by Devin Hanson
“I sincerely hope not.” Iria sighed. “But I would not be surprised.”
The pair ghosted across the desert, darting from scraggly shrub to cactus to rock outcrop, making little noise and leaving no trace of their passing. Soon they grew close enough to make out the words being shouted back and forth.
Aruul: “–not the deal! This was not what was arranged!”
Another man responded, speaking in a normal tone of voice, far too distant for Iria to make out.
“You did not say that earlier! I would never have agreed.”
So. Aruul was the traitor. Iria drew closer to the arroyo and recognized it as the place where the dragon had been found slain. Within the arroyo, a large fire had been set for cooking the evening meal. A pair of guards stood at the top of the arroyo looking inward occasionally, but mostly outward at the desert. They were dressed as Rangers, long hooded robes with leather face masks, but they carried crossbows, a weapon too bulky for a Ranger to carry on the desert walk.
And no Ranger would keep glancing toward a fire while on watch. It ruins your night vision. Iria flicked a sign at Rajya to take the left guard and heard the quiet click of her tongue in acknowledgement. Confident in the skill of her balai, Iria circled a bit wider, came in on the guard’s left as he was turning back from a glance toward the campfire.
The guard hesitated, just for a second, and then it was too late. Iria jabbed three fingers into his throat, stunning his larynx. He choked, went for his short sword, but his reactions were far too slow. He was still reaching when Iria caught his wrist in fingers of iron and wrenched his arm around. He squawked, or tried to, but it came out like a muffled cough and then he was down on one knee, wrist pulled painfully tight up between his shoulder blades. Iria’s blade flickered in the light from the campfire and sank four inches into the base of his skull, severing his spinal column. The tension melted abruptly from his body and Iria lowered the corpse gently to the ground.
A glance told her Rajya had subdued her target as well and she froze, listening for the sounding of an alarm. The desert was quiet, the silence of frightened wildlife, the only noise coming from down in the arroyo where the fire crackled and men spoke quietly to each other.
Iria cleaned her knife on the dead guard’s robe and grabbed his crossbow. Despite it being too heavy to carry on the desert walk, it was an admirable weapon. She found the quarrel that had slipped from the serving when the guard dropped the crossbow and fitted it back into the slot. Moving low, she crept to the edge of the arroyo until she could look down into it.
A group of people stood loosely about the campfire. All wore the hooded robes of the Rangers, but they had lowered their masks. She recognized Malik, arms crossed, staring into the fire, and Aruul, pacing angrily beside him. The rest, three men and two women, she did not recognize.
“Should not we have heard back from the alchemist by now?” Aruul growled. “How long does it take?”
“Do not be so sure,” Malik responded grimly. “Iria and her balai are not to be taken lightly.”
“Captain,” one of the men said, turning to Malik, “I am quite certain the alchemist can deal with one little girl. However, this is taking too long. The alchemist said one hour. I will be missed if I am gone much longer.”
“What are your orders, sir?” Malik asked.
It was not until Malik spoke that Iria recognized the man. She had only seen him once, at a distance. He was Colonel Mohandi, a high-ranking officer of the Ranger balai. Iria turned her head to look at Rajya, her mind spinning. Corruption in the ranks of the balai? It was unheard of!
The glance saved her life. She saw a flicker of movement behind her and swung the crossbow around. A blade thunked into the wood of the stock and the impact drove her down to one knee. Iria had no time to collect herself, and only caught flashing impressions as she desperately parried another stroke with the crossbow. She had no time to draw a weapon of her own, no room to lower the crossbow. The bolt had flown loose again at any rate.
Her attacker wore the Ranger garb, but he moved like a seasoned warrior. One of the balai. Impatiently, the man seized the stock of the crossbow and yanked it from her hands. Iria grabbed after the weapon, missed her grip and bumped the firing lever.
With a heavy twang, the crossbow discharged. Iria’s attacker screamed, his hand mutilated by the string. The thumb and several fingers were missing, the whole hand too mangled to tell for sure. Iria drove her knife through the man’s throat and spun toward Rajya.
