West, then—as the river turned away toward the sea, and the distant peak of Mount Abora faded into memory, I pursued the setting sun through monsoon-flooded lowlands. Somewhere far to the north lay Phyreios, sleeping quietly under the watchful eye of its god, the mines empty and quiet; farther still stood the land of my birth, winter spreading over it like a cloak.
A shrouding layer of clouds obscured my view of the sky, and I lost track of days. Counting backward to the morning I left Nagara, and watching the pale spot in the gray where the sun hid, I guessed that autumn passed along with the miles. The wind turned cool enough to keep Bran comfortable, despite the wet air that hung around us; I wondered if it were possible to drown on dry land, but I remained alive and breathing.
Nagara had bidden me farewell with enough supplies to last me a fortnight. I slept my last night in Taherah’s house, in the embrace of the blanket she had woven for her son, the hollow in the mattress beneath me reminding me again of Khalim’s absence. The memory of him lingered in that place, like the pale wisp of a ghost, seen out of the corner of one’s eye, but of Khalim himself, there was nothing.
If only he had stayed in the blank white city I had seen in the vision of the Dreaming Eye, I caught myself thinking, before I pushed the thought aside with shame. From the beginning, had my endeavor not been to set him free, even before I knew that he was imprisoned? I could not blame him for freeing himself.
I should have asked him where he was, that last night outside of burned Phyreios, when he was permitted to appear to me. I should have told him to wait for me.
It was then, as I crested a low hill in the middle of a torrent of rain, and Bran complained and tugged at his bridle, that I wondered for the first time if it had indeed been Khalim who had come to me that night, or if it had all been an illusion of the god. In my brief experience, Torr had not been a trickster; he was a hero-god, a warrior-god, a god of golden sunlight and orderly city streets. And yet, he was still a god, his mind impossible for a mortal man to comprehend.
If I did not trust Torr, a conclusion I had long ago taken with confidence, then could I trust Nashurru, goddess of the deep, who presided over the gate of bone in my vision? Could I trust the stag with human eyes, who appeared in my dreams? What little faith I’d possessed had crumbled with the walls of Phyreios.
What could I trust? The kindness of the grandmothers on the volcanic isle, Bran’s sure feet, the sails of the Lady of Osona, and the fact that Khalim would do what he thought was right, regardless of the danger.
I had no faith in the scribe of the book I carried, which was precisely why I sought him out—or anyone who had heard of him, as he may have been long dead. It was just as well that I couldn’t read it. I would require a living person to vouchsafe its contents either way. Human beings were fickle creatures, I knew very well, but I could understand them better than a god or a book.
Days passed. The rain slowed, and the sun broke through to dry the vast expanse of mud and turn the forest to emerald. I climbed a wandering path through a series of flat-topped mountains, themselves like the stumps of great, felled trees as large as the world. Layers upon layers of red and gray rock towered above me. What I could see of the very tops of the plateaus were all dusted with glittering white snow. The air, so long made heavy with moisture, at last turned dry, and on occasion a cold wind blew down from the high places.
Winter would arrive before long. For now, it remained in the North, fenced in by the faraway mountains where my people made their home.
The autumnal equinox passed while I walked between two sheer cliffs that stretched on for days, the sun never touching the ground beneath my feet. Still, I was grateful for dry days and cold nights, and I slept without dreaming. I found I missed the strange stag with its oaken antlers, and worried that its absence meant I had made the wrong decision by coming this way, but it was far too late to return. My dreams would come back in their own good time, and I would proceed with or without its dubious guidance.
It was nearly winter, as best as I could reckon it, by the time the mountains flattened out into a blinding expanse of pale yellow desert, blank as an unwritten vellum page, the sky a deep, shimmering blue like a sea inverted. These were not the iron-tinged sands of the desert surrounding Phyreios, where a similar sky burned through rarefied air; this was a low desert, close to the sea, where the approach of winter would grant only the barest of reprieves from the sun’s unrelenting heat.
I had met no other people on the trek out of Nagara, though the signs of their passing and their habitations were there to be seen: footprints in the mud, filling with rainwater; a vast stretch of tilled earth; the ruts of cart wheels crossing my path. Carved stone steps, so old that it was difficult to tell where they ended and the mountain’s own features began, aided my journey through the mountains. Here at the edge of the desert, I found myself in need of human contact. I needed water, and the means to carry it, and I would require fuel to warm me when the sun set and the desert turned cold. The monsoon was far behind me now.
Bran was a creature of the steppe, a landscape almost as flat and dry as this one. He could survive on dry grass and little water, but I could see neither from my vantage point on a spar of pale stone jutting out over the desert. I would need supplies for him as well.
