Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert)

by Leona Wisoker

  “Did you hear Evkit telling me the story of this place?”

  “Yes.” His tone, mordantly amused, said Of course.

  “Is that true?”

  “More or less.”

  “And you were—”

  “Leave that for another time. Let’s go get some dinner,” he suggested.

  She opened her mouth to protest, to demand the rest of the story; then found herself at a loss for words and suddenly aware that she was hungry.

  Deiq’s grip on her upper arm tightened. He let out a small sigh, then turned her around and steered her through the maze of broken stonework to the small teyanain campsite.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Teyanain trail food never sat right in Deiq’s stomach; this time, the offering was stale flatbread soaked in boiled goat milk and a side of fermented black beans. Alyea’s nose wrinkled, but she had the sense not to protest or to hesitate about eating; Idisio showed no discomfort over the smell or appearance. Deiq gagged down a few bites, then handed the rest off to Idisio without comment.

  The smell of the camp, from the food to the rank sweat of a day’s hard travel, suddenly felt like a thick slop in his nostrils. He stood and walked out into the dark beyond the firelight. Once far enough away that he could breathe again, he put his back to one of the few remaining upright pillars and studied the stars, a vast, irritated restlessness stirring in his muscles. He wanted to move, but didn’t dare go too far from Alyea; and right now, walking off his frustration would take him miles from camp in short order.

  Some time later, he felt Idisio approaching. Not inclined to talk, he allowed himself a small grunt of acknowledgment.

  “Everyone’s settled,” Idisio said quietly, and perched on a chunk of overturned column.

  “Good for them,” Deiq said, glaring out into the dark, and wished Idisio had stayed in camp; he wasn’t in the mood for inanely pointless statements.

  Idisio scuffed a foot lightly across the litter of stone chips on the ground. “I’ve never been able to see so well on a moonless night before,” he said. “It’s strange.”

  Not as stupid a comment; worth answering, at least. “You’re growing into your heritage,” Deiq said. “Over the next twenty or thirty years, you’ll see more changes.” He tilted his head and looked up at the constellations overhead, thinking about his intention of teaching Idisio the old stories; but surrounded by the ghosts of his failures, he couldn’t bring himself to care enough.

  “How come I thought I was human all my life?”

  “Because that’s how you were raised,” Deiq said, impatience returning. “If you’d been raised by a family of ducks you’d have thought yourself a mallard.”

  “Really?” The startlement in Idisio’s voice was a sharp reminder of his youth and inexperience.

  “No,” Deiq said heavily. “It’s an allegory.” He stalked a few paces away to relieve his frustration; humans didn’t understand such things, and Idisio had been raised with human blinders. Deiq didn’t have the patience at the moment to strip them away.

  “Don’t you mean metaphor?” Idisio said from behind him, not moving to follow. Deiq stopped and turned around slowly, annoyance melting into a mild interest.

  “No,” he said. “There’s an old tale I’m referring to. Allegory.”

  Idisio hopped off his crumbling seat and came over to stand beside Deiq. “Show me the well?”

  Deiq blinked, taken aback. “The well?”

  “From the story I told you.”

  “I told you that story wasn’t any good. It’s distorted.”

  “But any big city needs wells,” Idisio pointed out. “And ha’reye like water. And you told Alyea that Evkit’s story was reasonably accurate. So whatever happened, was near a well.”

  Deiq stared at the younger ha’ra’ha’s night-blurred features, astounded at the sharp reasoning; perhaps Idisio didn’t suffer from human blinders quite as much as Deiq had thought. And he shouldn’t have been able to eavesdrop without alerting Deiq.

  He settled for saying, “I didn’t know you were nearby, hearing all that.”

  “I’m good at sneaking around,” Idisio said with some pride.

  “Apparently so.” Deiq let out a long breath, debating whether to warn the younger of how rude he’d been, and how dangerous stalking an adult ha’ra’ha was; decided Idisio already knew, and didn’t care. The boy was brash and arrogant, just like Deiq himself at that age.

  I’m not old, damn it. I’m not! He’s just too damned young, that’s all.

