Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  “Don’t look at me,” were her first words. “I must be a horror.”

  Treet swallowed and whispered, “You are beautiful.” He touched one flawless cheek with a finger and let it trail down along her throat. It was true—Yarden was even more beautiful than before, if that was possible. Her fine skin had lost none of its silkiness, and the tiny laugh lines at her eyes and the corners of her mouth had been erased. She appeared years younger.

  She blushed under his gaze, a rosy tint spreading from throat to cheeks. He pulled away the cracked encrustment over her torso, allowing her to sit up. She shrugged her right arm free and brought it over to cover her breasts demurely. Now it was Treet’s turn to blush. No stranger to female anatomy, he nevertheless turned away and handed her a yos to put on, keeping his eyes averted.

  “How long have you been up and around?” she asked. “You can turn around again. It’s incredible we’re still alive.”

  “Not more than a minute or two.” Treet bent to finish freeing her from her crumbling prison. She kicked her legs, the cocoon shattered, and she stood up.

  She looked at her hands, legs, and arms with wonder. Treat followed her gaze, drinking in the glowing freshness of her body. She had never appeared more lovely, more desirable than at that moment. He felt a pressure in his chest, and his throat constricted. He couldn’t speak.

  “Ahhh!” yelped Yarden amiably. “Oh-h-h, it feels so good to move, to be alive!” She burst out laughing just as he had done, then shook out her hair, brushing away the clinging pieces of crust. Treet watched her with utter fascination.

  No woman has ever had this effect on me, he thought. It’s like I’ve never seen a woman before. I feel like an awkward kid.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Yarden, her eyebrows arching gracefully. “You’re looking at me funny.”

  “I—I am?” Treet blustered. He turned away. “I feel a little funny.”

  “Come on, let’s get the others out of those horrible body casts!”

  Together they worked at pulling Pizzle, Crocker, and Calin from their loathsome cocoons and finding the newly-released captives something to put on. When all were presentable, they stood around gazing at one another, beaming foolishly, grateful and happy to have survived, and full of the wonder of the transformation each had undergone. Even Pizzle’s looks had improved; he appeared less jug-eared, his features less haphazard than before. His straggle of beard had thickened out, and the little bald spot on the top of his head grew new hair.

  “There’s no explaining it,” said Treet. “We can’t even begin to know what happened to us. Even if we could explain it, I’m not sure I would believe it anyway—it still seems far too incredible. By all rights we should be moldering corpses. Instead, we’re all standing around fresh as baby’s breath, looking fifty years younger.”

  “An exotic virus or bacterial infection—” put in Pizzle.

  “I don’t care,” said Crocker. “I’m just glad we survived. Did any of you others have dreams?”

  “Did I!” Yarden said. “They were terrible. I’ve never had such bad dreams.”

  “I know—maybe an enzyme of some kind,” continued Pizzle, shuffling away deep in thought.

  “How long do you figure we were out?” wondered Crocker.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Treet answered. “I have no idea. The last thing I remember is getting up to get a drink. That was maybe two days ago. At first I thought it was a dream, but I woke up out here on the sand, so maybe not.”

  “You got a drink?” Something in Pizzle’s tone made them stop and turn toward him. He was staring at the skimmer with the water supply.

  “Yeah, I think so. Why? What’s wrong?” Treet exchanged a quick glance with Crocker.

  “Then this is your fault …” Pizzle turned to the others, his face grim, the light dying in his eyes.

  “What’s my fault?” Treet moved toward him, then froze. The waterbag was limp, deflated. “No!”

  Pizzle spoke softly, but his words boomed in their brains. “It’s all over now. We’ve had it. We’re out of water.”

  “We can’t be!” shouted Crocker, dashing forward. He stopped in his tracks when he saw the tent, now flaccid, its mooring straps hanging loosely, the whole thing collapsed. The inner flap that had sealed in the water gaped, having been carelessly ripped open and not closed properly. The seal had dropped below the waterline, allowing the water to leak away. The sand beneath the skimmer was a shade darker, still damp from the water it had absorbed.

