Snowtear

by S. B. Davidson

  She heard movement close to the crate.

  “What in the Winds?” an agitated voice called. The speaker must’ve been in back of the wagon with them.

  “Reese got bit by a damned rattler,” another answered.

  “Ain’t no rattlers in these parts.”

  “Tell that to the one I just sliced in half.”

  “By the Wind,” the first man cursed, and Sage felt vibration as he exited the wagon.

  “He’s out. We need to take him back into town. He needs medicine.”

  “Nay.”

  “What?”

  “Let him crawl back if he wants. It’ll take him a day to get better, if even he does. I don’t fancy being late, not when we’re doing business with those bloody savages. They don’t take kindly to such, if you forget.”

  “He’ll die,” the second man said.

  “Less coin we have to split then. By the Wind, it serves him right for being so careless.”

  “But…”

  “I won’t say it again, Toma. Shove Reese’s fat, lazy ass out and get us moving again, or you’ll be wishing that snake had sunk its fangs into you too when I get through with you.”

  The second man cursed quietly, but offered no further dissent.

  In a few moments, Sage heard a something heavy crash to the ground, probably Reese, then they were moving again.

  Exhausted from conjuring and holding the worthless illusion, she couldn’t fight the swell of despair breaking within her. As the wagon resumed its course, bumping sadistically toward her doom, Sage snatched two great handfuls of hair and yanked with all her might. Anything to fool the crippling misery in her heart.

  The land had begun to shift.

  Two days past, after over three weeks of traveling flat, barren plains, the group had started to notice their surroundings altering, gradually at first. Here and there, great stretches apart, they’d seen small rock formations protruding from the ground, hardly the size of the crates of dwindling supplies their horses carried strapped to their sides. But the formations had slowly burgeoned as they pushed further west. First, they’d seen the jagged rocks mature into steep, standing stones – some over twenty feet in height, lonely black sentinels in the distance. Next, they’d multiplied, becoming sporadic armies defending the unattainable horizon. The pitch of the group’s travel had inclined, slowing their mounts’ progress so that Tawny had to increase his efforts. The small, smooth bluffs flanking them turned into lofty ridges and plateaus that eventually shaded the sun from the travelers on both sides. Soon, they were guiding their horses into deep canyons, and Payton and Dexter had to light their way with torches sparked from their hands.

  In the glow of the two pyrons’ hands, Riken could see the astonishment engraved on his crews’ faces. Not even Payton, who’d seen more of the world than any of them, had ever traversed this deep into Black Earth.

  Black Earth, at least the segment they were now in, was an unforgiving wasteland, good for little but concealing its baser inhabitants from the prying eyes of the civiler of Cryshal’s people. Forever lost in this forgotten land, the primitive tribes of Black Earth had lived in complete isolation for thousands of generations. They lived lives foreign to anything Riken had ever imagined, doing as they pleased, beholden to no law but their own. Most of what was known about them was only from stories told in drunken spewings in taverns, or by traveling weavers spouting their craft for coin, who’d most likely never set toe beyond a well-worn road. Their life, their ways were, quite simply, a mystery.

  In point of fact, Riken had never believed the rumors regarding their arcane practices and rituals until recently, when he’d learned the truth of Sage’s disappearance. He still wasn’t wholly convinced, but he couldn’t risk being wrong. It mattered little, however. Whatever they planned to do with her and the rest of those innocent children, Riken planned to stop them. When he left this damnable place, Sage Ullimar would be riding next to him. If he had to bring the very depths of the Seven Layers down on the heads of anyone that dared stand in his path, he was prepared. His own demons, real and imagined, would allow nothing less.

  “The Fire damn this insufferable land,” Payton yelled. His words ricocheted along the high, serrated canyon walls, becoming a quivering whisper somewhere down the line.

  “Unwad your frillies, will you?” Dexter said, though without much conviction. He’d probably just piped in to have something, anything to say.

