The Changing of the Sun

by Lesley Smith

  “But if Her Grace, your Saiara, is truly traveling north should we not follow?”

  “We are buried and the passages have not been checked,” Rand said. “I can send brothers to scout but I fear for those who choose to wander the passages. You would need a willing brother to escort you, and the legend about the passages, the one which says you can walk the Underside to Canhei, it may be simply that, a legend.”

  “I choose to stay,” Caspa said, voice raised with the conviction of a pious son of the temple. “Eirian told me this is what I must do, even when the urge that comes with living tells me to run. I chose to stand and listen to Aia, as all of us should, and have faith. I will never see Saia again, but I would rather we both be alive and separated than together and dead. As she cares for those above ground, so I ask you to let me keep you alive here in the Underside.”

  There was contention, of course, there always would be. Some wanted to try and dig themselves out. Others considered climbing the tree and seeing if the lightgate was big enough for a man to climb through. Some even thought, more from the legends associated with the Voices of Aia, that Saiara would know they were here and come to rescue them. She might try, but it would take a town’s worth of strong men to move the stones which now made up the ruins of a once-thriving town.

  “Oracles serve a world, not specific souls. She might want to help us, but she serves Aia now. The people in her care are her highest priority. We have food, water, and the will to live. Your bones might break but they will mend. We have air and time and knowledge,” Caspa said. “I ask only for patience.”

  Patience would take days, it would take the resourceful men with ideas time to run out of steam. There were like birds who flew into glass, unable to perceive the transparent panes which blocked their flight paths. Rather than recover and fly higher, they just kept slamming their bodies against the barrier. So the stubbornest would die in cave-ins where a tunnel fell and crushed those trying to dig themselves out, so a man fell from the boughs of the tree…. Time would harden the resolve of those left to live but at that moment, Caspa found his eyes settling on the Edoi boyling, the one who identified himself as Jio, a son of the Yulam Eroi.

  “Jio?”

  The boy looked up and there were unshed tears in his eyes, his voice was quavering now as the shock slowly wore off. “Yes?”

  “Do you trust me to keep you safe?”

  “I don’t have a choice,” the boy said with grief, suddenly realising how far from home, from his natal kin, he was. “But I want to live.”

  “A good choice. Then you’ll be my helper in the days to come?” Caspa asked.

  “I’m quick,” the boy said softly. “And I trust in Aia and her oracles.”

  “Good lad.”

  Rand and the other remaining brothers spent the rest of the day trying to patch up the wounded, two more passed across the River from their injuries. The rest had simple and minor injuries which only time could heal. Jio seemed happier with things to do. They cleared debris from whatever spaces they had and billeted the new members of their clan-family in pallets which had never been used, theirs, after all, had never been the largest order.

  In his dreams, Caspa flew high and free on the night winds. With a god’s eyes, he found himself watching as Saiara and her caravan of brave souls left them far behind. They must continue on, across the harshness of the desert. They must not wait, not even for an Oracle’s beloved, not when the lives of an entire race depended on it.

  Caspa wept for her in those dim and quiet hours, knowing that this was his burden to bear and that the River seemed suddenly so far away.

  The River Road meandered north through the Western Plains and the Azure Grasslands, ending in the Canhei Mountains. Heading east, the Oasis Road passed through a gap in Reskha’s Spine then drifted through the Southern Desert as far as Sadrish and the briny Lake Lurem on the edge of the salt flats.

  Taras, Meresia, Eirian, Saiara, and Jeiana stood as Thaeos set, turning the sky into shocking shades of blood red, scarlet, gold, pink, and purple. Danshu was behind them and the air still smelled of death, of pain, and unquenchable grief.

  Vashi watched as Taras knelt down, testing the soil; the Suiashveram flooded each summer just after the New Year festivities and turned the fertile plains into a giant bog, with unsteady ground that could swallow even a mighty baelish, and he was worried they’d left it too late. Under his fingers, the ground gave and he shook his head.

