Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert)

by Leona Wisoker

  Deiq fought with his eyes shut, lashing out with hands, feet, and a speed and viciousness that shocked her. Evkit had withdrawn well out of range, and the teyanain fighters surrounding the ha’ra’ha grinned as they danced clear by mere hairs. They seemed to regard this as nothing but a game, an elaborate dance with bizarre rules.

  At last one of Deiq’s blows connected solidly, and the unlucky teyanain tumbled across the room to crash into a wall that must have been over ten feet away. Expressions changed; knives appeared. The teyanain clearly weren’t inclined to play any longer.

  “Deiq!” Alyea screamed, fighting against her captor’s grip again. “Knives!”

  “He already knows that,” a calm voice observed in her ear.

  She twisted and stared back at the teyanain behind her. He regarded her dispassionately, then returned his attention to the embattled ha’ra’ha.

  Deiq had changed his fighting style; had been changing it, she realized, before she even screamed the warning. Now he was defending, as the teyanain pressed in even closer. In what seemed moments, a thin line of blood appeared on his cheek as a long knife scored; as though that had been a signal, the teyanain all backed away swiftly. A heartbeat later, Deiq simply collapsed, his knees giving way as though the tendons had been slashed.

  Alyea screamed again, unable to help herself. In the back of her mind, she’d believed Deiq could win free and get them all out of this disaster.

  The teyanain swiftly clustered around the tall ha’ra’ha, lifting and carrying him from the room. Another group ferried Idisio’s limp form away. Both Deiq and Idisio appeared to be breathing, but unconscious; so murder wasn’t, directly, the intent.

  As soon as the two ha’ra’hain had been taken from sight, her captors released their grips, and Lord Evkit moved to stand in front of her. His expression displayed no triumph or sneer. If anything, the little lord seemed grave and concerned.

  “Now you are safe,” he said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Deiq opened his eyes, scrabbled upright and lunged forward before awareness even came clear—and slammed face-first into a hard stone wall.

  “You fucking little rotworm!” he screamed, curling his fingers against the rock, searching for a crack, a flaw, any dent he could exploit to rip the wall apart.

  The smooth surface defeated him. It felt oddly slimy, and his fingers slipped over what his eyes insisted was dry rock. Unable to gain any purchase, he stepped back and threw himself against the wall; his only reward was a blazing pain flaring through his shoulder and head.

  Reason caught up at last, and stopped him from another useless charge. He sucked in a deep breath between his teeth and turned in a deliberately slow circle, studying the prison. Idisio lay in a heap in the middle of the floor; still breathing, if shallowly.

  The slick yellow walls climbed like those of a well: rounded, tall, and impossible to scale. Far overhead a thick-barred metal grate blocked the only opening. Sunlight streamed in from above, but with an oddly diluted quality. Squinting up at the grate, Deiq finally saw a thin screen laid over the bars; he grinned without any real amusement. Another Aerthraim invention: it would let in light, but block a large proportion of the heat. That told him that this prison hadn’t been built only for ha’ra’hain, who could easily regulate their body temperatures, but also for lesser enemies—like desert lords.

  He took a closer look at the yellow stone as his rage faded, and sighed.

  “Aenstone,” he muttered under his breath. “Bloody hells. And stibik powder.” He scuffed a foot against the floor, hopefully; but that too was aenstone, and cut as tightly as the rest. The only way he’d be calling out for help was by voice, and then only if someone stood directly overhead.

  Their packs lay against a wall, apparently undisturbed, and nobody had searched their persons, either. One game ruled out, a thousand possibilities left.

  He retrieved a full waterskin, took a sip, then crouched next to Idisio. “Wake up,” he said. “Idisio. Wake up.” He set the waterskin aside and shook the younger ha’ra’ha, reflecting rather sourly that here, at least, Idisio didn’t surpass him.

  Idisio coughed, rolled to one side and dry-retched, his whole body convulsing and his eyes rolling back in his head.

  “Gods damn it!” Deiq said, alarmed. “Idisio! Sit up. You have to sit up. Look at me. Sit up! Idisio!”

