by Gav Thorpe
They fingered talismans and fetishes of small bird and mammal bones, intricately carved with verses passed down from ancient generations. The eldest dozed, clasping prayer-sticks across their chests, the faint whistles and whines from the pierced bones changing as their chests rose and fell in the constant but weak breeze. Around them infants dug in the sand for wadi-nappers and desert whelks, though in their minds they imagined they were opening up one of the Lost Vaults to unearth archeotech treasures from the time of the Last Wandering. They picked over pebbles and small fossils, dividing them into piles of varying shininess, size and other criteria only small children would understand.
The older children dared each other to stand in the sun for as long as possible, timing their efforts with small sandglasses, ignoring the warnings of their parents who spoke of some uncle or aunt who had died from a skin-curdling sunrash or been consumed by swarms of tumours.
The youngest adults attended to the shrine. The centre of the camp was dominated by four large poles, each made up of separate totems carved in the many likenesses of the four Powers. Though they were Dedined, forbidden entry into any of the great cities, they nevertheless paid homage to the gods of their ancestors as best they could. Offerings of small sacrifices burned in incense bowls at the base of each pole, their scented wisps drifting out across the camp, carrying the prayers of the faithful into the air. The ward-priests kept the small fires burning, moving from one to the next in constant work, wafting air, rearranging kindling adding sprinkles of more incense where required.
Now and then one of the nomads would rouse in the stupefying heat, struck by a sudden thought or need. They would scribble their prayer on a scrap of papyrus and pass it to one of the totem-attendees. Murmured incantations would accompany the flare of burning papyrus, their meaning lost to antiquity, but their importance sustained over a hundred generations.
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Fan Morgai, leader of the tribe, gathered his family to a brief council. He pointed to the darker shimmer on the horizon, which a stranger to the deserts might have mistaken for a mountain. The nomads knew better - the mound whose peak was just visible in the distance was no natural formation but the remains of a city of their ancestors, long dead sands claimed by the desert.
'Two more rest-eves, with good walking,' he told them, waving the fabric map that was his most prized heirloom. The symbols were all but faded from view, but he knew how to read the topography, taught by his mother and grandfather as soon as he was old enough to learn his letters.
'A prayer in a hole,' muttered Stanzia, his eldest sister. 'You think the gods will guide us to a Lost Vault?'
'No,' Fan Morgai said with a sad shake of the head. 'I think that this is the City of Mirrors. See the clouds above it. Rain, my boys and girls. Rain soon.'
'The wadi at Fushas is said to be flooded again,' said his youngest cousin, Fabri Tal. 'Only a wake-rise's walk away, no more.'
'The wrong way,' argued Kora, Fabri Tal's elder brother, who had already expressed his favour for the plan of Fan Morgai. 'And who said this? A drunken soothsayer at Maiporis? He would tell you anything for a sip of j'kahs.'
'He had one of the old books,' protested Fabri Tal, 'and he cast the bones upon its pages right in front of me, I saw. A wind symbol and the sun. Fresh beginnings, he told me.'
'And you spared him a sip of your liquor for the good news,' said Fan Morgai. He was about to continue but a shrill call drew all their attention to the shaded watchpost on stilts erected at the windward side of the camp. Others were standing shielding their eyes against the glare.
'Go, Alannat, swap with Benjor,' Fan Morgai told his young sister, and she dashed off into the light, sweeping her headscarf about her face to shield against the sun for the moments it took her to reach the watchpost.
Benjor dropped down and ran back to the elder, his looking-tube glinting in his hand. He gestured for Fan Morgai to meet him between the two nearest tents and pointed into the wind, a little to edgewards.
'Caravan!' he blurted, thrusting the seeing device to Fan Morgai. 'Caravan!'
The tribal leader lifted the telescope to his eye. Retinal detectors clicked and whirred as they adjusted the liquid lens, bringing the horizon into sharper focus. He swept right a little, towards the far distant coast, and caught a blur of darkness against the dunes, no more than a kilometre away.
