Mazie was the first to spot the red sandstone monolith, its shadow barely noticeable in the midday sun, across a field of parched grass without trees. “Is that—?”
“Aye,” said Garet. “Century Rock. We’ve come a hundred miles.”
They had left Muster five days ago. The hills of these badlands, painted in pink, white, and gold stripes, were like no place Mazie had ever seen.
“Or, I should say, we will have come a hundred miles once we get there.”
They stopped for lunch in the boulder’s limited shade. Mazie sat apart from the others, and Garet joined her.
He asked, “Is this place to your liking?”
“Aye,” Mazie said. “It is.”
“But?”
A fly landed on Mazie’s arm and she swatted it away. “Nothing.”
Garet said, “Do you miss home?”
“That’s not it,” Mazie said. “This is home now. It’s as much of one as I’ve ever had.”
“That’s the attitude it takes out here.” Garet laughed. “Tomorrow’s lunch will be more interesting. Taro bread.”
Mazie nodded. She was, at least among the six travelers younger than forty, the one who complained least about food. The fare was often monotonous—dried fish or meat, lightly salted and tucked into a hardtack biscuit, occasionally with a dab of agave marmalade—but she found others’ complaints—about the heat, about camp chores, about the smell of the untas’ urine—grating, because her own familiarity with hard life set her apart.
”I hope we’re worthy traveling companions.”
“You are,” she said, content to let the ambiguity of the word “you” hang in the air.
She did like Garet. His campfire stories were an excellent distraction from the aches and rashes and scratches, which did not bother her during the daytime but sometimes pestered after nightfall. He and Saito had made a poultice after, while dislodging a husker carriage from a gnarly sagebrush, she twisted her back. She was grateful for their help.
Claes meant well, but he could have done a better job bringing the group together. As a young woman, Mazie had been involved in enough “leaderless” revolutionary movements, none of which had amounted to much, to know that every group needed to have someone in charge, and that this person needed to seem impartial. Claes would often go with Garet and Saito or Farisa into the weeds for secret discussions of who-knows-what, and this was not unusual, but conditions out here made it impossible to hide the fact. A group this small, in such an environment, couldn’t afford to have factions.
No, I get it; you don’t trust a Snake Bay girl. You shouldn’t.
She avoided Runar and Kanos as much as she could, not for any offense they had committed, but because they were tall men in their early thirties who, as such, reminded her too much of Vikus. He and Mazie had both grown up penniless, but chance had set him on one path, and her on another. He had found his way into the service of one of the Continent’s few generous families, and she had... a lilt in her voice and an accent the whole world, even other persecuted people, considered dirty.
“You’re quiet today,” Farisa said.
Mazie swallowed a bite of her sandwich and nodded.
There was Farisa; of course, Farisa. No one would say she had an easy childhood, but even Farisa had no experience with generational poverty, a thousand-year stain that seeps into one’s bones like a cold winter rain and stays forever. Farisa had few material possessions, but she would always be somebody—if nothing else, she was Kyana La’ewind’s daughter.
In truth, Mazie was starting to find Farisa ridiculous. She observed the prudish modesties of Lorani noblewomen, though they meant nothing out here. Feet meant as little as wrists or elbows. Plus, it was so very Farisa to place herself in her native culture as one of the princesses who might require such concealment, as opposed to a shoeless street child.
Once Mazie finished eating, she leaned back on extended arms and took in the sights of badlands. There were worse places than this to nurse petty gripes, and within an hour those would fade away. Tired; she was tired and they all were. Their bodies were still getting used to the miles, whether on foot or on a saddled unta.
Claes, who had finished eating, stood. “Are we ready to go on?”
Mazie got up. “I’ve been.”
The trail was flat and open, so they could ride their untas. In spite of all her grumblings, she would have chosen this group over any other. The older men—Garet, Claes, and Saito—were stronger than most men her age, and had a grandmaster’s knack for terrain and travel. If there was drinkable water within a mile, one of them would find it. Runar and Kanos had stellar reflexes and perception, and had already steered them clear of one attempted ambush. Farisa, of course, was a mage. What did Mazie offer? She was not sure, but could say this: raw commitment. She could not double back, because she had nothing to return to. All adventures faced risk of death, but she risked something worse, because to fail out here would, in some sense, validate the ancestral inferiority that, to her, seemed to carry no objective truth, but that had nevertheless been painted on the faces of her mother and father, their mothers and fathers, and so on, going back for hundreds of years.
They had been on their untas for an hour when Garet again rode up to speak to her.
“How are you handling the heat?”
Mazie laughed. “I’m getting used to it. It’s only what, seven flags?”
“Seven point two, and yes, you do get used to it.” He chuckled, and adjusted his wide-brimmed hat. “Then it gets worse.”
Mazie found it almost impressive how Garet could have said tomorrow it would rain fire and still made it sound tolerable. The old man, even more than Claes, held them together.
“As for now, though, we’re climbing up that escarpment.” He pointed. “We’ll be at ten thousand feet tomorrow morning, so it could get down to three flags.”
“That sounds heavenly,” Mazie said, consciously expressing the H in the word.
The rocky ground did steepen; had the pitch been any more severe, they would have had to walk alongside their animals. Mazie, though she’d never thought herself sentimental, was beginning to feel affection for the half-ton woolly-necked creature beneath her.
She asked Garet, “Have you named your unta?”
“No.” He chuckled, then looked down. “Out here, it’s not a good idea. Treat these animals as well as you can, but always remember that we might have to choose between their lives and ours.”
In the late afternoon, the ground flattened out on a high savannah. Rain began to fall. They all had to dismount to guide their huskers, who had become skittish in the mud. Thick soil stuck to Mazie’s boots; more than once the ground seemed not to let go of her.
She ended up falling back with Talyn and Eric. The two of them, despite a tense start, were not bad company. Eric was, for a boy who had recently turned eleven, remarkably well behaved. Talyn, though mannish and inexpressive, would be the one to ask, when the time came, about the feminine logistics of travel. Farisa was far too prudish for matters like that.
“Let’s start looking for a place to camp,” Garet said as the sky hardened. “We want high ground, as high as we can get.”
