That thought didn’t make it much easier, but she pulled the strip of cloth and its pendant off and handed it over. Kelena spent little time on it, her curiosity apparently satisfied by turning it over once or twice.
Isavel stared at it in her hands for a moment, finding it… heavy. Not physically, but heavy in a way she wasn’t sure she wanted it back on. Her moment of indecision was broken when Tharson asked a question that almost certainly meant “What is that?”, and she quickly pulled it on in the hopes of making it less interesting to them.
“Nothing. Personal.” She doubted they understood, and she didn’t have the martian words, so she shrugged.
One of the martian villagers appeared several strides away and stopped short, as though he had forgotten there were earthlings about. He edged away from Isavel slightly before directing a few words at Kelena, and she nodded curtly, standing and making for her animal, her Red Sword swinging down almost to her feet. Even this rest would be short, it seemed.
Tharson patted Isavel on the shoulder and gestured towards the small lake. “Come.” She glanced back and saw the others quietly rounding up their mounts and preparing to leave, but she assumed Tharson was well aware of that. She followed, and when they reached the edge he knelt down and lowered a leathery flask into the water. Then he looked at her and patted the surface of the wine-red murk, and as Isavel noticed its incredibly strange movements - exaggerated ripples and sloshes, as though the water itself were drunk on the wine it was mimicking - he enunciated a martian word that must mean water.
She nodded, repeated it, and knelt down, cupping a bit of the lake water in her hands and tasting it. It was not the same as any water she’d tried on Earth, but it was still freshwater. Tharson seemed to think something was funny, shaking his head a little, then stood up. “Let’s go.”
It would not be the last word he taught her - he continued to do so, deliberately, naming basic things around them and hoping the words would stick. And they did. But just as they were preparing to leave, the wraith entered the clearing around them, sending several of the martian riders scurrying off in a fright, and it was Isavel’s turn to teach Tharson a word when he pointed and asked what it was.
“A wraith. ” It was currently the size of a large wolf, coiling around the base of a tree. It was a cold irony that she had a name for it, but little more idea what it was than the martians. “It’s a friend. Sort of.”
Tharson’s lip twisted. He didn’t look convinced, or maybe she had butchered the words, but his concern seemed to come more from puzzlement than fear. She hoped that was a good thing. Whatever dark bargains these thieves had supposedly struck may well be with things that made the wraith seem quite tame. They set out, and as the sun rose into the yellowing-olive sky and crested overhead Tharson continued babbling, a steady stream of words that, even when they yielded no meaning, grew more and more familiar to her ear.
The martians rode their galhak in a straight line, shifting only for the occasional rocky outcropping or stream or thick copse of trees. As with the sun, that misshapen moon was also flying overhead, and this time she was certain - it was moving far more quickly than Earth’s moon. If she stared long enough, she almost thought she could see it go.
Between the dimming sun and the paling people, the beaten-up moon and the lack of a ring, the weak gravity and the dusty plains, she felt she had been transported to the very end times of Earth, when everything was dying and the world was mere decades away from dissolving entirely. It was not a comforting thought, but there was something about it that fit, somehow. Like this was a natural place for things to end.
She… Was this a better place for her? Here, at the end of a long chain of losses, a bringer of death. Maybe this is where the gods thought she belonged. Or maybe it was only here, so far from the world she had been reborn into, that she could escape the path the gods had set her on.
She quashed that thought with another: her companions surely didn’t deserve to be here. To die here. She had to send them home.
As they travelled, they did see more than wilderness. In the afternoon she spotted a village off to the west and thought they might stop there to rest, but it quickly became clear that something was wrong. She pointed and Tharson turned a little in the saddle to look at her, apparently thinking this was a linguistic opportunity. “A village.”
She tried some shaky martian. “Was it burned?”
He frowned and peered again with ungifted eyes, but after a while he turned around and nodded, gesturing at time left behind them. “Azure. A long time ago.”
“How long?”
