“Hail, shiv,” one of the somatarchs replied in the same, odd language.
“You were eating up a lot of sand there. Where to in such a hurry?” the stranger asked.
“Delivering prisoners to our thral,” answered the somatarch.
“And what thral would that be?” the stranger asked.
“Velta.”
“Well, what a fortunate stroke for four exhausted shivs like you. We’re headed that way ourselves.” Cruel laughter broke out amongst the surrounding crowd. “You must be exhausted, carrying those two scraps all by your lonesomes. Tell you what, we’ll take them off your—”
“That won’t be necessary,” the somatarch cut him off. “We are fresh and strong. Waymen never tire,” he said, but the passionless tone sounded unconvincing.
“Oh, but I insist. Eighty of us and only four of you. I’d say we’re a lot stronger and fresher for the task at hand,” the stranger replied in his croaking voice and then joined his men in their derisive chuckling.
The somatarch holding Adan dropped him to the ground. He landed hard on his side, but the sand cushioned the blow somewhat. He heard Will hit the sand just after he did.
Then the stranger cried out, “Shivs to the cutting!”
His men answered with a chilling shout and surged forward. Their cries were harsh and wild and full of rage. Adan felt them somehow almost physically, they were so jarring. He had never heard such hate-filled speech before. It had not even occurred to him that words could be used in that way. He wished he had not been able to understand what they meant.
When the first wave of men got within striking distance, the somatarchs leapt straight for them, in a blur of violence. From his position on the ground, it was hard to see exactly what was happening, but they seemed to be everywhere at once. With sweeping kicks and cracking blows, the somatarchs sent their enemies careening back into the onrushing crowd or dropping them to the ground. In no time at all, half a dozen or so men had fallen.
Adan shut his eyes. Though he could see very little through the fabric of his cloak, it was still too much. In the Basin he had been removed from the actual fighting, but now he was thrust into the middle of a whirlwind of death.
As the battle raged on, Adan was buffeted, kicked, and trampled upon. At one point, a body slammed down on top of him before rolling off to the side where it lay, motionless in the sand.
Several men cried out, “We’ve got one. He’s down!” and they howled with morbid glee. Adan rolled away from the body and opened his eyes just in time to see a tempest of men swarm the fallen somatarch.
Several pairs of hands snatched him roughly and hoisted him into the air. He was carried out of the thick of the battle and again unceremoniously tossed to the ground, this time landing on his back.
He was now too far away to clearly see what was happening. All he could make out was a seething mob of men, fiercely pressing forward, trying to move up the dune and into the tumult.
He looked around for Will, but he was nowhere to be seen. Trying to remain calm, Adan closed his eyes and sought him out with his mind, hoping that somehow he had managed to regain consciousness. He sensed nothing.
More cries went up, shouts of triumph mixed with savage shrieks. It sounded like the attackers were having their way with the somatarchs. And yet the screams and wild cries did not die down for some time.
As the intensity of the conflict eventually faded, Adan could see men dragging around some of the bodies of the fallen somatarchs, continuing to lay into their enemies’ inanimate corpses, pounding them with their fists and trampling them with their feet as if they were still a threat.
He turned away from the gruesome sight just as several figures near him reached down and began to rip and tear at the cloak he was wrapped up in. For a moment he wondered if their bloodlust had not so overpowered them that they meant to finish him off as well.
He cried out, begging them to stop. After a brief struggle, they pulled away, leaving the cloak in tatters all around him.
With his wrappings gone, he could clearly see that the men surrounding him were Waymen and not somatarchs. Though their kaffs covered all but their eyes, those eyes were all too human, pulsing with reckless life. They stared back at him, whispering in low voices amongst themselves. Two of them knelt down and attempted to remove the clamps which still bound his hands and feet.