  Deiq pushed aside that line of thought and turned to stare over the ruins, gathering his bearings.

  “All right. This way.”

  Sunlight poured through enormous stone arches painted with vivid red and white stripes. The floor beneath was thick whitestone tile, cool under bare feet even on the hottest day of the year. Walls were sparse, more dividing sections than true barriers; the staggered archways led from the lush gardens to the luxurious throne room with little visual interference.

  Fine draperies of handwoven silk, laced with threads of silver and gold, hung between the pillars in the throne room, providing some privacy but allowing the intermittent wind to wander through unchecked. Sunlight seemed to bounce from every surface; the white underfoot, the drapery threads, the massive, gem-bedecked throne on which the kaen sat, draped in shimmering cloth and watching Deiq’s slow approach.

  Sunlight failed to light the kaen’s face, which was shadowed and harsh, pitted from a childhood bout of sun-pox. His deep-set black eyes glared unforgivingly.

  “Ha’inn,” the kaen said, but the word was a curse, not an honor. “Come for my other daughter? Or perhaps for my only son?”

  Deiq blinked away from sun-flooded memory into midnight darkness, and realized he’d gripped the low wall in front of him so hard the stone was beginning to crumble under his fingers. He let go gingerly; a few small fragments skittered to the ground with a hissing rattle.

  “This was the well,” he said aloud, smoothing his palm gently over the wall in silent apology to the innocent stone. “The central well of the city. This is where the seers and wise men and priests came to commune with the gods . . . and with the ha’reye.”

  “Plural?” Idisio said beside him.

  Deiq decided he’d definitely have to stop thinking of the younger ha’ra’ha as ignorant. “There was only one here,” he said, “but back then, there were so many more of them . . . speaking to one might as well have been speaking to all. It was . . . like a net. Tug on one, the rest feel it. Now there’s too much space between. . . .”

  He stopped, pursing his lips; none of this was news to the teyanain, but still, no point risking the conversation moving into areas they might not know about. He wasn’t stupid enough to think he’d sense one listening nearby; today’s teyanain had an uncanny ability to hide from other-vision when they wanted to.

  “So what really happened?” Idisio asked, trailing his own fingers across the well-wall surface.

  “I was an idiot,” Deiq said, and sighed. “I didn’t see it that way at the time, but I made a bad mistake, and upset the kaen; and he passed that anger on to his son. It didn’t help that the son turned out sterile. . . .”

  In the back of his mind, he remembered the young kaen’s rage: Lift your curse! he’d demanded. Deiq had shaken his head, over and over, trying to explain the condition had nothing to do with their mutual antagonism, and couldn’t be so simply cured. Not surprisingly, the young man hadn’t believed him. . . .

  “He thought I’d done something to stop him from fathering children,” Deiq said after the memories subsided enough to allow him speech again. “He swore he’d have his revenge on me. I tried to tell him it wasn’t my doing. He wouldn’t listen.”

  Although he could have done a better job of explaining, in retrospect: arrogant, temperamental, and powerful, flushed with youth and surety, Deiq had seen humans with only a fraction less contempt than his parent ha’rethe. He’d made mistake after mistak
e and seen it all as human idiocy rather than his own rashness.

  “He threatened to refuse the annual gifting if I would not give him back the ability to father a child,” Deiq said, his voice thickening in his throat. “I told him the death of his city would be on his own head, and I left.”

  “Left the room?” Idisio’s tone said he knew better.

  “The area. I didn’t come back for two hundred years, and by that time the city was long since destroyed, and the land barren.”

  Heavy silence hung around them for a long time. At last Idisio said, shakily, “You knew that would happen?”

  “Yes. I warned him, and he said I was lying to him, as ha’ra’hain always lie. I got angry, so I walked out . . . and kept going.”

  It had been so much more complicated than that, of course. But explaining years of built-up tension in a midnight discussion to a younger ha’ra’ha who had no idea how things had been back then wasn’t realistic. Maybe as they traveled, he’d be able to tell bits and pieces of the painful story, and make Idisio understand; but Deiq felt he had reached the limit of what he could talk about at the moment.