He made a spinning motion and a flurry of words that built on each other. “Warm times. Cold times. Seasons. Years.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Because of you?” She tried not to glance at the sword bouncing alongside Kelena, on another mount, but still the question lit some alarm in Tharson’s eyes.
“You know the Red Sword?”
She shrugged. “Not really. Azure is… hunting you?”
He corrected her words, then nodded. “He is hunting the Red Sword. But that -” He gestured at the village. “Always. Every year one village, another village, two or three or more.”
She nodded slowly. The galhak were leaving the village behind; she did not see any activity down there, but from this angle she could see a great cavity in the center where things had been blasted to ash, and that ash was in the process of being buried by rust and dust. No more than a few years, then. “Why?”
“Azure says there are too many people.” Tharson settled forward again, and for a while said nothing.
“Are there?”
He laughed. “For me? Sometimes. For Mars? No.”
She smirked at that, and settled in for the remainder of the ride to… wherever they were going. The world was not particularly lush, but it was still a whole world; there seemed plenty of room. Whatever gods they were approaching, she hoped they were of a more generous sort than Azure.
When the martians finally pulled to a stop at another dense copse of trees, she was starting to hope they would actually sleep this time. She hadn’t properly slept in two days, and for all that the galhak were doing the hardest work, riding was still numbing her legs and her core, and she could feel the weight of sleep descending on her, the one and only thing that felt no lighter on Mars.
The martians must have felt it too. The people slung themselves off their mounts a bit more slowly, and while galhak didn’t pant or sweat as far as she could tell, their sagging body language as their riders dismounted told her they too were tired.
Tharson gestured to the trees around them as the others unpacked, and between his hands and context and some familiar words, Isavel found she could guess what his martian meant. “No fire. But the trees are safe. We can rest here.”
She nodded, wondering privately what a bunch of trees would do to stop flying barges with cannons and drones. That was the concern, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t try to articulate that in her pitiful martian, though, so she sat down against a tree, shifting awkwardly until the roots were no longer uncomfortably jamming up against her rear or her lower back, and tilted her head up.
It was harder to see colour at night, but as best she could tell the bark was the colour of pale beach sand, like many of the trees she had seen before. It was certainly some kind of pine; long, thin, purple or black needles wavered in the wind. The form was familiar, but the details were still alien.
Hail slumped down next to her, her breathing steady and quiet but her eyes tired. As everyone else settled down and the galhak curled up around one another, Kelena walked over to them with a pile of cloth in her arms. She said something incomprehensible, which Isavel only belatedly realized was a question.
“What?”
Kelena raised an eyebrow slightly and tossed two thick, oddly-shaped blankets at them. Then she tugged at a new garment she was wearing - a thick woolen sheet with a hole for the head woven into it - and named it. “ Pacha. ”
Isavel frowned as the swordswoman walked off, repeating the word to herself. It was a garment she had never seen on Earth; had Tharson named it earlier? It sounded familiar. Hail, though, breathed a low hum of understanding, and Isavel looked at her. “What?”
Hail glanced back. “Oh, I thought you’d know. People from further south, near Sajuana. Or even from the edge of the eastern wastelands. They’d wear these when it got cold - not Glass Peaks cold, but still. Called them ponchos.” She pulled the garment up and sighed at it. “All the way at the end of the world, and it’s almost the same word.”
That reminder sparked a sense of familiarity, like her mother might have said the word once or twice; but even more it filled her with shame for not immediately recognizing it. Of all her youthful indiscretions, her stubborn refusal to speak her mother’s tongue in her teenage years was the one that now haunted her most. Any brief returns to the language in the past months had only brought her so far. She sighed, pulling on the pacha - poncho - whatever it was. “Have you ever been? To Sajuana.”
Hail leaned her head against Isavel’s shoulder. “Never that far. I’ve been places where they spoke the two languages pretty evenly, or a mix, and I learned some, but that was really only for one summer, when…” Her voice trailed off. “I forgot most of it.”
