Something about this stirred his interest. Where are the insects going? He let it go: it seemed too much effort to think about it. Much easier to lie down and let them pass overhead, on their way to…to wherever insects went in the evening.
To water.
‘Drink this,’ said a voice, startling him, distracting him from thoughts of hope.
‘Leave me alone,’ he rasped, his voice more puff than words. ‘There is water—insects—must follow…’ His swollen tongue failed him, and his limbs flailed uselessly in his urgency.
When he next awoke it was night. Lenares hovered above him, the half-moon a halo about her hair, her face in shadow. She dabbed at his mouth with a wet cloth—a rag torn from her dress, Torve noted, as he forced his eyes to focus—then trickled living sweetness from the water pouch onto his tongue. He put out a hand and snatched awkwardly at the pouch, but she pulled it away.
Consciousness returned with roaring pain. It was dawn, their fiery enemy already looming above the sonwards horizon, and his neck and head boomed with every small sound. Surprisingly he did not feel thirsty. He pushed his tongue around his mouth: his gums hurt, and at least one tooth had come loose.
‘Lenares?’ he called. In answer a hand came from behind him and caressed his face. Cool. He sat up, his limbs screaming with pain, and sweat broke out all over his body. He almost collapsed with relief.
Lenares leaned over him, her drawn face close to his. Her skin was blackened on both cheeks, and her nose seemed to have shrunk a little. ‘Can you stand?’ she asked him.
‘You look terrible,’ he said as he struggled to his feet. ‘Was it worth it? Have we caught up with the expedition?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lenares said, weariness lacing her voice. ‘I think we may be ahead of them. It depends on whether they stopped to rest in the afternoons. We could search for evidence here of their passing when the sun is a little higher.’
‘Where is here?’ he asked, his eyes settling on a grove of date palms.
‘An oasis. I knew it was here. I saw it on a map.’ Her face closed, as though she relived a memory too painful or beautiful to bear.
The oasis was a beautiful sight. Situated in a sandy basin a little lower than the rest of the riverbed, it had been scoured out when the Marasmos ran between the cliffs, perhaps; the site of some powerful current. Since then sand had drifted into the basin, lining the gently sloping sides down to a barely rippling pool surrounded by date palms. The dates were not ripe, unfortunately, but the sight was a welcome one, comparable in style if not in grandeur to the house of the gods they had left behind.
With that thought an ache sprang up within him, the remembrance of a place at once entrancing and forbidding; a place in which humans were not meant to dwell, yet somewhere they might long for if they knew of its existence. He wondered if the time they had spent there, the sense of being in a high place beyond mortal insight, might ultimately prove more curse than blessing. Cursed is he who leaves the house of the gods; doubly cursed is he who remains…
Torve could see a small piece of broken ground leading off to the left, most likely an animal track. They would have to be careful if they remained near the oasis: danger of a different, more prosaic kind awaited them if they were careless.
Something about Lenares’ explanation made him uneasy. ‘But how did you know which route fatherwards they planned to take?’ he asked her. ‘Even Captain Duon wasn’t sure. Was that not why he called the meeting with the senior Alliance figures?’
Lenares looked away. ‘I guessed,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that if they went directly fatherwards like Captain Duon wanted, we would never have caught them. I thought our only chance was to travel as long as we could along the riverbed, then cut across the edge of the stone plain, reaching the coastal hill country before the expedition. I hoped that might be the route they chose.’
‘There is another reason, isn’t there?’ Torve knew Lenares would never have based any decision on mere guesswork. ‘I don’t believe your analysis. Fatherwards of here is the rest of the stone plain, and if the expedition went that way we could have caught them in three days, provided they rested in the afternoons. You know something.’
She looked directly at him. ‘You won’t believe me,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Does it matter? I’ll follow you whether I believe you or not.’
