The Red Sea

by Edward W. Robertson

  To match the mood in the air, rain began to sprinkle the canopy. Dante lowered his head and tried to ignore the percussive droplets on his crown. "Your language. Will you teach it to me?"

  "Why?" Winden said. "You leave here in twelve days."

  "Which means that for the next twelve days, you're our only way to communicate. With people who appear to be professional liars. If we're separated, or you get hurt, we could find ourselves in deep trouble."

  "Our language is for ourselves. Outsiders have no claim to it." She was quiet for a moment. "Why are you here?"

  "You know that. To save my father."

  "You barely saw him. You ask no questions about him. It's obvious you care nothing for him."

  "You're right. I came here because I would have regretted it if I didn't. If he had been all I'd found here, I doubt if I'd be hunting flowers with you now."

  "What else did you find?"

  "People who, despite their fondness for scamming strangers, seem peaceful. Who deserve to live free of the threat of constant violence. If I can help give that to them, then I'll leave here happy I came."

  She pressed her lips together. "I'll teach you. But if someone asks, it wasn't me. You will lie."

  She started at once. The language was called Taurish, named for the raiders, who were said to be the island's first inhabitants. Over the years, Dante had tackled several foreign languages, but soon found Taurish to be the easiest he'd encountered. Structurally, its only major difference from Mallish was that it tended to place the subject of the sentence at the very beginning, or even to isolate that subject as a chopped-up sentence of it own, which explained Winden's occasionally curious Mallish grammar.

  Besides that, though, Taurish was very intuitive. Learning a conversational vocabulary was going to take far more time than he had, but by the time they made camp that night, he was already able to form simple sentences.

  In the morning, they resumed the march. A single mountain loomed ahead, abutted by a lower shoulder that Winden confirmed was the Dreaming Peaks. Within an hour, the jungle thinned to a tree-studded veldt. A few hundred yards to their east, the land fell away in a series of sheer cliffs. A mile below, the sea shimmered and tossed. When the wind was right, Dante could hear the surf booming.

  Streams trickled through the grass. Soon, there were no trees at all. Small pools of water blistered the rocks, steaming and churning, the vapors smelling of bad eggs. The banks of the pools were encrusted with blue, red, and yellow crystals.

  Ahead, the eastern edge of the land bulged up into spires of naked rock. A trail was worn through the grass, leading straight to the pass between the spires and the mountain to their right. Cresting it, they looked down on the ruins of a city.

  "Can't imagine why they abandoned this place," Blays said. "The location is so convenient."

  "It's not abandoned." Winden withdrew a small bone flute from her pouch. She blew three quick notes. They seemed to linger on the air longer than they should.

  After a minute, a man appeared at the fringe of the ruins. He carried a tall staff and wore a purple robe the exact shade as the ever-present clay; it must have been dyed with it. He stopped ten feet from them and spoke a few words that Dante couldn't catch.

  Winden replied. After a brief conversation, she took off her pack, kneeled, and withdrew a shiny black box. The man lifted the lid and withdrew a shaden, water dripping from its black shell. He put it back in the box and tucked the box under his arm, then gestured down the path.

  "We proceed," Winden said. "Don't speak to anyone. No matter what they say or do."

  The man in the purple robe led the way. Winden continued to speak to him. Dante hardly understood any of it, but heard one word repeated: Tauren.

  Crumbled walls rose to the sides of the street. Five minutes later, Dante hadn't seen a single soul. He didn't smell wood smoke or any of the general miasma associated with permanent human habitation. A white crow perched on a crumbling wall, raucously criticizing them as they passed. To the right, a solitary woman tended rows of orange flowers.

  From their left, the spires of rock veered closer, channeling the ruins into a narrow canyon. The way ahead was blocked by a high wall in better repair than anything they'd seen so far. The path led straight to an entry in its side. There, the man in purple swept aside a shaggy-haired pelt hanging over the doorway, leading them into a cavernous chamber with twenty-foot ceilings.

  Bodies stretched from wall to wall.

