by Rin Chupeco
“It’s just like Their Holinesses’ hair,” Charley marveled.
Odessa reached up self-consciously, combing through her locks. Their colors shifted to mimic the variety of hues above us, almost instinctively. “It’s beautiful. I’m going to treat this as a good omen for the day ahead.”
Arjun and Haidee trotted toward us. I took note of the rumpled state of their clothes, the wild arrangement of their hair, the way their hands were constantly reaching out for each other, lightly skimming across skin, wanting some evidence of the other’s company. I smiled. At least there were two people in camp who’d had a good night.
Odessa looked at me, and then at Haidee. Her sister blushed, and my goddess giggled.
I waggled my eyebrows at Arjun. The grin he shot my way was almost bashful. “Had to find shelter from the rain,” he said.
“I’m sure you did.” I would have offered him some of the Liangzhu’s deathworm piss-wine, but the girls were watching. It was nice to see him sounding more like himself again.
“I’m still not sure setting the cannibals loose was wise,” Arjun grumbled to Haidee. “You do remember that the one with the scar tried to eat me, right? And tried to eat you too, now that I think about it.”
“His name is Bull,” Haidee informed him.
He sighed. “Naming them again?”
“They named themselves this time. They spent a good part of the morning yelling their names out just because they can.” She sighed. “This is a good thing, Arjun. With names, they can finally start remembering that they’re human, too, and not just meat for emergencies.”
“Where’s Lord Vanya?” I snapped. The boy, I was told by the other camp dwellers, was not an early riser, but he knew today was important. We absolutely had to return before the next wave of galla arrived.
“The proximity of the Golden City should afford us more protection, even if Latona refuses to aid us,” Mother Salla said. “But Tamera has asked to join you.”
“Well,” Arjun began diplomatically.
The Fennec clan mistress actually smiled. “My people are the ones most familiar with the area, after the . . . Saiga men.” She grimaced at calling them by their clan name. “Perhaps I have grown too cynical, but this seems to me a very long shot. And yet we have little other recourse.”
“There is much knowledge to be had in books, clan mistress,” Odessa said softly. “People remember. People write things down, in the hopes of enlightening the next generation. I hope everything we have learned from this particular book will be enough to return things to their proper course.”
“And what is the proper course, Your Holiness? Do you intend to bring back the old glory days where the goddesses ruled and the Devoted ran the cities? To repeat their mistakes all over again? I am old enough to remember what those days were like. Perhaps I am not so eager to put my life back into the hands of those who destroyed the world in the first place.”
Both Haidee and Odessa met her rebuke with implacable calm. They stood side by side, one with her darker skin and short bob, and the other fair-complexioned, with hair coiled into a loose tail that trailed down her waist. When one spoke, it felt like the other did, too. “We aren’t eager for those days ourselves, if those stories are true,” Haidee said. “We don’t know what the answer is yet, clan mistress—”
“—but we do know that we and the goddesses that shall come after us can no longer afford to stay sheltered and ignorant, as our predecessors had been,” Odessa continued. “That much we can promise.”
The older woman shook her head in wonder. “Perhaps there is hope for us still. But the future is still some long ways away—as is this alleged temple.”
“We’ll find it,” Arjun rumbled. “I wound up traveling halfway around the world with Her Holiness on gut instinct, and I was right, wasn’t I?”
Haidee blushed again. Odessa laughed, a welcome sound.
Lord Vanya finally arrived, bright red and fumbling. I was about to reprimand him for oversleeping, then paused. There was something odd about his appearance. The lordling’s usually painstakingly neat clothes were uncharacteristically rumpled, and tufts of dark hair stood up from his head. His embarrassed demeanor I presumed was for his tardiness, until Lisette sauntered up.
The pretty girl was practically purring. There was an extra bounce in her step, and she looked like she had stolen the choicest parts of the meat Sonfei had cooked that morning without anyone the wiser. In contrast, her normally messy shirt and breeches had been carefully smoothed out, and the well-polished Howler slung over her shoulder gleamed, slick with whale oil.
