by Ben Galley
All Nilith could think of was the sound of sizzling flesh, and for once in the blasted desert, not her own. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the skin of Krona’s face cooking. Bubbling. A worthy punishment for a person like her, she’d judged, but at the same time, it was another scratch in the sand. She’d hoped for stealth and speed on this journey, but all she had found were murder and delay. Desperation was twisting her into something she did not like.
Throughout the morning, whenever she had craned her neck to the heavens, she noticed a black spot wheeling overhead. A vulture, most likely, though at times Nilith swore it hovered like a kestrel or hawk. Twice she waved a feeble arm at it, and mumbled something about coming back when she was dead.
She gritted her teeth as Anoish skipped over a stone and her head came up and down with a painful thump. Nilith patted his side. She could hear his breathing becoming increasingly laboured.
It was time to be upright once more. It took some time but she got there, pushing herself up with her fists while her back clicked in far too many places. Her chest was numb, her arms limp, and yet before she massaged them back to life, the first thing she did was look behind her.
The late morning sky was stark, bereft of clouds or haze. The unhindered scorching of the sun bleached the colour out of the sapphire, leaving it turquoise. Apart from Farazar’s slumped form, the horizon was empty. No dark spots in sight. Nilith felt some of the tension seep from her bones. The sun was leaning towards the west. The worst of the day’s heat had already passed.
She scanned the dunes for a sign of a settlement or a hiding place. The salt flats shimmered cruelly as though they carried water, but amongst their blur she saw nothing; not so much as a rocky outcrop.
Nilith tapped her teeth together in thought, feeling the grit between them, and began to gently probe her face. Her teeth had settled back into their sockets at least. Her puffy eye was slowly deflating. Her split lip had scabbed over. Even the bruised and cracked ribs weren’t screaming as much when she pressed them.
She spread her hands over the horse’s sides, noting the new wrinkles in his coat where the Ghouls’ switches had kissed him. There were fresh scabs there, too, and despite his whinnying when she prodded them, he would be fine. Nilith was still thanking the dead gods he hadn’t twisted a hoof in the mad dash out of Abatwe.
It took an hour for a smudge of red to appear in the haze. Nilith set a course for it, hoping it was not a trick of the heat. What little luck she had left held. The smudge was no trick, but a ruined cottage of stolen quarry stone and bone-white wood. Just a broken ring of it remained. The rest had been chewed away by the winds or appropriated by nomads. It peaked in the centre like a dented crown, providing a few feet of wall and a patch of shade. A rusted cooking pot with a hole in it lay half-buried in the sand.
‘Who on earth would live out here?’ Nilith muttered, sliding from Anoish. Her legs were far too numb, and she crumpled into a heap. She lay there, face against the hot sand, until her blood stirred enough for walking.
She only needed to make it the dozen steps to the shade, and then she could crumple again. Fire and food, if any… they could come later. Watering herself and Anoish was more important.
Once she’d mastered being vertical, she remembered water. Her remaining skin was still tied to Farazar’s corpse. It was practically empty, but she shared the remnants equally between her and the horse. He seemed as tired as she was, if not more. In fact, he beat her to the shade, taking up most of it besides a patch where she could lay her head on his double knees.
Nilith was asleep before her cheek met his bony leg. Her dreams were full of moaning breezes and the slow sizzle of the sand shifting around them. All through it, she felt as though something was brushing her cheek, like a lover’s hand. Faceless people stood around her and watched her fit and shiver.
When she awoke, she found darkness above her. A cold wind had sprung up, blowing sand up and over the wall and onto her face. Had she lain there for a night it would have buried her, but for now it was just an inconvenience.
The soft glow of Farazar sat nearby, looking back the way they had come. The wind had covered their tracks. In the moonlight it kicked up skinny dust-devils and set them dancing across the cracked salt.
‘Storm coming?’ Nilith spoke up, her voice scratchy with the amount of sand she must have inhaled over the last few days.
Farazar shook his head, still as vacant as a blue balloon. She tapped her teeth, shuffled upright, and edged around Anoish so she could face him. The horse snuffled softly before going back to sleep.
