Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5)

by Guerric Haché

  For all that she didn’t envy Tharson, that was a simple story to draw them towards Red Rise. What exactly the man might say to a brother he had raised and then tried to kill, she couldn’t imagine. She had fought and killed more than she would have liked, but that was one thing she had been mercifully spared.

  She awoke to the clawed feet of a galhak stamping in front of her; but the animal was on its way elsewhere, grazing for food. She sat up and stretched, rocking Hail awake as well. The hunter gave her a meek smile, and for an instant Isavel grew worried Hail had overheard something last night. Then the smile turned more genuine. Maybe she was just tired. It wasn’t worth asking, she told herself, knowing it wasn’t true.

  Soon enough they were astride the galhak again and on their way. Tharson was chattier now, less trying to throw new words at her and more interested in telling her about the places he had seen. She got the peculiar impression he had, in his years, walked around this entire world. It seemed unthinkable to her - it was rare enough to meet someone who had ventured into the eastern wastes, let alone crossed them. Were there no impassable oceans or mountains or deserts on Mars?

  By midday they had reached the lowlands, where the forest had thinned and the air had grown dryer, dense tree trunks replaced by lush, long grasses and flowers of purple and red.

  And, in the distance, smoke.

  As they advanced, she started to notice hovels scattered around the plains, with suspiciously patterned vegetation all around them. She spotted the watchers, then, and it all made sense - farmland. Not the kind of farmwood she was used to, but she was familiar with the idea of open-sky agriculture just the same. Although, to her surprise, here and there she saw martians tending the fields themselves. Did Mars not have enough watchers?

  They came across the first of the burnt-out hovels not long after that, smoke or ash still rising into the sky. The blast radius was familiar - it was immediately clear what had happened.

  She asked Tharson as they slowed some hundred meters from one. “Why? This is just… nowhere.”

  He nodded at the horizon, and as she followed his gaze, she spotted another column of smoke. Combined with the bodies she could see in this little hamlet, things were not looking promising.

  “This would not be the first time he culls many villages at once. But for the Sword?” Tharson glanced at Kelena, who was bringing her galhak up alongside theirs. “This is bad.”

  Kelena nodded. “If the gods are in disarray, he may be moving on Crimson.”

  “And do what? She is not like him. She has many homes.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

  Hail glanced between them from behind Kelena, har martian less steady. “Would he attack a city?”

  The Swords, present and former, exchanged hesitant glances. “Normally, no.” Tharson shook his head slowly. “And when a village is cleansed his followers announce it, as a divine mandate. But these are not normal times.”

  “Doesn’t anybody other than Azure have barges?”

  “Red Rise has a handful.” Tharson sounded bitter. “A few of the biggest. A few dozen of the rest. Azure builds them - any not under his control were taken from him, at some point or another. They would be better off fleeing across Olympus than trying to fight Azure’s fleet.”

  She could see Yarger, further on his own galhak, give Tharson an agitated stare. She wondered if he expected more aggression from the Swords, or if he was going to finally open his mouth and argue. But he remained silent, with Zoa at his back carefully watching whatever he was looking at, melding feathers firmly fixed to her shoulders and her head.

  They rode on, and the second column of smoke was similar to the first at its root. It was closer to dark, when they reached the third of these scenes, that something different jumped out at them.

  Quite literally. After their brief shouts of surprise as they pulled the galhak to a sudden halt, Tharson turned to give her a grimace. “Your pet is back, Isavel.”

  “It’s not my pet.”

  But she jumped off the galhak and made towards it nonetheless. It hung there in the night, just outside the smoke, dark magics coiled in tendrils that gently scintillated whites in the evening, almost as though for the sole benefit of their human eyes. Dread curled in her like the wraith’s own tendrils at the sight of it, buoyed by the fear it might speak again, so she was almost reassured to hear its familiar cooing and wailing instead.

  “Was it here?” Hail glanced around at the chaos. “Did it do this?”

