by Ron Collins
It had strength to it.
The sound of the wind was touched by the final calls of jah and rela packs and the more solitary kish. If you listened right, sometimes the wind would bring rustle of a piela lizard as it raced across pebbles to find its crèche. The air was usually calmer in the pre-Eldoro heat, too, and the skies were often colored with dazzling displays of light. Now, for example, the eastern sky was red and purple with a single blazing streak of gold that curled along the horizon. The heaviest clouds marked the western darkness in a way that suggested turbulence later. He felt a dust storm in his bones.
The Esgarat range was a tiny sliver against the horizon, and Taranth savored the essence of the morning as he and his da had done so many times back when he was young.
It seemed such a long time ago now.
When he was done he turned to Yip Kil.
“Never interrupt a quadar’s first moments of the heat,” he said, just as his da had said to him the first time Taranth had interrupted him.
“Accept my apology,” Yip replied, bending her neck and turning her primaries in proper deference to his age. He saw the scars branded across her fingers that marked her for the Kandar clan, and that matched the old marks on his own fingers. He studied the piercings in her cheekbones and along her primary ridge that marked her for the Kil Family.
Taranth pulled his lips back in a dry grin. The whelp’s attitude fit the morning in a satisfying way. She could teach some of the others.
“You asked what we would do,” he said. “It’s quite simple, isn’t it? We will go to Harshish Point and get carts and tal beasts.”
“But the motor—”
“Motor carts can break in the best of times, true?”
She hesitated. “I’ve never seen one.”
“A desert storm is not the best of times,” Taranth replied as if it was the wisest thing said throughout history. “There is no other answer.”
Yip flicked a hand upward and clicked her throat to suggest agreement, but Taranth saw she didn’t like it.
“We won’t do it,” Hateri said from across the crevasse.
The young quadar had just come from his lean-to. Both his central and primaries were focused on Taranth. A streak of blue witze spread across his cheek and down his neck. Behind him, Pietha M’ktal crawled from Hateri’s blanket.
“I’ll return alone, Elder,” Hateri said, his accent on the term Elder as thick as the oil smeared over his face. “And I’ll still beat you back here.”
“Good luck,” Taranth replied, standing.
“I’ll do it.”
“It’s not easy to find Lashto’s Break unless you know what you’re looking for. And if you can’t find Lashto’s Break, you won’t find this mesa.”
“I will still return first, Elder.”
Movements came from the sleeping team—the tone of the conversation having clearly woken them as much as the volume.
Taranth gazed at the whelp.
“Then go,” he said. “Go back to your da and to his council, and live your life however you feel it should be lived. That’s been your goal from the beginning, so go. If you do somehow manage to retrieve these stones that are not stones, then good for you. But you should know that your da personally asked me to lead this search because I am the only plainsguide alive who knows the desert like a fourth heart.”
Taranth saw the shock on M’ran’s face.
The council’s executive thought he was the only member in on the negotiation and that he had brokered the deal through their friendship, but that had never been true. The elder E’Lar had plans, it seems. He had come along after M’ran and made the offer considerably better.
“When I declined,” Taranth continued, “he begged me to reconsider because he said the falling light could not be retrieved without me. He is the one who convinced the rest of the council to pay a fee few wanted to pay. So if you leave, and if you do see your da again, be certain to tell him of his mistake—and when you tell your da that he was wrong, I recommend you use the same tone of voice with him as you have been using with me.”
Hateri glared. “Perhaps I will.”
“Then, Hateri E’Lar, I suggest you pack your roll and go with good speed. While you are traveling alone, I also suggest you avoid movement at highpoint.”
Taranth turned to the rest.
“In the meanwhile, the rest of us will also need to prepare for a trip. Harshish Point is a good hike away, but at least we can travel at a normal pace rather than at a searching saunter.”
When the group left a short while later, Hateri E’Lar was with them.
CHAPTER 7
Heat rising from the baked ground curled in the air as Taranth and the group drew closer to Harshish Point. Eldoro beat on the back of their necks. The wind tore into their already raw skin. Though it was too early in the evening for its flowering, Taranth could smell the essence of katja root in the air.
To Taranth, for whom comfort was a clean floor and a cool cave, Harshish Point would be the hub of culture.
The others were of different minds.
A series of sand squalls had turned the five-heat walk Taranth had promised into six heats, and then seven. Yanil Dareh twisted a knee two heats in, so he walked with a gnarled stick in one hand and leaned on Yip Kil with the other. Three others suffered from heat sickness, their skin growing orange and their centrals sometimes roaming in random patterns.
As they neared Harshish Point, they were weak, sore, and too tired to do anything but argue with each other.
Not that Taranth could blame them.
He felt exactly the same.
To call Harshish Point a village was giving it too much credit.
