Journey to the Water Chapter XXXIX: Across the Sea of Dust

Journey to the Water cover image: three evergreen trees stand on a hillside, shrouded in bluish fog. Subtitle reads: the sequel to Beyond the Frost-Cold Sea.

Two others stood up with Fenin: young men, one in the tattered remnants of an attendant’s white robe, and the other carrying a pitted, splintery staff that might have been enchanted to look like a spear. Had I met either of them before the illusion broke? I could not imagine a connection between their gaunt cheeks, thin hair, and missing teeth and the bright, bronze faces I had seen yesterday. Except for Fenin, everyone here was a stranger.

The elders remained where they were, kneeling on the dusty ground. They bowed their heads, turning their faces away from me. They would not look at me, or their three defecting subjects, again. In a rasping, wavering voice, they sang a hymn to their dead god, and we left the barren garden in search of enough provisions to survive in the desert.

We would not take everything. Though part of me wished to punish them for their treatment of me, and reasoned that if they were going to do nothing, they deserved whatever fate the sun and wind had in store for them, I could not leave them to starve. I found a little dried meat, caked with dust, some handfuls of grain, and another few days’ worth of water, murky and tasting of mud. The rest I left where it was, hoping that the people of Svilsara would recover it before the rats did. I could hear movement in the walls and the scratching of many tiny claws.

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVIII: Svilsara, As It Always Was

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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.

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVII: Within the Illusion

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I had been warned of this. At the temple of the dragon, the warrior Jin had told me of the devious spirits that haunted the world beyond death, luring the unwary into certain doom. He had described them as less than gods, but what was a god to a man who lived in the shadow of an ancient dragon who refused all those who would worship her? A god, to Jin, would have been something beyond imagining. The thing calling itself Svilsara’s god was far beneath his acknowledgement.

And what was a god to one such as me? The Ascended, hungry for blood and willing to destroy their thousand-year reign to obtain it? Their master, who could not prevent the destruction of the city, and yet thought it right to rule over it afterward? The gods of my people were hunters and wanderers, warriors and magic-workers, and the great beasts that roamed the vast icy plains of the world beyond. I could not imagine any of them here in the desert, so far from the place of my birth.

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXVI: The Sacrificial Stone

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I had been tied to the iron ring in the stone more securely than Fenin had been. Though Svilsara’s priests had accepted my repentance all too easily, having never encountered an outsider with no faith in their serpent, some suspicion as to my motives remained. In a way, I was grateful for the rope chafing my wrists. The people of Svilsara were like children, naive, trusting, and unable to imagine that another person might not share their belief in the benevolence of their god. If they could doubt me, then perhaps they had within them the capacity to break free of the serpent’s hold.

That, however, was a concern for later. The blinding desert sun bore down upon my head, its heat like a burning iron weighing down on my face and the exposed skin of my arms. My thin traveler’s robe did little to protect me, and I could feel my flesh redden and burn.

“Come on, you foul creature,” I shouted into the burning expanse. “I’m waiting.”

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXV: Outside the Temple

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I ducked beneath the window. The bright lights within had seared my eyes, and I could see nothing of the benighted garden without for a long moment. I held out an arm, blinking to clear the colorful spots from my vision as I groped for my harpoon with the other hand.

“Who’s there?” I whispered.

A human shape resolved out of the gloom, tall and slender and dressed all in black. An angular face at last came into view, and along with it, a sharp, too-wide smile reflected the light from the window. The skin of his face was a pale brown, almost like sand, and from his hood emerged a handful of shining black curls.

I had seen this man before. “You!” I cried, remembering at the last second to keep my voice down. “Who are you? What do you want?” Now that I could see, I freed my harpoon from its sling and held it between myself and the stranger.

“They can’t hear you,” he said. Though the voice emanated from him, his mouth did not move, maintaining its viper’s grin. “I thought I’d give us a moment to speak, while the good people of Svilsara are finishing their performance.”