  She looked to the others; they were all keeping their distance, but when she beckoned they did ride a little closer. Then she turned towards it, and as she approached it flattened and compressed itself a little, tentacles melding into wing-like shapes, and soon solidified into a flattened, almost triangular shape. It reminded her of a person wearing a wide cloak.

  “You’re back.” Isavel looked at it, wondering yet again what it wanted. Maybe Sam was right - maybe it was just an animal, some kind of stray that followed her because it didn’t know what else to do.

  This time, though, it defied those expectations. Instead of just wailing like some confused banshee, it spread coils across the space between it and her, and parts of those coils rose into the air, building rough shapes that would look like rocks if they weren’t gently writhing code. Tiny lights pulsed in these shapes, too, lights the rusty shades of Mars’ rocks and dirt and sand.

  Tharson’s eyes widened, pointing to a sort of ridge in the coils. “That is Olympus. I recognize the shape.” His eyes narrowed at the wraith. “Has it been?”

  It did not answer, but at the opposite end of the black morass it had spread across the ground, it extruded a few dozen wedge shapes, flickered them with blue, and pointed them at the ridge. The core idea was clear enough that Tharson seemed to get it immediately, muttering and cursing, and Isavel found Kelena’s normally closed expression was looking a bit more alarmed than usual as she explained. “The city of Red Rise is built into the cliffs of Olympus. Like steps.” She gestured to the wraith. “Is Azure attacking?”

  Isavel thought that was clear. “Did they already attack? How long do we have?” She dreaded to ask this, but it seemed expedient. “Can’t you just tell us? ”

  Apparently not, but it danced a little yellow sphere in an arc over the map, dimming it to blue around the edges before letting it disappear and reappear on the other side. Four times.

  “Four days.” She glanced to Tharson, who was stroking his chin. “Can we make it in four days?”

  He was stroking his chin with an intent look. “Yes. We must. At a leisurely pace we would be six days away, but this - we can’t wait.” He nodded intently. “We can do it. I’ve ridden galhak much harder than this. They can manage.”

  She could tell that now, he did want to get there - it was one thing to have to face his brother, but it was another to know his brother might face Azure.

  Zoa stepped forward, arms crossed and feathers bristling angrily at her shoulders. “Can we trust this thing? It’s been gone for what, a day at least? How could it get far enough ahead of us to figure this out?”

  The wraith made its angry piping sound at her, and for a moment Isavel wasn’t sure if that was genuine displeasure or an echo of Ada’s own dislike of the blue-haired woman. Either way, right now, it amused her a little. “I don’t know how fast it can go, but I don’t think it ever gets tired. Besides, what would a wraith gain from lying to us?”

  “I have no idea.” Zoa glared at it. “What would it gain from helping?”

  It piped back a few curt sounds. Tanos laughed, and glanced cautiously at Zoa. “Maybe we should name it. Stop calling it a thing.”

  Isavel looked at him. “I can’t imagine what you’d name a wraith.”

  “Midnight.” He looked at her, but he could clearly tell she was unimpressed. “Smoky. Ash. Pine Needles?”

  Sam ruffled his hair and he writhed away from her. “Hairball.”

  “We can name it later. Or it can name itself.
” Tharson made a gesture to Isavel. “If we must make it in four days, we will need all the speed we can get. We should feed the galhak some chara , if we have any.” He glanced at Yarger, who nodded silently. “Then we ride through the night.”

  Isavel looked at him, and she saw the pleading there. He was right, of course. She turned once more to the wraith. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

  It didn’t make any more sounds, though, but it did retract the smoky images it had been maintaining in front of them, tendrils collapsing into the dust while the wraith’s core remained so dense it seemed solid. That seemed like a no. She couldn’t help herself from wondering, but a glance at the scenery, as far as she could tell, suggested this village had been blasted by the same weapon she had seen Azure using again and again. No particular reason to think the wraith was involved.

