by EM Kaplan
“Where are we?” Mel asked, blind as a mole, unable to tell if Treyna could hear her.
The humming stopped. After a moment in which Mel sensed confusion, Treyna said, “You can hear me? And speak, too? The others cannot.”
Mel silenced her own questions just long enough to seek out Ott. Yes, there he was, not too far from her in the…clay? She found the others, too—the baby. They were all there, interred again, but not buried in the same manner as when the meeting hall had collapsed on them. Here, the dirt was…fluid. She was not crushed, but could breathe. Just not move. Exactly. She attempted to flex her toes, to tilt her head.
“Stop fidgeting,” Treyna said, irritation in her tone. “This is difficult enough as it is. If it weren’t for the grains of sand I left inside you, I wouldn’t have been able to bring you with us at all.” Mel frowned—well, she meant to frown though nothing moved on her face.
Grains of trog-tainted sand inside of her body?
She would have shaken her head in disbelief, had she been able to move. The taint could very well be what was causing her sickness and—what she hoped was temporary—blindness. Turning inward now she went through the fibers of her body, prodding with gentle invisible tendrils along the tendons and through the passageways of her body, in a way in which no human could ever be acquainted with herself. Eventually, on traversing the recesses of her breath ways, she encountered maybe a few tiny grains of sand. They were easier to find now, of course, because the flesh around them had blackened as if charred by smoke…or rotted by poison. Which, of course, it was.
When she had been outside of Cillary Keep, her first symptom of trog exposure had been an utter loss of control over her emotions. Then she’d lost her strength and her Mask-given abilities. Only later had she realized that the trogs had caused it. Later, at the big house, when she’d worked with trogs to clear them of their agamite, she’d not been affected in the same way…or had she? She thought back now to those heady, emotional days with Ott. Like the heightened romance of a newly-wed couple…though they had never wed in the tradition of his people. She wondered now, with an uncomfortable pang, if that high emotion had been caused by poison. And not love.
“Keep still,” Treyna reminded her. Mel must have been squirming under her emotional distress. She was such an inadequate human, never sure of what to do with her excessive feelings.
Still, she wouldn’t remove the grains of tainted soil from herself—even though she felt as if she might be dying, inch by inch. Nor could she even feel the least bit resentful toward Treyna, who was now rescuing her. All of them, for that matter.
“Where are you taking us?” Mel couldn’t detect any movement and she had no visual guides, no physical markers by which she could discover their direction.
“I overheard you and your Ott speaking about how the trogs may not be able to burrow into the sand of the desert, that it might cave in on them like water. I don’t know if I can move through it either. I need water, I think. Without it how I can mold clay for shaping a pot? But I mean to take us to the edge of this clay all the way south until we’re safe. Now stop speaking to me so that I can mind what I’m doing.”
Though Mel couldn’t see Treyna’s expression, she could hear the grit of her teeth and feel her determination. Somehow, this wounded woman—this girl who had never had a chance to be a child—was moving them through the dirt, underground, away from those who would kill them. What had they, other than Harro, ever done for Treyna? Shame crept through Mel at her treatment of the woman. Though Mel had neither eschewed or taunted her or been outright patronizing toward her, Mel had never found the time to accept her, to learn about her, and to value her as an equal.
And now this girl would save them all.
“Thank you,” Mel said. She was weak and sick, but grateful beyond measure. And Treyna didn’t chastise her for speaking this time.
Chapter 59
Zunee felt as if her chest were a bellows trying to stoke a fire that would not light. Every time she took a great breath to knock away a line of monsters, another wave of the creatures formed to replace it. Infinite like fever nightmares, they swarmed over the desert’s red hills like water overflowing a riverbank.
“Over there. They come from the west,” Deni said, pointing at the hill line, the bloody scrapes on his knuckles standing out.
So far, she’d been doing a good enough job on her own, blowing back the phalanxes of monsters, the row after row coming toward them. Her thoughts touched on the camp city just southeast of them where her sisters—and now numerous stragglers, remnants of her father’s enemies, and drought refugees—gathered in blissful ignorance of the threat now advancing on them.