'Caravan, out here?' He looked at Stanzia and they shared a glance of concern. They both looked to the main tent that housed the chief's family.
'Say nothing to the strangers,' she told him and he agreed with a nod.
'Make ready, get your weapons,' he told the others. 'But do nothing to provoke them and let me do the talking.'
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The largest vehicle crested a broad dune like a breaching whale, its huge flanks rearing up over the sands amid a plume of dust and smoke. A dozen small funnels trailed oily fumes from their gargoyle caps. Thick wooden tracks churned the sand as it achieved the summit, the sand plough upon its front furrowing aside dirt and grit into twin banks on either side.
Details were scant, the caravan just a vague darkness in the haze, but as the vehicle approached the other shapes around it resolved into better focus. Two-crew four-wheelers ran as outriders, their roofs and spoilers glinting with solar collecting plates, balloon tyres carrying them over the shifting desert.
With them came actual riders, mounted on sunstriders decked in faded ribbons and pennants, the streamer of a black-and-red prayer flag curling from the back of each scout. Their faces were hidden by thick scarves and glare goggles, their riding robes tattered and dirty. Their steeds had also seen better days, flanks scarred by sandstorms, hair matted, tails docked short in the style of the inner waste tribes.
Other vehicles followed, forming an entourage for the temple-rig - carts pulled by threesomes of dromedores, and sun-strider chariots, two of them, each hauling chains and weighted flags through the sand to obscure the trail left by the caravan.
The shrine wagon could now be seen more clearly, a turret above its driver's cab topped by numerous flared speakers flanking a pulpit, large reflectors casting a brightness onto the decking behind, where dozens of armed men and women waited. As the great sheet above the deck flapped and bulged in the winds, spear-tips and mauls, arrows and slingstaves glinted in occasional flashes of sunshine. Beyond the stacks of the traction engine the large wagon heaped up into a type of aft castle, upon which two spear-launchers were mounted. Here mast-like poles were joined to the exhaust piles by black and red bunting, missing in places, giving the impression of gap-toothed grins.
From the summit glinted a golden icon, of a book aflame. A symbol of allegiance and faith, a testament to one of the proselytising creeds of the old cities. The Covenant of Vharadesh.
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The glimmer of eyepieces sparkled along the deck of the shrine wagon as the occupants turned their attention to the cluster of tents sighted in the distance. Orders were barked down the speaker tubes and the engines of the mobile chapel grumbled in response to the coaxing and curses of the crew below, hauling the unyielding vehicle onto a new course into the broad sand basin beyond the ridge.
Nairo darted between the caravan guards, scooping a ladle from his bucket to slop grease onto the exposed cogs of the running gear below the main platform. Around him the sellswords at the gunwales readied their windbows and dart guns, and loosened cudgels in their belts. A few aimed kicks at the ageing slave; others directed only curses at the man winding his way in a half-crouch between them.
He was clad only in a loincloth and headband, his whip-marked back and shoulders an exposed maze of sun-darkened skin and white scar tissue, turned leathery and cracked by years of exposure. It was, Powers be praised, a miracle Nairo had not been cursed with the tumours like so many of those he had grown up with - his advanced age was something of a talisman among the other slaves. Six Colchisian years he had survived; thirty as the adepts of Terra would later reckon such a time span
.
His head was shaved bald, tattooed on the right side with a simple version of the Book of the Word, symbol of the Covenant who ostensibly owned him.
He passed fierce Cthollic mercenaries, their porcelain masks flat over their faces, decorated with cruel visages drawn from the vision-journeys of intoxicant-fuelled coming-of-age rituals. They wielded serrated spears, their jerkins adorned with discs of refractive material that gleamed white in the high sun.
Next to them the Archer Brethren - sea warriors now confined to land, their windbows resting on the side of the wagon. Fierce of expression, the men heavily bearded, the women with braids tied under their chins in imitation of the favoured facial hair.