Prior evenings had been hot and dry, but after dinnertime a chilly wind picked up, knocking strands of grass against each other. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Before they all went to sleep in the tent, Mazie remembered to close its flap, because otherwise it would have been cold. She woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a harsh, violent rain unlike any she’d ever heard, and at dawn, though the sky was clear, she realized why Garet had insisted on taking high ground: flash floods had cut new notches into the land.
The next day, their movement was slow. The untas’ legs were black with mud, the husker carriages seemed to get stuck every quarter mile, and mats of displaced grass on hills presented the hazard of slipping. By noon, the air was warm, but the sky had clouded over again with a flat stratus reminiscent of winter, leaving the sun invisible, though the mud was drying.
Mazie pointed at a row of mountains, same as she’d seen it the day before. “It doesn’t seem we’re closer to those than this time yesterday.”
He laughed. “We are six miles closer. It’s not enough, but it’s something.”
A few hours later, the mud ended and they reached a plateau covered by alpine meadow, its short grass dotted with eight-petaled blue flowers shaped like daisies. They were all on foot, because the untas had been struggling to navigate the mud and were visibly fatigued, but this high and flat terrain, after days of ankle-bending up-and-down, after rocks and mud and heat and wind, was mercifully easy to traverse. One could, by Mountain Road standards, consider these miles a break...
Talyn screamed. Mazie looked back. A mass of papery ugliness, twice the size of a coconut, had been broken by a husker wagon’s wheel. Buzzing flying insects emerged by the thousands, and these were not like the homeland hornets that traced a few eccentric circles as a warning. They came in a straight line. Garet used his shirt to cover his neck. Claes, shouting profanity, did the same. Kanos raised his gun hand at first, then realized he would do better to run. Mazie felt a sting on her throat so painful she thought she might stop breathing. Eric, chased by the swarm’s center mass, kept running until he tripped on a rock and fell. Mazie, wanting to shield the boy, ran after and covered him, taking two more stings on the back of her neck, each of which struck the base of her brain like an icy hammer.
Eventually the buzzing stopped. Saito had taken two stings on his forearm, and Talyn sported a bright red spot on her forehead. Claes had taken five welts, including one on his hand that had already swollen. Mazie now shivered in pain, pain she had not noticed in its full intensity until the spirit of combat had waned. When the pain crested, her eyes turned wet, because it felt as if three hot nails had been driven into her flesh.
“Eric,” Claes shouted. “Is Eric—?”
Saito said, “I’m looking at him right now.”
Garet said, “How many?”
“At least fifteen. It would have been four times that number had Mazie not covered him.” He looked at her. “You may have saved his life.”
“Fuck,” Garet said, with an anxiety in his voice that Mazie had never observed before. “Ten from these is a lot. We’re going to have to—”
Eric stood up. “I’m fine. Let’s keep going.”
Saito said, “You really need to—”
“It barely hurts. I’ll let you know if it gets worse.”
Mazie looked around. Claes was a man almost two hundred pounds, but the five stings he had taken had caused him to shiver, though he was hiding it well. When they set up camp an hour later, Saito counted twenty-four stings on the boy—the horrid things had gone up his shirt and stung his chest, back, and sides. How had he been able to walk, let alone go fast enough that, toward the end of the day, he was at the front of the group?
Impressive, kid. Damn impressive.
“We did eight miles today,” said Garet. “We’ll do better tomorrow. The trail will be fully dried out if it doesn’t rain again.”
The sky cleared up, giving a long spell of mountain light for the evening. They had a quick dinner around their fire. Eric ate very little, because the medicine Saito gave him had dulled his appetite, and went to sleep early. No one else could.
“I still hear that buzzing,” Runar said.
“So do I,” Mazie admitted.
#
A few hours passed. The wind picked up, making the night air chilly on Mazie’s exposed arms. Claes, after studying his maps for a little while, had gone to sleep around nine—late by trail standards, but early considering what had happened. Garet and Saito turned in shortly afterward. Kanos, the only one who hadn’t taken a sting, was still awake, but hadn’t said a word.
Runar and Farisa, outside the tent, sat on a rock facing the fire.
She asked, “Did you get stung?”
“Three times,” Runar said.
“Just one,” Farisa said, showing a welt on the back of her hand. “A small price to be out here.”
“It hurt like a bitch when it happened,” Runar said. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Not by the fire.”
Runar put his hands before the flame. “To think,” he said.
Farisa raised an eyebrow. “To think what?”
“Fire. It’s the human story. All of this, the heat and the light, comes from the breaking of chemical bonds.”
“Not exactly,” Farisa said. “Common misconception. The heat doesn’t come from broken bonds, because it costs energy to do that, but from the new ones made—mostly, in water vapor and carbon dioxide.”
“I knew that,” Runar said. “I was just making sure you did.”
Farisa leaned forward. “Were ya, now?”
Although Mazie doubted Farisa had much interest in men—it had not been said, but Farisa was a strange one, and nothing she had said had ever indicated a romantic or sexual inclination of any kind, and this absence of story stood out, given her age—there seemed sometimes to be a friendliness between her and Runar that left her feeling disinvited. How odd that, even in this wilderness, closer to the sky’s high arch than any town or city, those petty jealousies still existed.
She meandered back to Kanos, who was sitting on the fallen bole of what had once been a lone oak tree, as he drank from a bottle of vodka.
“You’re not supposed to have that,” she said.
“If you don’t tell Claes, I won’t.” He handed her the bottle.
“Thank you,” she said as she took a swig. The alcohol gave the back of her throat a pleasant burn.
“I need it badly,” Kanos said.
“You weren’t stung.”
“I never said I was.” He slowed his words and lowered his tone as he spoke. “The day’s events were harrowing.”
Talyn came out from the tent. “Give me some.”
Kanos, hearing Claes stir, called into the tent to offer him a drink.
“My liver has lived enough,” he mumbled.
“Suit yourself,” Kanos said.
“Claes doesn’t want us drinking in the desert,” Talyn explained. “We’ll have to conserve water. But it’s chilly up here. No reason not to.”
“More, Mazie?”
“I suppose it won’t hurt. We are still on the evening side of the wolf’s hour.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said. Talyn extended a flask, and he filled it. “I’ve got more than enough for everyone.”
A night of reprieve seemed a small thing to ask for, Mazie realized, and soon the five of them who were awake—she, Farisa, Talyn, Kanos, and Runar—had formed one group around the fire. Kanos and Runar were trading stories about girls in the town where they’d both grown up, and Talyn’s intuitions were strong enough that her interjected questions seemed to be keeping the men honest. They laughed and they drank—even Farisa lightened up—and the world spun in a way that, after more than a hundred miles of mud and heat and stinging insects, gave comfort.
