The jovial mood didn’t touch the eyes of the other gypsies, and that wasn’t lost on Traveler. He found his gaze drawn repeatedly back to a young woman, maybe twenty. She sat in the door of one of the wagons, a tiny cloth bundle on her lap. An older woman tried to feed her, but the girl would only stare at the ground. The firelight was bright enough to pick out each glittering tear as it dropped from her face to the sand.
They had to be relatives, given the similar wide noses and the green eyes. They spoke with a brogue that tasted of the far North, which only added to the wrongness of seeing them here. Best to be direct about it, even if it meant he would find no rest once again.
“I’ve not seen the sand this far into the Glass Desert. May I ask what brought you all the way out here?”
The conversation stopped. Not in a hostile way, but with a heavy sadness as each looked to the elder. Finally, the old man spoke.
“We have followed the red star from our homeland. When someone dies, if a red star appears, our people believe we will be reunited with the soul of our loved one if we follow it.”
“And has it ever worked?”
“I have only seen a red star once before. And we ran out of land before we could sleep beneath it.”
All their eyes drifted upward and Traveler looked, knowing but not wanting to know.
A red star hung above them. Feeble and faint, but clear enough beside all its burning white brethren.
His lips felt numb, but he heard his own voice say, “Who has died?”
“My child.”
They all flinched. She’d walked up behind them quiet as a cat. She still held the bundle in her arms.
One of the women tried to hush the girl and take her back to the wagon, but she would not be moved. She stared into Traveler’s eyes and right on through him.
“His father was taken from me by a fever when I became with child. He was born never knowing a father, and now I will never know my son.”
“My lady, please know my heart aches for you. Ain’t right, what happens in this life. Losin’ a child is something no one should ever know.”
She stared at him a moment longer, perhaps seeing a bit of her own pain in his eyes. She nodded and turned back to the wagon, but this time she didn’t perch in the door. She climbed inside and blew out the lantern.
This was why they’d been so quick to welcome him. They knew his burden, the power hidden inside, squirming to get out.
He stood and excused himself. “I thank you for the meal, but it has been too long since I shut my eyes in peace. I ask for your leave.”
They all nodded and smiled as he went off a proper distance on the sand and made his bedroll. The boy caught none of the tension.
Just before Traveler closed his eyes, he saw the storytelling elder showing the boy how to make a gargoyle out of goat skin and rabbit bones to watch over your garden.
*~*~*~*
He must have slept, surely. The stars were in different positions, and embers winked in the dark like dragon’s eyes where there had once been a crackling fire. But it didn’t feel like he slept. It felt more like reality just slipped for a moment, and when it caught, he was here, lying under the stars. Just as bone-tired as he had always been.
What had roused him, or brought him back to the here and now, whichever it was? A sigh? Faint shuffling?
Whispering? A whispering voice from his pack…
No. No, it wasn’t that.
Traveler rose from the sand, silent as a shade. One hand held a pistol, the other, his burden in its leather pack. A wise and experienced traveler, he simply stood and listened. Watched for movement on the edge of his vision where it was easiest to see at night.
The tactic rewarded him with a glimpse of someone moving onto the widening sand, away from the sleeping camp and the Glass Desert. Traveler stepped over the boy, who had curled up next to him in the fleeting moment he slept. Past the tents and wagons of the slumbering gypsies he went, treading in the tracks of the person he’d seen.
When he rounded the first dune, he heard the sound that woke him. A soft hitching sob. He saw the girl, saw the blackness of her blood like oil in the moonlight.
The shining blade poised to strike the other wrist now—
“Stop, girl!” Traveler wrenched the knife away. He took hold of her slashed wrist so hard that her fingers turned white.
“You tryin’ to doom yourself to wander in darkness with those who leave before the Maker says to?”
“I wish… to die. To stop my heart from beating so I won’t feel this ache every day, every hour, every breath since they’ve gone.”
Even with his iron grip, the blood coursed between his fingers, dripping into the thirsty sand and onto the cloth bundle in her lap. She’d struck deep and true. Traveler stared into her dying eyes, just as he had stared into the eyes of the man whose bones he carried.
Again the whispering itch inside his skull where it couldn’t be scratched, couldn’t be quieted.
Poor girl.Poor, poor girl.
He clenched his teeth, but a pathetic whine still escaped.
Pity to die so young. Just like Agatha.
“Stop.”But weak, so weak. “Please… not her name.”
Tears streamed down his face and he felt something give inside, collapsing his will, bending him as easily as a smith’s hammer shapes soft copper.
His hand dug into the leather pack, and even then a last bit of his stubborn heart tried to squeeze his eyes closed against the name he would see. He knew the bone that would come from the pack. A short rib.
Through the blur of his bitter tears, the symbols on the bone danced, daring him. When he read the word, it burned his mouth and nose on the way out, the sound bursting into a brilliant light that blinded him. He fell screaming to the sand, fists screwed into his eyes, begging for the black fire to stop. The pain twisted him into a ball of flesh and bone and he felt as if he’d finally die.