‘I am being pulled,’ she said. ‘The hole in the world has returned. I have felt it, have seen evidence of it, for the last week. It has enlarged much faster than I thought it would. Something is wrong with one of my calculations, or one of my strange numbers is wrong. The hole is here, all around us, and will reveal itself soon. I followed it as it moved sonwards, because I believed it thought I was part of the expedition. So, wherever the hole is, there the expedition will soon appear.’
Torve grunted. His head, already thick with pain, seemed to turn itself inside out in an effort to follow her words. Who followed whom? He could not get the sequence straight: hole, expedition, Lenares, all chasing each other and being chased sonwards towards the Skeleton Coast…
Oh. Something he had reasoned out for himself, which he had subsequently forgotten in the trial of the desert, returned to the forefront of his mind with a crash.
He licked his lips. ‘Lenares, I know what the mind behind the hole in the world is unleashing on Captain Duon.’ Cold fear settled on him. Fear of what was to come, fear that Lenares would not believe him.
He needn’t have worried. She stared at him with a burning avidity, as though she sought to drain his mind of everything he knew. ‘What? Tell me! If we know, we can warn the expedition!’
Torve arranged his thoughts carefully. ‘Captain Duon told the Emperor he lost a man on the stone plain on his way home from the first expedition. I think that man was captured by those who live here. You know what this riverbed was, don’t you?’ An unnecessary question for a cosmographer.
‘Oh, yes. The old Marasmos River,’ she said, her face taking on her puzzle-solving look. ‘Are you saying that there are Marasmians alive still? After all these years?’
‘Their descendants. They will have learned that Captain Duon intended to return this way with a far larger force. Whoever—whatever—is behind the hole in the world could have intervened, assisted the coastal peoples to raise an army. That is why the hole seems much larger.’
He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, jerked his head up in involuntary surprise. ‘That—that is why,’ he continued, lowering his voice, ‘that is why it surrounds us.’ He motioned discreetly left and right. ‘Don’t turn to your right, Lenares—don’t!’
She paused halfway through the act of spinning around. ‘What do you see?’ she mouthed at him.
He turned slowly. ‘On the rim of the bluff to our right is a scout. He is still now, but he moved a few moments ago.’
‘What can we do?’ Lenares asked, sinking to her knees. ‘You are right, I can feel it—the hole is getting smaller.’
‘Then the expedition cannot be far away. All we can do is wait. I’m sure the Marasmians, or whoever they are, know we are here. Although they may not; we haven’t moved since sunrise.’ He thought carefully. ‘If we move now they will see us and take us for scouts. They would likely capture us, or at the least prevent us from leaving. We will have to wait for Captain Duon to come to us. And,’ he said, looking over his left shoulder, ‘we will not have long to wait.’
The bright colours of the Amaqi expedition, dimmed somewhat by their passage through the desert, came streaming down through a gap in the fatherwards wall of the riverbed.
‘The Marasmians will be some way behind them, remaining out of sight in the expedition’s dust-cloud, closing the ring of this ambush,’ he said. ‘There will be slaughter.’
Lenares nodded, her face pale. Torve touched her blackened cheek with his fingers. ‘Does this hurt?’
‘I can only feel the hole in the world,’ she said, gasping out the words as t
hough she were being crushed. He pulled his fingers away.
‘Lenares, I don’t understand. Why didn’t the expedition just travel sonwards down the riverbed if the riverbed route is more direct?’
‘Because it is not,’ she corrected, a trace of asperity in her voice. ‘The riverbed curves sonwards and then daughterback. In the last five days we have travelled almost as much between fatherwards and fatherback as we have sonwards. The expedition took the shorter but more exposed route.’
‘And now they are here,’ Torve said. ‘I only hope we can inform Captain Duon before the Marasmians strike.’
The expedition made an impressive sight as it wound down to the riverbed. A hundred horsemen led an equal number of chariots, the Amaqi weapon that over the last thousand years had made them invincible in battle. Behind them came the foot soldiers, choking on the dust of the chariots. Drovers led the remaining animals, most of which drew food wagons.