She and Farisa, who was now slurring her words, were playing spotz when Kanos handed her a bottle. “Last of the night, if you want it.”
“I think she’s had enough,” Mazie said.
Farisa laughed as if she’d heard someone else say something foolish. She took the bottle’s final swig. “I’m still beating you.”
“That is true.” Mazie looked at her hand. She was the only one sober enough to deal, so no one had been cheating, but her run of lousy cards had not abated.
Meanwhile, Farisa’s winning streak had made her insufferable. She seemed to bounce as she played each card. When she revealed top aces in her two-long hand, she said, “Are you cheating, Mazie?”
“How could I be cheating?”
“Cheating to lose, could be?”
Mazie felt a flash of heat on her face. “Just play.”
“I have been. It’s you I’m starting to question.”
Mazie noticed that Kanos’s vodka bottle still had half a mouthful in it. “I’ll finish that,” she said as she grabbed it and drank. “I haven’t had cards, is all.”
Farisa rolled her eyes. “It’s not your cards. Stop playing slum game and beat me for once.”
Mazie threw her cards in Farisa’s face. She found, before she knew what she was doing or why, her finger along the woman’s calf, under the band of her sock. Mazie had figured something out about Farisa that she doubted the other woman had realized yet about herself. This Lorani food modesty was not about men, at least not in Farisa’s case, because she had no attraction to men and because there was no need to hide something that men in this part of the world did not care about. No, it had always been some sort of secret society amongst women, and right now Mazie wanted nothing more than to take that away from her. She dug her fingernails into the arch of Farisa’s heel as she removed the sock and stormed away.
Slum game, Farisa? You want to talk about slum game? I know the slums and you don’t. Slum game is a knife in the ribs you don’t see coming. Slum game is when you’re sixteen and you end a man’s life because otherwise he’ll force his way inside you. Slum game is nibbling the last thread of meat off a chicken bone from someone else’s trash. That’s what the fuck slum game is, Farisa, and fuck you, you child of a failed resistance movement, you spoiled little girl who panics about others seeing her feet like that’s a real thing, you... fuck you, I cannot believe I once thought you might be the hope of the world, you weird little girl who can’t even handle her liquor, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
Mazie walked by moonlight. She had probably gone half a mile from camp, on a flat but rocky ridge trail, when she realized she was still carrying a purloined sock. With enough force to rattle her elbow, she threw it into a ravine.
She began to voice her anger aloud. It didn’t matter; no one would hear her.
“I followed a fucking name to this godforsaken place. I didn’t know you, Farisa, not really. Now that I do, I want to be anywhere but here, so fuck you, fuck you for leading me out under this sky of fuck-spun nowhere when I could be more useful on Ettaso.”
She looked back. She could no longer see the hill on which camp had been set.
“I’ll go back. There’s work to be done there. Manifestos to be written. Riots to be started. I could train as a sniper. I’d be good at it. It’ll be a losing fight for fifty more years, and I’ll be dead before it’s won, but....” She growled. “What are we doing, Farisa? We are not dismantling the Company. We are running away.” She balled her fists and shouted. “You stupid girl, you spoiled brat!”
Her own sounds echoed back to her. Wolves howled. She looked back to see the light of camp. She did not want the others to find her, so she tightened the straps of her backpack—she was glad to have remembered to take it, as it had enough food to get her to Muster—and started running.
She realized that she and Farisa could not be more different. Farisa had an older generation’s grudge against the Company. Mazie had thousands, and hers went beyond one institution. Farisa could still indulge the belief that, in a world without the Globbos, she’d have been a Lorani princess. What would Mazie have been? The same. Her parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents had been ground into the dirt with such force over centuries that the soil had mixed into their blood. At least, that was how the world saw it. Dignity, for her sake, would require more than the Company’s overthrow, but a five-hundred-year burn to scorch down to every root the tendencies that had brought it into existence, had afflicted her with the status of pessima, had destined her to live in slums that had been slums before the Global Company had ever come into existence.
Ettaso? Why go back? The Continent is dying. Let it die. They’ve hated my kind for hundreds of years. It is too late to save those people. I’ll go to Salinay. I’ll go to Mount Alma if I have to. There is somewhere that I will be treated like I have a right to be there, but isn’t this place and it sure isn’t the fucking Antipodes.
She heard Claes and Garet shouting her name and, looking back, could see their lanterns. She had nothing against them, nothing at all, but she would not stand to be brought back to a group where she had to take insults from a woman who was barely twenty years old and couldn’t stand to be barefoot, and she was a faster runner than both men—I could outrun those geezers in my sleep—so she increased her speed to rate she knew they would be unable to sustain.
Mazie had been going downhill mostly for half an hour when she stopped hearing their calls and could not see their lights. The moonlit night had turned quiet, with no wind; even the wolves seemed to have lost interest in announcing themselves. This run was easy; it was the easiest thing she had done since landing on Muster. She was glad to have memorized the trail’s markers—she knew all along it might come to this.
A branch snapped. Scratchy dry grass abraded her bare legs. The ground bounced against her a few times—she had fallen, was falling—but the alcohol in her blood blocked most of the pain. She banged her knee on a rock before coming to a stop. She looked up to see that she had fallen about a hundred feet.
Her leg felt too wobbly to get up and run again, but she had landed in a spot hard to see from the trail, and she could continue her return to Muster in the morning. Thick clouds, coming in from the east, would cover the moonlight soon, and make her impossible to spot.
She heard Claes and Garet pass overhead on the ridge she had fallen from. They argued about where she might be, clearly having no idea of it, and passed. They would give up hope soon enough. She turned over a rock and lay her head on its mossy underside, with only the dimmest awareness of the snake slithering against her leg.
#
As a young girl, Mazie would wait for her parents to fall into laudanum sleep, then go outside, no matter how cold the night was, and stare into the black sky. If a place existed where she would be home, it must have shared the same stars.
She realized she was poor at age seven or eight, that her parents had fallen so low in life as to subsist on odd jobs off the market. There was work sometimes; sometimes, there was none. They asked her to help out in wage labor, mostly factory cleanup, and she knew what would happen if she refused. They taught her how to steal and gamble, and it was through the latter that Mazie realized her mother was, in fact, quite intelligent, although she lacked the discipline to keep hold of her gains.