Arjun looked at them and groaned. “You didn’t.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” the young clan mistress said glibly, breezing past them toward one of the jeeps. “You should be thanking me for distracting him.”
“I—” Vanya stammered. “I wasn’t—I didn’t expect—I had a—”
Sonfei, who had been checking the wheels of his own rig nearby, began to laugh uproariously.
“They didn’t!” Haidee exclaimed, her eyes wide. Odessa clapped a hand to her mouth before a snort could escape.
“Oh, they did,” Arjun said darkly. He looked to the lordling, who was still trying to find words, and took pity on him. “The best way to go about this,” he said, clapping the noble’s back, “is to enjoy the moment for what it is.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Lord Vanya managed to squeak out.
“That’s often the case, yes.”
The cannibals occupied three of the two dozen jeeps. They took the lead, careening on ahead; their driving was just as haphazard as everything else about them.
“Full bellies keep them under control more easily than any chains can,” Sonfei observed. He and a couple of the Liangzhu made up another rig; the big man had insisted on accompanying us from the very start, but directed the rest of his clan to go with Mother Salla and the others to Asteria’s camp. “We are good at extracting water out of everything,” he boasted, his vehicle keeping easy pace alongside ours as we tore through the sands. “In our home we have taken water out of everything to survive; from the smallest particles of sand, from the very air, from the monsters that prowl the Sand Sea, from the deathworms. If there is anything to siphon out of this desert, then my Mudforgers will find a way.”
“I’m sorry,” said one of Tamera’s clanswomen, a fresh-faced girl named Cailin. “Did you say deathworms?”
Sonfei responded with a lovingly enthusiastic and excessively long description of the creature in question. The roar of the engines was no match for the sound of his booming voice, and by the time he was done, most of the others wore a faintly greenish cast. Cailin herself looked like she’d regretted asking before he was even halfway done. “I miss them,” the man said sadly, like he was talking about beloved pets. “It is true that they be gigantic parasites with razor-sharp teeth, but they be helping sustain us for all these years. They be admirable, noble creatures.”
“You were at the Breaking when it happened, weren’t you?” another Fennec clan member asked. “Did you escape through those strange portals too, like Asteria and Latona?”
“No. We fled as the mountain broke into two, away from the shadows that swarmed the chasm. We ran as far as we could, but we not be running far enough; the world warped and twisted all over, and we saw the corruption set in, even hundreds of miles away. We saw the ground spit up sulfur and acid like poisonous fountains. We saw the trees decay and rot down to their cores. The Sand Sea was a new phenomenon then; the strange magic from the Great Abyss corrupted it long before we arrived at its shores, and it be turning the life-giving waters into churning gravel.” His eyes grew distant, and I suspected he was thinking again of Asteria.
My curiosity got the better of me. “I worked for Asteria for almost all my life,” I said slowly, trying to figure out the right way to phrase my intentions without giving offense, “and I never heard her mention your name. She doesn’t talk much about her life before Ara
nth.”
Sonfei nodded. “If I may?” he asked, and before anyone could answer he immediately vaulted off his jeep to land in the empty seat beside mine, his eyes aglow from his air-gate. “I do not be blaming her,” he said, lowering his voice and ignoring the annoyed yelp from Arjun as he fought the wheel to adjust to the new unexpected weight. “She must be having a lot of trauma to unpack, and it is easier, I think, to ignore me than to address it head-on. It is the same whether you are a lowly Liangzhu or a noble goddess. Did your parents tell you much about us Liangzhu?”
“No. My father was gone before I was even born, and I never knew much about him. My mother I recall dimly, but she died of a lingering sickness before I was four years old.”
“Tianlan means ‘blue sky,’ did you know?”
“Yes. A little ironic, considering I’d never actually seen one until a few days ago.”