I climbed down, and I wandered in the shade of the last flat hill for half a day. Night fell quickly, the sun receding in the endless sky until it was no more than a bloody stain upon the sand. In its place, tiny fires flickered into view on the rocky plain before me, so distant they were little more than candles. I made my camp and resolved to find the source of the light in the morning.
When I emerged from the mountain’s shadow, after noon the next day, a strange sight appeared: a stone building, three stories tall, planned by human minds and built by human hands. From its great southern gate wound a single file of men riding camels, saddled between cloth-wrapped parcels and woven baskets. The village of Nagara could have fit easily between its walls, with room left over for half their rice fields. Not since the port of Charkand had I seen so much land given over to civilization.
The camels filed out onto the expanse of sand, their shadows growing long, as though they left streaks of dark ink in their wake as they walked. I approached the gate, leading Bran with my harpoon on my back.
This place had not been built to stand alone. A well-worn road stretched out to the east, between the foothills that emerged from the mountains like the still-living roots of a felled tree. I could not say how far it went before it turned to goat-paths and crumbled stone steps, but there it lay, less than a day’s journey from where I had walked. Perhaps it went all the way to the river valley; perhaps it joined with another desert road and led travelers to Phyreios. By some ill luck, I had bypassed it entirely, taking a route too far south.
As I came near the gate, and saw the busy press of humanity within, I understood that it had not only been luck that had kept me from the highway. My heart quickened and my hands grew slick with sweat. I had become accustomed, once more, to solitude. I had even fallen out of the habit of speaking to Bran, though he gave no indication that he had noticed. The last human with whom I had exchanged words had been Sala, as he bade me farewell on the bridge out of Nagara.
I still possessed the power of language, though my voice was hoarse and my command of the local tongue a sorry patchwork of sailors’ patois and the language of the steppe. I spent half the money I carried—my share of the treasure awarded to us in Salmacha—on supplies for myself and my horse and one night in a room on the second floor.
The entire complex was an inn, built around a vast central courtyard where travelers mingled, sharing tales of the road in a cadence too quick for me to follow. I relinquished Bran to a stablehand, offering another gold coin for his shoes to be changed and his tack repaired, and followed the innkeeper up a set of carved stairs and underneath a series of graceful arches. But for the seams between sections of pillar, I would have thought that this place was carved out from the surrounding rock, not built. My room, for the one night that I would sleep under a roof, was across from the great gate. I stood upon the balcony and looked out over the courtyard and out into the desert.
I went below for an evening meal, and shared a table with a wiry man of middle age, his long black beard plaited in a single braid and his clothing the same sapphire hue as the sky. He was a cloth merchant, and a seller of the particular indigo dye that adorned his robes, and by his account he was quite successful. He gave his name as Kosa son of Aym, and I answered him in kind.
Taking a westward heading, he explained, I would walk for ten days across stone and gravel before finding an oasis built upon a deep well. After that would come the sand: fine-grained and as deep as a sea, with winds like a winter storm over the cold Northern ocean—this last was my interpretation, as this man had never seen any ocean, nor had he experienced a winter like one I might recognize. Winter in this desert meant rain, but it was not the blessed return of green life that I had expected. It would come in torrents, Kosa said, and the plain would flood before one could hear the water coming, carrying with it entire camps and caravans.
“If you must go, keep to the high places,” he told me. “Make your camp on stone.”
I promised him I would. It sounded easy enough. I had seen treacherous landscapes before, and once crossed the sea in a canoe made of a hollow log. Whatever this new desert might bring me, I thought in the hubris of my youth, it would be nothing greater than I could survive.
That night, I slept on a thick carpet beneath a heavy woolen blanket, as the faint sound of music drifted up from the courtyard. I dreamed of Phyreios and awoke before dawn, the image of hard golden eyes lingering even as I got up to gather my provisions.
Bran and I set out into the desert as the sun cast a pale light on the mountains behind us, both too heavily laden for me to ride. Our burdens would quickly grow lighter as we consumed our food and water, but our first days on the dusty paths would be slow.
We reached the oasis on the morning of the tenth day, just as Kosa had said, and just in time to see a flash flood tear away the embankment that was to be our path into the ocean of sand. Turn south, the merchant women said, as they drew up water from the deep well, but beware the demons of the desert. You cannot trust your eyes so far from the traveled roads.
Back to Chapter XXVIII: A Feast
Forward to Chapter XXX: The Sea of Dust
Thanks for reading! I have a good plot for Eske to encounter next, so stay tuned.
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