Mazie remembered the date of that horrid conversation—May 22, ‘83—because it had come on the eve of her fifteenth birthday. A Globbo barracks had been installed on Jack Hill, only a mile away.
“Fifteen’s old enough to do what the world really runs on,” her mother had said. “It would make a real difference.”
“You could come home with twenty grot per night,” said her father.
They had not meant gambling or smuggling, either of which she would have done without complaint. So, in the middle of the night as she stared at her cracked ceiling, she determined that she had become more useful to her parents than they would ever be to her, and that she would not have to go far—pessimou didn’t travel, because it wasn’t for them. If she wandered two miles in any direction, there was a good chance her parents wouldn’t look for long enough to find her. She left the house she dreaded in the black of night, and never looked back.
At first, she survived by picking pockets, a vocation on borrowed time because she knew that, though she was quite dexterous, one error could end her life. She shifted to card games like spotz and poker, already familiar with the hand rankings. She never cheated, but could not escape accusations to that effect, given her being not only a woman but one who dropped the wrong sorts of consonants. Few could stomach being defeated by her. By eighteen, she’d been robbed more times than she could count on one hand, and beaten up badly enough to wake up in a hospital, discharged that morning because she spoke with an accent that made clear she’d be unable to pay her bill. She was never raped, but it almost happened three times, each one escaped on favor of a concealed weapon, twice a knife and once a pistol. The day after she first ended a human life, neither the sky nor sun shunned her for what she’d had to do. Indeed, nothing in the world noticed a difference.
She knew gambling offered no sustainable life. Exmore’s mayor busted all the card rooms that Company didn’t own and, at those, the rake had been set so high that even the best players couldn’t make money. She had also tired of the seedy, smoky rooms; the constant slights at her integrity though she played on her wits alone; and the knowledge that she was making her living off people as ill-put as she. In her early twenties, she gravitated to the University District, where the games were lower in stakes but the players disinclined toward violence upon losing—these were the well-meaning but misguided college students who openly discussed revolutions they would probably never create. She studied not their play—she had already learned more than they could teach her—but their mannerisms; she learned how to feign their pompous accent, to occupy the right amount of space in each room, and to treat the world as if she had been born into it to collect a debt.
Changing her name was the easiest part. She had been Mazie Naveed since her first turn at the gambling table; she had liked it then, and she still liked it now. Realizing that no law prevented her from discarding her born surname, she decided she had always been, in some sense, Mazie Naveed.
She decided, in her early twenties, to sneak her way into a legitimate job. Gambling had become unprofitable and tiring, and she’d already learned how to hide her accent and constrain herself to the narrow emotional range—a useful but bland neutrality that left her feeling alien to her own self, an affliction she could turn on and off—that caused no discomfort in the middle and upper classes. If she could hide her face before a deal of bad or good cards, she could hide herself for long enough to get work. It didn’t hurt that she was intelligent and attractive; the world often wanted to be fooled by her. Getting jobs was easy, and doing them was easier. Keeping them, on the other hand, was tough. It only took one vowel twenty cents off its prescribed pitch to have her Snake Bay origin discovered by someone somewhere, which would lead to a summons into the boss’s office. Sometimes they were apologetic; sometimes, insulting; in either case, the result was always the same.
Her longest gig had run for ten months. She had become an editor’s assistant at the Exmore Telegraph where she proved so adept at covering her boss’s mistakes, she was given an unprecedented promotion to staff writer. Her colleagues took her out after work to the local tavern, and the conversation turned to the pessimou and, of course, their world-famous graffiti and rhyming slang. Something Mazie said indicated more knowledge on the topic than was deemed appropriate to have, causing an awkward silence to fall over them. The next day, some of-the-litter revealed her lowborn origins to management. A man who had been her staunch advocate eighteen hours ago lashed her with the words “dishonest” and “unprofessional” before letting on that there was only one way she could keep her job—an offer that most of the well-to-do girls, knowing and accepting the ways of this world, would have likely taken to preserve their careers and respectability, but that Mazie refused. She had lived with nothing before; she could do it again, and would happily go back to picking pockets before letting a rich man’s skin serpent vomit inside her.
She had once been truly ashamed of what she’d done to survive, but direct experience with office work proved there was no shame, not in relative terms, in any of it. Snatching purses was more dangerous than working in a room full of typewriters and desk lamps, but no less dishonorable once one considered what those organizations existed to do. The only difference between Mazie and the children of the High Families—the Bells, Harrows, and Steyrs—was that, centuries ago, their ancestors had been adept enough at robbery to scale it above street sight, while hers had not been. That was all the long-dead past, though; she could beat them at any fair game.
The only enemy she feared was... if not herself, not exactly, the ashen spirit that could strike in the middle of the night, producing a vivid nightmare, or on a sunny afternoon, leading to shaky hands and a racing heart. The world had always been full of dangers like rabid dogs, thieves, and drunks, and those invariably required caution, but none produced the terror that spread itself through time. Her mother would come home early, having lost a job to her headaches; her father would return, with the same sort of news, for something he had said. They would argue about money; voices would be raised; hands would land, and the little girl’s vain attempt to defend one from the other—it went both ways in that house—would never go unpunished. The sentence that invariably provoked blows was, “You always do this.” It was always in wait, ready to be said. Poverty put a house in stasis; there was only one conversation and it was always the same one. Feet and miles, hours and years, provided no escape. Her stint at the Telegraph proved that.
The dreams were getting worse. She was in the Telegraph office and her parents were arguing. Inkwells and letter openers were flying overhead; glass was breaking.
“Mazie!” her mother’s voice would call. “It’s time to come home.”
Her father’s would add, “All we’ve done for you.”
She had never let herself be sold, and she had never sold herself. She had remained a virgin into her early twenties. She had done everything right. The dreams and the daytime terrors—the worst ones hitting around three in the afternoon—still came. She would find herself in an office, losing yet another job because of her accent or because she had laughed at the wrong time, and then she would be home where a lost job meant no beer and sometimes no food and the whole house had better keep quiet and cover its head.