Isavel knew full well what Hail had probably been doing. The woman had a past of thieving, and killing out of panic or convenience. It pained Isavel to know the hunter’s present was perhaps even more violent in some ways, though the discomfort was not enough to force her to push Hail away. Even though she probably should.
Instead, she leaned her head against Hail’s. “ ¿ Me entiendes? ”
Hail scoffed. “No.”
“ ¿ Entonces por qué respondes? ”
“I really can’t.”
Isavel smiled, not entirely sure whether or not to believe her. Maybe it was true, and Hail only remembered a few scattered words for things that didn’t have names in the north. If so, Isavel might be the only person on this vast, distant world to carry that tongue within her, however unsteady her grasp on its finer points. However little it was actually hers . What alien words they would be, echoing over rusty plains that had never heard them before.
She let her eyes wander, picking out her comrades. Sam and Tanos were lying down near one of the galhak, Tanos’ back against Sam’s chest. They seemed to have fallen asleep with enviable ease. Zoa was lying down and staring at the sky; Isavel did not expect the coder to get much sleep, but hoped for it still. Erran had slumped down against a nearby tree and seemed deliberately still, as though trying to sleep but not quite there yet. The wraith, thankfully, was keeping a respectful distance from martians who wanted nothing to do with it.
Tharson and Kelena were in conversation nearby, with Yarger listening silently. She heard the words passed between the martians with the customarily unnatural clarity of her pathfinder’s gift, and tried her best to listen and pick those words apart. With luck she would not only learn words, but might also get an understanding of where, exactly, they expected to find another god.
Hail’s right hand slipped into Isave’ls left, fingers intertwining under the ponchos. She stilled, surprised, but Hail said nothing and didn’t move, and Isavel couldn’t tell if the unusually intimate gesture was an accident of grogginess or something more deliberate. She let her fingers reciprocate naturally, shifting a little in place, and stayed quiet.
Her companions didn’t deserve to be trapped here. She had to send them back. Everyone who had gotten too close to her… was close no longer. Perhaps it would be better if she sent Hail back before she grew too close, before that closeness snatched Hail away, as it had everyone else who had either left or betrayed her or died.
She tried to find her way back into the arms of exhaustion, tried not to let the anxiety rise too high. Strange animal calls echoed across the night, closer to hawks or eagles than anything else she could think of, and she focused on those. Animals were nothing unusual in the mountains of her home. Once, they might have sounded dangerous - a tiger or a bear or an angry bull mammoth could kill someone. But she felt the dragon blood in her veins, and it knew no fear even of beasts it had never seen. There was more of Isavel that was alien to Mars than just her mother’s language.
Somewhere, in the focus on those outside sounds, and the warm kindling of dragonfire she knew glowed near her heart, she found her way down into darkness.
Dawn woke her a bit too gently, but at least martian nights weren’t unnaturally short or long. The sun was spilling blue into the sky, and some of the martians were already moving about, packing food and blankets onto the galhak. As Isavel lay across the roots and let her eyes grow accustomed to being open again, she noticed their hands had become disentangled. She left Hail alone and stood, feeling the locator stone bump against her chest again, and tried to push down the sense of anxiety it hit her with.
She found Tharson and helped redistributing supplies across the galhak, then they all saddled up, still wearing their ponchos to break the wind. Soon they were bounding south again, across rusty plains spattered with purple and deep red shrubs and the occasional gnarled pine. Tharson kept up his steady stream of words. For someone who claimed there were too many people for his taste, he seemed happy to talk almost non-stop - though more than once, she realized he was mostly talking to himself, and smiled at his apparent lapse of awareness.
They travelled for most the day. They passed villages in the distance, these ones alive rather than burnt-out husks, but Tharson pointedly steered their galhak away each time. If he was trying to spare them the carnage of Azure’s pursuit, it was a mercy that made Isavel more and more skeptical of Azure’s motives. How was a sword worth so much death?