“A name is an important thing. To a Liangzhu mother, a name is not given because of what she sees around her, but what she sees in her child. And Asteria . . .” He paused, his gaze fixed on one of the sand dunes before us, his face a forlorn sight. “Asteria wanted to have a child. But it meant nothing, when she couldn’t be with the one she loved. She fought with Latona before her twin and her husband, Aranth, departed for Farthengrove. She cut them off, told them never to return. It be easier for her to staunch her wounds than wait for them to heal with time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Odessa was silent, her head tilted to one side, listening. But her pale eyes were glittering, like she was holding back tears.
“It is what it is. That I am not the one for her does not mean that I love her any less. If she can remember me with fondness one day, then that is all I will be hoping for. It is a Liangzhu problem, to love too fiercely.” He grinned. “Is she your yexu yet?”
I felt my face flame.
“Do not be so shy about it, Tianlan. There is no shame in wearing your love with pride.”
“She does.” Odessa curled an arm around me, smiled back at Sonfei. “I’m her yexu.”
He chuckled. “The little goddess is, at least, more forthcoming. Celebrate happiness wherever you can. It is a good code to live by, even when living in a desert of shifting sands.”
“Asteria is still here,” Odessa said. “Will you take the chance as well?”
Sonfei froze. “That is very different. You saw her rejection of me, little one.”
“You said yourself that she cuts people out of her life so she won’t have to care too much. Mother has been lonely for a very long time. I think it would be good for her to see you again, to help her remember the better times.”
“You are a very idealistic lady.”
“And very forthcoming about it, as you said.”
“An asset. I do not know what I will do when I face Asteria again. But it eases my soul very much, to know that she is here.”
A very different conversation was taking place in one of the other rigs to my left, one composed mainly of long silences. Lord Vanya had not been happy about being placed in the same vehicle as Lisette, who was behind the wheel, and he’d buried his face in The Ages of Aeon, refusing to raise his head. Lisette kept sneaking glances back at him.
Noelle, who was unfortunate enough to be sitting with them, cleared her throat. “You’re supposed to let us know if we’ve passed any landmarks.”
“I know,” came the muffled response from behind the pages. “But I’m not very familiar with the lay of the land, either.”
“You weren’t familiar with the lay of the land last night.” Lisette seized upon Noelle’s words to reach out to Vanya again. “But you did quite well, if I do say so myself.”
The figure behind the book slunk down farther.
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
“No.”
“I promise to be gentle. Not at all like—”
“Good goddess, woman!” Lord Vanya roared. “I don’t want to talk about it, least of all with you!”
Lisette sighed, then fell silent.
“Thank you,” Noelle murmured, speaking to no one and everyone at once.
“Serves her right,” Arjun muttered, pulling slightly away from the other rig so the words didn’t carry over the wind.
“Arjun,” Haidee chided.
“She’s used to being the center of attention, to getting her way. Vanya’s stumping her.”
Our hope of finding landmarks, it seemed, had been too optimistic. The springs that could have marked the route had long dried out, and though we spotted a few broken, crumbling structures along the way, we could ascertain no recognizable shapes.
“This is where the going gets rougher,” Tamera told us. “The sands peter out here, and the rocks make it harder to drive. Hopefully our rigs will not suffer too much from the shocks.”
“The shocks?” I echoed.
“The constant pressure coming from underneath the ground causes small explosions,” one of Tamera’s clanmates informed us. “The whole place appears to be made of flat rock, and stress from the Breaking has caused it to shift and fracture constantly. The movement isn’t strong enough to cause injury, but it can be alarming if you’re not used to it. And loud.”
We stopped to rest two hours in. There were now more rocks here than sand, and we wanted to get our bearings before we moved on. Sonfei’s Mudforgers squeezed out as much water as they could from the air, and we dined on fruit and dried meat, took turns keeping an eye on the Hellmakers and watching for any suggestion of the galla’s presence. Lord Vanya was studiously avoiding Lisette, who was now clearly irate at still being ignored. The cannibals, without any prompting, set up their own camp separately from ours, perhaps sensing that they were not yet forgiven, though they still groveled happily whenever either Haidee or Odessa walked by.