  Long seconds passed before anyone spoke. Treet stared in disbelief at the empty tent, his face ashen. Pizzle and Crocker turned on him as one. “You did this!” they accused. “Because of you we’re all going to die!”

  “I—I’m sorry … I didn’t know …” Treet mumbled, stunned.

  “It’s all your fault,” said Pizzle darkly. “This whole expedition is your fault—it was your idea in the first place. We’re going to die out here because of you. We can’t last even three days without water.”

  Treet bristled at this. “What choice did we have? You tell me that.”

  “We could have stayed in the colony. We could have hidden somewhere and been safe,” snapped Pizzle.

  “That’s crazy!” Treet turned imploring eyes on Crocker. “Tell him it’s crazy, Crocker. We had no choice.”

  Crocker scowled darkly. “What’s crazy is being out in the middle of this wasteland without water. He’s right, it’s your fault.”

  “Stop it, you two!” Yarden charged into the middle of them. “It is not his fault. How dare you blame him? He was out of his head with fever—as we all were. He didn’t know what he was doing. Besides, we don’t really know what happened at all. It could have been any one of us. Maybe you didn’t close the seal properly, Pizzle!” She thrust a finger in his face.

  “Me!” Pizzle flapped his arms in exasperation. “He’s the one that got us into this mess. Why are you defending him?”

  “No one got us into this predicament. We all went willingly. Only Treet had the courage to follow his instincts. Let’s forget about laying blame and figure out a way to survive.”

  Pizzle crossed his arms and stalked away.

  Crocker fumed for a while, but eventually came to his senses. “We just got a little panicked, that’s all. It’s a bad shock.” He looked at Treet with raised eyebrows. “No hard feelings?”

  Treet nodded, accepting the apology. “Pizzle’s right though,” he said glumly. “We won’t last three days without water. What are we going to do?”

  FORTY-NINE

  “Maybe Nho can help us,” suggested Crocker. He glanced around quickly. “Hey, by the way where is Calin?”

  “She was here just a second ago,” said Treet. “Check the tent.”

  They searched the tent and the immediate vicinity. Treet turned up some footprints leading away from camp. He found Calin sitting hunched up in the sand at the foot of a dune, head down, her arms drawn around her knees. He sat down beside her.

  “We’ve been looking for you, Calin,” he said gently.

  She made no answer.

  “If it’s the water you’re worried about—”

  “It’s not the water,” she said, her voice trembling.

  He waited, but she did not continue. “What then?”

  “It’s Nho … I can’t—he’s …” She raised a round, tear-stained face, lips quivering. “He’s gone!”

  Treet sat looking at her for a moment, then put his arm around her shoulders. “Hold on now,” he soothed. “What do you mean he’s gone? Where could he go?”

  Calin shook her head in dismay. “I don’t know, but it happens sometimes. I’ve heard of it before. The psi gets angry and leaves, and the powers vanish. There is no way to get it back. I’ve been trying to contact him, but …” Her voice quivered, and the tears started again. “I’m not a magician anymore!”

  Treet pulled her close, feeling a little foolish. How do you comfort someone whose psychic entity has disapp
eared into astral never-never land? “There, there,” he said. “Maybe he will come back. Maybe you just need a little time to recharge your batteries, you know? You’ve been pretty sick. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  They sat for a long time clinging together. Treet surprised himself with a sudden outpouring of tenderness for the stricken magician. She was weak, vulnerable; she needed him. He rather liked the feeling, liked the yielding nearness of her.

  “I think we better go back now,” he said finally. “I’ll tell them about Nho if you want me to. Crocker won’t like it, but there’s nothing anyone can do. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Only Yarden was cheered by Calin’s loss. She took her shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Don’t you know what this means? You’re free!”

  “Yeah,” griped Pizzle, “and we’re history. We have no compass anymore. No water. No nothing. We’re sunk.”

  “Squelch the doom forecasts,” said Crocker. “I’ve been assessing our situation. We didn’t lose all the water. While you’ve been bellyaching Yarden and I measured out what’s left. We’ve got about twenty liters, by our best estimate, besides what’s in our emergency flasks.”

  “So we postpone the inevitable four or five days. Whoopee.”

