Into the Desert Wilds

by Jim Galford

  “It’s kind of hard to break them,” Estin told her, sitting back down to watch. “They’re more likely to break you.”

  *

  It was nightfall the next day when Atall returned, collapsing through the entrance to the den and very nearly falling atop his smaller siblings. He tried to get back up, but flopped at Estin’s feet, breathing shallowly.

  Rushing to his son, Estin checked over the boy, looking for any injury. Finding none, he stared in confusion at Atall for a little while, before dragging him to the nearest pile of bedding.

  “Is he all right?” asked Lorne, shooing away the female kit for the thousandth time as the little girl tried to attack Lorne’s tail.

  “He’s physically fine,” Estin told her, opening Atall’s eye. “I think he’s just exhausted.”

  Turning, Estin looked over at the three kits that continued bouncing around Lorne, tormenting her endlessly. All three had napped in Estin’s arms earlier in the day, but upon waking had gone straight back to their assault, as if encouraged by Lorne’s discomfort around children.

  “Hey,” Estin told the nearest male, poking him in the side to get his full attention. “Where did your brother take you?”

  “Past where we saw mom and Oria. Near the place that stinks of dead humans.”

  “What did you see there?”

  The kit screwed up his face, thinking hard. “Um, I saw her,” pointing to his sister, then to his brother, “and him. Oh, and Atall.”

  Patting the boy on the head, Estin went back and checked Atall again, finding that he was unchanged.

  During the next few hours, Estin managed to get the boy to choke down some water, though he still did not wake. If anything, Atall fell deeper asleep.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Lorne asked Estin, sitting down next to him. “People don’t just pass out like that and stay down for this long.”

  Nearby, the kits slept fitfully in a huddled pile, kicking and twitching as they dreamed. When they had passed out, Lorne had been quiet a long time, watching them until she was sure they would not come after her again.

  Estin shook his head, touching his son’s ear to check his temperature. Aside from the feel of a sunburn, he was normal.

  “I had this kind of thing happen to me once,” he told her, taking his son’s hand in his own. “It was just exhaustion.”

  “Even we slaves don’t get quite that tired, Estin.”

  “For me, it was magic. The first time I pushed my abilities, it knocked me out for hours. My master told me that it was normal for most people just learning…though she put a dress on me while I was out and let others come and laugh at my expense. I’ve made very sure not to let that happen again.”

  Lorne leaned closer to Atall, looking him over. “Is your son a healer, too?”

  “No,” Estin told her, patting Atall’s hand and then setting it back on his chest. “He wanted to learn to be a warrior.”

  That made Estin look over Atall for his own reasons. Nowhere on the boy was a weapon, not even the dagger Estin had given him. Atall’s thin linen shirt and pants were relatively new—not a surprise after months away. The only thing he wore that Estin recognized was the silver ring that Asrahn, the boy’s grandmother, had given him.

  “What now?” asked Lorne.

  “I need to know what he found and whether it has anything to do with Feanne and Oria,” Estin replied, grabbing his swords from where they rested at one side of the room. “You need to watch over them. If Atall wakes, explain where I went before he does anything rash.”

  “I don’t know where you went, though.”

  Estin smiled back at her. “Neither do I. I’ll follow Atall’s scent while it’s fresh. If I’m lucky, I can get back by dawn.”

  “But…”

  Estin knelt down beside Lorne, giving her a friendly hug. “You’ll be fine. I will hurry.”

  “Estin,” she pleaded, grabbing at his arm as he tried to stand back up, “don’t leave me with your horde of little monsters.”

  “Blame their mother,” he told her, grinning as he left.

  *

  The hike across the desert took longer than Estin would have liked, but at night, it was far more comfortable. He jogged much of the way, happy to be able to move at his own pace, without fear of his feet or head—or even his tail—burning in the sun’s heat, or Lorne slowing him down.