It was almost never discussed after it happened. When it was, her parents would justify what they had done by saying the world would do much worse. Time had proven them right, but this only made her hate them more. She still—on this humid March night, more than a decade after running away—hated them. She had been awake since two o’clock or so, and she didn’t remember the dream she’d had—just a nightmare, and she’d be putting an end to those—but she had donned the darkest clothes she owned and walked out into the rain with a handgun, unsure where she was headed. She considered a visit to the Telegraph, but no one involved in her humiliation would be there at three in the morning, and this story had neither started nor would end there, so she went instead to her parent’s hovel.
She had not seen her parents since her last day aged fourteen, but she was still deathly afraid of them. Without the handgun, she could not have come within a mile of this place, not even in the middle of the night. She wished she had brought a lamp as she opened the front door—they had not locked it; typical drug addicts—and crept in to the bedroom.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Tommy?” said her mother, deep in the pearly muck of opium. The bedsheets were stained and stank like shit.
Her father, still asleep, had open sores on his face and looked like he weighed less than a hundred pounds.
In the world of fact—that night in March when it rained real rain—she walked away. She no longer feared nor hated her parents; instead, she found them so pathetic they weren’t even worth killing. But in this dream—on a June night, at the base of a Bezelian rock ledge—she fired her pistol until it ran out of bullets, and then felt such sorrow in the center of her head, she willed it to cave her skull. The bad memories were gone; the good ones had stuck around. She remembered her father returning from work exhausted but hugging his little ones anyway. She remembered her mother teaching her how to make bread from flour. They had tried for a long time, she realized; they truly had. She had ended their efforts, and it had not been right to do that. She cried so hard the world spun.
She found herself awake under a foreign sky, thankful to be in a world where she had not done that one thing, but a bolt of pain shot up her leg. She heard the snake move. A second bite, as fiery as the first, struck her inner thigh. Like wine spilled on carpet, pain spread through her flesh, causing her ribcage to hurt. Breathing made her wince. An owl hooted in the distance, indifferent. The sky was black and the stars shimmered until they were not there.
#
She heard Garet’s voice. She could not tell how much time had passed, but the pain in her leg had spread into her belly. She realized that if she did not answer him, she would die, and she had enough curiosity about the next hours of her life not to want that.
Garet called again. “Mazie!”
“I’m down here!”
“You’re lucky I found you. I heard you scream. What happened?”
Before she could form an answer, Garet had come down to her.
“Bezelian black snake,” he said when he saw the wound. “Thank the gods it wasn’t the ‘forty-pacer.’ I don’t think you need me to explain the name of that one.” He dressed the wound. “Can you walk through the pain?”
“I think so,” she said as she accepted Garet’s extended hand to pull herself up.
They climbed a zigzag route to the top of the ridge, where Claes stood above them.
“She’ll be fine,” Garet told Claes. “Let’s all be mindful of snakes, though. A hundred miles south of here, they get a lot more dangerous.”
Farisa, who was also there, offered Mazie a walking stick. She refused it, even though every step delivered new pain, often causing her to wince.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Claes said.
“I won’t,” Mazie said.
Garet added, “If we split up like that, there’s a good chance we die.”
Farisa offered her lantern to Mazie.
She waved a hand. “I can see just fine.”
Once they could see camp by the light of its fire, Garet said, “I’ll run along and tell the others I found you.”
Claes looked at Farisa and she nodded, indicating that he could go ahead as well. This left the two women alone together.
“You owe me a sock,” Farisa said.
Mazie shook her head. “I, uh, lost it.”
“I...”
Mazie looked at Farisa.
“Let me know if you need—”
“I’m sorry, Farisa. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Farisa grabbed Mazie’s hand. “I was a bad winner.”
“You think?”
“The air up here doesn’t go well with booze, does it?”
“No, it does not.”
“I’m told the altitude makes people turn—I mean, I turned into—”
“Somewhat of a cunt,” Mazie said.
“A full-on cunt, really.” Farisa looked down, then up.
Mazie smiled.
“It’s stressful out here. There are times that I absolutely love it, but at the same time, you walk and you walk and you’re always tired and everything hurts. The carriages get stuck all the time, there’s hardly any shade, and the meals are never enough. Eric got stung—we all got stung—by the hornets, and I was afraid that... well... there were so many possibilities, so when Kanos offered the moonwater, I...”
Mazie laughed. “Had too much to drink, as did I. Spotz is my game, girl. You wouldn’t have had a chance against sober Mazie. I accept your apology.”
“And I, yours,” Farisa said.
“Right.”
Farisa turned to face Mazie and lengthened her arms. “I’m glad you’re with us.”
Mazie said, “What’s the hungriest you’ve ever been?”
“I lived with a Vehu family, up in Tevalon. I tried to keep Exile once.”
“So you’ve never gone more than a day without food?”
“No.”
“True hunger takes over your whole world,” Mazie said. “You can’t think about anything but food. You dream about it. You’re always tired and you’re always cold; even between the horse nuts of August you’re cold, as if you've been covered in wet newspaper. Sometimes it makes you throw up, but you’ve got nothing to give.
“Doesn’t Exmore have food pantries?”
Mazie scoffed. “Lines an hour long for bread three days old. Half the time, they’re out before you clear the queue. Sometimes, they refuse to serve someone who looks like me; the economy’s bad and there are ‘more deserving’ people in need.” She looked up at the stars. “This assumes you have the strength to walk there. The nearest one was a two-mile trip, each way. You’d think you’d be angry, but when you’re down in it, you haven’t got sight for emotion—you just want the pain to go away. Some piece of shit kid throws an apple core at your head, you don’t throw it back. You eat it. You wait for things to get better, and sometimes they do. The night guard up at Fox’s Orchard falls asleep, so you grab a basketful of cherries, or you’re down on Seventh at the right time and you find the discards of a restaurant before anyone else does. You find a way to live—or you don’t. You lose one job; you lie your way into another. A certain kind of hunger, though, you never forget. You remember dying in plain sight, in front of so many people who did nothing; you remember their faces—” Mazie stopped herself short. She would not cry.
They walked for about a minute in silence, which Farisa broke. “You must think I’m a real bitch.”
“A complex bitch,” Mazie said. “I’ll give you an extra dimension."
“I appreciate it.” Farisa looked at her hands and took a deep breath. “I imagine...”
“What?”
“You said that when you were starving, others would walk by and do nothing to help you. I imagine you must hate them, even now. You must hate so many people.”