  The younger hitched over to his knees and kept gagging, but nothing came up. Deiq looked closer: stibik powder coated Idisio’s nostrils and eyes. Of course: he hadn’t known to stop breathing and shut his eyes; nobody had ever told him what to do during a stibik attack. Deiq hadn’t even thought of it, because the godsdamned stuff wasn’t even supposed to exist anymore.

  Idisio’s eyes were beginning to lose the whites, a black stain creeping across white and grey like spilled ink.

  Gritting his teeth against the impulse to curse for the next two years, Deiq shoved Idisio roughly back into a kneeling sit and slapped him. Idisio rocked back with a soggy gasp, his eyes paling back to almost normal. He stared past Deiq without recognition.

  “Idisio,” Deiq snapped. “Look at me.” He reached out and roughly jerked Idisio’s chin up as his watery gaze wandered to one side. “Can you see me?”

  “Nuh . . . colors. Shapes.”

  “Shit. Hold still.” Deiq reached for the waterskin, hating what he had to do; but human tears wouldn’t wash out the powder, and he had to get the nostrils clear too.

  Idisio screamed, his back arching, as water sluiced through his eyes and up his nose; sneezed violently, and collapsed forward to hands and knees. Deiq shoved him over onto his back, planted a hand on Idisio’s thin chest, and kept pouring until the waterskin was empty, ignoring the flailing attempts to push and kick him away.

  “Blink,” he ordered, his voice ragged with strain. “Don’t wipe your eyes. Just blink. Again. Again.”

  Idisio’s eyes, though reddened, were now a sharp white against black, and the tears streaming down his cheeks held no sparkle of stibik powder.

  “Good.” Deiq leaned back, lifting his hold, and let Idisio scramble clumsily to his feet.

  Deiq stayed on his knees, looking up at the younger, ready for a retaliatory attack; but Idisio whirled away and slapped his hands against the walls, feeling his way along as though searching for some secret exit. Deiq watched for a time, amused, then hoisted himself out of the puddle in the middle of the floor and went to sit against the wall.

  After making a complete circuit of the room, Idisio turned and glared at Deiq.

  “What the hells is going on?” he demanded. “There’s no godsdamned door!”

  He glanced up at the grate overhead, then back to the walls as though considering trying to climb; finally shook his head and looked back to Deiq. The grey color began to return to his eyes. Deiq let out a quiet breath of relief.

  Idisio’s stare focused on Deiq’s cheek. “You’re bleeding—what happened?”

  Deiq blinked, only then remembering the slicing sting of a teyanain knife down his cheek. He didn’t bother reaching to touch the cut. It would heal soon enough if he didn’t fuss with it.

  He gave the only answer he could, in the circumstances: “What happened is that I was an idiot.”

  He hesitated a moment; but Idisio deserved to know the truth of their situation.

  “And it’s probably going to get us killed.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Lord Evkit insisted on Alyea being settled in a room before explaining himself.

  “You honored guest,” he said with pleasant and unshakeable determination. “You rest, refresh, come eat. Then we talk.”

  Two teyanain dressed in sober shades of grey and brown accompanied her as guides and, she assumed, guards. While they displayed no visible weapons, the cut of their clothes allowed for fast, violent movement in any direction, and their precise, graceful movements spoke of extensive aqeyva training.

  She was shown to a small, plain room with walls of alternating coar
se grey and smooth tan blocks. The guides bowed out of the room without a word and shut the thin wooden door behind them as they withdrew. She hadn’t noticed a lock; but sure as sand in the desert, she thought sourly, one or both would be standing out in the passage, waiting.

  Escape was not only improbable, but useless. She had no idea where she was in the teyanain fortress, and where that lay in the Horn. With Deiq, maybe even with Idisio, she could have found her way through the rocky expanse outside these walls; alone, she knew she had no chance of survival.