  They lay on thin pallets, eyes closed. The nearest of them, a middle-aged woman, was breathing evenly, yet even with the rise and fall of her chest, she looked more like she was dead than asleep. There were perhaps forty of the sleeping people in all, dressed as simply as the fishermen in Kandak. Candlefruit glowed on black stone pedestals. Despite the height of the ceiling, the room felt close, smelling faintly of sweat and something floral, along with the pungent odor of the burning fruit. Down the way, another man in a purple robe trimmed a sleeping man's unruly beard with a pair of silver scissors.

  Something jabbed Dante in the side. He whirled on Blays, then grabbed his rope belt to restrain his fist from flying into Blays' face. Winden walked down the middle of the room and Dante hurried after. The man in purple carried the box of live shaden off to a side room. Winden continued forward. Ahead, daylight peeped around a hide draped over the exit.

  As Dante neared it, a woman sat bolt upright on her pallet. Her eyes blazed from the pallid sheen of her face, locking on his.

  "De tregen!" she yelled. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She lunged at Dante, hands outstretched like claws, but her legs gave out and she spilled to the floor, jaw hitting with a crack.

  Dante moved to help her. Winden grabbed his upper arm. Across the room, the man with the scissors stood, gathered the folds of his robe, and swished toward them. He took the woman by the shoulder and poured a viscous fluid down her throat. Winden hauled Dante outside.

  "What are the monks doing in there?" he said.

  She walked down the grass-dotted clay. "What they have to."

  "Really? Because it looks like they're keeping them unconscious."

  "Those people? They're the luckiest ones on the island."

  "Here's my question," Blays said. "Why'd we have to use shells to bribe our way through? The way those guys are snoozing, we could have cartwheeled through here and they'd never have known."

  She glanced around them, but they were alone again. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. Where we go when we die. Do you remember what I said?"

  "Despite trying very hard not to."

  "The Dreamers. When they eat the flower, they sink deeper than sleep. To the brink of death. Once they are there, they fight to rescue those who Kaval damned to be torn by the birds and the crabs."

  "They're saving souls?" Blays said. "How does Kaval feel about their efforts to defy his will?"

  Winden shrugged. "The Dreamers, most spend their lives here. Some die without saving a single one of the damned. Even Kaval respects their dedication. For us? There is no higher calling than to free those who have been burdened. That is why we bring the shells. Shaden treats the poison they take in order to enter the Dream. They do our holiest work. It is our duty to support them."

  A cold wind ran down from the peak. Dante tugged up his collar. "What was the old woman saying? 'He forgives'?"

  "Kaval must have freed one of the damned. A rare event."

  "Do they ever visit the dead? Speak to them?"

  "So they say." She stepped around a length of masonry that had fallen across the unpaved road. "For what the Dreamers do, the Tauren leave them alone. But the monk I spoke to said the raiders have been more active than ever. We'll have to be far more careful from now on."

  The land before them widened out. To their right, a stream cut down from the cloud-swept mountain, gashing a frothy, white channel eastward, then spilling over the cliffs. A wooden bridge spanned the roiling waters. Within minutes of crossing it, they were back in the w
ilderness, with no sign the island had ever contained anything else.

  * * *

  As they descended the southern face of the Dreaming Peaks, Dante got a clear look at the way ahead. The island, as far as he could make out—and Winden confirmed this—was essentially two land masses, bridged by the peaks. The southern lobe was roughly circular, with jungle on its higher east side, savannah on the lower central regions where the Tauren held sway, and a scrubby desert on its west.

  The molbry flowers grew in the lower elevations of the southeast jungle. Particularly around a formation called the Bloodfalls, which Dante dearly hoped was just a historical name. Winden set a relentless pace, breaking from the jungle wherever possible to strike out across the grassy middle of the southlands. When questioned, she seemed less worried about them missing their return trip on the Sword of the South and more concerned that Larsin Galand wouldn't survive to see their return.