“I do.” Mazie kicked a pebble off the trail. “Like I said, though, when you’re down in it—”
“You don’t have the energy for emotion.”
“Exactly. It all comes after the fact.”
“I hope you never think I’m like them. I’m not.”
Mazie laughed. “I wouldn’t be following you across this desert if I did.”
Farisa stopped. Her breathing hastened. Mazie remembered the blinding headaches her mother used to get, and this seemed for a moment to be similar.
“Are you having...?”
“I’m fine.” Farisa shook her arms. “It’s nothing you did. You mentioned memory. Mine isn’t very good. I mean, it used to be. I used to say that I could take any final exam in Cait Forest and ace it, because I retained so much of what I read. Then, after the…” Farisa’s chin quivered. “Have you ever seen a twigging?”
“A twigging? No. You?”
Farisa looked aside. “Not that I remember, no. I spent two weeks—but it felt like a year—in this horrible place where I had dreams and odd thoughts I couldn’t trust, as if my brain could rewrite itself, but it can’t, right? I kept thinking—it doesn’t matter. A long time ago, in Tevalon, my best friend—”
“Raqel?”
“Raqel, right. She’s married. I said something—or I did something—I was a bad friend, I must have been. I don’t remember, but she’s moving to the Yatek if she isn’t there already and maybe it’s all because... I don’t know, Mazie. Everywhere I go, goes up in flames.” Farisa buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know why I’m this way.”
“Farisa.” Mazie put a hand on the woman’s wrist. The rim of the sky’s dome had brightened; dawn was coming. “We’re friends again, right?”
“Of course, silly.” Farisa took Mazie’s hand. Their bare shoulders brushed against each other. “Of course we are.”
“That’s all I need from you right now.”
#
Over the following days, the trail went up and down, often through terrain too rough for riding—the untas sometimes had to be guided through it—so Mazie’s calves carried that dull ache that started in the ninth or tenth mile and required her to massage them at the end of the day. Hilltops sported black patches of forest.
Garet said, as he coaxed a husker to return to the proper path, “The Road’s not as wild as last time.”
“Plenty wild for me,” Runar said.
“As wild a place as I’ve seen,” Mazie added.
Out here, days could pass without signs of other people. At night, they might spot a campfire or two in the unknown distance, but that was all. On a crest now and then, one could see the trail ahead for miles—a narrow ribbon gliding into the lowlands before snaking its way up another transverse ridge—and Mazie would look for signs of human presence, seeing none.
“It worries me,” Garet admitted. “The last time I was here, there were obstructions everywhere: fallen trees, overgrowth, missing cairns. Finding the trail was sometimes as hard as following it. Someone is maintaining the Road.”
“Who?” Runar said.
“Or what? That is the question.”
Saito called up from the rear. One of the huskers had found mushrooms.
Garet cupped his hands around his mouth. “Describe them.”
“They’re white, with rings around the stems.”
“Leave them. Those are poisonous.”
They came along the canyon of a stream that had dried out long ago, forcing them to go single file on a rocky ledge. A wall of granite, hundreds of feet high, pressed their left flank; at their right was a drop equally steep. A couple hours passed, and clouds covered the sky.
Garet said, “Be careful coming around this bend. It’s the perfect place for an amb—”
A greenish-brown head poked out of a cave at a height of about eight feet. The orc, wielding a club that would break a man’s head if swung at full force, didn’t get very far because Mazie’s pistol doubled the size of its red open mouth. As more orcs emerged, Claes and Runar and Kanos fired. Saito loosed a crossbow bolt. Five of the six orcs fell, with one of them collapsing close enough to Garet that the trickle of blood met the sole of his boots. The sixth orc, in a panic, dropped the club he was carrying and ran over the cliff, falling to an outcropping far below where, to Mazie’s utter shock considering the fall, it bolted up and ran away.
Mazie aimed her gun.
“Save the bullet,” Garet said. “We’ll be gone long before he gets back up here.”
Farisa looked at her gun hand like an alien limb.
Mazie said, “What’s wrong?”
“I choked. I aimed but I... and then I missed, but I think I must have deliberately—”
Mazie put a hand on Farisa’s shoulder, covering the scar. “We survived it.”
“We did.” Farisa looked down at the spot where the last of the orcs had landed. “I just wish I had...”
Mazie was beginning to worry; Farisa, whose aim was improving but still no better than Eric’s, was losing her confidence.
Kanos, the only one who hadn’t dismounted, hopped off his unta. “Let’s search the bodies.”
“Let’s not,” Claes said.
“It’s better to get away fast,” Garet said. “There’ll be nothing useful on any of them, and there could be twenty more inside that cave.”
They pressed on with a hurry the rest of the day, skipping lunch and watering stops, not setting up camp until full darkness had been overhead for at least an hour.
Over dinner, Garet said, “Orcs are hardy bastards.” The fire’s orange glow turned the wrinkles and ridges of his face into rugged canyons. “I’m not surprised our jumper lived. I’ve seen them take more abuse than that.”
“How far did he fall?” Runar asked.
“About a hundred feet,” Mazie said.
“I’ve seen them survive two hundred,” said Garet. “Blunt force seems to be what they’re built for.”
Mazie asked, “Where do you think he was going?”
Kanos scoffed. “Why would he be going anywhere?”
“That’s a good question, Mazie,” said Garet. “I am curious about that too.”
“They were lousy fighters. We made short work of them.”
“That should worry you, Kanos. The mountain clans are skilled in combat, but few in number. If they’re being driven out, that suggests a denser population may be moving in.”
Once the meal was over, they all went to sleep. The owls and coyotes were loud that night, and Mazie was glad for their noises.
#
Travel went on as it had: south and west, south and east, south and up, south and down. Mazie’s skin had taken on a pleasant tan, although now she often wore a cotton shawl to protect her arms and shoulders from the July sun’s sting.
“Don’t expect much of Obbela,” said Garet. “There’s less of a town there than in Muster.”
After dinner on July 3, Mazie was, to her surprise, the one Claes took aside for a secretive discussion. “Before we get to the next town, we need to figure out Talyn.”
“What about her?”
Claes seemed to nod in Kanos’s direction.