She turned to where Deni had pointed and blew back the line of black spots that marred the desert floor. Bodies flew—most got back up, but many did not. Unlike when she’d blown the warlords out into the Great Mother’s barren garden, she felt something akin to panic flutter in her stomach. While she didn’t fear death…to be drowned in a sea of these beasts did not appeal in the slightest. And if the creatures somehow made it past her, which their increasing and never-ending numbers would indicate that they would…overpower her…she and Deni would be long dead before the suffering of her sisters and her charges would occur. She would not be around to feel their pain, nor hear their screams. Nor see them die.
But now, she felt that same flutter of panic in her belly grow when she thought about them. And she faltered, allowing the waves to the north advance while she decimated the ones to the west, killing a tenth of them at the most. Still, they came.
“To the north now,” Deni said, the urgency increasing in his voice.
The creatures’ gain was a small one, but one nonetheless. It meant that as Zunee’s attention was divided more and more, and as she began to fatigue, she would fail.
Because though she was the wind, she was only human.
It went on and on, and just as she knew, the waves of monsters advanced, slow but relentless.
Deni was looking at her, his face tight with concern. She sympathized with him—he could do nothing but watch his fate advance. He was a man who needed to act, to do, to win. Yet, their entire lives, she’d done nothing but try to best him at every turn. No wonder he thought of her only as a friend and hunting partner.
Her knees beginning to shake with exhaustion, her jaw loose, then stiff with spasms, she kept her eyes on the advancing monsters, but her focus on Deni. Always on him.
I’m sorry, she wanted to tell him.
She’d never apologized to him in the past. For anything. For the loss of his family. For the role of adopted nephew to which he’d been relegated in her father’s tent. Never fully accepted, never fully loved by anyone other than herself. She wanted to turn to him now and place her hands on his smooth, brown face, though it was bruised and beaten now. She needed to look into his dark eyes that were blacker than the darkest night—because the desert night was always bright and illuminated with an infinite number of stars, whereas Deni’s eyes were fathomless and unreadable, even when he was laughing. If she had the chance now, if the evil creatures weren’t bearing down on them, she would apologize to him for everything.
When she turned back to face the advancing creatures, Deni’s hands rested on her shoulders, one on each. He pulled her back around to face him, and as her heart began a solid, thumping beat within her chest, his steady, dark gaze met hers. Despite the horror of their circumstances, the faintest hint of a crease appeared in the corner of his swollen mouth, and a half-born smile crinkled his eyes. As she touched her forehead to his, understanding passed between them, and her heart lifted.
Chapter 60
Ott found himself expelled from the bowels of the earth into a teeming pile of trogs. Lutra on a spit, would nothing ever be easy again?
One moment, he’d been standing in the rank, underground passageway speaking to Mel, his feelings of uncertainty and helplessness increasing over the state of her ever-worsening ailments. Th
e next instant, he’d been shot out of the dirt, black and grimy as a piglet into a heap of trogs. Like the flip of a coin, his vision turned bright red with his berserker rage and grabbing his axe, he set to work clearing a path through them for the others.
Mel, he saw now, was stumbling to a clearing with the help of Bookman and Rav. Treyna had made it, along with a dirt-blackened Harro in his equally mucked-up wheeled chair. Ott coughed as he inhaled a lungful of dust. His vision had turned everything red, even the dirt underfoot. Although it didn’t seem to match the dirt that covered his group.
He shoved the body of a trog aside as its head separated from its neck. Had Ott retained an ounce of humanity, he might have stopped to ponder that the trog might have been Bookman’s brethren. But right now, he saw trogs only as obstacles to be mowed down.
Thank the good gods for Rav, she seemed to know in which direction they needed to go. Ott couldn’t see a bloody thing with this swarm of grunters around them. He roared, furious at them for hurting his woman. It was their stench that did it—she was losing her battle against their poison and he was going to murder every bloody last one of them.