The twins spent a couple of hours talking quietly, their hands linked as if their need to maintain physical contact was paramount. I understood; there was a powerful connection between them that transcended normal relationships. By all accounts, Asteria and Latona’s own closeness had been just as strong at their first meeting, which was why their falling out had been particularly devastating. I didn’t feel jealous; to be threatened over their obvious bond felt like refusing to accept a part of who Odessa was.
“What do you think they talk about?” Arjun asked. “Half the time they finish each other’s sentences anyway.”
“From the way they’re sneaking glances in your direction now, I have a pretty good idea.”
He actually blushed. “Yeah? You’re telling me you haven’t fooled around with her yet?”
“We’ve done plenty. But I’m not going to push her for more. Not when she’s dealing with so much.”
“I can understand that. How’s she holding up? Can’t be easy, especially with the galla.”
“She’s doing well. I don’t think I would have done as well as she has. I don’t want anything to happen to either of them.” I loved Odessa. Arjun loved Haidee. We both knew what the stakes were.
He nodded. “Then we just gotta make sure, right?”
The ground grew harder and more jagged when we resumed driving, and we were forced to slow down as the rigs’ wheels grated over broken stones, jarring us from our seats with growing frequency. Our sightings of broken statues, the ruined foundations of what might once have been cities, and other detritus grew more frequent. But the cannibals never faltered, heading unerringly west, and we followed.
Hissing noises sounded nearby, and Tamera cursed loudly, swerving wildly to the left as the stones underneath her jeep slid against each other with harsh grating noises, large cracks opening between them. We drove as fast as we dared, avoiding the steam that rose up from the fissures. Thirty paces away, the rocks broke apart with a loud bang, an unseen force from below spitting them up into the air.
“Like I said,” Arjun grumbled. “Not too dangerous, but they don’t help us go any faster.”
It was another hour before we finally caught sight
of the mirages. There were a dozen of them in a close circle—a literal interpretation of what The Ages of Aeon had described. They remained unmoving. It unnerved me. Not even their cloaks were being picked up by the wind.
“That’s more than I’ve ever seen in one place,” Lisette said. “Is Her Holiness Odessa right, that something here is animating these ghouls, somehow?”
There was no trace of a shrine here either. Only one small statue stood at the center of the mirages’ grotesque gathering, weathered from age. Its head and parts of its face were gone, but one arm was raised, pointing ramrod straight in our direction.
“It’s got a female figure,” Noelle whispered. “Just like that statue back at Brighthenge.”
No temple.
But there was a pool.
The statue stood in the middle of a small pond of water. Water that was physically impossible in the driest part of the Skeleton Coast.
Tamera made a sound of surprise, taking a step closer to the circle.
“Wait!” Haidee ordered.
“There’s a reason they’re circling the area like this.” I took a tentative step toward the mirages. None of them looked up at us. Arjun moved even closer, eyed the distance between them and us. “Step into the circle,” he instructed Bull, who was watching him a little more expectantly than he should.
The leader held back. “What?” he asked, with a startling nervousness he’d never displayed before.
“You look a little too expectant for me not to think you’re waiting for something to happen.” Arjun aimed his Howler in the man’s direction. “Either step into the circle, or spit it out.”
“Wait!” the cannibal squealed. “There are traps hidden beneath the surface!”
“What traps?”
“The traps that be killing these poor fellows,” one of Sonfei’s people, Oda, spoke up. He pointed to something on the ground, half hidden by the sand. To my horror and disgust, I recognized it as a grinning skull, bleached by the unending sun. Farther on, I saw a partially concealed corpse; there were no predators about, so it lay rotting with nothing to disturb its remains. Its clothes were blackened.