“I’m not sure I know...” Talyn’s one-sided attraction to Runar’s half-brother—perhaps she’d been taken by his rugged appearance, his nose crooked from a bar fight somewhere, as well as his air of having no concern for any company but his own—was obvious, and led Mazie to feel sorry for her, but she didn’t see it as a danger to the group. “...what you mean.”
“We’ll talk later.”
Mazie could see that much was on Claes’s mind. Eric, and it wasn’t his fault, was slowing them down. Elevation and the air’s dryness had cooled the nights to pleasant temperatures, but the days were now getting up to seven-and-a-half flags, and children weren’t built to handle that kind of heat, especially not when one had to go fifteen miles per day through brush no taller than waist height. They’d had to call several days early, and it was obvious by now that Talyn was doing less for Eric than Garet and Saito. Even Farisa's cat, who curled up next to him at bedtime, was more attentive than the woman who claimed to be his mother.
Still, they arrived in Obbela, no more than a cluster of white tents on a low-lying salt plain, early on July 5. It struck Mazie as odd how placeless this settlement was, as there was no river or lake to justify its existence. It could have taken any other spot within a one-mile radius. Vultures circled overhead as if the whole town were fey.
“This place is creepy,” Runar said as they approached the town.
“Aye.” Mazie looked up at the barren blue sky. “It is.”
The huskers seemed reluctant to enter, as if knowing the tent leather had come from their own kind. The streets, at ten in the morning, were deserted.
“We’ll try not to be here long,” Claes said.
They rented Obbela’s highest tent at a nightly price of six ounces of silver.
Talyn said, “Our tents are better than this one.”
“We’re paying for protection, not quarters.”
“If we spend so easily, they’ll think we’re marks.”
“They already do,” explained Garet.
As soon as they’d removed their packs and corralled their animals, Runar and Garet went out to restock their supplies.
Before Mazie could go anywhere, Claes called her and Farisa to join him on a walk. “You girls are friends again, right?”
“Best friends.” Mazie squeezed Farisa, digging fingernails into the flesh of her arm.
Farisa gave an awkward smile. Ouragan nuzzled Mazie’s bare leg.
“I wanted to talk to you both about Talyn. She’s not Eric’s mother.”
“She’s not?” Farisa said.
Mazie knew by Farisa’s overacted manner that she already knew. “Then who the fuck is she?”
Claes said, “I need the two of you to figure that out.”
“I see,” Mazie said.
Farisa said, “Do you want me to—? In this kind of heat, it’ll take me several days to recover.”
“We can’t afford the time,” said Claes. “Try to get the information the old-fashioned way.”
“Meaning?”
Mazie said, “Take her out for a drink?”
Claes looked aside. Mazie realized the sun had burnt one side of his face more than the other. “If that’ll work, do it. You don’t have to like her. My concern isn’t dislike. I need to be sure she’s not working for someone.”
Mazie felt a fly land above her elbow. “What if she is?”
“Depends who she’s working for.”
The fly bit Mazie and she smacked it. “You think she’s working for the—”
Claes nodded, and lowered his voice. “The two of you have unconditional permission, from Garet and me, to kill Globbos. If there’s one among us, nothing changes.”
#
The stars were ringing clear over the tavern space, half covered and half outdoors, that was the center of Obbela’s life, though nothing seemed to start here until an hour after sunset. A ring of blanched stones marked the perimeter and, although the patrons had only filled one-third of its space, the air and enclosure seemed unfriendly to anyone who was not buying liquor.
“She’s been there since dinner,” Farisa said.
“It figures.” Mazie looked up at the sky. She remembered how poorly Farisa had held her liquor, so she said, “I should be the drinker. You, stay as sober as you can, but you can’t be a teetotaler because that’ll make her suspicious. You can ask the hard questions.”
Farisa nodded.
It was hard to tell locals apart from travelers, because Bezelians had recent enough Ettasi ancestry to look identical, except for the suntans, which set in on everyone. Obbela’s dialect of the Ettasi language was mostly recognizable, albeit nasal, except for a couple dozen slang words that had probably been taken from some long-gone indigenous resident.
When the two women found Talyn, she was playing some kind of dart-throwing game amidst a group of men.
“Bother me later,” she said. “I need to concentrate.”
Rather than leave, Mazie and Farisa noticed her brown purse on the bar and flanked it.
“We're not going to steal it,” Mazie said to the middle-aged man behind the bar. “We’re with her.”
The bartender, recognizing Mazie’s accent, said, “Just give me the purse.”
Mazie rolled her eyes and did so. She’d stiff him out of a tip for that.
Farisa traced a finger along the wall of shot glasses Talyn had stacked up. “It looks like she’s had a few.”
“I bet this is nothing for her,” Mazie said.
Some time later, Talyn returned and put an arm around each of the women. “Hello girls.” To the bartender: “One dose for both of them.” To Farisa: “They call it a dose here. Not a shot.”
Mazie sipped the clear liquor. “It’s a bit too sweet for me.”
“Don’t let him hear that. The bartender made it himself.”
“Really?”
“It comes from a local cactus, I’m told.”
Mazie, pretending to be more inebriated than she was, threw her head back. “Is that so?”
As the women bantered, Mazie monitored each one’s intake. Farisa’d had two shots of the local swill, and by the look on her face she didn’t like the taste of the stuff, so Mazie furtively dumped most of the third one Talyn had pushed upon her. Once about an hour had passed, Farisa looked at Mazie and raised her eyebrows. Time to get to work. Mazie raised hers back. Yes, let’s.
Farisa pressed her thumb into the wooden table. “Tell me, what kind of person brings a child to the world’s edge?”
Talyn stepped back. “What kind of person comes here at all?”
“We’ll discuss ourselves in time,” Mazie said. “You first.”
Farisa put her arms on the bar and leaned toward Talyn. “You’re not from here, that much is clear. You get to Muster and the first thing you do is go and buy the four best untas. You had some kind of plan. I’d like to know what it was.”
Talyn smiled. “I wanted good traveling companions.”
Mazie said, “I’m glad you like us.”
“I didn’t say I like any of you, but you’re all... competent.”
Farisa took a deep breath. “Your son almost died in the heat.”
“But he didn’t. Had we stayed home, he would have perished long ago.”
“Explain.”
“Do you really want to know my sordid history?”
“We do,” Mazie said.
“My husband is an officer for the GC.”
Mazie reached for her revolver.