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXIV: The Garden House

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Alas, my mind was not like water, as the Dragon Temple acolytes had encouraged. Almost as soon as the illusion had been drawn away, it fell over my eyes again, and the filthy, smoke-filled room became clean and bright again, and its occupants were once more dressed in fine white silk and showed no evidence of their long starvation.

I had seen enough in my brief moment of clarity. This place—the whole of Svilsara, as Fenin had acquired health and beauty upon entering the city—was under the sway of a powerful magic-worker, for whom the whole city was a ritual chamber. Such a feat was beyond my experience of magic, but I did not doubt it could be done. It had been done, one way or another, and here were four wizened men ruling Svilsara from their secret throne room underground. I looked around, searching for sigils on the walls, but there were none to be seen.

“Please, wise elders,” Fenin said. “Help me to understand. I saw the serpent, but it vanished. I swear I did only as I was instructed.”

She knelt at the feet of the men, upon the rich rug that I now knew was only a faded, moth-eaten scrap. If the stone beneath it hurt her knees, she made no indication. Her rich hair fell over her shoulder, catching the torchlight like volcanic glass, and it looked perfectly real.

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXIII: The Temple of the Elders

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Two guardsmen in polished armor escorted us into the city. I could not tell from their demeanor if they would have allowed me to leave Fenin and flee, and I decided not to test them. They stared at me, thinking I wouldn’t notice, glancing away whenever our eyes met. I was taller than they were, though not by much, and my clothing covered my tattoos—I was no stranger a sight than any other traveler in the desert. I suspected Svilsara did not receive many travelers.

I could not say why. It was remote, yes, but so was every other waystation. Blue and white walls cast off the desert’s heat, and well-watered flowers bloomed from every window. A clothesline cast across the thoroughfare held tunics of bright, patterned silk dyed blazing orange and verdant green, floating gently in a cool breeze. Our small procession passed by a woman and her three children, all dressed in silk, gold baubles dangling from their ears and hanging around their necks. They, too, stared at me.

I put on a confident swagger, pretending that I had planned to return their sacrificed priestess all along, and that I knew exactly why the serpent had not devoured her as planned. Of course, none of this was true, but I hoped that I could mask my uncertainty and deter the guards watching me from attempting to do me harm.

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXII: Svilsara

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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.”

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Journey to the Water Interlude Four: The Land of Ghosts

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Khalim took a breath. Cold, wet air, heavy with the scent of rain and decaying vegetation, chilled him from the inside of his chest, where his heart only shivered instead of beating, down to his feet and the tips of his fingers. He took a step back.

The beast rose up out of the underbrush, its forelimbs thick as tree trunks. Thick, black hair covered each arm and the shadowed body, wet and shiny in the scarlet glow of its eyes. A mask of bone, the larger mirror of the one on the creature still clinging to Khalim’s back, reflected an oval of burning red light. Below the mask, two rows of sharp teeth stretched out in a sinister smile.

Khalim had the distinct impression that this was a smile, not just an animal’s threat display in response to the sound of his approach. It could see him, and the sight of him amused it.

“Is this your mother?” Khalim whispered to the creature on his back, “or did you just take me here to be eaten?”

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Journey to the Water Chapter XXXI: Black Desert Night

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In between tiny, nibbling bites of the offered barley and dates, my strange companion provided something of an explanation for the circumstances in which we found ourselves. Her name was Fenin, and she was a maiden selected from birth with the dubious honor of being offered up as a meal to the great worm of the desert. To that end, she had been taken from her home and placed here, loosely tied to this rock, just that morning. For the preceding seventeen years of her life, she had been kept apart from others in a small house in the center of town, permitted to leave only with three escorts. “Svilsara is the greatest city upon the earth,” she insisted, though from her description, it only took an hour to complete her daily, supervised circuit of its inner wall. In that small house, she was provided with everything she could want: the finest of clothes and delicacies, a room full of books, and next year’s sacrifice as a companion. Why she looked as though she had been starved for a year and was dressed only in a threadbare, dust-stained robe, without even straw sandals to protect her feet from the sunburnt rock, she did not say.

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