The midday sun burned like a forge overhead, and the heat bore down on me with searing claws. I had the presence of mind to gather my belongings and move them to the narrow band of shade beside the sacrificial stone, where the wind took up the frayed ends of the rope that had bound me.
At the foot of the stone was a black scar, a smear of soot barely a hand’s breadth wide on the burning rock where the god of Svilsara had lain. It was a small, inconsequential thing—in a few hours, a day at most, the wind would scour the surface clean, and nothing would remain of him but a memory. Gods, I knew well, could die. They did not die easily. If I had indeed slain him, and I had no reason to believe I hadn’t, the consequences to myself and the hostile land on which I stood were far beyond my foresight.
I tried to hold in my mind’s eye the image of Svilsara as it would have been without the illusion: emaciated people, streets of ruined buildings filled with desert dust, and cramped, smoky corridors.
The only thing I could see was Khalim, lying upon the stone, hands clutching the harpoon in his belly and his face contorted in pain.
“He was never here,” I said aloud, my voice a weak whisper. “His body is in Phyreios, and his spirit wanders the world beyond. I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t touch him. He was never here.”
My knees hit the stone before I realized I was falling. I needed water, shelter from the infernal heat, and a plan to make my dwindling supplies last until I reached another waystation, but my limbs were heavy as stone and a crushing weight pressed in on my chest. My breath came in strangled sobs.
Was this more of the illusion? Had I failed to slay the god and only dispersed his image, and was this how he chose to torment me for my transgression? I knew I had not harmed Khalim, but the fear and grief persisted even as the black mark on the stone faded and the burning wind lashed my skin with fine sand. Svilsara’s god could fool my eyes and ears, even my tongue, as the food I had been provided in the garden house proved. Perhaps he could fool my heart with his magics as well. I knelt on the stone, the weight of my despair too heavy for me to carry. If I wept, I could not tell, so great was the ache in my chest. I had slain Khalim, and my quest was over. Even if I found him in the other world, he would fly from me, an angry ghost unable to bear the sight of his murderer. Would he strike back at me? He had never raised a hand in violence in life, but a ghost was an unpredictable thing.
Minutes passed. It felt like a year. At last, Bran stepped into my view, his iron shoes loud against the stone, and put his nose to my ear.
I tore my eyes from the fading black mark and forced my hand to rise and stroke Bran’s sweat-lathered neck. He was thirsty, as was I, and I could not abandon my quest and perish under the sun without endangering this noble creature who relied on me as much as I did on him. I got to my feet, and with unsteady steps I retrieved some water and food for both of us.
The weight on my body lifted, inch by inch and breath by breath. The smell of water brought back hunger and thirst in equal measures, and my strength returned. I stretched my tent over the rock, and Bran and I rested in the shade while I decided what I should do.
I had, perhaps, four days’ worth of food for myself and my horse. I could stretch it to six, perhaps, but I could not negotiate with the three days’ supply of water without risking death on the road. Svilsara was remote, so much so that they had no knowledge of their neighbors and a traveler such as myself was a rare sight. They engaged in no commerce—their goods were all illusory. They, and their god, had called this safety.
Surely, I thought, they must have had some provisions. Fenin had lived to see seventeen years, and the elders she served many more, so they had some food and water, if not much. But how could I take it from them, when they had so little?
And where else could I go? As I came nearer to the coast, there would be more waystations and settlements, but I had no map and no guide. Three days of travel might just place me in the open desert, where not even my bones would ever be found.
And what of the people of Svilsara? Their supplies would run out whether I partook of them or not. “The Serpent provides all we need,” one man had told me. I could not yet say what that meant, but I suspected that no one in Svilsara knew how to hunt or till the earth, and I had just killed their Serpent.
Fenin and her people had tied me to the rock so their god could devour me. I was tempted to leave them as they were, as much in the haste to continue my journey as in retaliation. How many places had I left without looking back since Phyreios?
Khalim, driven by visions of the iron mountain collapsing from within and the city in flames, had left his home in Nagara to save Phyreios. In all the ways that he had feared, he’d failed. The city had fallen. His god had intervened only to pick up the pieces. In the long passage of history, who would remember Khalim? There was only the god, with an iron circlet upon his head, hard golden eyes overseeing the endless process of rebuilding what had been lost.
My eyes fell on the faint black stain where the god of Svilsara had fallen. I would remember Khalim. I had carried his memory here, where it was used as a weapon against me.
Then let it be used for some good, as well, I decided. Let me try to save Svilsara.
The sun slipped from its zenith and made its leisurely way westward. I gathered my belongings and took Bran back in the direction of the city. I arrived as afternoon turned to evening, and dust painted the desert sky red. I thought I had prepared myself for the sight of Svilsara as it was, stripped of the illusion of prosperity. I was wrong.
