As Tazi knelt and wiped away the sand from her bleeding eyes, she was certain her vision was still affected for she saw the worm do a curious thing. It wheeled about on Fannah and moved to strike. Neither Tazi nor Steorf was close enough to stop it. However, Tazi could have sworn that the creature paused when it saw the source of the annoying pinpricks in its side almost as though it somehow recognized Fannah. Rather than strike the nearly defenseless woman with its sharp jaws, the worm shifted its position slightly and batted Fannah away like a horse would use its tail on a fly. Fannah tumbled backward and landed hard on the ground. Tazi could see that she was not seriously injured, however, just had the wind knocked out of her. The worm turned its attention back to Steorf.
The mage had little time to defend himself as he had been more engrossed in Fannah’s fate, too. The worm lunged down at him, and he dodged again but was not quick enough this time. The worm’s ring of teeth tore away a chunk of Steorf’s leather tunic and laid bare a patch of his chest. While he scrambled to regain his footing and draw up his sword, the worm shook its head violently. The section of leather tunic it had torn from Steorf was still stuck to its teeth, and the worm whipped its head from side to side like a dog playing with a rag, trying to rid itself of the annoying cloth.
Tazi used the opportunity to charge at the worm. She struck it in the neck in almost the same spot that Steorf had. She managed to widen its wound, and a burst of purplish pus flowed out.
Tazi instinctively dodged the seepage, and the sand sizzled where the fluids splattered.
“Move!” she yelled at Steorf.
She raised her sword and swung once again at the beast. This time, the creature was prepared for her attack and brought its massive tail around front to parry Tazi’s blow with its sharp tail. She tried to strike at it once more, and the creature managed to block her again.
The worm caught her sword by the hilt, narrowly missing her hand with its razor-sharp spike. It flicked her weapon away.
Tazi didn’t have time to run. The worm slapped her across the sand with the bulk of its tail. She landed against a small pile of rocks and was momentarily stunned. Once again, though the monster had a clear shot at her, it hesitated.
Steorf and Fannah stood side by side and yelled to distract the worm from Tazi. Obviously they hadn’t come to the same conclusions as she had about the worm’s intended target.
The creature whipped its head around and dived under the sand again. Steorf and Fannah split up, both running in opposing directions. Tazi watched groggily and suspected that even though the worm had two victims to choose from, it was going to attack Steorf.
He probably makes louder vibrations on the sand than we do since he’s bigger, she thought.
The worm burst up in front of Steorf in a spray of sand and grit. It pulled back its head and shot forward, bombarding Steorf with a concentrated blast of sand as it had done to Tazi. Steorf hissed in pain and tried to wipe the sand from his eyes while still brandishing his sword with the other. The more he rubbed, the more he scoured his eyes. This was the distraction the worm was hoping for.
It lunged forward with its mouth of deadly teeth, and Steorf, partially blinded by the sand, only parried its mouth with his weapon. He didn’t see the worm’s tail poised to strike like some malevolent serpent. Tazi, who had risen to her feet, did see the impending strike.
“Steorf!” she shouted but was too late.
While Steorf had jammed his sword between several of the worm’s teeth and used both his hands on the weapon to keep the clicking jaws away from his throat, the worm struck with its tail.
As if it had a life of its own, the creature’s tail slashed across Steorf, and the young man’s reflexes were a hair slow. He pulled back his body almost enough to miss the gleaming spike at the base of the worm’s tail—but the worm was quicker.
The sharp tail sliced across Steorf’s chest where it had only moments before exposed his flesh as though this had been its plan all along. Steorf winced at the deep gash and dropped his arms. Tazi ran as she saw that he was completely vulnerable to the worm’s attacks.
Steorf recognized his predicament and started to backstep, but he tripped on his own feet. Tazi thought he was moving like a drunkard and wondered if it was a result of dehydration. It didn’t matter, she realized, because he was going to perish in a moment. Her heart started to pound harder at the thought of Steorf’s plight, and that gave her the burst of speed she needed. She leaped into the air.
“No!” she screamed in defiance.
Breathing hard, Tazi managed to straddle the monster’s neck. The creature tried to rear up and toss her from its body with no success. Tazi wrapped her legs tightly around the worm’s body and raised her guardblade, point down, high over her head with both hands. Using what was left of her strength, she drove the sword in with a scream.
The worm let out a high-pitched wail. Tazi winced in pain as she felt her eardrums come close to bursting at the sound, but she didn’t release her grip on her sword in the slightest. The dying worm slammed its body to the sands and reared up again in a desperate, last attempt to shake Tazi off of itself.
Tazi gritted her teeth, and when the worm slammed to the ground again, she twisted the blade hard to the right and snapped the worm’s brainstem. It sagged to the ground, dead.
Tazi tried to slow her ragged breathing and lowered her head, momentarily exhausted, onto her hands, which still held her sword.
After she was certain the worm was dead, Tazi struggled to pull out her blade. She was shocked how utterly spent she had become as she fought to remove her sword from the dead creature. With a sickening sound, the blade popped free, and Tazi staggered back at its sudden release. She didn’t even have the presence of mind to clean her blade before re-sheathing it.
