Confined by this new stranger’s grasp, his wicked knife inches from the pale veins of her emaciated arms, Fenin was surprisingly calm. Her eyes closed, and she knelt without struggling, her hands stretched upward above her captor’s curled fist, as if in supplication.
“I’m not from Svilsara,” I said, a needless clarification that I nonetheless felt compelled to make. Whatever devilry Fenin’s city had concocted and inflicted upon its citizens, I wanted no part of it. “I am a warrior of the North. Unhand the girl, and I’ll let you depart from here in peace.”
His smile only stretched wider. “I might have known.”
Perhaps it was the dim, flickering light of the half-buried fire, and the heat rising from it in rippling waves, but the man appeared more serpentine by the minute. The sharp-toothed grin split his face almost from ear to ear, and his eyes shone in a polished dark amber. I had thought him tall when he had appeared, but now he towered over me, his robe undulating like waves in a benighted sea. As I followed his impossible ascent with my eyes, my vision swam, and I tightened my hand around the shaft of my harpoon and planted my feet upon the stone.
The wind blew dust across my vision, and I turned my head away. When I looked again, he was gone—and in his place was the shining, scaly hide of an enormous black serpent. In great coils, its bulk spread across the rock, hiding Fenin and her captor at its center.
The great snake of the desert, for which Fenin had anxiously waited all evening, had arrived. It was quicker than lightning, more silent than a shark in the water. I had been blinded for only a second.
Well. I had fought worse. I took my harpoon from my back, raised it to my shoulder, and threw.
The sound of a thunderclap echoed across the sea of dust. Lightning flashed white-violet against the obsidian scales, and I closed my eyes again, bright spots crackling against the inside of my eyelids.
As it had in the chamber under Salmacha, the harpoon returned to my hand, its weight solid and reassuring. Squinting and blinking, I ran toward Bran, certain that the serpent’s as-yet-unseen head was about to strike in retaliation.
Bran stood exactly where I had left him. He flattened his ears and scratched at the dust with one forehoof, but the appearance of the snake had not set him to panicking. He was watching me, not the serpent, turning his head to regard me with one eye.
I grasped his halter and turned back. Something was terribly wrong—nothing had quite made sense since I had stumbled upon Fenin, and the appearance of the man and then the serpent had only made it worse.
Now there was no man, and there was no serpent. There was only Fenin, kneeling on the rock, her sunken eyes huge with surprise and grief.
“He was here,” she wailed. “He was here, and now he’s gone.”
A cold wind stirred the sand. The fire flickered once more and went out again.
“What happened?” I asked.
Fenin had begun to cry. Dry, rasping sobs wracked her shoulders, and she gave me no answer.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I searched the expanse of desert for any trace of the serpent. It had disappeared just as quickly as it had come, and there was no sign of the man, either.
“I fear there’s some evil magic afoot,” I said, mostly to myself. Fenin ignored me.
My tent was, by some miracle, unharmed. I retrieved a blanket from within. “You should rest,” I said, holding it out to her. “I’ll keep watch. In the morning, I’ll return you to your city.”
She sniffled and wiped at her face with the backs of her hands. “How can I go back? The serpent has rejected me. Without my sacrifice, he won’t protect Svilsara anymore. The city will fall to invaders.”
What compassion I’d had for this strange, starving girl was quickly wearing thin. “I can’t help you with that,” I said. “Take it to your elders. If they’re as wise as you say, they’ll know what to do.”
She took the blanket, running the coarse woven border through her fingers. It was wool, warm enough for a chill night such as this one, purchased for two copper coins and a packet of dried meat at the inn on the desert’s edge. She scowled at it as though she were accustomed to silk and an upholstered bed, but she drew it around her shoulders and lay down as I built the fire up a second time.
When the fire was lively enough to chase a little of the cold wind away, I placed a second blanket on Bran and the third and last around me like a cloak before sitting down across from Fenin. She stared into the fire, her hollow eyes shadowed, reflecting the flames in two burning points.
“Who was that man?” I asked. “Did you see where he went?”
Her eyes flicked upward. “What man?”
I sighed. I was still a young man at that time, but I had never felt older than when dealing with this child. “You blame me for the serpent not eating you,” I said. Most others might be grateful, but I had not found myself in the company of most others. “I can’t help that. I’m trying to keep you alive long enough to learn what went wrong. The least you can do is cooperate a little.”
With some difficulty, she pushed herself into a seated position. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only man here was you.”
Evil magic, I thought. The air tasted of lightning, dry and sharp, but that might have been my doing. To Fenin, I said, “What did you see when the fire went out?”
“The serpent came and encircled me with his coils. That’s what put the fire out. Then there was thunder and lightning, and he was gone. I didn’t see another man.”
“And you didn’t hear him speak?” I asked. “He had you by both wrists.”
Her expression grew troubled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. No one else was here.”
One of us was going mad. I’d have liked to blame Fenin, but my confidence faltered with each of her insistent words. I reached out a hand to the fire, reassuring myself that its warmth wasn’t an illusion. Bran stood where I had left him, and there lay my tent, one of its poles sagging under poorly distributed weight. Somewhere in the distance, a night-bird called for its mate.