Then, faint and weak… a sound that made every hair on his body bristle.
A muffled cry. Like an infant swaddled in a cloth bundle.
*~*~*~*
And this time when he woke, or reality caught like a branch in the spokes of a wheel, the night had fled for good.
“They left before sunrise.”
“You were supposed—” Traveler’s vision swam. His tongue lay in his mouth like a dried sliver from a wood plank. He retched into the sand and the boy handed him a skin of water.
“You were supposed to go with them. You would have been safe. Where I’m going is no place for a boy your age.”
“That baby was alive. And the mother said you healed her wrist. But Pastor Gilliam says—said that those bones you carry only kill and maim people.”
“Yeah, well… don’t always believe what the folks in charge tell you. They most often look to themselves first, like everyone else.”
Woozy, Traveler forced himself to his feet. Managed to stay standing. “And I told you once, it ain’t me and it ain’t the bones. What’s in them, I can’t exactly say. Them things are above my station in life.”
The boy’s dark hollow eyes held an accusation that wasn’t there the day before.
“They said the man you follow is no more than a day ahead of you.”
“What?” Traveler snatched up his belongings and made ready to leave. “How do they know this?”
“They helped the Apostate fix his wagon. His passenger’s making him drive too fast, and the heat has begun to make the wheels break.”
“Of course. He knows I’m behind him.”
“He told the gypsies a murderer was chasing him.”
“And he was right.”
*~*~*~*
He had hoped the kid would follow the gypsies. Those short young legs forced Traveler to a more methodical pace, when all he wanted to do was sprint along the powdered glass tracks until he either caught up to the wagon or his heart burst. Maybe it was a good thing the kid was here. Except for all the talking.
“The
gypsies said the sand is going to reclaim the Glass Desert someday, and the Apostates’ fortress will fall.”
“It’s not just the Glass Desert that protects the Apostates. They have strong weapons.”
“Do they have witches there?”
“Something like.Seen a painting of one, once.”
The kid looked like he just opened a Solstice Day treat or something. “Wow! What did she look like? A thousand-year-old crone, a mean snake-headed creature, a warted, nasty—”
“Something tells me your mother doesn’t like witches.”
“Oh… yeah.”
“She was none of those hideous things. Her skin was so pale, she must surely have lived in a cave all her born days. Naked as her birth-day, too.”
Traveler couldn’t help but grin when the kid’s brows shot up above his eyeshades.
“Eyes green as jade from the Southern Tribes, flaming red hair smooth as satin, and she held a snake of reckoning and a staff of power in her hands.”
“Where did you see it?”
That one almost stopped him in his tracks. He’d been talking about The Before without realizing it. And that topic wasn’t open for discussion.
“Never you mind. Now save your breath for walkin’.”
Before the boy could protest, in fact, before they could walk another step, they both saw it.
A shape through the undulating heat waves.Too square to be natural. But something looked wrong about it.
Traveler began to run, the pack of bones rattling against his back, breath coming in short gasps.
It was a steam wagon. Overturned.
*~*~*~*
The two front hubs had simply flown apart under the stress. The frantic pace overheated the metal, and the machine punished the two men riding on it.
Traveler shielded the boy’s eyes from the sight of the decapitated Apostate. He’d been ejected from the pilot’s chair into a field of jagged glass plates thrown up by a long-ago earthquake. Treacherous glass slick with blood. Even if the Apostates believed in recovering their dead, no one would venture out there after the pieces.
But the man he had been seeking for days or weeks or months or years laid not twenty paces away. The piece of black glass that ran through his middle was as tall as the boy and as big around as his arm.
Almost like a dream, walking up and staring down into those eyes. How long ago had it truly been since he last looked into them? The crow’s-feet had been fewer, the haze of a kabet smoker not there, but this was him.
“I never told you to kill that man,” he said, with blood on his teeth.
So rapt was he in the rage he’d bottled all this time, Traveler ignored the boy as he walked up behind them. He shouted down at the impaled man.
“You told me he was a seditionist, set against the Queen and the Senate!”
The man just giggled and coughed a bit of blood.
“Why would you tell me that? You knew what I would do.”
“Then you’ve answered your own question.”
“But why in Hades did you want me to do it?”
“He was to marry a woman I loved.”
“Liar.” Traveler spat on the glass. There was a higher purpose at work here, something greater in scope than a jealous lover.
The dying man’s eyelids fluttered, and he extended a hand to touch the hem of Traveler’s journey cloak.
“Set to wander the Irth until you drop, eh? Carrying the bones of that poor, righteous man?”
“I had a life, you bastard.”
“Did you? The Queen’s pocket assassin?Family dead and gone. What life is that?”
“I was no assassin.”
“The former owner of those bones might argue with you.”
Even losing his lifeblood onto the twisted desert glass, the man’s words were still fired with passion.
“They took your name from you, those witches in the Senate. Burdened your mind with the spell of the Traveler. And then set those bones upon your back. Why would they place such a powerful thing in the hands of a soldier?”
“The nature of these bones makes people pursue me. It’s the way of the journey.”