  Atall’s trail was not an easy one to follow, forcing him to stop repeatedly to sniff at the sand for any hint of where the boy had come from. Luckily, the winds had been mild all evening, leaving enough for Estin to follow. Another few hours and he doubted he could have found more than a few traces of the path.

  It was nearing midnight when Estin finally got an idea for where he was going. The path Atall had taken crossed over a beaten road that Estin had traveled recently himself. Less than a mile ahead, he knew that he would find the remains of the gypsy camp.

  Stopping, Estin thought about whether he really wanted to go back there. It was entirely possible that Atall had just found what Estin already knew was out there, but he had to know for sure.

  Continuing on, Estin soon reentered the village, though if he had not known where he was, he would never have recognized it.

  Estin passed the charred remains of the wagons, slowing his pace as he wandered through what was left of the shops, where fallen rocks from the partially-collapsed hillsides had not buried them. Here and there, goods still remained. These, Estin would occasionally pick at, grabbing any food or items he thought might be useful for the kits or Lorne.

  When he reached the north end of the wagon ring, Estin saw the long empty expanse where the slaves had been during his first visit. This time, he saw several long wooden poles lying on the ground.

  Climbing over the last wagon, Estin walked over to the pile of wooden poles, smelling the gore on them long before he reached them. Keeping a distance, he circled them, noting the sharpened and bloodied end of each.

  Estin had to struggle to still smell Atall past the stench, but he could tell the boy had been there. Following the trail, he went past the poles to where a long row of mounds had been built, as though bodies had been placed there and then covered with sand. Atop each mount, a pile of rocks had been stacked, marking the location and keeping the piles from being too easily dug up by scavengers.

  Acting on his healer’s instincts, Estin shifted his vision, unfocusing his eyes to see more with magic. He hoped to make out the moving shapes of the spirits of those who had died, which would allow him a slight chance of saving them, though that would require that he bring their corpse back to Corraith and the healing circle in Sirella’s basement. Nowhere was any spirit visible, both saddening Estin and relieving him that he did not need to bring anyone into that secret place.

  Circling the mounds, Estin came upon one that stood out to him. Beyond the rocks that all the other graves bore, this one had been covered with desert flowers. He had seen such plants only a few times, usually in shady areas right after the brief rains that came every so often. Never had he seen what amounted to a full garden of them. There were at least a hundred large white blooms atop the mound.

  Estin bent before the grave, sniffing at the flowers. Every one of them held Atall’s scent. The grave itself smelled of another wildling, but not one Estin recognized.

  “How long did it take you to do that?” he asked aloud, touching one of the flowers reverently. To grow so many must have taken considerable amounts of water, hauled in from somewhere nearby. “Who was it, Atall?”

  Shaking his head at the amount of work Atall had done if he had truly buried these people by himself, Estin circled around again, looking for any other indication of where his son had gone.

  That was when he saw the glow.

  Far to the north, past a line of ruins that at first resembled the stones that commonly dotted the desert, a dim rippling light filled much of the horizon. Had Estin been anywhere else in the world, he might have believed it to be the lighte
d walls of a large, distant city.

  Knowing that he was leagues from another city, Estin knew instantly what he was looking at and felt ill. It was the mist, the very thing that had uprooted his family and destroyed countless cities across the world, Corraith included.

  Estin gauged the distance to this mist cloud, trying to use what landmarks existed to determine how much time he had if it began moving straight toward him. From what he had seen back near Altis, the mists in that region moved swiftly, but this one was far enough off that he believed they had days, if not longer. That was even assuming the mist was moving at all.

  “Let him touch power again,” came the voices associated with Estin’s magic, making his head hurt as the words slammed into the back of his mind. “The mists might not kill.”

  Rubbing at the back of his head, he looked around one last time, then began his trek back home, hoping as he went that the kits had not injured or scared off Lorne.