“Clapped you up pretty good, didn’t they?” asked the one working on his hands. He turned to another Wayman and said, “Eh, gimme your shiv.” When the other seemed reluctant he added, “Ah, don’t worry. I’ll give it back. This black stuff is hard as a relic.”
The other one pulled out a piece of thin, jagged metal from the sash around his waist. It was about the length of his forearm with black cloth wrapped around one end for a handle.
It took some time for the Wayman to saw off the clamps binding Adan’s hands, and he nicked Adan’s wrist in the process. Adan screamed, but the Wayman just grunted in response. Adan couldn’t see how bad the cut was, but the pain quickly shot up his forearm.
When the clamps were finally off, his stomach turned at the sight of the blood running in streaks down his arm. He swallowed hard and grabbed one of the strips from his ripped up cloak and wrapped it around his wrist.
After he had done his best to stop the bleeding, he noticed a band around his other wrist. It looked just like the inhibitor Gavin had been wearing, with a flat, yellow crystal embedded in its surface. The somatarchs must have put this there. That was the reason he couldn’t communicate with Will in the desert.
He tugged on the inhibitor, but it wouldn’t budge.
The Wayman started in on the clamps around his feet. Adan watched anxiously as the man sawed them off, fearing another cut, but they were wider than the ones on his wrist and he managed to cut them loose without causing further injury.
“Thank you,” Adan said to the man as he got up. But he merely turned and wandered off into a nearby group of Waymen. Adan noticed he did not bother returning the cutting tool he had borrowed.
The men near Adan had been comparing stories from the fight while he was being cut loose. They seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the violence they had been able to inflict on their enemies. And they were completely indifferent to their own casualties. Dozens of Waymen lay bloody and forgotten on the ground, never to rise again.
Adan wandered away from the scene, numb and shaken. As he drifted aimlessly amongst the survivors, he thought he heard Will’s voice coming from another group nearby.
“Will?” he shouted, moving towards the other group. “Is that you? Where are you?”
Suddenly, he spotted Will’s face in the midst of the crowd. He looked gaunt, but not seriously hurt. “Are you all right?” Adan pushed his way into those gathered around Will.
“I’m fine. Just glad to be out of that sack. How are you holding up?” Will asked.
Adan was about to reply when he realized that all the Waymen nearby were staring at them. He wished he could speak through his thoughts, but Will’s mind was still blank.
“I’m okay,” he said, trying not to think about all the chafing sores or his throbbing wrist. Then he added in low tones, “Can they understand what we’re saying?”
“You have to use the Wayman cant for them to understand. And I’m sure you’ve already discovered that you know it.”
“Yes, it’s the strangest thing. How is that possible?”
“It’s your bioseine. I put both of the Werin cants in when I initialized you. You can speak them as well.”
“Amazing,” Adan muttered to himself, wondering what else this mysterious technology inside of him was capable of.
“But we can connect our thoughts directly if it would make you feel more comfortable. I just have to get rid of this first,” Will held up his wrist. He wore an inhibitor as well.
“I forgot about that.” Adan pulled up his sleeve. “I’ve got one too.”
“They’re bringing over something sharp to
cut it with.”
“Did they put these on us to keep us from controlling them?” Adan asked.
“No,” Will said, “Gavin was right. Those weren’t normal somatarchs. I tried to connect to their minds in the compound before they slipped the inhibitor on me, but they were using an unknown channel. I’m not sure why they put these on us. Maybe it was just a precaution.”
Another group of Waymen came over, interrupting their conversation. One of them had loosened his kaff so that it hung down on one side. He had a squat frame and a chubby face. His garrick oozed with sweat and he dabbed his brow with a filthy rag as he approached. He flashed a homely grin of dingy, brown and yellow teeth, but the smile, far from being friendly, made him look almost sinister.
“Here are your pincers—my personal set,” the man said in a loud, gravely voice. Adan recognized it as the one that had spoken to the somatarchs.