‘Feels like it. Air’s hot, not cold,’ she said.
‘Sandstorms fade at night.’
‘Maybe tomorrow, then?’
He grunted, staring off at the sliver of moon that had poked above a dune. ‘Unlikely.’
Nilith tutted loudly. ‘Got something you need to say?’
He spoke with an ice-cold bitterness. ‘I hate you.’
‘We’ve hated one another for years.’
‘It wasn’t enough for you to come and kill me. To have the audacity to bind me. No, you see fit to drag me across sand and mountain like a dead camel, right into the claws of the first bandits and backstabbers you find. I hate you for that, and more every day that you insist on this disgraceful quest of yours. You’re a fucking imbecile, punishing me with your idiotic choices. And what’s worse is you believe that ma’at nonsense will protect you, like some snaggletoothed witch in orange rags.’
Nilith ground her teeth. ‘I did what time demanded of me.’
‘Well, look at what your doggedness has earned you. You came all that way south to fetch me, and for what? You look deader than I do. This journey is cursed by your impetuousness. Carry on like this and you’ll be hounded all the way to Araxes, never mind reaching the Grand Nyxwell in one piece. I’ll be shocked if you make it to the Sprawls.’
His judgements stung her but she waited for her anger to quell. She hadn’t the energy for shouting.
‘So much hatred,’ she said with a forced smile. ‘And yet it was you, Farazar, who saved me from that Ghoul in the crater. Who undid my bonds.’
He snarled, clearly ashamed of himself. ‘I… I swore nobody would bind me. I would rather be murdered all over again before I’m indentured to filthy bandits. Or serve some beetle-riding quarry-owner, passed on to his moron son like an antique table—’
‘You’ve come around to my way of thinking, I see. Finally accepted your death.’ Perhaps there was a chance of a peaceful journey after all. ‘Why not work together? You could stop being a prick and I’ll carry on getting us home.’
He shot her a murderous look, and Nilith decided humour might not be the best approach. ‘Help you? How fucking dare…’ He was so disgusted as to be speechless. ‘I only help myself, as I have always done. This isn’t over, wife. I have accepted nothing. I didn’t want to be sold by the Ghouls, but it doesn’t mean I will stand to be claimed by you or any other. Better to wait you out and watch you fail. Take my chance when it comes. I told you: freedom, the afterlife, or the void. I am determined to keep that vow.’
Nilith pushed herself up, and holding her nose, she moved to Farazar’s corpse. ‘I may have lost my copper dagger, but fortunately for me you stink like a butchered hog left out for the flies. The Ghouls didn’t go near your corpse. Which means…’ After some rummaging between the cloth, she dragged out the scimitar. Its copper and gold looked liquid in the afternoon sun. ‘I have this. I don’t need your help.’
Farazar looked smug. ‘The sun really has baked your brain, hasn’t it? You’ve already failed and you don’t even realise it.’ His voice was sharp, like cut flint.
Nilith didn’t answer him at first. Instead she tried some experimental swings of the blade. She winced as her arm sockets protested. ‘I’ve made it this far.’
‘And still with many miles to travel. How many days do you have to bind me?’
Eighteen days. She could have probably
counted the hours if she had the time and inclination. She imagined herself short of the finish line, with only a puff of blue smoke and a stinking corpse to show for all this toil and terror. It was far from the result she had dreamt of.
‘A few weeks.’
‘Plenty of time for you to make a mistake. Why don’t you just drag me to the nearest pool of Nyxwater you can find? Be done with it instead of insisting on the Grand Nyxwell?’
‘It has to be done right. You know that.’
Farazar had no more to say on the subject. He shuffled around to rid her from his peripheries and busied himself with moon-gazing. Nilith returned to her spot beside Anoish.
With her sword balanced on her lap, she watched the ghost through narrow eyes. Sleep didn’t pester her. She’d had enough of that. All she entertained was suspicion and wariness of the ghost. She looked into the swirling of his skull, behind the strands of cobalt hair, and imagined him concocting ways to stop her.