  “Damn you, too,” Payton said, redirecting his hate of this place. “Will this unholy waste never end? I feel like we’ve been trudging deeper into the abyss for days. I’ve almost forgotten what the sun looks like.”

  Payton had the right of it. The canyons had become so cavernous that the sun, with all its nourishing warmth and brightness, had ceased its commune with them many days past. The eternal darkness was slowly seeping into the weary souls of his companions. With only Dexter and Payton’s light to see by, Tawny had been forced reduce their pace. Idle conversation had become a distant memory. Though they’d seen no sign of life in Black Earth since they’d first ventured into the territory, every minute sound in the reaches of the darkness sounded like an initiation of attack, and the sounds had been coming with more and more frequency. To say the least, the group’s nerves were stretched thin.

  And, to Riken’s way of thinking, it wasn’t simple paranoia. They had to be drawing closer to the Black Earth tribe’s territory. Even if the sounds weren’t coming from concealed Black Earth scouts, which he doubted, they could easily be coming from living beings. The inhabitants of this land had to live on something, after all. They weren’t feasting on dust and sediment every night.

  For what seemed like the thousandth time, Riken searched the black with his mind, probing for signs of animal life. And for the thousandth time, he found nothing. Considering the increased rate of nocturnal noises of late, this was all the more troubling. If there was life down here, it wasn’t susceptible to his fibra. He didn’t want to conceptualize the breed of animal that was beyond his considerable grasp.

  “How far, do you think?” Tawny asked, and Riken wished he hadn’t. The rest of the guys, even Abby, had long since grown tired of the unanswerable question.

  “Just up this ridge,” Dexter said, acidity lacing his words. “Look up there in the distance. Do you see? Right next to the wagon full of freshly-baked, cinnamon apple pies.”

  “I was just…” Tawny tried.

  “What?” Dexter growled. “You don’t see it? How can you miss it? It’s right in front of your damned eyes.”

  “Dexter,” Uther said from behind Riken. Uther had taken to bringing up the rear of the line. Riken supposed the big man wanted to be their first defense from a flank attack. He probably figured it would make the group feel safer. In reality, Riken didn’t feel quite so cozy. That Uther felt trouble might befall them at all was grimly unsettling.

  “What?” Dexter asked, restraining the anger in his voice when addressing Uther. “It’s not my fault he’s a simpleton who doesn’t know when to close his trap. Why don’t you use that tone on Scrawny, and maybe he’ll stop assaulting our ears with his nonsense.”

  “That’s enough,” Riken said. He couldn’t see Uther. He didn’t need to. They were all on edge, not the best condition for a man who could break a small tree in two with his bare hands. The last thing he needed was for these two titans to get into a tussle.

  Beside Illter, Tawny looked as if he’d shrunken a couple sizes under Dexter’s scolding. Riken felt for the young man. He was away from everything he knew and held dear, including a new bride at home. Despite a proficiency in a fibra usually associated with travel, as far as Riken knew, Tawny hadn’t set foot beyond the limited bounds of Winter Moon in his short life, excepting the short cycles he’d quested to acquire said fibra. Riken felt relatively safe in assuming that Tawny’s quest had never taken him to the likes of Black Earth. No doubt, the youth had envisioned a great many adventurous travels when he’d decided on his speci
alty. Surely he’d wanted to see the world. Riken didn’t think this was what young Tawny Crase had had in mind at all.

  That night they slept in shifts with their backs to the canyon wall, naught but black starless sky over their heads. Open and prone as they were, it seemed safer to have not even the thin leather wall of a tent to impede their hearing, lest something attempt to sneak up on them in the night.

  Once, during what he assumed was Dexter’s shift, Riken awoke in an exhausted haze. The diminutive fire had gone out, and Dexter was nowhere in sight. Riken had already taken his shift for the night, and being thoroughly drained, let his eyes fall shut again, allowing himself to believe that Dexter was simply out of eyeshot in the gloomy surrounding. He’d probably just been relieving himself. Still, Riken made a mental note.