The settlement was a sawgrass-rough outcropping of civilization built into, under, and around the isolated knob of a remote formation that was almost, but not quite, a mountain. It was home to a handful of outsiders, free-range quadars who made their lives in the wild deserts far to the south of the Esgarat. The scorched plains surrounding it were mostly level and barren. The crease it sat in was not quite a valley, instead more of a curved twist in the desert that might have been formed as the wind whipped around the rocky formation that gave the place its name.
The quadars here used the almost-mountain as a shelter from the weather. They used the radial ridges that sprung from the ground around it to defend themselves from the occasional bandits and raiders who thought they might benefit from the stores of goods that everyone knew were there.
Its inhabitants were a couple hundred animals of constantly shifting type, and an equally shifting collection of quadars, maybe fifty at any one time—each with a dubious love of the surface and a demonstrated ability to scratch life out of almost nothing. A few permanent living spaces had been carved into the bare rock, but most were built of gnarled wood that had been carted here from the cities on the backs of tal beasts or on the backs of quadars themselves, then put up again and again and again as the wind ripped them down.
The numerous fissures torn into the landscape gave entrance to a twisted tangle of caves where the quadars often stored items of value—or perhaps just of great secrecy—and where they retreated when the burning winds rose up too harshly. The wider caverns were used as cool shelters, bunks, and storage areas, while the smaller breaks and channels often grew the luminescent molds and slimes that desert quadars used as food, dye, alcohol, and for any other purpose they could devise.
The area had an endless supply of the katja plant, whose roots anchored themselves into rock, whose leaves crawled over flat sheets of rock each morning to drink spare molecules of water from the air, and whose fruit was a staple of the quadars here. The root reproduced so rapidly that harvested sheets would yield again a mere handful of heats later. Without the katja so close by, Harshish Point would almost certainly not exist.
But it most certainly did exist.
As such, Harshish Point was a place that lived on the random nature of free commerce, a place where desert people co
uld rest and catch up on news while they bartered for the few necessities of their lives. Occasionally, L’rdent himself—the gnarled-up quadar who had built the first of the Point’s hovels so many years ago, and who was so strongly tied to this place that it was impossible to conceive of the idea he would ever leave—would make a gathering, sell some fermented katja, and tell stories.
Taranth spotted the first of the sentries sitting, motionless, at the brush line along the ridge of the sharp cliff-line that led to the settlement proper. The sentry’s garments blended with the hardy thicket to make it nearly invisible. Once Taranth picked that one out, though, he saw another was at the peak of a raised stone on the opposite side of the pass.
Normally he would have set up camp earlier, but he thought they could make Harshish Point by the time the great heat was gone from the sky. The lookouts proved that assumption correct.
“What are we going to do?” M’ran said when he, too, saw the quadar atop the stone.
“What do you mean?”
M’ran pointed to the sentry. “He is probably with weapon.”
“I would hope so,” Taranth said.
“You would hope so?”
“And I would expect the same for the others.”
“Others?”
“Two more.”
M’ran scanned the area around him. “I still see only the one.”
“The second is on the running ridge,” Taranth said, biting back a caustic remark while M’ran scanned the ridge to confirm Taranth’s comment. Taranth was as sore and unhappy as the whelplings were, but this was not the time to let M’ran’s babbling get him distracted.
“And the third?” M’ran said once he had found number two.
Taranth smirked. “Does not want to be seen.”
M’ran gazed at him. “You’re guessing.”
“No. I am certain there are three, but I cannot find the third so I’m saying the third doesn’t want to be seen.”
“He could ambush us.”
Taranth wiped his arm across his forehead to forestall his comments until he could say them without disdain.
“That the third can hide properly says these quadars understand the desert,” Taranth said. “That the third is choosing to hide now rather than showing force says they are interested in us rather than concerned about us. I would like to think this is because they have seen me at the lead of our little group, though that could just be me being wishful.”
“You’re saying they respect you?”
“I’m saying they have been watching us for some time, and have not brought up a show of force.”
M’ran twisted his lips, then looked over his shoulder to scan the team.
“Don’t worry,” Taranth said. “I have no intention of getting the council members’ whelps killed.”
The anxiety in M’ran’s expression had already served to put the twelve on edge. They clearly knew how close the end of this leg was supposed to be.
Hateri rushed to catch up, limping on sore legs, his lungs wheezing with the effort.
“What’s happening?” he said.
Taranth raised the fingers of his bony hand and slowed his steps to let the stragglers catch up. He didn’t miss the fact that Hateri E’Lar and Pietha M’ktal had started this leg of the trek together, but were now separated. All of them were separated, in fact. They needed their space, it seemed. None of them wanted to speak to each other. That’s the desert doing its teaching, he thought. Drawing its heat and its dust into your lungs for long enough makes anyone question the nature of their existence. Seeing how life clings to rock, and how life adjusts to the land around it was enough to make any quadar question what it meant to be alive. And those questions are always better faced alone. No one exited the heated plains without taking a quest inside their own minds.
As they collected themselves, most dug into their water bladders to take what little liquid remained in them. They had taught themselves to ration their stores by now, some sipping a few drops at a time, others going as long as they could between full mouthfuls. Taranth was pleased.