“This way,” Rav shouted above the din. She waved her thin brown arm and somehow managed to avoid a collision with a trog who lunged past her and at Ott. Where the woman thought she was going, he didn’t know. Frankly, he didn’t have time to care. Even if she led in error, it was some place other than here. And that was good enough for him.
But Mel’s friend was marching at a hasty pace now, taking them to what seemed the center of the ocean of trogs. Her thin, brown shoulders were set as rigid as a soldier’s, as if attitude alone would get her through the wall of their enemies. Ott lunged ahead of the madwoman, shouldering another filthy trog out of the way. If she wanted to take them into the center of the battle, it was fine with him. His suffering would be short-lived, in any case.
Bookman still pushed Harro’s wheeled chair, but Mel lagged a little behind—which was not safe with trogs all around them. While his gaze was on her, she coughed, hunching her shoulders, and when her hand came away from her lips, blood ran from the corner of her mouth.
“Mel!” he cried, but his words were drowned out by the snarl of a trog, whose downward chop with a rough-hewn saber forced Ott to block and feint. A chop of Ott’s axe to the beast’s ribs felled it, but another took its place. He shoved it off, his vision infused with red rage so much that he saw only red and the black around it. The ground had turned to sand, and he slogged through it, ankle-deep. Luckily for them, the sand slowed the trogs down just as much. The creatures panted, air chuffing through their bristled snouts, sounding like horses at full gallop.
Above them, the sand sloped upward into a wind-swept peak, and when Ott glanced up…Gods above, they were going to be swept under by another wave of beasts. He saw their horns and spears crest the top of the hill. A hundred of the creatures came for them, if not more.
One or two in dribs and drabs, he could take. But, Lutra, not this.
Ahead of him, Rav had halted on a weird smooth stone cut the shape of a piece from a pie tin. A wedge, Ott thought, then shook his head and swung his axe in the face of an oncoming trog. Who wondered about words for shapes at a time like this? He should be at Mel’s side. If these were their last moments on earth, he wanted to be with her.
She stood apart from the others—for now, safe from trogs, thank Lutra—coughing, still. Stopping to gasp for breath, she coughed more, crouching to put her hands on her knees, almost losing her balance, dirty hair hanging in her face, as her hacking overcame her. As he watched through his hazy red vision, her hand came away from her mouth, red.
“Mel!” he shouted.
This time, she held up a bloodstained hand to wave him away. As always, she thought of others before herself. The exact opposite of him, he thought ruefully, swinging his axe again. How could one such as she ever choose a far-inferior person like him with whom to spend her life? He didn’t know—other than to attribute it to the incredible luck that had followed him his entire life. Thank Lutra for that. And thank Lutra again for Mel.
Then the trogs crested the top of the hill and swarmed toward them. Ott roared in frustration, but he knew, deep inside, that all the berserker rage in the world wouldn’t succeed when it was only one man against a tide of the creatures. They would drown.
Harro’s chair had gotten stuck in the sand, but now Treyna was paving the way for him to reach the others. Bookman pushed the handles of it, and they began to move at a fast pace.
Rav, standing on the flat stone, waved her arms. The babe in the sling on her chest bounced and cried for what may have been the first time that Ott had heard her the entire journey. Rav was shouting now, too, though Ott couldn’t hear her. She’d spotted someone, and gave a shout of triumph that seemed to indicate she’d succeeded in capturing his attention.
Off to the side, Mel collapsed to her knees and spat blood onto the sand. With a shout of anguish, Ott lowered his axe and ran to her.
Behind him, the trogs flooded over the hill.
“No,” he cried, but he didn’t hear himself. His voice was drowned out by a woman’s voice. She cried the same word, but in a shout so loud it shook the entire arena in which the battle took place. The valley of sand vibrated, the sloping hills surrounding it shedding their tops layers of silt. Ott spun around, looking for the source of the voice, but it echoed around the hills. The line of trogs grew closer. He could hear their snarls and guttural growls. Crouching low, he braced himself for the first strike.