  Yarger had quickly dismounted, and was distributing some kind of fruit to the galhak, who ate it up hungrily after the first bite told them what it was. She took a deep breath, and a step closer to the wraith, trying to smile at it, though she was both hesitant to get too close and unsure of where to look, since it didn’t have a face. “Thank you. It was good of you to tell us this.”

  It cooed softly at her, and she thought it sounded happy. She hoped that was a good thing. As she turned to hop up onto Tharson’s mount again, she saw Zoa extend a hand and help Yarger up onto his, and she thought she caught a moment of eye contact between them. It wasn’t warm, by her estimation, but between a bereaved and perhaps slightly maddened earthling and a mute martian, it was certainly something.

  They were off again, and this time the galhak were indeed being pushed harder; apparently, chara was highly energetic food, and the martians wryly suggested it was an entertaining thing for humans to eat as well, though better spent on the animals in times of dire need.

  The wraith now flew alongside them like a flat, winged fish trailing black ribbons behind it, making its form visible in the dark with strange, sparking lights that coursed through its shapes. As the four galhak called to each other in honking chirps, the wraith took to answering them in kind, and Isavel couldn’t quite figure out whether this distressed the animals or pleased them.

  It was during this first long ride and its sparse breaks, from that night all the way to the next dusk, that she realized nobody had quite touched upon the question of what, exactly, they would do when they reached this Red Rise. The martians were not happy when she brought it up as they made a quick camp, but they grudgingly agreed it was a problem.

  “It the wraith was telling the truth, we’ll arrive a day before Azure, or on the same day.” Tharson was staring at the horizon, only visible as the space the dim sky vanished into total dark. “The city will already know a fleet is coming. They won’t need us to warn them.”

  Kelena glanced at Isavel, then at Tharson again. “The city will survive or it won’t. We are too small to change that. You must find your brother. Isavel must find Crimson. That is all.”

  Tharson did not respond to that, but she did hear him sigh.

  The wraith circled overhead, intermittently blocking out Mars’ tiny moon and the stars beyond. Isavel hoped it would ward off any rokh that ventured near, but so far she had yet to hear their echoing shrieks in these parts. If the wraith was not misleading them, they were racing against a god. They could only hope Azure might think twice about attacking the holy city of another god - if indeed Crimson cared much about it at all.

  Hail cuddled up to her again in their short fireless night, and Isavel was hesitant at first to reciprocate too much. She still wasn’t sure what the future held - even knowing whether she could ever return to Earth would not help her understand her future much more than she already did. Neither option ensured the cloud of disaster that followed her would spare her party.

  Could she bargain into whatever Crimson and Amber were plotting? Earn a way home for her companions, but leave herself here? Alone, she was a threat to no one - and she would survive. If there was one thing Isavel had proved incapable of losing, it was her own life. It felt, sometimes, like that might be the best she could do for them.

  The night was cold, so she soon at least returned the embrace. But even as she fell asleep, she couldn’t help but feel something was amiss. Like Hail was trying to look after her, almost. It was comforting, but it was not quite, not exactly, the kind of closeness she missed.

  They rode out well before sunrise, trusting Tharson’s sense of time on this journey. The animals were quieter, now - they seemed inclined to focus on the running, less chirpy and communicative. Whether they were stressed or tired or somehow determined, Isavel couldn’t tell.

  Halfway through the day, with the sun high in the olive-yellow sky, the clean line of the horizon vanished into a rusty haze.

  “Tharson?” She called out to him, hoping her words weren’t lost to the whipping wind. “What is that?”

  She felt him shake his head, and he introduced her to what must, she realized, be the term for sandstorm . She had heard of such things in the wastes east of her homeland.

  “What do we do?”

  He lifted a hand from the reigns and pointed straight ahead, towards an outcropping of stony buildings near a small hill. They didn’t look occupied, or recently destroyed for that matter.