  “The Oasis Road it is then. We can travel as far as Sadrish and then go through Trader’s Pass to the Azure Grasslands and Abbia.”

  “But the Oasis Road…won’t that take us through the desert?” Jeiana asked. “We need to keep our exposure to Thaeos at a minimum or we’ll cook in our skins.”

  “Then we travel by evening and the earlier parts of night. The baelish know the way,” Meresia said, but she sounded pained, as if the thought of travelling the Oasis Road brought up bad memories for her. “Taras-”

  The old clanfather’s tone softened. “Mere, it will be all right. If we travel hard we can avoid Pesh entirely, go straight from Kuut to Alarim, it’ll be tough, but we’ll be fine.”

  “Why do we need to avoid Pesh?” Saiara asked.

  Taras explained and Vashi found it odd, hearing the tale firsthand rather than via other sources. She trusted Beren, Jaisenthia guide his soul, but Taras had been there, had been intimately involved. “When Mere was a child, the oasis was taken over by some Thaeos-worshippers, one of the cults from the ages before Kaiene unified the orders. They made it clear the Edoi were not welcome. We can only pray they didn’t set their sights on the other oases on the road as well.”

  “So it could be a problem?” Saiara asked.

  “Potentially, yes.”

  Meresia spoke. “I’m not willing to risk the River Road, it’s too dangerous once the Suiashveram breaks its banks.”

  Vashi agreed with her mother. Even in Aiaea, tales had been told of the gruesome deaths that met those foolish enough to walk the Plains, and even the Edoi avoided the River Road after the floods.

  “Has Aia spoken to you of what awaits us, Saiara?” Meresia asked gently.

  Eirian nudged her. “It’s all right, Saia-child, speak. No one will judge you here.”

  “I’ve been dreaming of sand, of men screaming,” Saiara admitted. “But the desert is safer than the shoreline right now. There will be more waves, more chaos and destruction. I bow to the knowledge of the Edoi in this matter.”

  The desert wasn’t called the Sea of Sand by the Cavari and the Seaborn without good reason. Vashi had never seen it—the Edoi had switched to using the River Road north or traveling along the coast, moving slowly east, passing through Gehol and Caerim up to Fenoi and Benai long before she was born.

  The white sand stretched forever, a tide that refracted Thaeos’ light and threatened to blind anyone who tried to cross it during daylight. The baelish snorted, front hooves pawing the too-hot sand as the caravan waited in the shade of one of the small outcropping of rocks that offered all too little.

  “We can’t cross this during the day,” Taras, dripping in sweat, shook his head. “Perhaps were I a younger man. Now, though, it would be suicide, and I intend to live a longer life than this.” He glanced at Jeiana. “No offence to you, Lady.”

  “None taken, Clanfather,” Jeiana reassured him, at ease now around those who trusted in her status even when she was no longer as sure. “And we can get to the oases before dawn?”

  “Most yes. My clan is the only one that travels the desert regularly. Pesh was off-limits by order of Siriha of the Ifunareki while Meresia was still a child. I have no idea what it’s like now.”

  “Why?” Senna asked, helping to remove the harnesses from the nearest baelish. The beast licked her face and then made a dive for the bucket of feed Taras had produced.

  Taras looked grim. “Did you not ever wonder why Jashri’s official title was ‘the Found’?”

  “I thought she was �
�the Misandrist’,” Thressia said innocently.

  Taras guffawed and then seeing how Meresia was glaring at him, quickly shut up.

  “No, that’s just what everyone calls her, sweetheart,” Senna said and looked into the desert.

  Vashi had gone pale. “She was found here—well, deeper in—by Taras’ clan. That was where ‘the Found’ came from, and her name, Jashri, it’s the name of an Edoi and Cavari saint who walked across the desert and lived.”

  “The Cavari?” Saiara asked.

  “The Sandborn, the tribes who live in the six oases.”