“Thank you,” Will replied in the man’s language. He set to work snipping the black band from his wrist. “Adan, this is Nox,” he added while he cut, “He’s the sunder of the throng that saved us from those desert spirits. Nox, this is my companion, Adan.”
Nox clapped his hands together, “Ah, we were wondering who the other one was,” he said in his raspy voice. “I did not know the great seer had servants as well. Ha!” He let out a boisterous laugh for no apparent reason.
“He isn’t my servant. He’s a worker of the ancient arts as well,” Will said. He finished cutting the inhibitor off his wrist and handed the pincers to Adan.
“Ah, then we will show him the respect that he is due, just as we do for the great seer,” Nox answered, his eyes dancing with a mischievous excitement.
Adan snipped off his inhibitor easily, lamenting that the tool had not been available when they had removed the clamps around his wrists. He returned it to Nox as Will stepped towards the crowd of surrounding Waymen. By now, most of the talk had died down and almost all of them were staring intently at Adan and Will.
Will raised his hands and called out, “Waymen. Shivs! Hear my words.”
He waited for the chatter to completely die down and then continued in a loud voice, “Fate has smiled upon us this day. These desert spirits you defeated were sent to keep me from coming to you. But they proved no match for Waymen strength and cunning.”
The crowd responded with a roar, Nox yelling loudest of all.
Will continued, “And with your victory here today, you have struck the first blow in this war against our enemy. The end of your exile from the eternal city draws near.”
The howls and screams were deafening. The Waymen pressed in around them, so that they were almost touching Adan and Will.
What was Will talking about? Adan wanted to reach into his thoughts, but didn’t want to distract him while he was speaking.
“Soon, Tasada will be yours!” Will shouted.
At these words, the Waymen swept him off his feet and onto their shoulders, shoving Adan out of the way. Lurching into a march, they began chanting “Ta-sa-da! Ta-sa-da! Ta-sa-da!”
Adan straggled behind at the edge of the throng while their cheering echoed across the desert in the fading light.
With the chanting drowning out all else, he reached out to Will with his thoughts.
“Are you okay?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be safe with them. I’m their seer, remember?”
“But did you see the way they fought? They looked like madmen. I was more frightened of them than the somatarchs by the time it was all over.”
“Yes, they’re savages, but they’re fighting for us. And they are going to help us take Oasis,” Will replied confidently.
“Ta-sa-da! Ta-sa-da!” The Waymen chants surged in intensity. They teemed around Will like canvas rippling in the wind.
Staring around at the dozens of Waymen corpses laying scattered across the blood-stained dunes, Adan wondered what kind of men these really were. Their cruel cursing and bloodthirsty howls struck fear in his heart.
Leaving the gruesome, blood-stained dunes behind, he wandered after the chanting mob, wondering how many more battles like this he would have to live through, and whether or not the next one would be his last.
Twenty-Seven
Liquid Memories
It was almost completely dark by the time the chants of the Waymen died away. At last they let Will down and Nox stepped forward to address his men.
“All right you sand encrusted shims, enough celebration! We need to hit the sar at first light. There’ll be no time for stopping at the vadi—” The announcement was met with a few suppressed groans. “Blast your grumbling! Are you ishtos or men? There may be more spirits out hunting for the seer. Choke back the dust and obey your sunder! Match my pace or I’ll run you through with your own shivs!”
He spoke so fiercely Adan half expected him to start pummeling the men then and there. But instead of recoiling from him, the Waymen bristled with excitement from his insults and threats. They shouted together in unison, “The dust take us!”
Nox turned to Will. “Here you are, great one.” He handed him a set of desert gear and a slender, grayish rod. He motioned for Adan to step forward and take a similar bundle. The garrick he was given smelled awful and was stained with blood. It had probably been taken off one of the fallen warriors. Adan hesitated, uncomfortable at the thought of wearing a dead man’s clothing.
Will sent him a mental message. “Go ahead and put it on. If you don’t, the Waymen will take it as a sign of disrespect.”