Rajya was locked in her own duel twenty paces away. She was limping and her attacker pressed her hard. Iria had no time to reload the crossbow. She threw it aside and sprinted. Rajya’s attacker heard her coming and turned in time to parry the first sweeping downstroke from Iria’s knife. For a few seconds, Iria fought in silence with gritted teeth, her world focused down to the point of her own blade and the swirling robes and flickering dagger of her opponent.
Knife fighting, her balai instructor had taught her years ago, had very little to do with skill. It was not like sword fighting, where the blade’s inertia and size made it predictable and gave you time to react. Knife fighting was not about strength or endurance. It was about speed and the vicious need to do harm. A hesitant knife fighter was a dead man. A defensive knife fighter could expect wounds, even if he won the fight eventually. The best way, the surest way, to win a knife fight without taking injury was to strike fast, and ruthlessly take advantage of every momentary distraction and lapse of focus. Knife fighting was not about honor or artistry or flair. Leave that nonsense to swords and the fools that used them. Killing with a knife was dirty and desperate. The only truly safe way was to strike from behind with the target unawares.
With the safe and sure way to victory lost, Iria knew she had only a few moments before the surprise of her attack wore off. The man was good, fast and with a long reach that kept her at bay. But he had made just one mistake when he had disengaged from Rajya.
Iria pressed him harder, felt his dagger leave a searing line of fire down her forearm. The man shifted his weight back one step and cried out as his foot came down in a tangled patch of long-spined cactus. For a fraction of a second, his attention went down to his leg, pierced with dozens of lancet barbs. And in that moment, Iria struck.
Her knife flashed across the inside of his arm and his dagger went flying as the tendons in his hand went loose. In the same sweep, she swung down low. With all the man’s weight on his cactus-free leg, he could not shift it away in time and she sliced through one of the tendons behind his knee. With a scream, he toppled backward into the snarl of cactus.
With the fight over, the pain of her wound burned but she forced her attention away from it. The traitors in the arroyo could not have helped but hear the screams and they would be along shortly to investigate. She darted over to Rajya, caught the other woman as she started to sag.
“I have you. How bad is it?”
“Nothing that keeps me from fighting,” Rajya assured her through gritted teeth.
“There is no fighting here. These are balai. I got lucky twice, that is more than enough for one night. Can you do the sand walk?”
Rajya shifted her weight, grunted in pain. “I am bleeding too much. Buy me a moment to bind my leg.”
“I can do that.”
Iria dashed over to the guard Rajya had killed, found the man’s crossbow still cocked and the quarrel nocked. She set it aside within easy reach and ripped her sleeve open with her knife. The wound in her forearm was not deep, fortunately, parting the skin for a few inches, but never deep enough to go into the muscle beneath. Using her teeth, she tore her sleeve off at the elbow, keeping one eye on the rim of the arroyo.
She folded the sleeve up into a thick pad and set it aside. She was fumbling one-handed in a pouch for a rolled bandage when a figure climbed up out of the arroyo. Iria dropped the bandage and snatched up the crossbow. She breathed out, forced her injured arm to stop shaking, and pulled the trigger lever. The quarrel
took the figure high in the chest, and the force of the impact knocked him back into the arroyo. Shouts greeted his return and Iria smiled grimly. They would think twice before climbing out any time soon.
The threat delayed at least for a moment, she knocked the loose sand from the cloth pad, pressed it into the wound in her arm. Holding it in place with her forehead, she found the loose end of the bandage, got it stuck in place on some blood, and quickly wrapped her arm tightly. Without stitches it would leave a nasty scar, but at least she had not lost any movement in her hand.
Iria left the crossbow where it lay and jogged back over to Rajya, who was just finishing applying her own bandage, considerably neater than Iria had managed since she had both hands to work with. The fallen balai moaned and thrashed in the cactus, his limbs tangled among the spiny tangle of branches, in no way a threat. She considered ending his life, but decided the traitor could suffer instead.
“How is the leg, Rajya?”
“I can sand walk, at least for a little way.”
“It will be enough,” Iria promised.