  She dropped the light pack on the bed and sat beside it; giving in to a moment of despair, she cradled her head in her hands. But there was no use agonizing over the mistakes that had brought them here; she only gave herself a few breaths for self-pity. With a sigh, she straightened and looked around. Small and plain, with a simple, northern-high bed and table, the room had a single, wide, east-facing window high overhead, which let in a surprising amount of morning sunlight. On the floor near the bed sat a large jug of wash water with a cloth neatly folded over the wide handle, and the chamber pot had been tucked discreetly under the bed. A stone cup, so small it could easily fit in one of Alyea’s hands, sat on the table beside a silver jug that sweated chill drops down the sides.

  She crossed to the table—a matter of two steps in the tiny room—and picked up the cup, marveling at its smooth translucence. Carved from some pale amber-orange stone, with swirls of milky white, it would have graced a king’s table. Without a handle, it nestled in her palm rather like half of a delicately painted egg. She shook her head, set the cup down, and filled it with water.

  Sitting back down on the bed, she finally allowed herself to think about Evkit’s odd statement: Now you are safe. Assuming that the statement had been sane—which she wasn’t at all sure of, given his attack on the two ha’ra’hain—and that he hadn’t been simply trying to throw her off guard, what had made him think she was in danger?

  She sipped the chill water, which tasted vaguely of oranges, frowning as she considered. He hadn’t killed the two ha’ra’hain, hadn’t harmed her or shown any malice at all. He hadn’t shown any special animosity to Deiq or Idisio at Scratha Fortress, nor made any attempt to warn her of danger there. So had Scratha Fortress figured in his perception of her peril? Lord Scratha had tried to warn her about Deiq as well, so he couldn’t have been in-

  volved . . . Perhaps someone else at Scratha Fortress?

  Or—She straightened, lowering the cup to her lap as she was about to take another sip—something? Could it be that the teyanin lord was worried about the Scratha ha’rethe?

  It seemed an incredible notion. Evkit was a desert lord himself, after all, so he must have gone through the blood trials. And as the lord of the teyanain, he should have been bound to the Horn, if Alyea understood the process correctly.

  For the first time, she wondered how Evkit could travel so far from his presumably bound lands, when Scratha had said heads of desert Families couldn’t leave their sworn ha’reye. A shiver rippled down her back. Maybe Evkit wasn’t bound, after all, which implied the absence of a ha’rethe or ha’ra’ha strong enough to protect the area.

  She rubbed at her face, trying to work through the logical implications of that. After a few moments, she shook her head and rose to set the cup back on the table. Her mind felt too filled with the rush of fear and worry to sort out anything right now. She’d just have to listen to whatever Evkit said with a skeptical ear and think about it hard before she agreed to anything.

  Running her hands through her hair, she pushed it into reasonable order, then straightened out a rumpled sleeve. She glanced at her pack, thinking of the comb and fresh clothes inside; then remembered Chac’s advice: Don’t toss and flutter like you’re the prettiest in the room. Tidying up too much might come across as vanity to these dour people; instinct warned her that she couldn’t afford to lose any fragment of their respect.

  She turned to the door, which yielded to a light pressure, swinging silently outward. A cold part of her mind noted that she’d never know if someone came in while she slept.

  The two teyanain who had guided her to the room stood against the passageway wall, facing her door. They looked at her with the silent, dark-eyed impassivity she was coming to expect from the teyanain.

  She drew a deep breath. “I believe,” she said firmly, “Lord Evkit mentioned a meal?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “Why would Evkit want to kill us?” Idisio demanded.

  Deiq let out a snort. “I’m not well-liked among the humans, Idisio,” he said. “Tends to happen over time. Things one century thinks are perfectly fine get you painted as a monster in the next round. You’ll run into it too, eventually.”

  He slid his hand along the stone of the floor, feeling the rough surface scrape against his palm. Contemplating whether he could dig through the floor—and whether that was even a smart idea—he almost missed Idisio’s reply:

  “And so I’m going to die because you pissed Lord Evkit off?”

  Deiq blinked, focused on the moment again, and decided to shift the conversation to a less dangerous question. Losing his temper in here would be a very bad idea.

  “Idisio, do you remember the ugren cuffs?”