  As Kaiene rose, a mere slit in the dark of the starry night, the canvas roof of the cart was lowered and word was passed through the caravan about their travel plans. Each cart was driven by one of the Edoi, either Ifunareki or Feium Asun, and the largest could take a dozen passengers. Many more walked behind, and Meresia had ensured that three baelish rode point to make sure no stragglers were lost, or to give lifts to those who simply couldn’t walk any further.

  Barring the blind Oracles and mothers and their children, all were expected to take their turn walking. Eirian frequently joined them, as did Saiara who was beginning to trust her callow-wood staff passed down from Kaiene. Soon, when the darkness came, those with eyes were trusting two Oracles to guide them. The whole thing, had it not been so serious, would have had Vashi in fits of laughter as she fumbled in the darkness, needing Saiara’s arm to steady her rather than the other way around.

  The knowledge that they were walking the Oasis Road, even at night, filled many with fear. Senna was used to dealing with blisters, but she found herself having to reassure people that kaava snakes were probably more afraid of the Kashinai than they were of the snakes. The serpents were so named because they looked, when still, like a field of kaava grain ready to be harvested; that had been their original habitat, but the creatures were now found all over Reshka and seemed to love the desert above all other places.

  In the heavens, shooting stars were splitting the sky. Some were tiny but one was a fiery ball. It led the caravan and lit the way, moving as slowly as an ifkis snail. When they stopped around midnight for food and water, the fiery ball had vanished over the horizon and the ground shook as if someone had dropped a stone into a pond, the earth rippling under their feet.

  They reached Soik before dawn, just as Thaeos rose, turning the horizon into a great gash in the sky, a wound bleeding light. That was when they saw the first sign of the devastation that was to come.

  As the caravan traveled by night, Vashi found it hard not to notice the fiery objects, like comets, in the sky. She had seen the devastation during the day, when the Firefall had smashed into houses, into the very desert sands, but it was easy to assume the fires had been caused by the quakes. Only later did they see it happen with their own eyes and connect the red lights in the sky as the Firefall it truly was.

  The fires raged unchecked, smoke staining the horizon and making the air taste like ash and death. It chased them into the desert and even there the plains of sand had been turned into black pieces of glass as big as the main bath in the temple. The beautiful leaning pana trees were smoking husks and the water was too polluted to drink, even when the Edoi tried to filter it through layers of delicate material.

  The Edoi. Vashi shook herself, she was thinking of them as a clan apart from herself, as if she were of one race and they were another, when this was anything but the case. She was Edoi; the blood of the travellers’ clans flowed in her veins, and her life in the temple suddenly seemed like a dream from which she’d just awoken.

  Some of the caches remained, hidden underground beneath the sands. Almost all of the Cavari who had lived in Soik had died instantly during the impacts, their bodies vaporised or just burned to a crisp. The adults kept the children with the caravan while the Edoi, who knew the location of the caches, recovered what they could.

  Grief echoed in the air as the Edoi, regardless of clan, mourned the passing of friends and family. Jeiana lowered her head, feeling for anyone who might have survived, but not a single spark remained. They had all died sleeping in their beds, unaware, taken as swiftly as was possible. Her kerash would be busy tonight, and it saddened her.

  “There are no survivors,” she mourned, watching the fall of a piece of one of the destroyed planets which had once orbited Thaeos. The solar storm had begun, but it was not yet at its height. That would come, too quickly. “We don’t have much time left.”

  “I know, but tonight we must rest. We can’t make it to Kuut in one night, not walking, and we don’t have enough baelish to take everyone. We will make good time once we reach the pass,” Taras tried to reassure her. “I’ve done this journey in ten days at a push. A caravan of our size, we can do it in fourteen.”

  Taras had a map, one of many copies made to mark Jashri’s ascension as High Oracle. All the Edoi had one; they were created each time a new Oracle ascended, as a symbolic gesture. His was battered and annotated, covered in scrawl marks showing changes in the coastlines or alterations in the Suiashveram’s path. It marked the oases and the hidden passes used only by the Edoi clans. Taras had marked each clan’s route with a different coloured ink and each, it seemed, had their own preferred locale and choice of route.