“You are hurt?” Rajya nodded at Iria’s arm.
“Nothing. A scratch.”
“I am sorry. The man attacked me before I could alert you.” Rajya winced as Iria pulled her to her feet. “Did you see Malik? Did he live?”
“Time for that later. Now we must put distance behind us. I bought us a little time, but it will not last forever.”
Iria turned her back on the arroyo with the dead dragon and the traitors within it. For now, she had to survive, buy time to recover from her wound and figure out what to do next. “We go to Nok Norrah. They will not expect it.”
“Twenty miles, give or take,” Rajya pointed out.
“With doctors at the other end. You want to go to Chia? I would not trust the water there, let alone the medical services.” Iria tried for humor, but knew it came out flat.
“I cannot stand dirty water.”
“We sand walk as far as you can, then we rest. After that, you set the pace. We will get to Nok Norrah.”
Twenty miles was a long way to go. They had only the food and water they carried. Iria knew she could make it, but Rajya had a leg wound that would slow her down. There were very few she could trust anymore. The Rangers and the balai were corrupted. Her contacts, safe houses, headquarters, none could be relied upon. Danger and death were waiting for them in Nok Norrah, but it was their best option. They could lose themselves in the city, buy time to recover, seek out allies, identify enemies.
They just had to get there first.
The sand walk was strenuous when uninjured. Rajya put everything she had into it and made it nearly a full mile by Iria’s reckoning before she collapsed. Iria helped her limp into a shallow depression and put her injured leg up on a rock.
“How far did we make?” Rajya gasped.
“Beyond where anyone could hope to track us. Do not worry yourself about that. You did very well.” Iria pulled back Rajya’s robe and checked on the bandage. Rajya had bled through it, and a fresh trail of blood ran down her leg. “We have some time. I will stitch this together and do a proper job of binding it.”
“And look to your own wounds?”
Iria glanced down at her arm. She had forced the pain from her mind during the sand walk, but now that they had stopped, it throbbed to her shoulder. “We have time. Stay down. Drink. I saw a few plants around that might help.”
She did not bother putting the effort into the sand walk as she backtracked. To find her footprints, a pursuer would have to find them after traveling through the trackless desert for a mile. It was a great comfort on her aching muscles to walk normally at last, and she set out with a spring in her step. The sun was just starting to color the horizon pink.
In the shadow of an overhang, she found a cluster of aloe growing and cut half a dozen stalks. She cut a bundle of young leggy cactuses, carefully stripping them of their thorns and thick outer skin, leaving the juicy core. Her last errand brought her to a cluster of small, nub-like cactuses growing low to the ground. They had no spines, for their defense lay in other properties. She hesitated, then cut a flowering protrusion free. If things went badly, the little cactus might be the thing that got them out of the desert.
Iria brought her bounty back to Rajya and found her asleep, her head pillowed on a hump of sand. Gently, she shook Rajya awake. “Wake up, Little Bird, I brought some food. Did you drink?”
Rajya nodded, rubbing some sleep from her eye. “You have not called me that in years.”
“I brought you presents,” Iria said quickly, changing the subject and handing over the peeled cactus.
“I hate this stuff,” Rajya commented as she chewed down a cactus core. “Tastes like pine sap.”
“Lots of water, though. We will be eating a lot of it before we get back to Nok Norrah.”
As Rajya ate her fill of cactus, Iria set about peeling and pulverizing the aloe until she had a great sticky pile of it, then gently unwrapped and peeled back the bandage on Rajya’s leg. The other woman hissed as the bandage stuck, then went back to diligently eating the cactus.
“Sorry. Let me see how bad it is.” Iria wiped away some clotted blood and the fresh trickle, revealing the wound. It looked like a fairly deep stab, three or four inches, with a ragged tear where Rajya had jerked away. “Nice one,” she commented. “Definitely will leave a scar to show the boys back home.”
Moving quickly now, she stitched the wound closed and smeared a layer of the aloe paste over it. Iria placed fresh pad of cloth over the top and reused the old bandage to wind it tight. Rajya let out a shaky sigh when it was over and spit out the woody cactus core she had clenched her teeth on.