Witchwalkers of Carthass, dispossessed by the loss of their homes, swallowed by the great earth-tumults of a year earlier. An entire great city disappeared into the sand and waters, destroyed, so it was claimed by the Covenant, for their sinful ways. This handful of survivors caked their bodies in ochre paint out of shame, its colour visible between their segmented plastrons, vambraces and greaves.
And more, from other cities and none, all of them converts. Not a single warrior was a native of the Covenant; none were born of Vharadesh, the Holy City. This simple fact made them more fervent followers, with the vigour of those whose existence now depended upon the Truth of the Word to give their lives meaning. Their adopted creed made them as zealous as their master.
Of him, of the Bearer of the Word, there was no sign, though warning had been sent to the caravan's master that a Declined camp had been sighted. Nairo cast glances at the hatchway that led to the master's chambers in the bowels of the temple-rig, but there was no movement to be seen.
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Castora, the herald-slave, scuttled into view from the smaller entrance further aft and quickly ascended the ladder to the pulpit as the mobile shrine ground to a halt a hundred metres from the outskirts of the camp. With a scratch and amplified crackle, the address system sprang into life at her instigation.
Movement stirred in the camp as the nomads assembled at the edge of the shade cast by their covers. Nairo could see the glint of weapons - spears for the most part, nothing advanced - but the arrangement of the Declined suggested curiosity more than hostility. They could be seen talking to each other, casual in their attitude.
An automated clarion wailed several distorted notes from the prayer-hailers, cutting through the rasping wind.
'Rejoice, those who have fallen from the gaze of the Powers,' announced Castora. She spoke waterwords, the common language of the traders and missionaries who moved between cities. Nairo could see her face, resigned to her task though she tried her best to summon as much enthusiasm as she could for the audience. 'Celebrate the beneficence of the Powers, for this day they have guided to you the Bearer of the Word. Fear not, for he brings only counsel and wisdom for those who wish to heed it. No longer must you dwell in the wilderness of ignorance. The Bearer of the Word shall set you back upon the path to the Truth, and through his indulgences you shall know again the Will of the Powers.'
The sound of a foot upon the steps drew Nairo's eye back to the open grate. As Castora continued her speech, lauding the benefits of the Truth and the righteousness of the Bearer of the Word, the master emerged. He was young, three and a half years by the measure of Colchis' long orbit, but his brow already carried the deep furrows that would permanently twist them in later life. Gaunt he was, but not yet possessed of the lines of care and age that would mark his older years. He was garbed in dirty tatters of dark grey robes marked by sigils of the Powers and designs of the constellations of the Empyrean Above - the very same clothes that had been literally ripped from his back when he had been cast out of Vharadesh. His flesh was thin, his existence in the desolation honing his body to wiry muscle and little else. Already his skin was marked with the scars of exposure, dark from the sun and scratched from the wind-borne sands.
Castora withdrew as he reached the bottom of the pulpit ladder, slipping over the edge like a fleeing serpent to allow the master to ascend without obstruction. With characteristic energy he hauled himself up to the addressing platform while the clarions sounded their grating call again.
'Heed the Bearer of the Word,' he declared, raising his arms above his head. 'Witness the Truth from my lips and remember the name of Kor Phaeron!'
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The leader of the Declined raised his hand, giving the caravan permission to approach. The temple-rig rolled forwards at walking pace while the other vehicles formed a boundary about it and the escorts dropped down from the fighting platform to walk alongside in a guard of honour. Two sandsleds pulled ahead, raising up great sails to create a corridor of shadow between the lowering gangplank of the mobile shrine and the perimeter of shade at the edge of the camp.
Kor Phaeron swung himself over the side onto a rope ladder and swiftly climbed down to the shaded sand, his bare feet sinking into the heated grains. He hardly felt their scorching touch through scars and calluses as thick as the bottom of a shoe - it was a joke amongst his coterie that his soles were as inured to pain as his soul. He permitted such humour to continue as long as it was not deliberately perpetrated within earshot. Mockery of the Powers and the Empyrean was a blasphemy, of course, but he also knew that soldiers had their own ways and it was better not to test their loyalty too hard with unnecessary injunctions on their behaviour.