  To try to save two days, she intended to stop in to see the Shigur, who lived on the way to the Bloodfalls and might have the molbry flowers on hand. On the way, she continued to teach Dante the Taurish language. Once, they saw white smoke pluming from the coast where the Tauren held a village under siege. After that, Dante used the nether to kill a handful of jungle rodents (rats with long, powerful back legs like jackrabbits), then used the shadows to revive them, bonding his eyes to theirs. He sent them loping ahead to scout for Tauren warriors. A part of him wanted to recruit some of the four-handed, golden-furred tree creatures—Winden claimed they were a species of monkey—but he couldn't bring himself to hurt them.

  On the second day, his undead scouts spied three men in the jungle carrying bows and spears. Long bone daggers hung from their hips, curved like scythes, serrated on one edge. When he described these to Winden, she identified them as coming from sawteeth, a species of shark that swam around with their mouths always open. Along with these, the warriors wore dark hoods. Winden said they were wandren, people attached to no particular clan or settlement who roamed the island as traders. In desperate times, they often turned criminal or sold their services to raiders. Wary of being betrayed to the Tauren, Winden cut a wide berth around them.

  The morning of the third day, as their jungle trek continued, they came before a matted wall of branches and thorns eight feet high. Red-striped hornets as big as Dante's thumb lumbered between the flowers growing from the kudzu. They diverted around it. Dante sent his rat scouts bounding ahead. Five minutes later, he still hadn't found a gap in the growth, but for some reason, Winden was smiling.

  "What are you so happy about?" Dante said. "The fortress of thorns in our way? Or the kitten-sized wasps guarding it?"

  She gestured at the brambles. "This wall. Does it look natural to you?"

  "Not especially. But neither does the island's perpetual summer. Or those golden monkeys that keep following us around."

  "This is new. It must have been put here by the Shigur."

  Blays examined the wall. "Well, their tactical error was making these plants out of wood. That blade of yours should be through it in a minute."

  "You think they'll be eager to trade with us after we've torn down their defenses?"

  "If they get mad, remind them their wall will regrow on its own."

  "Grow a vine over it," Dante said. "We don't have time to spend all day hunting for a gate."

  After a moment's thought, she did just that. Ten minutes later, the three of them stood on the other side of the wall, picking burrs and thorns from each other's clothing and hair. The forest inside the wall was significantly thinner than the jungle outside it. Almost every one of the trees bore fruit of some kind, few of which Dante recognized.

  "If you see someone," Winden said. "Stop. Let yourself be known."

  She'd no sooner said this than a young man appeared a hundred yards ahead. He froze, gaped at them, then turned and ran.

  Winden halted. "We wait here."

  A great number of birds flitted around the trees, snapping up any bug that attempted to land on the fruit. Blays left his blades sheathed, hands folded over his stomach. Dante pulled the nether closer. Where the young man had run off, five warriors emerged, approaching them. They were armed with spears, at least two of which bore metal tips. Two of the soldiers were men and three were women, but they all wore the same purple-trimmed yellow tunics. After a conversation Dante could almost but not quite follow, the warriors escorted them to a trail through the trees.

  After a few hundred yards, the fruit trees fell away. Lone trees stood isolated from each other among patches of manicured grass. These trees were graceful, trunks rising like the necks of swans. They were bent downward at the tips, each one burdened by an enormous seed pod. Long, narrow ovals, the smallest were three feet in length, with some upwards of twenty. The largest were supported by scaffolds erected around them.

  Blays nudged his shoulder. "Do those look like bananas to you?"

  "Oh yeah," Dante said. "Especially the part where they're as long as a house."

  "Those aren't bananas," Winden said. "Look."

  She pointed to the left. Beneath an open-walled thatched roof, four people swarmed around the shell of a nut that was thirty feet long if it was an inch. It had been split in half along the seam. Two workers scrubbed dark brown fiber from the outside of the shell while two others scraped the interior.

  Dante craned his neck. "Is that a boat? Like you have in Kandak?"

  Winden smiled faintly. "Shigur. Boat-Growers. The ships they make are seamless. Hard as rock but as light as bamboo. Finest on the island."

  "They grow boats. On trees."