Nilith spat the grit from her mouth and hunkered down out of the hot wind. At the noise, Farazar looked over his shoulder. His lone eye glared at her, then returned to the glowing heavens. Nilith squeezed the sword’s hilt tighter. She had planned for this. She knew he would be a liability the moment her knife had sawn through his windpipe. There was always cutting his tongue out with copper, but conflictingly, his hate-filled protests kept her sharp, shoring up her determination and reminding her why she had planned this whole journey in the first place. Not to mention the enjoyment of poking and prodding, of telling a captive audience how wrong he was.
Perhaps Farazar had been right. Perhaps there was a lesson in all of this; one that she wanted to teach him before it was too late, final words he would have never listened to whilst alive. It would be a sweeter end, but she didn’t need him to understand in order to finish what she’d started.
Her thumb whispered against the honed edge of the scimitar.
Farazar had either lied or erred, but in any case, the sandstorm rose with the dawn. A band of orange on the eastern horizon, it rushed across the landscape like a mountain range loosed from its roots. Towers of dust curled above it like grasping claws. Here and there, yellow lightning forked between the billowing clouds, showing their insides and sending thunder rolling across the Duneplains.
Nilith withdrew her head from the lip of stone and wiped her face. She’d wrapped some spare cloth around her mouth and nose, but her eyes were still bare. ‘You said there wasn’t going to be a storm.’
‘I said there was unlikely to be one.’
‘We can’t stay here. We’ll be buried!’
‘You want to go out there, onto the plains?’
‘I saw lights there last night. Uncovered for just a moment, but I saw them through the haze.’ She knew of several small settlements sprawled between Araxes and the Steps. There was a slim chance this was one of them.
‘Trick of your eyes. Or a quarry. One whose masters would slap you and me in iron and copper before we blinked. Or greedy nomads looking to make some quick gems. I refuse to move.’
‘What do you care?’ She stared at his shoulders, hunched and glowing brightly wherever the sand punctured his vapours. Which, in fairness, was everywhere. He refused to move further behind the wall. It meant being nearer to her.
‘Because there’s copper dust in the air. Feels like needles, trying to scrape me away. I would rather not traipse through a sandstorm for hours on end, enduring this.’
Nilith was sure she had seen something in the early hours, to the north and west, but there was a chance that she was mistaken. It could have been a wandering ghost, or nomads, even a soultrain, and yet her doubt was trampled under the desire to prove him wrong. ‘Tough. We’re moving.’
Anoish, being a desert horse with the eyelashes of a camel and wide hooves, wasn’t particularly fussed when Nilith poked him into action. Nevertheless, she ripped some more fabric from the bundled corpse, and wrapped some around his snout. Once she had made a crude visor for her eyes, she handed the rest to Farazar.
‘Here, wrap yourself up.’
He accepted it grudgingly and slipped it over his head and shoulders like a rough cloak. He still wasn’t standing, but after Nilith led the horse far enough, he decided he’d rather walk than be dragged along the sand.
The going was tough even before the sandstorm hit. Its vanguard winds whipped the dust up into their faces. Balls of scrub-grass and vegetation flew by like catapulted masonry. One struck Anoish in the side, thorns raking bloody scratches, but he ploughed on.
With every mile they battled, the sandstorm claimed ten. Soon enough, the distant band of orange had become a towering mass, higher even than the Cloudpiercer of Araxes. It billowed and surged like ochre dye blooming underwater, never staying still for a moment. Nilith could hear the deeper roar of rock and dust over the animalistic howl of the gales.
‘Where are these fucking lights of yours, wife?’ Farazar yelled.
‘Ahead!’
They made it another mile before the sandstorm struck them. A wall of sand-laden air and wind drove them to their knees, tearing at every loose scrap of clothing, every strand of hair. Nilith had to walk at an angle to fight the gusts. Both hands were clamped over her face, and yet still the grit poured into her mouth and nostrils. She managed thin sucks of air through her lips, always one breath away from choking. If she held a foot in one place too long, the sand began to swallow it. Whenever she dared to open an eye through the slits of her fingers, she saw an angry, roiling world of orange and brown, dark as twilight. Palm fronds and scrub and pebbles from old riverbeds tore through the murk, cartwheeling at vicious speeds. One clipped her knee, sending her staggering right into the path of a ball of dry weeds. It knocked her flat and left her with blood smeared across her arm.