  “Yes. . . .” Idisio’s face shifted into horrified understanding. “But they wouldn’t! I mean, that would be . . . that would breach that . . . what’s it called, the Agreement? Isn’t that—I mean, enslaving us, or killing us, would be—wouldn’t it?”

  “Only if it were found out,” Deiq said, and patted the floor lightly. “This is called aenstone. It blocks mind-speech.” It did more than that; but he decided to keep it simple for the moment. “We can’t call for help, and nobody can see us here. The teyanain can put round any story they like about where we went; they’re exceptionally good liars.”

  Idisio’s face went ashen again. “Oh, gods,” he breathed.

  “Oh, yes,” Deiq said without humor, and shut his eyes, giving Idisio a chance to compose himself. “If you’re going to pray,” he added as an afterthought, remembering that Idisio probably did believe in some form of deity, “pray that Alyea stands up for us. Because she’s the only one who can demand we be released, and Evkit declared her guest, which means he won’t hurt her. And you can bet he’s doing his best to convince her that ha’ra’hain are monsters who can’t be trusted at your front or at your back.”

  “But why?”

  “Because that’s what humans do, Idisio. They hate anything stronger or different; they attack it and tear it down.” Deiq didn’t open his eyes as he spoke. “I’ve been watching it happen for hundreds of years.”

  “That’s too easy an answer,” Idisio protested.

  “Then find your own. Now shut up. I want to take a nap.” He didn’t, but it was the simplest way to stop the younger from his endless questioning.

  Idisio fell silent, sulking. After a while, he said, “It didn’t count, you know. The marriage you told me about. You never really wanted it.”

  Deiq opened his eyes and stared at the younger, bewildered and more than a little annoyed. “Where in the hells did that come from?”

  “If we’re going to die,” Idisio said, jaw set in stubborn lines, “I want you to know that I don’t think you ever really tried with that girl. Woman. Whatever. You could have made it work.”

  “You weren’t there,” Deiq said tartly. “You don’t know what I tried or didn’t try.”

  “I know you,” Idisio said. “You didn’t really want to be married, so you didn’t really try. It was a experiment for you. It didn’t mean anything. And I’m betting that’s why none of your other attempts ever worked. You didn’t care enough.”

  “Are you trying to get me to kill you?” Deiq snapped, but the words held little force, and no real anger rose in him. Idisio’s arrogance was too close to the self-righteous, smug attitude of his own younger days, although it was laid at a different slant.

  “If I was wrong, you’d be laughing an
d calling me an idiot,” Idisio said, not moving.

  “You’re ignorant, is what you are. She was human. They die by seventy, eighty, maybe ninety; I would have had at best twenty or thirty years with her before she began to fade. That’s nothing.”

  “No,” Idisio said. “That’s twenty years of something honest.”

  Deiq shook his head, amused by the younger’s stubborn hold on innocence. “You’re going to drive yourself insane trying that approach, Idisio.”

  Idisio didn’t say anything in response to that, and Deiq let the silence remain unbroken.

  He thought about what Idisio had said, his sour amusement fading. Onsia had been a good woman: slight, compact, quick-moving. Quick-tempered, too, rather like Alyea; Deiq grinned, remembering the wooden bowl shattering beside his head. Onsia would have aimed at him, not the wall. . . .

  In almost every other way, the two women couldn’t have been more different. Alyea was still young, and stubbornly clung to her northern convictions of propriety. Onsia, after losing two husbands, hadn’t cared what her neighbors thought; although had she taken up with a less wealthy, influential man, the gossip might well have turned uglier.

  Well, done was done, and Onsia’s grandchildren were long in their graves. No point thinking the matter over at this late remove. Idisio would learn how to see these things, if they managed to come out of this situation alive.

  Deiq sighed, letting go of worry as a waste of energy, and surprised himself by falling into a light doze after all.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The meal proved as simple and yet elegant as Alyea’s room: delicately spiced flatbread and clear cool water, along with a bowl of pale beans and dark grains tossed in a light, floral oil. The wooden plates had been so carefully shaped and carved that they felt like gifts from the tree instead of mere surfaces to transport food. The cups resembled the one in her room, but of a darker, more speckled stone, carved translucently thin.