“Your turn.”
Iria submitted to Rajya’s ministrations, distracting herself by eating the rest of the cactus. Rajya was right, it tasted awful. Bitter and green-tasting, the only saving grace was the pale inner flesh heavy with juice.
“There we go,” Rajya announced. “Fourteen stitches.” She smeared the rest of the aloe on over the wound and replaced the bandage, making a much neater job of it than Iria had back at the arroyo.
Iria flexed her wrist and forced a smile. “Thanks. How are you doing? Feel rested enough to continue on? I want to try and put some miles behind us before the sun gets high.”
Rajya struggled to her feet and tested her leg gingerly. “I have got a few miles in me,” she said dubiously.
“No sand walk, but let us try and stick to the hardpack where we can find it.”
“No need to convince me.”
“I will follow,” Iria said. “Set the best pace you can.”
They made another four miles before the heat grew uncomfortable and Iria left Rajya in the shade of a towering cactus to go and scout them a sheltered overhang where they could spend the hottest hours of the day. Rajya was pale and trembling when she returned. Iria knelt down next to her and touched the back of her hand to Rajya’s forehead.
“You are burning up! Come on, let us get you to someplace cool.” She helped Rajya to her feet and hauled one of Rajya’s arms up over her shoulders to help take the weight off her leg. “Easy now, Little Bird, it is not too far.”
“I do not know how to swim,” Rajya mumbled, and Iria looked at her in confusion before realizing the other woman was out of her mind with the fever. “Mama says the deep end is for old kids only.”
“Hush now,” Iria grunted, half-carrying Rajya, “We are all off the deep end now.”
The overhang was in the southern wall of an arroyo, deep enough to stay cool throughout the heat of the afternoon. Iria used the time to sleep and ventured out only briefly to gather more succulent cactus. She made a press from her hood and a pair of flat stones and managed to refill both of their water skins with the slightly sticky, bitter cactus juice. She also went through their packs, putting everything that would be of use into her own and leaving Rajya’s behind.
Rajya slept, fevered outbursts bringing her sporadica
lly up to semi-consciousness before sinking back into sleep. Iria took advantage of Rajya’s more lucid moments to rub her lips with aloe and propped her up to drink as much as she could.
Night fell and Iria waited for the sand to cool as long as she dared before shaking Rajya awake. Rajya woke slowly and protested weakly as Iria helped her to her feet. “Just want to lay here. A little longer.”
“We have a long night ahead of us,” Iria chided her gently. “There is still a long way to Nok Norrah. But look!” she held up a slender slice of the little cactus bulb she had picked earlier, “Piroki. Fresh as it gets.”
Rajya focused on the reddish sliver in Iria’s hand and her eyes widened. “That is illegal, you know.”
Iria smiled encouragingly, “Only in the city. Lucky for us, we are not.”
Rajya tilted her head back and let Iria pinch out a drop of juice, one into each eye. A deep shudder ran through Rajya and a flush of color returned to her cheeks. Piroki was ostensibly a mild hallucinogenic, but had a long history of abuse by berserker tribes. It unlocked deep energy reserves, numbed pain to a dangerous extent and gave the user a sense of weightless invincibility. The flowering bulbs contained the raw alkaloids that triggered the effect. Unprocessed, the high would be longer-burning and more subtle, along with having a tendency to cause long-term eye irritation.
She watched carefully as the drug worked its way into Rajya’s system, dilating her pupils until the iris was just a thin ring of hazel. As a last test, Iria reached out and pinched her arm, twisting the skin savagely. Rajya did not even look down.
“How are you feeling, Rajya?” she asked.
“Great, like I could run all the way to Nok Norrah!”
“Okay, that is good. But you cannot. We walk only, understand? You remember your leg is injured?”
Rajya frowned down at it, flexing her knee back and forth. “It does not hurt, but I do remember.”
“It is the Piroki,” Iria said. “Remember your training. It is a very powerful analgesic. If you tore the stitches out, you would not feel it.”