At Will’s prompting, Adan unraveled the gear and slipped into it, but he couldn’t suppress a shudder as he dressed.
“What’s this rod for?” he asked.
“They call it a glint stick. It’s just another form of neophosphorous. You won’t need it until it gets dark.”
While they were getting into their gear, the rest of the Waymen formed into jagged rows. Once Adan and Will were ready, they joined Nox in the front.
“We have a true seer with us now,” he shouted. “Let’s show him how the Waymen march! Let’s outstrip the wind!”
They set out across the dunes at a light trot. This soon became a jog and finally turned into something close to a run. Adan had never moved so fast for so long in his life. After a short time his lungs were searing. He faded back into the second row.
“I can’t keep this up. It’s too much. I need to stop,” Adan pleaded, pain exploding inside his chest.
“This is the pace the Waymen run,” Will replied. “But you can force yourself to go beyond your normal levels of endurance if you shut off your pain perception.”
“What? How can I—” Adan started to reply, but no sooner had he begun to ask the question than he saw what Will meant. It was possible to automate almost any of his bodily systems with his bioseine. All he had to do was transfer over control of his nervous system and it could filter out any sense of pain.
Without hesitation, he surrendered control to the bioseine. Immediately, the torturous burning sensation in his lungs vanished. It was as if he no longer had lungs at all. Unconsciously, he glanced down at his chest just to make sure everything was all right, but it looked the same. The aches in his legs disappeared as well. He was still consciously aware of the pain, but it was something distant, abstract. It was is if someone were telling him, “That person is in pain.” He knew it as a fact, but the impact of it was lost on him.
Adan was fascinated by the bioseine’s ability to manage his body in this way, but also disturbed. Somehow he didn’t feel like himself anymore. It felt a bit like the disembodied experience in the Institute when Will was controlling him. But there was no way he would have been able to keep up otherwise.
As night took over the desert, the Waymen pulled out their glint sticks. They broke them in two, holding one half in each hand. Will and Adan did the same. The sticks soon began to give off a gentle blue glow, bringing back pleasant memories of the Viscera.
There was no talk during the journey, just the occasional
grunt and lots of heavy breathing. Eventually they left the dunes behind and entered a flat stretch of dusty ground. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the horizon began to re-emerge, glimmering with a pale green light.
Off in the distance, several bright orange and yellow lights came into view. As they got closer, Adan could see that they were scattered amongst a large number of tents. The silhouettes of people drifted between them. The tents were rectangular in shape and much larger and taller than the dwellings of the Welkin.
This must be the Waymen camp. Under normal circumstances he might have felt a flutter of nerves at this realization, but all he could think about at the moment was that it meant the end to his run. Though he felt no pain, he was still putting tremendous stress on his weakened body.
By the time they stopped at the first of the tents, a small crowd had gathered to observe their approach. They were dressed in flowing robes with sashes tightly wrapped around their waists. They wore their hair short, like Will. From their faces, Adan would have said they were Welkin, except that their expressions were so much grimmer than the people of the Viscera.
Several of them approached, carrying large pots and trays bearing drinking vessels. They set these down before the thirsty travelers. Will was given the first drink.
“Get back, you cast-offs!” Nox shouted between his panting. “This is the seer we’ve brought with us. Give him room!” His voice was not nearly as boisterous as it had been at the start of the journey, but his tone was just as harsh.
At the news that the great seer was among them, the people drew back reverently, bowing their heads and staring at Will in rapt silence.
Once Will had taken his fill, Nox said to his men, “Drink up you rusted shims. We live another day.”
“Well, you made it.” Will handed Adan a full cup of water. He removed his sweat-drenched kaff. His mess of hair was soaked, but his eyes shone full of life. He looked to Adan like he would have run twice the distance again just for the challenge.
Adan was panting harder than anyone, yet he still felt nothing.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 19