  “Pizzle, you’re a crybaby, you know that? You’re a spoiled brat of a crybaby,” Treet said. “Here we all are, trying to pull together for survival, and all you can think of to do is carp and whine because things aren’t absolutely peachy.”

  “I beg your pardon! The prospect of immediate death makes me a little testy,” Pizzle japed.

  Crocker ignored him. “I figure if we push ourselves as hard as we dare, we ought to be able to make ten thousand kilometers in four days. That should take us out of this desert—it can’t be much bigger than that.”

  “Want to bet?” muttered Pizzle.

  “Can we go that fast?” wondered Treet.

  “I don’t see why not. Didn’t you tell me we topped out at four hundred kilometers per hour?” Crocker patted the side of the skimmer he leaned against. “That’s flying.”

  “But that was a race. We couldn’t drive like that all day.”

  “Only short bursts. I figure all we have to do is maintain an average of two hundred and fifty per hour over ten hours travel time per day. We could do that, I think.”

  “We’d have to double our average,” pointed out Yarden. “Before we got sick, we were doing a hundred and twenty-five. I kept track.”

  “Impossible,” said Pizzle, but he stood and came over to join the discussion. “I mean, we’d have to push it to the limit. And even if we were somehow able to keep from going around in big circles, we still don’t know precisely where we’re heading.”

  “We keep the sun at our backs in the morning and aim for it in the afternoon,” remarked Crocker. “Just like we’ve been doing.”

  “Too bad we can’t travel at night and use the stars,” Pizzle mused, “like in Dune.”

  “That’s another one of your adolescent fantasy stories, I take it?” said Treet archly.

  “Only one of the most famous classics of all time.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  The company struck camp and proceeded on their way, pushing the skimmers as fast as safety would allow, and changing drivers regularly. The pace wore down muscle tone and reflexes fast. But they soon developed a rhythm of driving and resting, and the kilometers fell away beneath the gleaming, sand-sharpened blades of the skimmers.

  At the end of the first day they had covered nearly two thousand kilometers. “We’re five hundred short for the day,” said Crocker, “but we had a late start. We’ll do better tomorrow.”

  They did do better the next day, covering almost three thousand kilometers of dune-strewn desert. They climbed down from the skimmers in the early twilight—gritty, bone-weary, parched, and triumphant. In their sleep that night they relived every dip and swell of the sand-filled wilderness as they slid once more over the endless white void in their dreams.

  On the third day disaster struck.

  Pizzle was far out ahead of the group—they took turns leading one another so those behind could relax somewhat since it was easier to follow than to forge the trail. Treet was second, watching the high white plume of Pizzle’s skimmer weaving its way over the desert landscape when without warning the plume disappeared in a great puff of sand and dust.

  Treet gunned his vehicle to the spot and skidded to a stop beside the smoking wreckage of Pizzle’s skimmer. Crocker bounded from the passenger’s seat and dashed through the clouds of hanging dust to where Pizzle lay spread-eagle on the sand fifty meters away. Treet approached as Crocker rolled Pizzle over.

  “Is he dead?” asked Treet. Pizzle’s head wobbled loosely on his shoulders. One side of his face was turning a bright red from an ugly scrape, and the heels of both hands were raw and bleeding. It looked as if he’d slid across the desert floor on his hands and face.

  “I don’t think so,” replied Crocker, placing two fingers beneath Pizzle’s jaw at the carotid artery. “I’ve got a good pulse here. He’s just out. I don’t see anything broken.”

  Treet straightened and turned back to the ruined skimmer. The smoke was clearing, revealing a twisted pile of metal half-buried in the face of a dune. “Oh, something’s broken all right.”

  Yarden and Calin came skidding in and ran to them. “Is he—” began Yarden, glancing fearfully at the limp body cradled in Crocker’s arms.

  Holding up his hands, Treet said, “We don’t know yet, but we think he’s okay. He’s scraped up pretty bad—that’s all we can tell right now.”

  Pizzle gave a long, low moan that sounded like a snore. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was sleeping,” said Treet.