  *

  The next morning, Estin was sitting in the den watching the kits sleeping against Atall as the sun rose outside. Lorne lay curled in her corner of the den, having wrapped herself tightly in her blankets, likely to protect herself from the kits.

  “Morning, father,” Atall whispered, though Estin had not seen his eyes open. “Where did you go?”

  “I had to see for myself what you found.”

  Atall opened his eyes, looking at Estin with a hopelessness that Estin had never seen in him before, despite the things they had both lived through time and again.

  “The camp or the ruins?”

  “I saw the graves, Atall.”

  Atall turned his head away from Estin, putting his arms around the kits as he did so.

  “Who died there?”

  Atall stayed silent a long time, until eventually he said softly, “A girl…female…whatever. I’ve been around elves too long.”

  “What’s her name?” Estin insisted, though he wanted on some level to let his son avoid having to talk about it. Still, he knew it would be better to get it all out at once. Atall would otherwise bottle up all his anger until he could not stand it anymore. It was Atall’s way. “She meant something to you.”

  “Arlin. She was a slave that Oria and I set free, nothing more.”

  “You still lie badly.”

  Atall smiled as he stared at the ceiling, though there was no emotion in the expression. “Mother told me once that our kind rarely live to adulthood and when we do, it’s almost a guarantee that we have already lost someone important to us,” Atall said, his voice shaking a little. “I hoped that we broke that cycle when we left Altis.”

  “Pain doesn’t care about what land it’s in,” Estin told Atall. “It can strike anywhere, against anyone we know.”

  Atall nodded, then closed his eyes again, though Estin could see the moisture of restrained tears at the corners of his eyes.

  “Oria and mother are dead,” Atall said abruptly. “They were supposed to escape within a day of the four of us. They never came out.”

  “Escape from where?” asked Estin, sitting sharply upright. Fear prickled across his skin and he prayed his son was wrong. His heart was beating erratically, making his chest hurt. “What happened, Atall?”

  Atall tried to sit up, but the kits were positioned such that he was stuck without waking them. Sighing, he relaxed again.

  “We went to live with refugees from Corraith in an underground tomb when you vanished. Mom tried to get them to accept us, but when Arlin died, I lost my temper on their leader. Oria and mom were caught and imprisoned. It’s my fault.”

  “Do you know what happened to them? Are you sure they’re dead?”

  Atall shook his head. “Oria told me not to come back if they didn’t make it out in a day. I did anyway, of course. One of my friends on the inside told me that Desphon—the useless sack of cow turds that leads them—had been bragging that Oria was gone and Feanne wouldn’t last another day from the beatings he was having her put through. That was almost two weeks ago, give or take.”

  Estin put his head in his hands, taking a shuddering breath as he tried to imagine the fear they must have felt after losing him, only to wind up among a group that would do this to them.

  “We’ll recover their bodies,” Estin told Atall firmly, struggling to keep his own emotions in check. For the first time, he truly felt old, as though he had blinked and missed years of his life. In less than a minute, Atall was an adult and Estin the senior. “When is a good time to go in and can these people be reasoned with?”

  “The people, yes. Desphon, I doubt it.”

  Atall finally managed to wiggle himself free of the kits, setting them down gently on the floor as he got up.

  “We won’t get near the place for a few more days,” Atall insisted, picking up a stick and drawing a simple map in the floor of the room. He marked a spot, as well as the den’s location. “According to my friend, they are planning some kind of public event here soon. Even he isn’t sure what the reason is. The guards will be spread thin then. It’s still three days off, though.”

  Estin studied the map briefly, recognizing the location Atall was indicating. Somehow, he had never seen anything in that area, though he knew it to be very hilly and nearly anything could have been hidden there.

  “What would stop us from going sooner?” Estin asked grimly, wondering if he could fight through whatever these people had at their disposal. For Feanne—or her remains—he thought he just might try anyway. He would need to convince Atall to stay behind, as it would likely be a one-way trip.

