red and thick.

He glanced up and men were falling everywhere, most dead and some wounded, and other men were streaming down the dunes toward them. Brigands. Screaming in the voice of war. At a glance they looked like they could be Brock’s men, but the Poet couldn’t tell with blood running into his eyes. The two divers poked up then, at just the wrong time, and the Poet saw them killed right quick. They always thought they’d die down under the sand, or up on top in a bar somewhere, but they died half in and half out, with sand up to their waists.

Without hesitation, the Poet reached under his robe and activated his suit. He’d learned to dive as a boy, hiding from his father in the box town outside of Low-Pub. And he was good, too—a natural, they said. He never dove deep and he never took salvage, but he could move sand like no one’s business. But that was before his daddy taught him about the fundamental worthlessness of a diver, about how being a diver was like being a dog, only without the intrinsic values of loyalty and obedience that came with the canine species. So the Poet had given up diving, though he kept up his skills by going out a couple of times a year—out into the Thousand Dunes, to make sure he could survive.

Now he took a big gulp of air and made himself sink until the sand swallowed him whole. He struggled with the robe on, but what could he do? He worked his way under the sand and over to his gear bag, and when he knew he was near it he thrust his hand up above the surface and groped around until he felt his hand hit the bag.

Open the bag. Reach in for the visor. Now goggles. Got it.

He dove again, the sand ripping at the gash on his scalp, and when he was ten meters down he stopped and softened up the sand enough that he could pull on his goggles and visor. He went through the process of trying to clear the gunk from around his eyes, but he knew the best he could do was remove enough to allow him to see colors through the visor.

His lungs were straining now, driving him to want to exhale. He hardened the sand by his feet and pushed off toward the north, kicking for all he had. He would need to clear the nearest dune before he could risk surfacing for a split second to grab a breath. He pushed and kicked and he could feel his head growing lighter and the blood pulsing in his temples and neck. Counting down, he supposed, to his death. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He was already operating beyond his abilities, he thought. Yet he kicked and kicked, and when he thought he couldn’t go another stroke, he kicked again.

He guided himself by the colors. When it looked to him like he’d cleared the nearest dune and was on the backside, he pushed again. Angling upward, toward the purple, he moved his body skyward as his every cell screamed for him to exhale and then suck in anything—anything at all. He broke the surface in a burst of energy and rolled onto his back, gasping and straining for air. One second. Two seconds. And then he turned back to his stomach. He forced himself to not just lie there, and when the first dollop of blood hit the sand in front of his face, he sucked in all the air he could and dove again. He calmed himself. This time he moved more slowly, kicking his feet against the sand that he hardened behind himself and pulling himself forward with each stroke. His muscles were screaming, but he put that pain out of his mind. After a one-hundred count, he pushed up toward the purple again, letting only a portion of his face break the surface this time. He sucked in air and grit and dove again.

In this way, he pushed farther north, farther into the wastes.

^{The Sand Don’t Care} Chapter Six

Peary did a cursory hand search around the bodies. Both dead men were in dive suits, coffined in the sand. He tested the first man’s tank and tried to take a breath through the regulator, but the tank was dry. Both of the bodies clung to some kind of metallic superstructure that came to a point at the top, with long antennae pointing up from there toward the surface. Down a ways he could see where horizontal shafts of steel extended outward from this main tower where he’d found the bodies.

The dead men were only a few feet apart, so whatever had happened, it looked like they had died together. Maybe there was some peace for them in that, but Peary wouldn’t know. He was, as always, alone.

He softened the sand as best as he could, but it was tough going at that depth. He did the calculations in his mind and he realized he didn’t have enough juice to make it back to the top if he tried to drag both divers’ bodies with him, even if he could physically do it, which he doubted. One diver was clutching some kind of case in his hands, and had obviously been trying to get the salvaged materials back up to the surface when something had happened. It was a pretty common story with divers. Coffining happened most often either when a diver panicked, or was trying to move heavy salvage.

Instinctively, Peary reached his hand down the man’s leg to see if the man was carrying a dive knife—something that might have his name on it so that the body could be identified. He couldn’t find the knife, but he did find out what had contributed to the man’s death.

There was a long, steel cable wrapped tightly around the man’s leg. He felt farther down and found the cable’s other end was wound almost in a knot around the heavy metal of the structure. He pulled hard a few times to try to free the diver’s leg, but the man was stuck and there was no extricating him.

Peary took a pull on his own regulator and got that response that told him his own oxygen was running out. Better get moving or there’ll be three dead bodies down here. He was to the bottom of his twin tanks. Obviously, he’d been down here longer than he thought. A lot longer.

Don’t panic. You have a spare, and another waiting at one fifty.

It was time to go. When he felt his tanks were completely empty, he swapped out the twins for his one spare, but he didn’t start breathing from the new tank yet. He needed to ration his air. If for some reason he couldn’t find his stashed tank on the way back up, he would probably die. No two ways about it now. Peary checked the other dead diver and found no dive knife or any other item that might be used to identify him. This man was also clutching a hard-sided case, so Peary freed the two cases from the dead men’s clutches and then took his first long breath from his new tank. He felt his blood respond to the oxygen. Time to head back up.