The horsemen approached the oasis where Torve and Lenares waited, while most of the foot soldiers continued to make their way down into the valley. The camp followers were nowhere to be seen, but undoubtedly trailed somewhere behind. They would suffer sorely in any battle, Torve realised, no matter the outcome.
He willed the riders on into the shadows, waiting until the first of them had dismounted and led their horses to the pool shadowed under the fatherback wall of the valley. He stepped forward, arms out and palms down, a gesture of calm.
‘Please, ma sorra, listen to me. I have urgent news,’ he croaked.
Two of the horsemen went for their swords.
‘Please!’ Torve cried. ‘We are being watched. Do not give any indication that you know this, or the expedition is lost.’
‘By the Son,’ one of the men said, wonder in his voice, ‘it’s that Omeran, the Emperor’s pet. We thought it was lost.’
‘Farouq will pay a coin or two for its return,’ said another. ‘Here,’ the man drawled, holding out a water pouch, ‘draw me some water from the middle of the pool. Not the edge, mind. I want my water clean.’
‘Then don’t get it to draw water for you,’ a third man said, to general laughter. ‘It looks like it’s been wandering lost in the desert sands.’
The men sheathed their swords, satisfied there was no danger.
‘That’s because he has,’ said Lenares, stepping out of the shadows. ‘So have I. Think what you like about him and about me, but you have stepped into an ambush. Keep looking at the bluff above us, ma sor, and tell us what you see. The rest of you, continue to water your horses.’
‘It’s the cosmographer. The runaway.’
‘Please,’ Lenares repeated, almost begging them. ‘Just look!’ Her tone of voice, as much as the content of her information, caused a few of the soldiers to raise their heads.
‘She is right,’ one of the men hissed. ‘There are men up above us.’
Faces that had been relaxed, anticipating the relief offered by the oasis, swiftly assumed a soldierly mien. The first man to whom Torve had spoken bent and whispered into the ear of another man, who remounted a watered horse. ‘Ride slowly, so as not to arouse suspicion,’ he ordered. ‘We must spring this ambush, or at least be ready for it.’
‘Is he going to tell Captain Duon?’ Torve asked, but was ignored as the horsemen, under the guise of setting up camp, spread the word.
‘We must leave,’ Lenares said to Torve. ‘We must not get caught in the fighting. The god knows who I am, and will send someone to kill me.’
Torve nodded, and began walking back towards the oasis.
‘Stay where you are, Omeran,’ the first man commanded. ‘And you, witch. My master will want to find out all about you.’
‘But Captain Duon already knows about us!’ Lenares said, panic in her voice.
‘Ah, then you are not aware of the little change in this expedition. Surprising, witch; I thought you knew everything. Duon no longer commands anyone. Sit down and ready yourself to meet the new commander of the Emperor’s glorious army of conquest. If anyone can break the ambush—if ambush it is, and not some scheme of Duon’s to reclaim power—he can.’
‘But—’ Lenares began to wail.
‘Be silent!’ He put his hand on his sword-hilt.
Bewildered and exhausted, with no choice but to obey, Torve and Lenares sat on a rock next to the oasis and waited to see how the expedition’s new leader would respond to their news.
Captain Taleth Salmadi Duon found his humiliation easier to bear if he avoided eye contact. For days now he had been a curiosity for the soldiers and the camp followers; it seemed that every member of the expedition had taken the opportunity to take a look at the man deposed as leader. Some were not polite in their comments, nor did they trouble to keep their voices lowered. The women took delight in making disparaging remarks about his golden hair, as did many of the men. One of the older women, a snarl-toothed farrier who had attended his horse on two occasions, rushed at him and, before his guards could prevent her, tore a handful of hair from his head. His scalp bled for hours. The guards kept the onlookers a good distance away after that, but he could still hear what they said about him.
He supposed the humiliation was necessary. Farouq wanted the expedition to reject their former leader as a part of cementing his own leadership. This exercise left no one in any doubt.