  The next day saw more of the same, and the next after that. The deeper into the uncharted – at least by anyone they knew – canyons they delved, the colder the air became. When finally they felt comfortable peeling off the extra layers of clothing they’d been insulating their frigid bodies with for the last few days, Riken correctly assumed they were hiking upward.

  The unexpected trek into the canyons, and the weakening of their pace that had facilitated, had penitent effects on their supplies. They weren’t in dire straits yet, but Riken was quite sure they wouldn’t have enough for the return trip home. In any civilized land, that wouldn’t be such a problem, but out here, there was no game or vegetation to live off. The best hope they had would be to travel south once they’d rescued the girls. That way they could make it to a port town and buy passage aboard Crystalline the next time the floating city passed through.

  Of course, making such plans was really getting ahead of the game. To assume such, they would first have to succeed in infiltrating the Black Earth tribe’s encampment, stealing the girls, making a safe exit, then keeping the tribe off their asses long enough to reach a safe haven beyond their reach. All those things were relative unknowns at this point.

  Dexter jumped from his horse’s sweat-soaked back, fell to his knees, and ceremoniously showered the level ground with kisses.

  Abby laughed. Riken didn’t know what made the sound sweeter, that she’d finally broken the icy silence she’d espoused since their row, or that it was the first timbre of lightheartedness he’d heard from anyone in the somnolent group for some time.

  “Give it a good one for me,” Uther called to Dexter, who was now doing things with the hard ground that a man usually had to pay good coin at a brothel for.

  Riken sighed, relieving his body of the last week’s persecutions with a shiver. He gave his dutiful horse – who he’d named Star for the strange five-pointed patch of white hair on her otherwise black body – a jovial scratch behind one perky ear, then took a single dismissing look behind him at the vast canyon they’d finally been freed of.

  Beyond western mouth of the great crevice, the geography resumed the flat, barren plains they’d hazarded before their detour into the deep, winding pits. Again, Riken could see forever and a day into the West, except, he found, if he looked to his sides. There, much to his wonder, were giant looming mountains of black rock. Not as lofty as Pristinus, but certainly more imposing for their utter bleakness. In the stead of trees and brush, these dark peaks were adorned in jagged bluffs and spiked stalactites jutting from their facades, like the behemoth structures had been attacked by some giant, mythic porcupine.

  “How is it that I’ve never known of these?” Payton asked, staring upward in disbelief. “How could they have gone undocumented on any maps.”

  Riken had an answer, but he didn’t feel the need to reveal it. To his chagrin, Dexter seemed to have come upon a similar solution, and had no qualms in sharing it for the benefit of the group.

  “I doubt any civilized eyes that ever feasted upon them made it out of this place to scratch them down on parchment,” he said. Riken wished he’d just skipped the sentiment and continued on with his horseplay on the ground.

  Payton nodded, clearly disturbed. Beside him, Tawny looked momentarily whiter in the face as he contemplated Dexter’s revelation.

  “Take a look back,” Illter said, nodding in the direction from which they’d just come.

  Behind Riken, Uther let out of long, high whistle.

  “By the Wind,” Abby exhaled, shaking her head.

  Riken turned, and his eyes widened as the picture they were all viewing came into focus. The landscape to their backs was a maze of canyons, like a sheet of cracked glass. Everywhere, they were. Mouths upon mouths, all leading into the murky depths of Black Earth, like dozens of dehydrated rivers. Next to the one they’d just climbed out of, maybe forty yards to the right, was a crevasse that stretched at least two hundred yards across. To their left was a series of shallower gaps, some only a few feet wide and no longer than a city block.

  “Where were these when we went in?” Abby asked.

  For a time, no one wanted to answer.

  “Luckily, for us, I suppose,” Illter said, “ours was the longest. At least from the eastern end.”

  “If we’d have gone into the wrong one…” Abby said, half-voicing the concern that was surely on the rest of the group’s minds. “I mean, what were the chances we’d choose one that actually had a way out. Some of these end in two hundred foot walls.”