A handful of the nomads clustered forwards, bearing cups of water in welcome It was a good sign, and Kor Phaeron felt his mood lighten at the prospect that his sermon might fall on willing ears for a change Custom dictated that they host the preacher, but all too often such hospitality was short-lived, long enough only to satisfy tradition and reputation. The offering of water seemed a genuine welcome.
He suppressed a grimace as he saw some of the nomads were marked with the swirls of the sand-curse, or the scabby lesions of the celleater. Uncleanliness was rife amongst the Declined, a symptom of their irreligious ways, but he did not believe this justified denying them the Truth. What was the point in bearing the Word of the Powers to those who already heeded it? That the fools of Vharadesh had cast him out for suggesting that the Covenant should be more missionary in its outlook had only reinforced his belief that the Truth lay in the wilderness between cities.
Thai this was an apt metaphor for his endless quest through the desolation for pockets of wisdom was not lost on Kor Phaeron. Guided by the Powers through the arcane mysteries of Colchisian astrology, Kor Phaeron had recruited dozens to his cause in the long seasons since his exile had begun. There were ears that would heed the Word and the Truth, and while they did it was his duty to bring it to them.
'May our journey end in the waters,' the nomad leader said, inclining his head in greeting. He was a little shorter than Kor Phaeron, and maybe seven years old, though most of his face was hidden by scarf and goggles. The hand that proffered the cup of water was lined with age the leathery skin cracked and tight over sparse flesh.
'Blessings of the Powers upon you,' Kor Phaeron replied, raising up his left hand with the middle and index finger together, drawing the Sign of the Four in the air as prescribed in the Accounts of the Barabicus: a circular motion starting at the top left and moving down and right, followed by an 'X' across the same. The nomad leader followed the movement of the fingers with a curious look, ignorant to its meeting but impressed by the import of the gesture and the solemnity with which it was delivered.
'I am Kor Phaeron, the Bearer of the Word.'
'I am Fan Morgai and these are my people.' He took a sip from the cup and passed it to Kor Phaeron, who allowed only enough liquid to moisten his lips.
He was eager to begin his sermon, but Fan Morgai was insistent that all the customs were followed. After they had drunk from the same water, he then insisted on introducing his family and other prominent members of the tribe, reeling off names that Kor Phaeron forgot immediately as irrelevant. If they became followers he would deign to spare more thought fo
r them, but not before.
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Eventually Kor Phaeron was guided to the mats closer to the heart of the camp, though not those directly next to the central tent as he might have expected. Rather than dwell on this strange departure from nomad tradition, he eagerly launched into his sermon, gesturing strongly to emphasise his points, dark eyes moving from one listener to the next in smooth transitions as he had been taught in the chambers of the Orastry in Vharadesh.
The heat of his passion consumed him, fuelling his words as he strayed from his practised lines to remark upon the journeys of Epixas of Eurgemez and her death at the hands of the Unbelievers of that city when she returned with the Truth. He could see understanding in the faces of his audience as they shared the pains of Epixas' tribulations and rejection, as they had been rejected by those who claimed themselves faithful.
'In each of us has been set a purpose,' he told them, glorying in the opportunity to unburden his mind of their heavy thoughts. 'The Powers look upon our works and are disdainful, for there is nothing beneath the Empyrean we can create that is not but a pale mirror to the glories of the Upper Spheres.'
The spirit of the Powers was upon him, a fire in his gut as their words passed from his lips. Theirs was the Will, his was the Word that carried it. He laid a hand upon the scarf-clad head of Fan Morgai, feeling a paternal regard for these dispossessed though most were his senior by a half-year and some much more. The Powers had ushered them into his care and he would not abdicate his responsibility to introduce them to the Truth.
'I shall not shun you as others have, for the Powers care not for our mortal hierarchies, only our dedication. It matters not that you dwell in the wild places, cast from civilisation into the desert like animals, for we are all nothing but tenants on the lands of the Powers.