  The Feium Asun, for example, did a lazy circle from Aiaea, through the desert to Sadrish, and then doubled back via the coastal towns of Benai, Ossoi, Gehol, and all the hamlets in between. The Ifunareki began in Abbia and slowly made their way south along the River Road so that they arrived in Aiaea for New Year, before heading back to the Grasslands before the river rose. The timing was tight, three days in Aiaea and then a race against the river.

  This year, however, they were too late. Their window of safety was long gone and only the harsher of the two roads were open to them now. Even prepared with extensive supplies (which they lacked), even if they traveled at night before the temperature plummeted too far to be comfortable (which would mean taking even longer to get to Canhei), even if they risked thirst and starvation (and they would), it was a better thing than taking the River Road.

  Nahris hadn’t truly expected everyone to acquiesce to the new Oracle’s request, after all, many said she wasn’t even the true Voice. Jashri hadn’t been the one to stand on the step, and Saiara could hardly be expected, in the short time she had, to go and break the bonds of every slave in the city.

  Jibran had snorted and threatened her with a thrashing if she tried to escape. Undeterred, she had waited a day until the city was empty and the streets silent before joining up with a rag-tag caravan of people who thought better of staying and cobbled together what they could to follow in the footsteps of the Edoi clans and the cityfolk. So many had left that it had sowed the seeds of doubt in the remainder.

  She had stolen clothes from one of Jibran’s concubines, one of the former clergy of Kodia whom he had tempted away with promises of money and prestige. Ebani had so many clothes she would never notice the dullest items of her traveling garb disappearing from a corner of her rooms. She was a lady now, a priestess no longer, but the purple robes and hakashari would come in handy in the days to come.

  The streets were deader than at Kaiene’s zenith, those silent hours when the first of Aia’s oracles, placed in the heavens for her service, cast her rays down upon the sleeping. Saiara had left the previous morning. They would be resting in Danshu now, and if they hurried, there was a chance the rag-tag band might catch them.

  Nahris had bought her passage with promises and a fistful of stolen coins. They assumed, despite her smudged face, that she was of the clergy, even though she spoke the commonest tongue of the lowborn. Did they expect her to share herself with them? She hoped not and quickly swapped her robes for the less conspicuous riding pants of an Edoi trader.

  It was easier to ride in the long pants rather than robes, and her gender became a lot more inconspicuous in a man’s clothes. Nahris was rare in that she had short hair and could pass for a boy-child. This, however, was not
down to her biology, it was due to the fact Ebani had cut off her hair in a fit of pique the previous spring. The concubine had found the blood on her sheets from her menarche and it brought home one chilling fact. Ebani realised this girl was becoming a woman and might draw Jibran’s eye away, and with it, her own position of privilege and favour in the household.

  They had two baelish and matching carts with over a dozen souls in their micro-caravan. She wondered if there were any Edoi in their number but she suspected not. The baelish were poorly trained, and the drivers unsure of how to make them move in the right direction without running so fast as to wear themselves thin.

  Nahris suddenly wondered if she had made the right choice too late.

  They missed the caravan in Danshu. The embers of the fires had cooled and the city itself was a living tomb. Bodies were strewn unburned, there simply hadn’t been enough time to give them the rites due those who crossed the River. She wondered how many had protested, had begged to stay and dig out friends and family, fathers and brothers and lovers. Had Saiara found her own beloved and rescued him from his grave still alive?

  At the crossroads between the River Road and the pass which led into the desert, they came to a natural stop and camped until early evening. The so-called leaders, a young man who fancied himself an Edoi by tenuous blood rather than culture, voted for the Oasis Road that wound through the desert. This was, he said, the way the Edoi would have gone and look, in the fading dust, there were hoof and padprints to prove it.

  But the older leaders overrode him. “We will take the River Road, there’s more coverage and it’s safer. Aia willing we can travel faster and meet Saiara as she and hers come through Trader’s Pass. We’ll have shade and water, it’s the easier route.”