  Crocker peered at him doubtfully. “He’s coming around.” He patted Pizzle’s cheek gently. “Pizzle, can you hear me? It’s Crocker—hear?”

  Pizzle’s eyes fluttered open. “O-o-h-h …” A hand went to his head. “What happened?”

  “You had a wreck,” said Treet. “Where does it hurt?”

  “All over … O-o-h-h. I don’t… remember … a thing,” he said, rolling his head from side to side. “I think my neck is broken.”

  “I doubt it,” said Crocker. “But it probably should be. Can you get up?”

  “Just let me sit here a minute.” Pizzle closed his eyes again. “I must have blacked out.”

  “Like a light,” said Crocker. “Tell us what happened.”

  “I don’t know. I mean—I was driving along, I looked down at the instrument panel to check my speed, and the next thing I know I’m waking up here.” He rolled his head again. “Oh, baby! Is my skimmer all right?”

  “Total loss,” said Treet. “You were lucky.” He studied Pizzle closely. His eyes narrowed. “In fact, more than lucky, I think. The only people who walk away from accidents like this in one piece are drunks.”

  “What are you saying? Pizzle certainly wasn’t drunk,” Yarden remarked.

  “No, he wasn’t drunk. He was asleep.”

  An expression of recognition spread across Crocker’s face. “Is that true? You fell asleep?”

  Pizzle blanched. “How do I know? Everything’s kind of blurry. Maybe I did get a little dizzy just before—”

  “Just before you fell off?” said Treet with disgust. He stomped off to examine the smashed skimmer. The machine looked like someone had tried to fold it in the middle. Its sides were crumpled and bowed; its blades stuck out in artistic angles.

  “Pizzle, you grouthead!” exploded Crocker. He stood up quickly, dropping Pizzle onto the sand. “Look what you’ve done!”

  A sickly grin warped Pizzle’s face. He pushed himself back up on his elbows. “Sorry, guys. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t mean to. I guess I got mesmerized or something. Rapture of the road, you know? It’s never happened before.”

  “Well, we don’t have to worry about it happening again. You’ll have to ride with Yarden. Yo
u take the prize, Pizzle, you know that?”

  “Ease up on him,” said Yarden. “He could have been killed.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” said Treet, joining them once again. The tone of his voice made the others glance at him. “We’ve lost the rest of the water. The tent was punctured in the crash. It’s all gone.”

  Pizzle groaned. Crocker swore under his breath.

  “We’ve still got the emergency flasks,” Yarden pointed out.

  “Well, this is an emergency.”

  “We’re never going to make it,” moaned Pizzle.

  “Not if we sit around here much longer,” said Treet.

  “He’s right. I suggest we get moving again pronto. We can’t get out of this desert fast enough to suit me,” Crocker said.

  They left, but not before Pizzle had stripped everything of possible use from the damaged vehicle. That took some time, but Pizzle convinced the others that it would likely pay off in the long run. When at last they got underway again, the sun was starting its slide down toward the western horizon and a stiff breeze had picked up, sending sand devils twirling across the flats.

  A ridge of cloud appeared away to the south, and the breeze turned into a steady wind. Treet noted the clouds and pointed them out to Crocker. When he looked again, he was amazed to see that the ridge had swelled to a hard, brassy brown bank that was moving toward them fast. He held up his hand and slowed to a stop.

  “I think we’re in for a storm,” he said, indicating the clouds. The wind whistled over the tops of nearby dunes as sand snakes hissed up the smooth dune faces. The sun had become a pale platinum disk in a sky of brittle glass.

  “Maybe we can outrun it,” said Crocker.

  “We can try,” agreed Treet.

  They pushed the skimmers as fast as they would go, but at the end of another hour the wind had become cold and strong, flinging the sand into their faces, stinging exposed flesh; it became apparent they would not be able to outrun the storm. Crocker cupped his hand and shouted, “Let’s find the biggest dune around here and pitch our tents in the windshadow.”

  Visibility had dropped to a scant few meters by the time they found a place to stop. Copper clouds opaqued the sky and all but obscured the sun, which burned with a ghostly pallor, like a candle shining through burlap. They managed to get one tent up and anchored between the two skimmers when the gale hit.