He oriented himself by following the direction the antennae pointed, red arrows directing him to life, and when he was ready, he pushed toward the surface. His mind had been on the salvage, and now that he was kicking upward he once again realized just how dense the sand was at this depth. Now, instead of sinking down while carrying only spare air tanks, he was struggling against both gravity and the sand pressure while trying to drag two heavy cases up. The effort required was multiplied, and he was using a whole lot more oxygen, working to flow the sand around both himself and the cases he carried with him.

He felt like he was making no progress at all. Meters were counted in what seemed like minutes and not seconds. He almost coffined again when he felt panic begin in his mind and then tremor down his whole body. When that happened, the sand tightened on his throat and chest—and only by stopping and re-focusing his mind was he able to loosen the sand enough to continue his upward journey.

His biggest problem was that he had no idea how deep he was. His visor had yet to pick up the surface, so he had no reading on his depth. He stared upward and couldn’t see even the faintest trace of the blood red indicator that would mean he’d found his spare tank. He struggled, pulling against the sand, and he was forced once more to stop and re-focus his mind. It was harder to push toward the surface dragging the bags. Harder than he’d expected.

The sand don’t care!

He didn’t know why he thought those words at that moment, but he did think them. He’d heard the phrase bandied about by divers who’d been around awhile and were still alive. Those who’d made it through tough scrapes. It was true. The sand didn’t care. But Marisa did, and that made him move.

He kicked again, pushing surface-ward, but on his second kick he felt his tank go dry—and there was still no red object above him on which he could focus his attention. Nothing to give him hope. In the distance, he could barely make out the faint pulse of his beacon on the surface. Too far away to mean anything if he didn’t find the spare tank. He adjusted his regulator and reached back to fiddle with the knob, checking the line too. Nope. Already his mind was screaming and fear was causing him to sweat despite the cold. He knew he could hold his breath for several minutes more, but his body didn’t listen to his mind, and that craving to exhale came upon him like never before. He dropped one of the cases—an offering, or maybe it was just panic—and pushed harder upward. Still no red in sight, and he felt himself growing lightheaded, and all the while the weight and pushback impressed upon him that the sand didn’t care.

^{Bleeding Red} Chapter Seven

When the Poet figured he’d gone a quarter mile, bobbing to the surface for breaths after every dune, he stopped and waited just under the sand with his body mostly buried and his head in the lee of a rise. He waited for the sun to go down, and for the moonrise over the wastes to light up the silica like little diamonds or stars in the night.

The bleeding from his head hadn’t fully stopped, but he applied pressure with his hand as best as he could. And when that blue-gray glow was sufficient that he knew he could travel safely in the shadows of the dunes, the Poet surfaced and walked back to the site of the battle. Struggling. Step by step. On top of the sand, but still subject to its whims. He had to know if any of the team was spared; and if no one had lived, then he needed to look for gear or weapons. Anything that might give him a chance at survival.

When he reached the site of the battle, he wasn’t really that surprised by what he found. No survivors there, and the bodies he could find had been stripped by the brigands. There were no tools or canteens left behind, or even a spare ker to stanch the blood seeping from his head. Bad luck. He sat down against a dune and cried for a moment, not knowing what he should do.

This was no way to treat a valuable man. His life was worth more than this. If it was Brock and his men, they should have known better. They’d treated him just like a common diver. And although he had trouble grasping it, it was very likely that they’d succeeded in killing him along with the others—it was just taking a little longer for him to die. No way he could walk the dozens of miles back to Springston, and the wastes had a way of making even faint hope disappear with the sift. Dying like a diver, robbed and bleeding out in the wastes. No, this was no way for a valuable man to go out.

He tried to calculate how many days he could go, and how much battery he had left in his suit, but his calculations went awry as his head began to spin and his consciousness drifted in and out like the sift. He brought his hands to his face and saw the blood was still running down past his temple and matting in his beard. He tried to mouth the word “blood,” but he never got it out before he fell unconscious back onto the dune. For its part, the dune received him with apathy. Just another body in the sand.

^{A Man’s Breath} Chapter Eight

When the Poet regained consciousness, he found himself in the haul rack of a sarfer. The man who was sailing the thing was talking non-stop and was in mid-story and mid-sentence. It looked to be early morning, and from the angle and direction of the first glows of sunrise, he figured they were heading south. He tried to rise and to speak, but couldn’t. He raised his hands to his head, and found that it had been wrapped thickly in a heavy cloth. The fabric of the cloth was so dense and luxurious that it was altogether something he’d never felt before. He’d only seen such things in the black market, coming from salvage found from the old world.

“…so when I found my spare tank, I’d been holding my breath—I don’t know—maybe four minutes or more. I was blacking out when I saw the red of the spare in my visor…”

The young man kept on telling his story, even though the Poet had obviously missed most of it, and didn’t care about the rest.