All was as it should have been, but it offered me no comfort. I could not trust my eyes. Whether there was some sorcery at play, or I had lost my grasp on sanity after too long spent alone in the desert, I could not say.
I looked out across the sand again. Everything from my camp to the silent, wind-carved rocks was in its place—even the sand, where the light from my fire reached. If a serpent as long as a ship had slithered here from the open desert, its weight would have left a mark even in the shifting sand. Despite what I had seen, and Fenin’s insistence, there had been no serpent. Either we were both bewitched, or we had both lost our minds. I had no respect for the elders of Svilsara, based upon what little I knew of them, but I hoped that they might provide some explanation.
If I slept that night, it was in fits and starts, never resting long enough to dream. The sun woke me , and I struck my camp and buried the last embers of the fire. I put Fenin in Bran’s saddle—I suspected she was too weak to walk, and I could not wait for her to finish picking at a single barley cake—and we set off among the stone columns, seeking the ill-omened city.
She did not speak that morning, and she avoided my eyes, though she accepted the offered food. I detested and distrusted her elders more and more with every step. What sort of wise person would fault a maiden for surviving an encounter with a great beast in the desert? Gods demanded blood, that I knew well, but their ways could not be understood by mere mortals. If it was the god of the desert’s will that Fenin live another year, then who were these elders to disagree?
I would leave her in the city, I told myself. I would not let her starve on the rock, or succumb to sun and heat, but my part in her confounding predicament would soon come to an end. I had more pressing concerns. Whatever became of her afterward was not one of them.
The city appeared at midday, a shining crescent atop a far western hill. As we came nearer, it resolved into a wall of sand-colored stone encircling five sky-blue towers like the fingers of some azure giant emerging from the earth. Tiled roofs in white and red-brown lay beneath the spires, warming in the midday sun. It was beautiful, and unnaturally clean—the ever-present layer of desert dust that clung to Bran’s coat and tangled in my hair was absent from the colorful plaster walls and stone foundations of the city. I saw no source of water that might have encouraged its early founders to build in this location, nor was the hill upon which it sat particularly defensible. It was as though the entirety of Svilsara was picked up from elsewhere and planted here by the hand of a god.
The gate was solid iron, ponderous and foreboding. A pair of guards stood upon the battlements above it, their armor glittering in the sun and their surcoats a spotless white. A shout went up as we approached, Fenin riding Bran as I held his lead, and with a turning of well-oiled gears and heavy chains, the gate crept upward.
I tugged on Bran’s halter, and we made our way forward under the massive stone arch. Minutes passed as we walked from one side to the other; no siege engine that I had ever seen had the power to break through a wall this thick. Only a beast like the great serpent, if indeed it existed, or the worm that lay waste to Phyreios could threaten Svilsara.
Within, the desert heat loosened its grip, and I thought I smelled water, though a series of clean, blue houses obscured my view of the rest of the city. No dust troubled the stone road that branched left and right from the gate. I was suddenly aware of the days of sand and sweat that clung to my skin, and I scratched at my head and grimaced at the grains of sand that worked their way under my nails.
A third white-clad guard greeted us as the gate shuddered down behind us. He carried a small, round shield polished mirror-bright and a short spear with a winged head. Even to my uncultured eye, the metalwork was obviously of fine quality, the etching at the tops of his bracers and the spear’s wings carved by the hand of an artist.
“Lady Fenin,” the man said, a frown troubling his handsome face. He was perhaps my age, taller than I in his cloth-wrapped helmet, his thick beard combed and his teeth white and even. “You’ve returned. What happened? Who is this stranger?”
“All in good time,” Fenin said, in an authoritative tone I hadn’t yet heard her use. “I must speak to the elders.”
I looked back to her. Despite the lingering heat, my blood turned cold.
In place of the emaciated girl dressed in rags that I had met upon the rock, a priestess in a robe of white silk and a collar of pearls sat straight-backed and proud in the saddle. Her hair had become thick and dark as the desert night, falling in a single braid to her waist. Her sunken cheeks had become round and rosy, and her full-lipped mouth showed no sign of the disease and decay I had seen in the desert.
I thought for a moment that someone had taken Fenin while my back was turned and replaced her with a healthy young woman, but upon a second look, this new face and the one I had met on the rock were the same. There were her sharp cheekbones, though much less prominent, and here were her suspicious dark eyes, brighter and less sunken. When I had last looked at her, on the other side of the gate, she had been as she always was.
There was magic here, crafted to deceive the senses and confuse the mind. I adjusted my grip on Bran’s halter, pulling him close. I could trust him, and I could trust my enchanted harpoon, but all else could have been an illusion. I had walked once again into danger.
Back to Interlude Four: The Land of Ghosts
Forward to Chapter XXXIII: The Temple of the Elders
The plot thickens! Tune in next time to find out what the heck’s going on. Thanks for reading!
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