  “Most of them seem to,” Uther added.

  “We could’ve had to backtrack miles,” Abby said.

  “Or not been able to at all,” Payton said.

  Before this theorizing became totally out of hand, Riken interrupted, “But we didn’t. We made it out. I don’t see how anything else matters.”

  “How will we know which one to take home?” Tawny asked. “They all look the same. These here we can enter, how do we know they have a manageable end?”

  Riken had already thought of that. “Payton will be able to return us here, and we can mark the spot.” That, of course, rode on the assumption that Payton would still be with them on the return trip, but the others seemed somewhat calmed by the strategy, so he didn’t burden them with grim ideas. “Though I’m truly hoping we don’t have to return this way at all.”

  “No way of knowing what a southern or even western path will be like,” Uther said, then gestured toward the maze of gorges. “Obviously.”

  “Aye,” Riken said, “but we needn’t assume the worst, either.”

  Uther nodded, but hardly looked convinced to share in Riken’s optimism.

  Riken felt a change of subject was in order. “What’s the plan from here?” he asked Payton. “Which way are we going?”

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” Payton said. “Though I’ll be able to answer that better if I can do some scouting tonight.”

  “That seems likely,” Uther said.

  “Aye. Looks like. Let’s hope.”

  “Otherwise, we could be roaming this Prince-loving land an age and never set peepers on those thieving savages,” Dexter said, resuming his seat atop his horse.

  “Payton’ll find our way,” Riken said. “Tonight, we’ll eat before making camp, so him and Tawn can head out and pick up some kind of trail.” Tawny didn’t look pleased with the idea. “That’s why I hired him. There’s none better that I know of.”

  “In your price range, anyway,” Dexter added.

  The group enjoyed a healthy round of smiles at the jest. Riken was pleased to see them finally coming out of their mutual gloom. He hoped they would remain that way, even after this dreadful business had finished. He held onto the aspiration. Always nice to dream.

  “We’re not going to beat them there, are we?” Abby asked.

  Riken could’ve feigned dumb, pretended he didn’t comprehend the hard truth she’d come upon, but to what avail?

  “I think our little excursion into the canyon erased any chance of that,” he said.

  “Aye,” she said, regret on her lips.

  Knowing what it might mean for those six little girls, Riken felt it too.

 
; Chapter Twenty-One

  “Can you smell it on the wind?” Payton asked.

  “Aye,” Riken said, “though just barely.”

  “We saw it last night.”

  “How far?”

  “Twenty miles,” Payton said, counting off fingers of his right hand. “Maybe less.”

  “So we’ve come at last?”

  “So we have,” Payton agreed.

  The smell was a faint inconsistency on the early morning breeze. In fact, if not for Payton’s scouting report, Riken might’ve been convinced he was imagining it, merely wanting a sign of their progress so badly that his mind had conjured the scent for him out of sympathy. But it was no artifice, and on the sixth day since retreating out of the canyon, the sight the scent had foreboded appeared.

  Smoke on the horizon – great belching puffs, like grey arms ending in a commanding fist, striking for the army of bulbous clouds above.

  “You saw their encampment?” Riken asked.

  “If you’d call it that,” Payton said. “It’s more like a large village. Dozens of great, big tents strewn all over a bed of chasms and gullies. They’re extremely well-contained, secure on all sides. I’d hate to be the army going in there after them.”

  “Good thing we’re not an army then.”

  Payton nodded, but didn’t look comforted.

  “How’d Tawn do?” Riken asked.

  “Fine, for a novice. Seeing the immensity of that compound, I think he might’ve drenched his britches if he’d have had others to change into.”

  “He’ll be fine. We all will.”

  “Count on it,” Payton said, attempting a light-hearted smile. He scratched at the spot of bare skin where his beard wouldn’t grow. “I plan on collecting every kyn I got coming my way once this job’s finished.”

  “Count on it,” Riken said.

  “I am.”