Her heart skipped when she saw a barge flying in the distance, its long, flat-topped bronze hull glinting in the same daylight that let her make out the colour of its banners. They were not blue; some patchwork of red and white instead. How common were the things? A grin came to her as she realized Ada would love to see a world with such artifacts in use, then the grin broke with a twang of betrayal. She shouldn’t make space in her head for someone she would never see again, for thoughts she had no place having.
Evening was approaching when Isavel saw a change in the southern horizon. It was clearly a ridge, but strangely shaped - very even, very smooth. It looked like a deliberate mound in the terrain, its slopes denser with blood-red thickets than the surrounding shrubland. Tharson turned to give her an ominous look. “Deep Tharsis is very dangerous. But it is faster, and Azure will not follow.”
She frowned. A god would not follow them through this place? Tharson did not elaborate, so she was left to wonder. Did it belong to another god, or was it somehow beyond their reach, as Mars was beyond reach of the gods of Earth?
She soon realised the ridge was be capped by some kind of ruin - unnaturally solid structures jutted out like long, irregular teeth, some flat and others triangular, a few reaching tens of metres in height. Metal struts spanned by thick glass.
An animal call echoed across the sky, birdlike and cavernous, and this time Isavel felt a jolt in the galhak underneath her. Tharson shifted, too, urging the animal forward. She glanced all around them but saw nothing threatening, aside perhaps from the wraith. And that was not the sound of a wraith. She took a deep breath and focused on her gifted senses, on the lookout for things she did not know. Did Tharson and Azure fear the same thing in this place? Was it just some beast, or something more?
They reached the edge of the ridge when the sun reached the horizon. When they crested it, travelling the edge until they reached a gap in the glassy protrusions, Isavel looked out upon Deep Tharsis and saw .
The ridge was too exact. It was a circle - a vast circle stretching out all around her, vanishing in the distance, rimmed with glassy teeth. With the crater’s maw, a great city sat half-swallowed by the world. Decrepit buildings of pale sandstone and rock and reddish concrete sheltered purple and
reddish weeds, dense thickets peeking from ancient courtyards or streets.
But besides that… starlight. A faint twinkle in the red sands and soils she had not seen anywhere else. The stars had fallen, and as she watched them rise up into their past she realized they had not fallen from the heavens, but from a vast glassy dome that must have once covered the entire city. Transparent, hard, protective material ground round and small enough to barely scintillate from the sands after centuries of erosion. Deep Tharsis had survived the ages well enough to become the vastest intact ruin she had ever beheld in a single glance, the shape of its death written all over the sands.
Tharson drove his animal onward as another avian cry echoed across the basin. She kept her eyes on the old city until they were too close, and they scampered through the streets until they found a few large, intact buildings adjacent to one another. They quickly led the animals inside the largest of these, and under cover of its ancient roof they started a fire. Isavel was quietly glad the wraith didn’t join them in the cramped space, skulking away into nearby abandoned buildings instead.
She settled against the wall of their shelter; they didn’t need sleep yet, but the martians seemed determined to wait out the night under cover, for once more afraid of whatever was outside than of earthlings. Eventually Tharson named this thing they feared - rokh , a harsh-sounding word that meant nothing to her yet. She gathered it flew and killed and was difficult to see, but that was the extent of what she could pry from them.
Hail leaned against her again as they settled in for the night, and in adjusting herself Isavel’s mind focused on the locator stone again in a sour panic, one she tried to overcome with steady breathing that could only help so much. Whatever a rokh might be, she had fought and killed dragons and worse. Beasts were low in the hierarchy of her fears.
Chapter 6
Here in the reddish dust and sand of an eroded concrete floor the sky had long forgotten, some of the martians began to setup a small cooking fire. She wasn’t sure she could force herself to sleep again when she had already slept last night, so instead she watched, noting the gentle smell of smoke drifting from the fire, past her and out into the deathly quiet city. When they began to toss food in a metal dish, the smells revealed themselves alien and musky, but they drew some of the earthlings in closer - which alarmed the martians. She gestured towards Tanos and shook her head, and he backed away.
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 8