Where the wall of white stone had stood against the real and imagined threats of the world beyond, there were only drifts of sand. Beyond that, half-buried hovels sprawled across the dunes. Most were open to the air and dust, but a few near the edge still had a few dry, crumbling timbers laid across the tops of their walls. The blue plaster that had lent Svilsara its particular charm was nowhere to be seen. The sun had long ago leached any color from the hunched buildings. Age and weather had pitted and scarred the thin, brittle walls, and the streets were little more than footpaths carved into the sand.
The city was a ruin. The hands of neither gods nor men had cared for it in an age. A chill wind, harbinger of the night to come, whispered through empty houses and down buried staircases. I dismounted and crossed over the ridge that marked the outer wall, keeping Bran close at hand. He flattened his ears, his eyes darting from one deepening shadow to the next.
But for the wind, the city was quiet. Had the people I had seen here been illusions, as well? Fenin had seemed real enough, and the serpent god had spoken of them as though they were real. They couldn’t have gone far.
Some unconscious instinct led me through the center of town toward the garden. Darkened windows stared at me as I passed. I risked a glance inside one house, halfway up what I thought must have been the grand staircase leading up the center of town. The fading light caught the dust hanging in the air and touched tattered curtains, a filthy tabletop of jagged splinters, and a moth-eaten basket of rotting, unrecognizable fruit spilling out onto the sand on the floor.
My stomach turned. I ducked my head and hurried Bran up to the temple.
Here, where a lush green garden had demonstrated every blessing their god had to offer, there was only more sand. The temple of the elders stood above it, barely taller than my head, its magnificent vaulted ceiling only open air. Black soot stains around the windows offered the only evidence that anyone had used the building in a hundred years or more. The house in which I had stayed—the house that Svilsara’s god had promised me, if he had indeed intended to allow me to live—was nothing but a ring of wind-blasted stones, half-covered in sand.
At the center of the garden, around an empty, shallow hollow I assumed must have been the fish pond, the people of Svilsara huddled together against the coming night. In the dark, I could not count them, but I guessed there were fifty of them, men and women and children, clutching at their thin, dust-stained robes with skeletal fingers. A pair of chipped clay lamps spit foul-smelling smoke into the air and cast baleful shadows on the hollow eyes and sunken cheeks of those sitting nearby. A tiny child suckled on the hem of his dirty sleeve, his head huge and heavy above narrow, knife-sharp shoulders. I could not tell his age.
What could I say to these people? I had done exactly the thing I had hated their god for doing: I had taken away their choice to live without the illusion. Now, they must have thought they had been cursed, that their current miserable state was the result of magic, rather than the lack of it.
“You!” a familiar voice rang out. Fenin rose from the far side of the gathering, one hand holding her rags closed over her distended belly while the other pointed an accusing finger at me. Around her, the elders’ wizened hands shook as they pleaded silently with the sky.
I held up my free hand. “I mean you no harm,” I said, but my words were meaningless. I had already done them harm.
“You are a demon from the wastes!” Fenin screamed, harsh and shrill across the dark expanse of the ruined garden. “Begone from here! The Serpent will strike you down and devour your flesh!”
“Your serpent is dead,” I said. I had not the strength to invent a convincing lie, not after what had occurred upon the sacrificial stone, and not with a hundred shadowed eyes staring at me, accusation and even hatred in the tiny reflected flames that burned within them.
“Impossible,” said the wavering, raspy voice of one of the elders. “The Serpent is eternal. A god cannot die.”
If only this old man pretending at wisdom knew how wrong he was. He and his fellows, I knew, were not the ones who had first made their deal with the serpent, but it was under their auspices that Svilsara continued to offer blood for imagined wealth and protection. I could not blame them for the city’s suffering, but neither could I forgive them—not that it mattered, in the end. Mine was not the forgiveness the elders should have been seeking.
“You can believe me or not,” I said. “It makes no difference. Your serpent is not coming to save you, and you’ll need food and water and shelter before nightfall. I’m leaving to seek out others who might help. If you wish, you may come with me. Otherwise you can remain here and wait.”
A second elder waved a bony hand, as if to dismiss me like a puff of smoke. “We are protected here. You will only lead us to our deaths, demon.”
“Sit down, Lady Fenin,” a third said. “We must pray.”
Fenin looked at them, and then at me, and she shook her head. Thin wisps of hair drifted around her ears.
“You’re going to find help?” she asked.
“I swear it,” I said. “I will do it or die in the attempt.”
She gathered up the hem of her robe and squared her narrow shoulders. “Then I’m coming with you.”
Back to Chapter XXXVII: Within the Illusion
Forward to Chapter XXXIX: Across the Sea of Dust
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Eske has made a new friend, but he’ll have company on the next leg of his journey. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
2 thoughts on “Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVIII: Svilsara, As It Always Was”