In an ear-popping gust, the entire line of beasts was swept away. Rough and rusted weapons clanking, most of them flipped over backward, feet last in view. With hoarse shouts of surprise, they blew back over the hill as if they were leaves in the wind. Ott’s ears blew out and the hair on the top of his head was mussed, but otherwise, he remained untouched.
He whirled around again looking for the source of the blast, but found only his friends’ equally confused faces. Then he saw Mel lying on the ground.
Chapter 61
“No. Mel, no.” Ott skidded the rest of the way to her and fell to his knees beside her. His heavy axe landed with a thud next to him in the sand. What good was it now if Mel was—no, he wouldn’t even think it. “Mel,” he said her name again as he scooped her off the ground and brought her into his arms.
She was pale and weak, as her glassy, brown eyes stared up at him. “Once more,” she rasped, but he didn’t know what she meant. But then she stirred and twisted in his arms, turning to the side. Another endless cough racked her body, her gasps and wheezing inhalations robbing him of his own breath. His hands on her back and sides felt every spasm, every faltering breath as she failed to draw in enough air.
Her body wrenched one more time, and she coughed more blood into her hand. As she lay panting in his arms—just when he was sure she was dying—she smiled and color suffused her cheeks.
“Much better. I can see now. Somewhat,” she said. Looking at her hand, all he saw was the red tint of his vision. He knew her palm was covered with blood because of how dark it was, but otherwise, he didn’t understand what she was saying. “I had tainted dirt inside me. Had to get it out. I’ll be better in a while.”
Better than what? he wondered, looking around as he set her down and stood to assess the latest threat. Even if she had stopped coughing, they were still surrounded by trogs that were coming closer and closer, advancing.
But now she was standing, albeit hunched over like an elderly woman. He switched his axe to his single hand and offered her his other arm, which for some reason, made her laugh, setting off another bout of coughing.
He shook his head, amazed at how much better he felt, even though they were about to die, by the looks of it. The woman was a balm to him, even in the worst of times.
“Follow Rav,” she said, between coughs. Without hesitating, Ott turned the direction she’d gestured, and made their way as quickly as they could to the center of the basin.
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He watched a sudden commotion as Rav thrust her babe to Bookman’s arms. Mel’s friend lunged toward another thin brown woman—Ott could have sworn they were sisters, though he didn’t know how that was possible in the middle of this bloody red wasteland—who was standing in the center of a smooth stone. But before Rav reached her, the bruised and bloody fellow with the sister held his arms out wide in caution.
“She’s the only thing between us and them,” he shouted. “Don’t interrupt her.” Then he added, “Please, Rav.” Some kind of silent communication passed between the two, something Ott couldn’t even pretend to understand. But then Mel came up behind the girl on the stone and, tilting her head to the side, performed an invisible examination of the girl. Ott shivered—he knew how that felt.
“I’m going to touch her,” Mel told them, asking for permission more than anything. When the young man nodded, Mel lay a hand on the girl’s thin brown shoulder.
While the girl had been taut with concentration, her beaten body strung tight as a wire, now she stood straighter and with more spirit.
Though Ott wouldn’t have been able to tell it without seeing it, as he looked across the arena, the wave of trogs rising toward them was bowled backward over the lip of the crater. And then they were gone from sight.
He knew they’d be back. But for now, he let his axe fall to the ground with a thud. Might as well rest when he could. Lutra knew the trogs would be breathing down their necks again in no time.
Only then did Ott notice Rav and the new girl who looked like her were embracing and he realized, stupidly, that it was indeed her sister, the one they’d been looking for this whole time. He watched them step back, arms still around each other. One slim hand stroked the other’s face as they stared into each other’s eyes, intent and rapt as if drinking the other in after a long drought. A lump seemed to rise up in Ott’s throat and the red faded from his vision with a mist that he blinked back. He had to look away before he embarrassed himself, thinking about his own friends and sister back home.