  "Wait until you see their houses."

  Just as Dante began to glimpse them—they were round and onion-roofed, and though they were asymmetrical, that only made them look more solid—a woman moved to intercept them, accompanied by four more armed locals. She wore a leaf-like green cape that tapered to a point. As she neared, Dante saw it was a leaf, clasped around the neck by a thin curling vine like a pea plant.

  Winden offered a greeting, which Dante understood, then said a lot of words he didn't. There was much gesturing, particularly to the southwest. The direction of the Tauren.

  "We have bad news," Winden said. "This woman is a Harvester. They have no molbry flowers and know of none between here and the falls."

  Dante folded his arms. "I suppose it would be too much to hope to catch a break at some point."

  "Also, they were attacked. By the Tauren. Some died. Others maimed."

  "All right," Blays said. "That's slightly more tragic than not being able to find a flower."

  Winden glanced at Dante sidelong. "Would you help them?"

  "Why?" Dante said. "Not to say I won't. But is there some reason you want me to do this?"

  "The Tauren. If they keep pressing, we won't be able to fight them by ourselves. We'll need every ally we can get."

  The woman wearing the leaf-cape gazed at him steadily. Dante inclined his head to Winden. "Tell her I'll do anything I can."

  The two women spoke briefly. The woman in the cape gestured Dante on, leading them into town past the round houses, which appeared to have been grown from the ground. In different circumstances, he might have marveled at this, but he was too busy being led into one of the black stone buildings that speckled the entire island. Inside, three people lay on pallets. Each was in the fetal position, right arms clenched to their chest. Their wrists terminated in wads of bloody bandages.

  Dante unwrapped the rags from the wrist of an unconscious man. The blood was rusty, at least a day old, and the rags clung to the dried fluid. "Why did they do this?"

  Winden conversed with the other woman. "They couldn't pay what the Tauren wanted. The Tauren said, if you won't use your hands to work, then we'll take those instead."

  "Lovely people," Blays said. "You ought to invite them for a swim in the Current."

  Dante cut his arm and fed the nether. He couldn't regrow their hands, but he could smooth over the wounds. Fight off
the infections. He did so, then washed his hands and stepped out into the courtyard behind the building, joined by Blays, Winden, the caped woman, and her warriors.

  "She thanks you," Winden said. "She says you must be very powerful."

  "That sounds like flattery," Blays said.

  "She wants your help."

  "Definitely flattery."

  Dante glanced at the other women. "Help with what? Do they have more wounded?"

  Winden shook her head. "Two months ago. The Tauren came. When the Shigur couldn't pay their demands, the Tauren took four children. As ransom."

  Dante drew back his head. "I see where this is going. No way."

  Blays squinted at him. "As in, no way are we going to help these people recover their kidnapped children?"

  "Where are they being held? At the tower?"

  "Correct," Winden said.

  "Which is how far from here?"

  "Forty miles. But not much is forested. Two days of walking."

  Dante held up a palm. "Which means four days round trip. Plus whatever time it takes to free them. That's too long. We'll miss our boat."

  "So we won't walk," Blays said. "We'll run."

  "Using the horses that don't exist here?"

  "Using our legs. Which you will refresh with the nether. Allowing us to be there in no more than a day."

  "And on arrival, my supply of shadows will be as exhausted as our legs."

  Blays sighed raggedly. "Remember that year I spent learning to shadowalk so I could hide from you? Well, my plan here—and let me know if I need to slow down—is to use those same abilities to infiltrate the tower and get those kids back."

  "And you'll get them outside how, exactly? Give them a quick shadowalking lesson? And then we carry them back here for forty miles? And then go look for the molbries, and hope we find them right away, and also that nothing else delays us on our return to Kandak, or that my dad doesn't die in the extra days we're gone?"

  The Harvester and her people were staring at him. Dante lowered his voice before continuing. "We came here to help my father. He may be useless to me, but to the people in Kandak, he's a savior. You want to help the Shigur? Fine. But you can only do so by sacrificing the Kandeans."