Cale would have my hide for treating a weapon so shoddily, she thought after she realized her mistake. Right now, he can have it.
Tazi stopped her wistful thinking as soon as she saw Steorf. For as long as she had known him, he had never looked vulnerable to her. But as she saw him, leaning against some rocks, Tazi’s heart missed a beat.
His head of unruly hair was bowed, and Tazi could see that both he and Fannah dabbed at a wound across his chest. Tazi forgot her weariness and ran to kneel at his side.
On closer inspection, Tazi could see that the slash that ran over Steorf’s heart was no ordinary wound. The edges of his torn flesh had puckered, and the cut itself was a strange, purple shade. Very little blood ran down his exposed skin, but a milky white liquid seeped out. Tazi looked up at Steorf to see that his eyes were already regarding her.
“What is it?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
Steorf winced and said, “I think that vermin poisoned me with its tail.”
“Well, then,” Tazi replied matter-of-factly, “get rid of it.”
“That’s what I’ve been attempting to do,” he said through gritted teeth.
As Fannah passed over a section of the wound with a torn piece of her robe, Steorf bit back on a scream and dropped his head down. Though sightless, Fannah raised her head and evenly met Tazi’s worried stare.
“He has been trying,” Fannah told her. “I think he is too weak to expel the poison.”
Tazi refused to accept that. She gripped his face in both her hands and looked him hard in the eyes.
“If you were able to save me from the spider’s venom,” she told him, “then you can do this for yourself.”
Steorf nodded briefly. He brushed away Fannah’s ministering hands and closed his eyes. He laid both of his hands on the oozing gash, and Tazi watched hopefully as his fingers glowed with a faint white light.
That was all that happened.
With beads of sweat rolling down his face, Steorf let out a defeated sigh, and his hands slipped to the ground.
“No use,” he whispered. “I can’t get it all out. I just don’t know the spell very well.”
“I’m sorry,” Tazi told him, stood up,
and reached to get an arm under his.
“What are you doing?” he demanded with surprise.
“What does it look like? I’m helping you to your feet,” she said in a tone that brooked no refusal.
Steorf didn’t budge. With a burst of strength, he grabbed Tazi’s arm and pulled her crashing back to her knees.
“I am dead weight,” he said. “In more ways then one.”
“I refuse to accept that,” she argued.
“Open your eyes, Tazi,” he replied. “I don’t know how much farther I can walk, and you and Fannah cannot carry me the rest of the way. I am no longer an asset. You have got to cut your losses.”
Tazi stood up and faced north.
How many more miles? she wondered. I have to face him with a blind woman and a dying mage, no water, and only one sword. And all I have to do is keep him from presenting my friend’s soul to a goddess as some kind of gift.
She shook her head and almost laughed at the absurdity of the picture she had painted for herself.
Turning, she told Steorf, “You are absolutely right. I have to cut my losses.”
He closed his eyes almost gratefully at her pronouncement.
“I knew you’d see the merit of my words,” he finally said.
Tazi squatted in front of him and replied, “How can I argue with logic?”
Fannah turned with a worried expression, and Tazi leaned across to pat her on her forearm comfortingly.
“I’m going to need your help, Fannah,” she told her blind companion. “Could you take Steorf’s sack?”
Fannah didn’t say a word, but she did accept the bag that Tazi helped remove from Steorf.
“It’s the only choice you have,” he told the Calishite.
“Now,” Tazi added, “If you grab his right arm, I can get his left and we’ll get him to his feet.”
“What?” Steorf exclaimed.
“You are absolutely right,” she told him gravely. “At this stage, I cannot afford a single liability. And you are hardly that.”
“But, Tazi …” he implored.
“No,” she cut him off. “Don’t waste your breath. We will have only one chance to defeat Ciredor. Our strength lies in our unity, and that is how we will face him: together.”
Tazi took Steorf’s left arm and laid it over her shoulders as Fannah took his right. He shook his head but when the women tried to stand, he struggled to help them. They rose, as one, from the bloody sands.
CHAPTER 15
THE LAST WAY
Steorf had been passing in and out of awareness for the past few hours. He spoke less and less coherently to Tazi and started, instead, to mumble strange words and phrases as she and Fannah had helped him across the wasteland.
“The desert nomads say there are six stages of thirst in the Calim,” Fannah said. “First, there is the clamorous stage. I think it is fairly obvious that is what he is entering.”
Tazi leaned slightly forward of Steorf’s dangling head to look at Fannah.
“I think you’re right. What else can we expect?”
“If there was not the worm toxin to consider, the next stages, in order, would be: cotton mouth, swollen tongue, shriveled tongue, blood tears, and finally, living death. I am not sure how the desert worm’s sting will change any of it, other than to hasten the steps.”
Tazi shook her head and found all she could say was the obvious, “We have to find him some water.”
“We all need to find some water, Tazi,” Fannah reminded her. “This is our fate as well, given time.”
Tazi didn’t even want to ponder that. She had already begun to feel the painful beginnings of dehydration herself. Her eyes were slowly pulling back in their sockets, and her nose felt like some small, foreign object hanging from her face. She could feel other subtle, and not so subtle, ways that her body was trying to conserve water as well, but the insidious fact was that to do so, her body was picking and choosing what parts of her were expendable and what parts were not. She was not in control.