“We have visitors,” he said, making an obvious display of pointing out the sentries. “They are almost certainly armed, so I need us all to keep walking. Stay near me, but spread out enough that they can see who we are. It is important that you not present weapons.” He looked at Kip, then at Hateri. “Not a knife. Not a stone. Not a throwing needle. Nothing. The Harshish need us as much as we need them, but they will defend what is theirs before asking questions—so our challenge now is not to give them reasons to ask questions.”
The conversation made several eyes grow wide. The team had been prepared for heat, thirst, rela beasts, and the rest of the problems presented by the free-range, but the idea of quadarti aggression did not fit their preconceptions.
“We didn’t come out here to deal with packs of belligerent renegades,” Hateri said, confirming Taranth’s read.
Taranth’s face flushed. “I have been here before. They will know me. Follow my instructions and we will be fine.”
The whelp’s gaze narrowed, but he was too weary to argue.
“Are there any other questions?” Taranth said.
The gathering was silent until Ogala spoke up.
“What if the people there are no longer the ones you know?”
Taranth grunted. It was a good question, or at least close to a good question. The right question would have been “what if L’rdent has been usurped? What if the entire settlement was now overrun by renegades?” Secretly, he judged M’ran lacking for having not asked it.
“Word travels. I would have heard rumors.”
It was not a complete lie, anyway.
Words did travel, but Harshish Point was a hub, and a hub could be managed. Words would flow through it or not flow through it because L’rdent knew how to mold a message and put it on the wind, and because he also knew how to make it known that passing words he did not wish passed could result in misfortune. Even the wildlands were not immune from politics, it seems. But any quadar strong enough to take control of the Point would know how to manage such things, too. Nothing is forever, and L’rdent was even more ancient than Taranth. The relative riches of Harshish Point would eventually bring an adversary great enough to take the village.
Yes, eventually.
So, while they could certainly be walking into a thorny situation, Taranth needed the whelps—and M’ran—to be calm, so the half-lie that said he was not concerned was required.
Taranth took the lead again, smiling to himself as he heard footsteps getting in line behind him. The whelps had no option but to follow him.
The party kept a steady pace as they crossed the open pass.
Taranth made their progress obvious so the Harshish sentries could make their assessment. A flash of light reflecting from a knife came from the brush line, followed by another from the hill.
A final movement came from the sand ahead of them, and the third sentry appeared to rise up from behind a heat wave that shimmered in the last rays of setting Eldoro, his forehead visible first, then the rest of his face and his shoulders appearing before finally the entirety of his body was visible.
As the third came forward, the other two sentries weaved their way down the slopes to the right and left, revealing themselves, but retaining the high ground when they stopped. Both carried bows that were already strung, and both flashed blades that hung from belt loops at their sides.
Taranth halted his team.
The third sentry approached from ahead. Taranth hoped he would recognize the quadar, but it was not to be.
The third was wiry, draped in loose-fitting clothes that flapped in the new wind and had been made of orange-brown cloth fabricated from fibers of the desert scrub. His primaries were drawn hard on Taranth, his face covered in colorless witze that had been applied long enough ago that it was flaking off to reveal skin marked with dark patches. His hands were wide and knobby, all twelve of his fingers oddly spaced in the way t
hat showed that as a whelp the quadar had been subjected to the peculiar practice of hand-tying—a process where young quadars’ hands were bound over progressively larger rocks so that their bones and their flesh were formed to be both wider and longer. These larger hands were supposed to make for better climbers.
The process had always seemed grotesque to Taranth.
So much pain, he thought, for so little value. But who was he to judge what was right for another?
“I am pleased to find another who knows how to hide in the heat,” Taranth said. “It is a skill few understand.”
“What are you here for?” the Harshish sentry said.
“These whelplings and I serve no threat,” Taranth said. “We need shelter and rest, and we wish to buy beasts.”
The quadar examined them all. His grin was an orange-toothed taunt.
“You are an old thing. The others look like they would trip over a knife.”
“As I said. We provide no threat.”
“That much is certain.”
“I would meet with L’rdent to renew our storytelling,” Taranth said.
The words had the desired effect on the quadar, but before he could reply Hateri E’Lar spoke up. “All we want is to rest.”
The sentry used his central to gaze Hateri’s way, focusing on the whelp with such intensity that Hateri actually shut his trap. The sentry’s primaries, however, stayed on Taranth. “You cannot control the whelp?”
Taranth grunted. “Perhaps we can leave him with you as tariff for our passage?”
The quadar grinned.
“You are a hired hand, then,” he said.
Taranth indicated the correctness of that statement with a movement of his hand.
“They say you can choose your fares,” the sentry said.
“They also say you can starve,” Taranth replied.
It was a common phrase among plainsguides, and the quadar’s use of it brought them immediately together.
“I think we can let you pass as long as you promise to take him with you,” the sentry said.
Everyone smiled, then.