“Exactly. And sooner or later you’ll fall. Best if you fell to some small wizard out here, someone with an axe to grind. Those old crones want the things in the bones loose in the world. Out here in the Wilds. It makes them needed in the Known, gives them the power to do what they please. All in the name of protecting the People, of course.”
“You. You were the seditionist.”
A weak smile. “Come now, Traveler. Heal me with one of those righteous bones. Speak the word that is not a word and make me whole again.”
“No.”
Whispers itched in his skull.
“No, be quiet.”
“What is it, Traveler? The righteous bones talking to you, telling what you must do? Telling you to help a soul in need?”
Louder, scratching and rough, not a seductive whisper—
Small fingers grabbed his hand and brought Traveler ‘round like a splash of cold water.
“He’s already done that.” The boy said.
The man glared at the boy for a long moment, but when the youngster didn’t back down, the man sighed.
“Then kill me. I’ve failed, so I might as well die here.”
“Failed? What was your goal?” Traveler said.
“Making you chase me until the desert killed you.”
“What would that have gained you?”
“The bones. Those things the righteous bones hold. I would have carried them to the hands that would do the most good with them.”
“Traitor.”
“And you? What did loyalty gain you?”
The boy stepped between them and looked up at Traveler.
“The gypsies said there’s another strip of sand ahead. If we want to camp there before dark, we should go.”
It suddenly occurred to Traveler. “Go where?”
“Well… we should tell the Apostates that their brother is dead. At the least, they’ll want their wagon.”
“At the least,” Traveler said. He ruffled the boy’s hair and they started off toward the horizon, following the Apostates’ road.
“Wait! Don’t leave me like this. Kill me or heal me, whichever you will. But not like this…”
The weight of one more life on his shoulders slowed Traveler’s feet. He glanced back and tossed a skin of water next to the man.
“Goodbye.”
He took the boy’s hand and they left together. After a long while, they heard one last plea, screamed as a name.
“Davian!”
Traveler certainly didn’t know that name. It made walking on that much easier.
*~*~*~*
The craggy cliffs bursting through the deep glass looked deceptively close. In truth, both he and the boy were near death by the time they arrived.
He was burdened by a leather pack of dry bones on his back, and a bundle of flesh-covered bones in his arms. The boy stopped sweating this morning, and Traveler knew he’d be among the ether-folk before sunset if they didn’t find water here.
He staggered into a wide crack in the cliff and saw light on the far side. The smell of water was so sudden and clear he thought some vital workings in his brain had ruptured. Surely it wasn’t–
Real.
He’d heard the Apostates had a mighty fortress in the heart of the Glass Desert, but that was a lie.
The lush valley of verdant life hidden behind the gargantuan cliffs had him slack-jawed, like a kid who just saw a conjurer turn a hare into a horse.
Orchards bursting with succulent fruit, soaring oak trees that cast inviting pools of shade, rough stone and earth huts scattered throughout. The life here was not simply healthy; to desert-burned eyes, the plants here looked aggressively alive, twisting and turning upward to take life from the same sun that was killing him and the boy.
Two men wearing sky-blue robes of Apostate Brothers approached, their long
hair dyed the same midnight black. The older had discs of polished glass in his stretched earlobes, while the younger man still had the acolyte’s pebble in his.
“May we offer water, food, and shelter, weary Traveler?” the eldest Brother said.
“Please.” Did that dry croak form the word?
His arms unfolded of their own accord and the acolyte caught the boy. Two more young acolytes appeared and carried the unconscious lad into one of the larger huts.
Traveler’s glazed eyes followed them, but his heat-addled brain was unable to form the question.
“He will live,” the older Apostate said. “He is safe here.”
The old man’s gnarled hand touched Traveler’s arm and a feeling of serenity and peace washed over his tired bones. He would have wept, had he the moisture for it.
Two young women dressed in the brown robes of Apostate Sisters came bearing a tray of meats, bread, and cheese, and a large skin of water.
Any other time, he would have been ashamed at wasting the water that splashed down his front, but all he cared about at the moment was how much made it into his belly. He drank and drank until he was sick with it.
He collapsed onto the improbable green grass and the girl who offered the water smiled at him. Fair, even with her shorn hair and the three scars of the Original Sisters on her left cheek.
“May I take your burden from you?” Her voice so soft.
A groan. That’s the best he could do. He felt at the end, his death sentence near fulfilled. Finally, the weight of this would break him.
“I carry the bones of a righteous man.”
The older Brother gave him a strange smile. “Do you? What was his name?”
“Barnabus Platick.”
“And how did he die?”
“I killed him.”
The old man stepped over to a pile of green tree branches, freshly cut and stacked near the entrance to their paradise.
“Pity. Too much hatred, evil, and fighting in this world. Not enough love. Not enough care for someone other than ourselves. Grena, will you help the man?”
The young woman, Grena, held out her hand. In days past, Traveler would already have pistols out, blazing a path of death on his way to—
Where? Where had he been on the way to, exactly? Before. Before he’d chased the man who started all this—
Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology Page 36