  “You could have stopped it,” Idisio said, his tone filled with accusation.

  Deiq stood silent, looking back through memory at the proud folk he’d been dealing with; at the prickly pride he himself had nursed at the time; at the many, many misunderstandings that had lain among the humans, the ha’reye, and the half-breeds—most of which still stood to this day.

  “Maybe,” he said at last. “I don’t really know.”

  “But you didn’t even care, did you?”

  Deiq blinked, rage rising fast and hard; he gripped the wall again. It crumbled sharply under his fingers, and he let the pebbly bits fall, rattling, to the ground. Some fell into the well itself, and landed not far down; the sands of a thousand years clogged the funnel.

  Idisio backed up several hasty steps, and Deiq felt the younger’s fear rising as sharply as his own anger. A red haze began to haunt the edges of his vision.

  “Go back to camp, Idisio,” Deiq said through his teeth. “Slowly.”

  Idisio took a startled, bounding step, then froze, breathless, as Deiq whipped around.

  “Slowly, Idisio,” Deiq breathed. The pulse in his temples overcame all sound, all sense; and the red haze was closing in. “Slowly.”

  Idisio edged a cautious step further away, another, and another. Deiq forced himself to turn around and stare into the blackness of what had once been a massive well. He fixed his thoughts on what the buckets had looked like: larger than a man, they had been hauled up throughout the day by an ingenious winch system only the Aerthraim understood today.

  At last Idisio and his jagged, provocative fear moved out of range, and Deiq let out a shaky breath; desperately hoping none of the teyanain had been around to see that, and wishing, not for the first time in his life, that he could find solace in prayer.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As the grey dawn warmed into a rich spray of orange and red across the horizon, Alyea realized the teyanain weren’t assembling into a traveling configuration. Instead, they seemed to be packing up in a much more leisurely fashion than usual, and the athain sat in a triangle, heads bowed, chanting under their breath. Watching them, Alyea was irresistibly reminded of musicians practicing before a performance.

  She shot Deiq a worried look. He lifted a shoulder, but the lines around his eyes were tight, and he said little as they waited. At last, everything loaded and packed away, Lord Evkit waved to them.

  “Follow,” he said, grinning. “We go.”

  Alyea cast a quick glance at the sun, already nearly free of the horizon and well on its way to heating up the desert around them. She said, tentatively, “Are we traveling far today, Lord Evkit?”

  “Very far,” he said, his grin settling into smug lines. Deiq gave a short bark of astonishment.

  “That’s not possible,” he said, but Evkit cut him off:

  “No, ha’inn, you no spoil surprise,” Evkit snapped, pointing a stern finger.

  Deiq shook his head, a dark frown wrinkling his face, but said nothing. Evkit waved again, beckoning them forward; Deiq nodded curtly to Alyea’s dubious glance. She bit back questions, but his evident startlement had laid a cold chill of fear down her spine that didn’t dissipate as they began walking.

  They filed through the ruins at the head of a tidy column of teyanain guards, athain, and packbearers. Idisio’s usual, brightly curious gaze seemed dimmed this morning, and he stared more ahead or at his feet than around at their surroundings; he refused to look directly at Deiq.

  Deciding to stay out of whatever was going on between those two, Alyea looked around as they walked. The great archways they’d camped among fell behind them, and the walls became thicker and less damaged; almost as though the palace had been the center of whatever disaster struck this place.

  At last they reached a building that seemed nearly whole: pale walls with wide, rounded openings curved about one massive central chamber, the roof pierced by nine symmetrical, almond-shaped openings, two of which had crumbled together into one irregular, gaping hole.

  Standing just outside one of the archways, Alyea could see that the floor had once been richly laid with an intricate mosaic of blue, red, black and white tiles. Many of the tiles had been pried free of their settings, and the few remaining pieces only hinted at the overall design.

  “Blue tiles,” Evkit said, following Alyea’s glance to the floor, “have ground in sacred stone, blessing-stone, what northerns call lapis. White is finest marble ground in with finest god-milk stone, what you call chalcedony. Red had rubies, black had jet, sometimes even black sapphire. All sacred, all great value. Most go with refugees fleeing city. Some go to looters, but not many.”