  As they approached the storm ahead darkened and grew more textured, bulbous plumes of red and brown bursting forward as its winds mingled and roiled. It swallowed more and more of the land, and though Isavel could see space off to the west where it didn’t seem to be advancing, that safe area was far out of reach. The galhak grew increasingly noisy as the storm loomed, and darted readily into the ruins.

  Unfortunately, these ruins were little more than two rows of small, mostly crumbled stone buildings arranged to flank an ancient metal door into the hill. Tharson made no attempt to open it after they dismounted, and when she started walking towards it he grabbed her shoulder.

  “Do not disturb ancient places.” He shook his head. “You do not know what you will find there, or what gods may find you.”

  She glanced at the door, foreboding yet strangely clean in the manner of many ancient relics, and nodded. Fair enough - if there was some risk of Azure finding them by opening it, it was best left untouched. Tanos stared longingly at it for a moment, though, before Sam approached him and gently pulled at his shoulder; they had a hushed conversation before turning back to the others, though Tanos’ curiosity remained on his face.

  They all huddled in the largest of the stone buildings, which didn’t have much of a roof but had enough wall to provide cover for the four galhak and their eight riders. The martians passed narrow, reddish cloth wraps to the earthlings and proceeded to wrap others around their own faces. To keep the sand out, no doubt; in the awkward and slow manner of people unpractised in such things, one by one the earthlings managed to fasten the fabrics to their faces.

  They pulled their ponchos tight around themselves as the storm hit, and suddenly the world was lost in a howling, dry storm the likes of which Isavel had never seen or even really imagined. To her surprise the galhak were also ready, fans of little white feathers suddenly spreading down from above their eyes and nostrils to shield them from the dust.

  She shouted to be overheard, and felt the finest dust particles pepper her tongue despite the mask. “Tharson! How long?”

  He looked grim, and shook his head. She turned to the others, but they seemed to have gotten the message. There was no way to know. They settled down, backs to the wall, and began to wait.

  It was so difficult to see into the storm that everybody jumped when the wraith appeared, surrounded by a bubble of… not storm. It didn’t just endure the winds - it was doing something to force the sand away from itself. A kind of invisible shield, Isavel realized, that broke the sand and shoved it aside, leaving relatively clear air where it was floating.

  She tapped excitedly on Tharson’s shoulder, not wanting to open her mouth again, and he stared at
her and nodded slowly. She scrambled forward, past the flat disk-like ends of the tendrils the wraith had extended towards the storm, and suddenly she could almost breathe normally again.

  “Wraith!” She looked back at her companions, just outside its shield against the winds. “Can you lead the galhak?”

  The creature cooed, then chirped at the galhak in their own avian sounds. The galhak’s heads perked up oddly and they started shuffling towards the wraith, their heads cowed low to the ground. Martians and earthlings followed them into the clear space, all keeping a wary eye on this incomprehensible thing that seemed more than willing to help.

  “Tharson - would the storm delay Azure’s barges?”

  He hummed. “The small ones, certainly - they will lose track of each other, and their only shelter is cloth. They may need to slow or ground themselves.”

  She smiled at the idea as they clambered up onto their mounts again. “Good. How big are these? Is it likely they’re caught in it as well?”

  “The storms cover entire lands.” He led his galhak cautiously out the ruin, and the wraith kept pace with them, black shield-disks moving around as though in water to keep the worst of the storm from hitting any of the animals directly. It seemed not to have any trouble maintaining five at once, one to shield each galhak and one for itself, and once they were clear of the ruins it began moving faster, warbling at the animals, leading the party directly into the howling storm.

  Chapter 11

  The storm lasted for the rest of the day, blotting out sun and sky. The dust beyond the wraith’s breakers dimmed even faster than Isavel expected as night fell, and soon became indistinguishable from the darkness of night, whipping angrily around dim lights flickering along the wraith’s wings and tendrils. Tharson seemed determine to make the most of this shield against the storm - any advantage they could gain on Azure’s incoming fleet was welcome.