  “At least eighty soldiers—probably closer to a hundred—a dozen wizards, including my source for the information,” explained Atall. “They’re elven, but mom trained a lot of the warriors. I can tell you where the entrances are and where you’ll die trying to go if they’re ready for an attack. You wouldn’t even get within sight of where the bodies would be until the guards are spread out.”

  Estin looked up at the boy, seeing a mirror for his own anger and determination in Atall’s eyes. Realizing how foolish he had wanted to be, Estin nodded and touched his son’s shoulder in reassurance.

  “How do we wait out three days?” he asked, staring at the point on the map, as though he could get there by watching it carefully enough.

  “We go look at some ruins,” Atall told him, marking two more spots on the map. One was the gypsy camp and the other was slightly farther north of it. “They’re empty, but I nearly killed myself breaking through the entrance into them. It was under a lot of rock and sand. I really wasn’t ready to summon that much wind.”

  Estin looked over his son, debating whether to ask.

  “Yes, I’m a wizard,” Atall offered on his own without looking up. “I forgot that you…disappeared…before I started learning.”

  “Go ahead and say it, Atall.”

  “You left us. Not much different. Either way, I have you back to help me get revenge on these people.”

  “It makes a big difference in how you look at me, Atall.”

  Atall glared at Estin, then softened his demeanor and shrugged. “You had a reason, I’m sure,” he answered, then looked over at Lorne. “If I’d met her three months ago, I’d have tried to kill you both for what you did. Now, at least someone’s happy.”

  Estin grabbed Atall by the shoulders and turned the youth to face him.

  “I did not want to leave. What I did was to keep Arturis’ ghouls from following me back to you. I didn’t want them to find Feanne or the kits so soon after she gave birth. Then, when I felt it was safe, you were gone…”

  “We couldn’t wait forever for you to come back,” Atall snapped, looking over at the kits. “She refused to name them, hoping that you would come back soon.”

  “Then we’ll name them after we recover her body,” Estin answered, his voice finally cracking.

  “What about her?” Atall asked, pointing his nose in Lorne’s direction.

  “She’s a freed slave and a friend.”


  “And?”

  Estin stared at Atall until the boy smiled slightly and appeared to relax.

  “Good,” said Atall, shaking his head. “I wasn’t sure how to treat her. Knowing that you aren’t…it just makes it easier to focus on getting mom and Oria back.”

  Looking back down at the map in the sand, Estin tapped the ruins with his finger. “What did you find?”

  Atall wiped away the markings with his hand and then drew a series of symbols with the stick. Any one of them was obscure enough that Estin was unsure what he was looking at.

  In a flash of insight, Estin copied several of the symbols nearby, mirroring them on either side. He then drew a simple human face in the sand, redrawing the symbols along the sides of the eyes.

  “That’s Turessian,” he said aloud, kicking the sand to wipe out his sketch. “Something recent?”

  “No, it’s very ancient,” Atall assured him. “I couldn’t go too far without someone to run with the kits if I found that it wasn’t as empty as I’d thought. I didn’t smell anything in there but dust, though.”

  “Take me in the morning. Lorne will come, too. Among us, we can manage to keep the kits as safe there as anywhere. I’ll have her wait outside, while we check it out.”

  They sat quietly for a little while, Atall looking over his father slowly, as though trying to absorb whatever he had missed in the last few months.

  “You used to be able to raise the dead,” Atall finally said, rubbing his hands together uncomfortably. “What are the limits on your ability?”

  “I can’t save her anymore, Atall,” Estin assured him, knowing already where the conversation was going. “I searched for spirits at the graves and there were none.”

  “If there were, could you have done something?”

  “Within a minute or two of death, I could have mended her body to save her. After that, I can’t bring back the dead without a place strong in healing magic. We lost our circle back at Altis. Even that only buys me another hour or so.”

  Atall’s eyes were distant as he thought. “You haven’t found another?”