  He bared small teeth in a humorless grin.

  “Teyanain guard this city. This ours. We not like looters.” He looked at Deiq, as though expecting a challenge to his ownership claim; the ha’ra’ha just stared back, expressionless. Evkit shrugged, his grin fading into a faintly disappointed scowl, and returned his attention to Alyea. “This was temple of city, the place for all to worship. Old gods, these. Before Three, before Four. Strong gods.” His scowl turned to a smirk again. “Not nice gods. Liked sacrifices.”

  “Human?” Alyea said, one eye on Deiq, whose expression was rapidly darkening.

  “Sometimes,” Evkit said. “Not always death, though. Sometimes just—”

  “Lord Evkit,” Deiq said flatly. “Are you going to talk us to tears, or are we moving on at some point?”

  Evkit grinned, as smug as Alyea had ever seen him. “Of course we go,” he said, and motioned to the athain.

  The three athain knelt, each before a different archway, murmuring what sounded like prayers. Then they stood, one by one, and walked directly into the temple. Reaching the center of the room, each athain simply vanished, between one step and the next; Alyea let out a startled yelp.

  Idisio and Deiq had identical grim expressions, but showed no surprise.

  “I go now,” Evkit said. “See, you safe. You come next, ha’ra’ha—” he nodded to Deiq. “Then you, younger, and then the Lord Alyea. Order of honor, yes? Then the rest come through. Move quickly, door not open for long.”

  Deiq scowled in black outrage for just a moment; then shook his head and went back to looking grim.

  Evkit grinned and strutted out into the center of the room, vanishing as had the athain.

  Deiq drew in a deep breath and glanced around at the waiting teyanain. He put a hand on Alyea’s shoulder for just a moment, then walked forward and disappeared. Idisio made a faint, choked sound, and his gaze darted around as though he might try to run; then his back stiffened and he marched forward, tight-lipped.

  The remaining teyanain all took one tiny step forward; the message was clear. Alyea fiercely blocked out fear and walked into the ancient temple before thoughts of how insane this was could stop her.

  She passed from
chill to cold and back into a damp heat in less than a breath; took a sideways step, not quite a stagger. Someone caught her arm and pulled her aside. Something about the warmth and size of the hand told her it was Deiq; she let him direct her without protest.

  Blinking eyes clear of a strange haze, she looked around. Stone walls mottled with grey-black patterns rose into a dome overhead. The floor felt gritty, and glancing down, she saw it was covered with a light scattering of sand, seeming more as though it had been tracked in than spread deliberately.

  The air felt odd: overpoweringly humid after the desiccated ruins, and hard to breathe. Idisio stood, ashen-faced, not far away. Deiq stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders and his warmth unpleasantly intense against her back.

  Lord Evkit and a handful of other teyanain stood before them, and the look in the teyanain lord’s eyes drenched Alyea in sudden cold sweat. She felt Deiq’s hands tighten on her shoulders, a low growl building in his throat.

  “Welcome, Lord Alyea,” Evkit said, bowing and flourishing out one hand. As he straightened, Alyea bit back a gasp at the transformation. All pleasantness had disappeared: now Evkit’s eyes held a murderous glare. Hatred changed his entire face from amiably wrinkled to demonically furrowed.

  Deiq’s grip moved to just above her elbows. He almost lifted her out of the way, the growl emerging, then started forward. Before he completed the first stride, the air filled with a white dust. Alyea felt hands latch onto her from behind and draw her back, clear of the forming cloud.

  With a choking cough, Idisio staggered and collapsed. Deiq let out an ear-bruising bellow and flung himself at Evkit, hands reaching for the teyanin lord’s throat. Alyea delivered a neat back-kick that should have connected with a knee—or, given typical teyanin stature, something even more sensitive—and found herself kicking empty air instead. Off-balance, she would have fallen but for the firm grip of teyanain seemingly all around her now. Glancing reflexively towards Deiq, she stopped struggling, too fascinated by what was happening to pay attention to freeing herself.