Direction became moot. She couldn’t see ten paces in front of her. Nilith, to her shame, found shelter behind Anoish’s flanks. The horse plodded on, staggering here and there but otherwise staying strong and sturdy. It did little for the violent gales, but it kept some of the dust out of her face.
She vowed to buy him the largest bale of hay possible when they reached the city. In that moment, the doubt hit her. If they reached the city. Barely half an hour into the storm, and she was all ready to mimic the ghost and curl up in the sand, and wait to be swallowed. Behind her, Farazar had hunkered down into a ball, succumbing to the pull of his corpse and letting himself be dragged.
Nilith cursed her impetuousness. Farazar – though she wanted to spit even thinking of it – might have been right: she didn’t pay heed. She did rush in, but it had always worked. Luck had been her friend until now; a smattering of a plan had always managed to bring her through. Though the impetus behind it had been years in the making, even leaving to hunt down Farazar had been a whim riding on the back of a rumour. She had memorised her maps on the back of a wagon across the Long Sands.
Nilith clung to that dogged luck now, pushing forward in what she trusted was still north. There was nothing to be said of direction besides guesses and luck. The sandstorm obscured all.
Her first clue that she was right came in the form of a small stone wall, disguised as a bank of sand. Nilith went tumbling down onto all fours, staring at a ragged thread of garment under her fists. Anoish nuzzled her, but she patted him away. It was a scarf of some kind, half-buried. She tugged it free and it whipped her in the face.
‘What have you got?’ yelled Farazar.
It was a scarf. Clutching it in her hand, she pushed forwards through the raging clouds of grit. She felt as though she were being sanded away, layer by layer.
Something made of stone loomed out of the orange haze. She pressed her hand against an adobe wall, like a mother finding a lost child. Nilith lead Anoish behind a wall where the winds were lessened. Through her fingers, she spied another stone lump, and another. Six altogether, huddled around a covered well. Something was drumming loudly in the roar of sand and wind.
Nilith shielded her face and pok
ed out to see. She got a mouthful of grit for her troubles, but she spotted a lamp hidden behind glass, affixed to the wall of the largest building. She held the scimitar at her belt and pressed on, faced into the wind now rather than traversing it.
‘This way!’ she called to Farazar, who had fallen behind, glad for the wall’s shelter. Once again, the spell tugged him, and he came walking moodily beside her.
As it turned out, the drumming was the wind rushing through a banner. It puffed like a sail against the gales, and the thin smiling holes cut in its cloth produced low, undulating tones. It seemed to proclaim some sort of tavern, and she wondered if the noise was intentional for times exactly like this. They seemed used to sandstorms: the lamp was hidden behind a dirty pane of glass, and next to it was a door of palm-wood and rusty iron, sails against the winds. Nilith groped for the handle, found it immovable, and resorted to pounding on the door.
‘Please! Help!’ she yelled. Then, remembering her Arctian, ‘Quia! Ayun khas!’
The door shifted outwards, and a thin metal tube was poked through the narrow crack. Its eye found her and she instinctively held up her hands, wincing in the thrash of sand. Holding the tube was a thin old man, very dark of skin, matted locks of hair waving like tentacles. He was wild of eye, but a hand on his shoulder held him steady. A woman was there, half hidden by the frame. She was willowy with a proud jawline. She had the milky skin of Ede’s cave-city folk.
‘We need help! Myself, my shade and my horse.’ Nilith let the scarf flap in the doorway and the woman took it.
The tube waggled towards the blade at her belt. With finger and thumb, she pinched it by the pommel stone and drew it out for one of them to take.
‘My horse?’
The old man spoke, in a voice so deep she struggled to hear him over the din of the storm. ‘Uela. Shasim.’
Nilith got the general meaning. His words were clipped and his dialect twisted but she still understood. Horse out back.