“…I broke through the surface about a minute after my spare tank ran out, and I thought I was dead. I’d sucked in so much grit I thought I’d never cough it all out…”

The Poet felt up under the head cloth; it seemed that he was no longer bleeding, that the blood had finally clotted up. The diver had put a thinner cloth directly on the wound, and that cloth was stuck in the dried blood. He didn’t want to peel that off because he was afraid the bleeding would start up again. But the heavier material—the luxurious fabric—he unraveled from his head.

The diver looked down at him and saw him working on his head cloth and smiled. “Try not to do anything stupid. Seeing as how you already got yourself near-enough killed once already on this trip.”

The Poet glared at the diver. “I’ll have you know that I am known as the Poet, and I—”

“I don’t care if you’re one of the Lords himself or maybe one of the gods of Danvar!” the diver spat. “They just call me Peary, but surprise, looks like we both bleed the same. And if you start up bleeding again I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it stopped again.”

“Well, I do thank you for saving my life, but—”

The diver stopped him with a raised hand. “I don’t care what else you have to say, but your thank-you is received and appreciated. Now shut up while I finish my story. You see, the two cases I’d found and pulled up were heavy and full…”

The old Poet stared at Peary, not knowing what to think about the young man. The unraveled cloth was now whipping in the wind as the sarfer cut in an angle down from a very high dune and sped toward a long area of flats. The light was enough now that he could see the mountaintops off to the south and west, and he guessed they must be getting close to Springston—or maybe they were already west of it. He held the cloth up so that he could see it in the light. It was some kind of garment, and it was the brightest orange he’d ever seen. It was a color that didn’t happen in nature. Almost electric, like the orange you’d see in a visor. There was an emblem on the front of the garment, and words that he couldn’t yet make out.

“…and the cases were full up with clothes and trinkets. More stuff from the old world than I’d ever seen in one place! Just one of the larger items would probably bring more coin than I could make in a year or more.”

The Poet interrupted. “Are we going to Springston?”

“No.”

“Why not?” the Poet asked.

“Springston’s gone.”

The Poet looked up at the stranger. He stared for a moment before daring to speak. “Springston is… gone?”

“That’s what they say.”

“That’s what who says?”

Peary jerked his head back, as if to say back there.

The Poet tried to straighten himself in the haul rack, but he was hemmed in by some large, hard cases. “Who says Springston is gone?”

“The divers. I found the information in a dozen notes and messages left between the wastes and here. Someone blew up the walls with bombs.”

The Poet raised his hand to his head, pressing on his wound, feeling for the pain. “How long have I been out?”

“Excuse me?” Peary asked. “You have to talk over the wind, old man!”

“How long have I been with you?”

Peary shrugged his shoulders. “I found you the night before last. Took a long time to get the bleeding stopped, especially once I got you hydrated. I had to stop the sarfer every few miles to check your wounds and give you water. I watched over you all last night. I didn’t think you’d make it to sunrise, to be honest. I dripped honey water into your mouth, making you swallow it, on and off until morning.”

The Poet just stared at Peary. For several minutes he just watched as the sailor/diver handled the sarfer like a professional. It seemed to him, for the longest time, that there were no words to say. Perhaps the blood loss…

“Got going early this morning,” Peary said. “Carried you to the sarfer just hoping you weren’t going to die on me.”

“Why did you save my life?” the Poet asked.

Peary stared back at the old man and narrowed his eyes, then looked back at the dunes. “I don’t understand the question.”

“Why did you save my life? You have your treasure. You have riches.” The Poet rubbed the hard cases and then looked back at Peary. “All you needed to do was leave me there to die and head home. Where is home, by the way?”

“Low-Pub.”

“You could have just gone back to Low-Pub and not risked your life and wealth on me.”

Peary just shook his head.

The old Poet pressed him. “Why did you save my life?”

Peary looked at the man again and sighed. “Because it’s a life, man. Besides, you would have done the same for me.”

At that, the Poet felt a chill. It ran right down his spine and made him look away. Now he held up the electric-orange fabric again, looking at the image emblazoned on the bright cloth. It looked to be a horse’s head, with a fiery mane flowing back—as if the horse were running at full gallop. There were words below the horse’s head, and having learned some of the old world words, the Poet recognized the bottom one.

Danvar.

The writing was odd-looking, and the word was spelled with a couple of funny symbols, but it was clearly recognizable as the word Danvar. The poet touched the print with his hand.

The word below the emblem of the horse and above the word for Danvar… that one the Poet could not decipher. It was in larger symbols that stretched all the way across the cloth. Peary, and then the whole sarfer, leaned into a high dune, and as they climbed it, the Poet’s finger traced the old symbols.

The sarfer sped southward, and in the wind, when he paid attention, the Poet could hear his driver still talking.

“…and when we get to Low-Pub, I know someone who’ll move all this for us… Maybe we make two coin for every ten it’s really worth, but even at that we’ll be rich and no one will know we are. I’ll get Marisa… pack up and head west… you can come along if you’d like…”