Steorf’s head rolled back, and that motion snapped Tazi from her dreadful realizations. She could see that his eyes opened slightly. He looked at her and Fannah, and Tazi saw an unreadable expression spread across his face. She started to motion to Fannah to slow her pace even more when Steorf had a small burst of strength and shook himself free of the two women.
“Get away from me!” Steorf shouted at Tazi and Fannah.
He stood swaying in the sand. With one hand he rubbed uselessly at his desiccated eyes. His eyelids had dried, and Tazi had noticed how difficult it had become for him to close them. He had taken on a blank stare because of it. He flailed his other hand out in front of him, desperately trying to ward off his imagined attackers.
“What’s wrong?” Tazi asked him.
“It’s all right,” Fannah tried to soothe him, somewhat more aware of the confused state of mind Steorf was slipping into. “We’re here.”
Neither of the women’s words had their desired effect on the failing mage. He staggered a few steps back from them and started to fumble around with his tattered shirt.
“Where’s Tazi?” he demanded of his apparitions. “What have you done with her?”
Before Fannah could stop her, Tazi started to move slowly toward Steorf.
“I’m right here,” she tried to convince him.
“Don’t,” Fannah warned her. “He no longer knows who we are.”
Steorf tugged at his ripped shirt, and Tazi was startled to see that he was struggling to remove it. Without thinking, she reached over to him and tried to stop his jittery fingers. The moment she touched his hot, dry skin, Steorf swung a fist in her direction. The only reason it didn’t connect was because Steorf was so disorientated that his aim was off. Tazi herself was too stunned to move out of his way.
Steorf staggered a bit more from the momentum of his badly executed punch but recovered enough to yell, “Where is she?”
“He needs to be stopped before he hurts himself,” Fannah exclaimed, closing in on him from one side as Tazi finally made a move from the other.
Or hurts one of us unintentionally with either his fists or his magic, she thought.
Steorf was clawing at his sword’s scabbard. She sprang at him, all the while trying to be careful of his open wound. Tazi hit him in the shoulders with her outstretched hands, and as they both tumbled to the ground, she tucked herself up to somersault away from him. As soon as her feet hit the ground, Tazi scrambled around and slipped her right arm around his throat. Kneeling behind his prostrate form, she grabbed her left shoulder with her right hand and secured him in a headlock. She slipped her left forearm between her chest and the back of his head and applied increasing pressure until he became still, her chokehold the gentlest way she knew how to take him out.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she relaxed her hold on him, certain he was unconscious.
She even allowed herself a moment to pass her hand through his hair. The strawlike quality it had taken on was simply one more reminder of their predicament.
“Are you all right?” Fannah asked her.
“Yes,” Tazi choked out, “but we can’t go on any farther like this.”
“Then this is where we’ll rest,” Fannah replied and kneeled down.
As Fannah began to scrape away a large layer of sand from in front of her, Tazi asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m removing the top cover of sand, which is the hottest. A few inches down,” she explained to Tazi, “the sand will be significantly cooler.”
Tazi fell to her knees as well and helped clear away the hot sands. When they had cleared a furrow large enough to hold Steorf, both she and Fannah dragged his inert body over and laid him in it. Tazi felt as though they were lowering him into a grave and tried desperately to keep that image from creeping back into her thoughts.
Tazi could only watch uselessly as Steorf suffered in mute torment. He came around shortly after being placed in the cooling pit, but he sh
ook uncontrollably, caught in the grip of fever chills. When he faced Tazi, however, there was recognition in his eyes.
“What happened?” he asked weakly.
“You got a little confused,” Tazi explained gently.
“And?” he prompted her.
Tazi wasn’t sure what offered the most temporary relief: that he had regained consciousness at all or that he actually appeared to understand the conversation they were having.
“I think this was your way of getting even with me for years of tricks,” she admitted. “You took a swing at me.”
“Are you all right?” he asked, his own eyes filling with concern.
She leaned closer to him and whispered, “Not even on your best day could you ever hope to touch me.”
Steorf tried to smile but instead stifled a cry of pain. Though he tried to maintain a brave front, Tazi knew with an absolute certainty that he was dying. Her faint smile died on her chapped lips. She and Fannah busied themselves and tried to make him as comfortable as possible. Fannah removed her outer robe and pillowed it under his head.
“There is not much more we can do for him,” Fannah whispered to Tazi.
She looked more closely at him and saw that his wound continued to slowly seep. The discharge was a mixture of the worm’s milky venom and a trace of his own blood. What filled Tazi’s heart with dread were the red lines of infection that had spidered out from the original injury. Tazi knew that their inexorable march to his heart was what spelled Steorf’s doom.
“I will not accept this,” Tazi said. She was filled with the absolute need to move. “There has to be something we can do.”
“I do not know of anything within the Calim that could cure him,” Fannah replied.
She rubbed her forehead, tired.
“Think!” Tazi ordered the Calishite angrily. “There has got to be something here. Anything!”
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