His hands were bound behind him, but he was otherwise unfettered. The six Elboran guards allocated to prevent his escape ensured that. Their purpose, he decided, was more a deterrent to anyone misguided enough to attempt to rescue him. The Pasmarans in particular might have had a vested interest in seeing him released, though if they were to return him to leadership it would be as a figurehead only. And now that Duon was deposed, the Anaphil Alliance had no power, so they would benefit most from his reinstatement. Farouq kept the few Anaphil representatives under close observation.
Duon’s head ached uncomfortably. An odd feeling: a cold lump at the back of his neck, unlike anything in his experience. He found it unsettling. How could an illness make one cold in the midst of all this heat? And in only one place? Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of his disgrace. His neck and scalp were particularly uncomfortable today, and had been since dawn.
Farouq had come to see him as the sun crested the horizon. Not content with usurping his place as leader of the expedition, the Elboran Elder continued to pump him for information. Where was the next well? How long should they camp in the afternoon? How many more days until they reached Nomansland? Ironic, really, as the argument that led to Duon’s foolish ultimatum and the calling of his bluff had been about the choice of route. He had been deposed for trying to impose his views on those too proud to take orders from a social inferior, yet his views were necessary, and were being actioned. He was leader in all but name.
Well, and in all but comfort. Farouq and his associates—he could think of less flattering descriptions, but he would remain a gentleman, in his mind at least—rode in sumptuously appointed palanquins, while he stumbled along in their dust.
His career was over. Even if the Emperor somehow appeared and confirmed his leadership, none would now follow him. Those who desire to lead need to be worthy of leadership was a widely held Amaqi dictum, and he had proved himself deficient. His plans for the future had shrivelled in his mind like a desert bloom at the end of the rainy season. He could see himself returning to Punta to live with his unendurable mother. Unless, of course, the Empero, or the leader of the Anaphil Alliance, of which he was a recently promoted senior member, simply took his head.
As for his head, it ached to distraction. For the last two days there had been a buzzing in his ears, almost forming words, at its worst when his head ached the most. It had taken a day for him to recall that dreadful voice in his head during the Leaving Ceremony at Talamaq. Was it possible? Could a man have a separate voice in his head, one with its own volition, with views and manners entirely the opposite of its host? Or was he insane? He had once seen a man bitten by a rabid
bat while exploring the Caves of Turfann a week’s trek daughterwards of Punta. Cuevarra felt ill for a few days on the journey home, but was then taken by hallucinations, believing himself to be the Son. His neighbours had stoned him to death rather than risk infection.
Try as he might, Duon could not remember being bitten by any animal. Nor, he thought, was his delusion on the day of the Leaving Ceremony anything like that suffered by poor Cuevarra. He had not felt unwell during his fatherwards journey. And it had been many weeks since they had left Talamaq. Rabies acted more quickly on its unfortunate victims—comfort of a sort.
Yzz…izza…foool went the sound in the back of his head. He ignored it.
He remembered the times travelling players had performed in Punta. As a child he sang along to the songs, thinking he knew the lyrics, but had discovered when he was a little older that much of what he thought he knew was wrong. One of the players had laughed at him. Son, the human mind always tries to make sense out of whatever it hears. You thought we were singing about a sunset in a field of horses? What we sang was a nonsense verse, just sounds put to music, not words at all. No sunset, no horses.
And now his mind heard words where there were none. An illness of some sort, a trick of the mind, nothing more. Not a voice.
Azz…blinzz…fool!
Random sounds.
His guards guided him down the steep slope to the Marasmos riverbed. He had argued that if the Alliances were determined to detour closer to the coast, the riverbed would be a much more sensible—if slightly longer—route. But all the Elders were interested in was haste. This was partly his own fault: had he not increased the pace after the lion attack, the Elders would probably not have realised just how fast a caravan could travel. Though they complained while under forced march conditions, once they reached the Marasmos riverbed they refused to believe such efforts could not be sustained. Curse that foolish cosmographer and her lover, falling victim to a lion! Even as the thought rippled through his mind, he knew it was uncharitable.
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