“Relax, girls. I’m running from him. You think it’s a rare story? The women in the town’s back row, half of them are fleeing the Company, and I think you know what they’re doing now to survive. I’d rather not, not ever and certainly not at my age. If we make it to Switch Cave, I won’t have to. I’ll grab as much treasure as I can, and then Eric and I can start a new life.”
“Eric and you,” Farisa said. “Eric’s not your son.”
Talyn’s mouth opened. “You promised—”
“I already know,” Mazie said.
“From whom?”
“Not from Farisa. She kept your secret.”
“So, then...?”
Farisa said, Eric was delirious from the heat, remember?”
“He didn’t rat you out either,” Mazie said. “I was able to infer it.”
“Not that it matters.” Farisa rapped a knuckle on the bar. “Again, we’re talking about you. No one else.”
Talyn stood. “Do you doubt that he’s better off out here than as an orphan back home?”
Mazie asked, “What’s your husband’s rank?”
“Z-5.”
Farisa said, “What’s the insignia of a Z-5?”
“Double stripe, both red. He had a blue star in the center of the top one, because—”
“Office or field?”
“Office. Moyenne.”
Farisa wrinkled her nose. “What’s the address of Headquarters?”
Talyn nodded. “414 Walker Street.”
“I would like to help you.” Farisa, now directly facing Talyn, opened her legs to take up more space. “I want to believe your story. You say Eric’s not your son. Then whose is he? Your husband’s?”
“No.”
“So, you adopted an orphan. Why a boy, not a girl? How’d you pick which one?”
Talyn looked behind herself before getting up and stepping back. “Ladies, I think it’s time for all of us to be going to bed.”
“One more drink,” Mazie said.
“No. It’s a little too late—”
Farisa stood to meet Talyn’s level and put a hand on the woman’s elbow. “Your husband must be a bad man, if eight-flag heat’s worse than he is. I want to know what’s going on.”
“Eric came to our door during the White Famine.”
Mazie cleared her throat. “Your story still doesn’t snap in. You said you’re from Moyenne. The White Famine didn’t get that far east.”
Talyn dug the corner of her empty shot glass into the table, palm on the rim. “He had come far. It was cold and he didn’t have a coat. He was sick. He still gets sick, because he’s... special. Talented.”
Farisa said, “Doesn’t every good parent think their child is—?”
Talyn leaned in and lowered her voice. “By talented, and by sick, I mean—”
“I think I have it. So if the Globbos—and you had all the bad sense to marry one—find out, the boy ends up in one of those concrete pyramids and then he’s subjected to their disgusting experiments. Right?”
Talyn nodded.
“Rhymes with ‘sage’?”
“Rhymes with ‘lizard,’ rhymes with ‘rich,’” Mazie added. “Rhymes with, uh, ‘schmorceror.’”
“Yes,” Talyn said. “Yes, that.”
“I see,” Farisa said. “Do me a favor.”
Talyn pulled her shoulders back. “Do you a favor?”
Farisa, stepping on Talyn’s toes, whispered. “Shut the fuck up about your special son.”
“She doesn’t mean to be rude,” Mazie said.
“No,” said Farisa. “I do mean to be rude. There are Globbos everywhere—there could be five in this town—and I want your son—I mean, I want Eric—to be safe.”
#
“I’m glad she’s not a Globbo,” Farisa said on the way back. “I’m not sure I would be able to bring myself to...”
“I know,” Mazie said. “It would be hard. But you’d do it, right?”
Farisa stopped. “I think so, but it would be different. We know her. Why, would you?”
“G-Comp? Any.”
They went to sleep around two o’clock. A shelf of cloud had come in overnight and, the next morning, was still there, leaving the air cool enough that Mazie found herself looking forward to the day’s miles—the exertion and the changing scenery often pulled her mind into a pleasant space, even in spite of discomfort—but Claes announced, after they finished breakfast, that they would be spending another night—at least one—here.
“Why?” Runar asked.
Claes started to answer, but Saito spoke. “I’ve been many things in life, including a doctor. I’ll tell that story another day. Three of our untas have chemical burns on their back legs, and our huskers aren’t looking great either.”
Kanos reached for his revolver, though he wasn’t wearing it. “Chemical burns?”
“We’re on a goddamn salt plain,” Talyn offered. “It’s gotta be that.”
“It probably is,” Saito said. “The animals aren’t in danger, but it’ll be at least a couple days before they can do any work. We won’t be able to ride them.”
Kanos shook his head.
Claes looked into the morning sun, hand on brow. “They’re well enough to walk a mile. I’ll lead them up into the hills and hide them so they don’t get stolen. There’s better grass there, too.”
He and Mazie looked at each other. They had both converged, she imagined, on the same theory—Obbela’s townsfolk had deliberately put minor injuries on their animals so the tokolaiko (“foreign idiots”) would spend more money on alcohol. Alas, it would almost certainly work.
Saito said, “We caught this problem in time. The burns are superficial, and the worst-case scenario is that we’re here for two days. Untas heal quick.”
Runar said, “What if they don’t?”
Claes said, “We know a very talented healer—Garet does, someone in town—but I hope we don’t have to use her—him, I mean.”
Mazie remembered that not all of the group’s members knew that Farisa was “that Farisa.”
“He is expensive,” Garet said. “If it comes to that, we might all have to spend a few days here, working for him.”
Runar asked, “You’re sure he’s any good?”
“One of the most talented people I know."
Mazie crossed her arms and looked aside. She didn’t think she’d ever been described that way by anyone.
“It isn't the worst thing, having an extra day here. We could use it to buy supplies. Pickings are thin out here, but we have time and can afford to be selective.” He handed out sheets of paper. “I’ve made a list for everyone, with the price ranges you should be prepared to accept.”
Mazie looked at hers. “Mine only has one item.”
“It’s one of the most important ones, though: lamp oil. Buy as much as you can. In the ten-flag heat of the Ashes, we’ll be traveling by night exclusively.”
“Lamp oil,” Mazie said, as if it were almost normal to be preparing for a trek through a ten-flag desert. Five flags—the temperature now at sunrise, and the heat of a summer day back home—had once seemed hot; it felt cool in comparison to the eight flags—the noon ground was often hot enough to cook an egg—they would experience today.
Claes said, “We’ll meet back here an hour before sunset.”
Garet, with a nervous chuckle, said, “Stay out of trouble till then.”
#
Mazie had little difficulty finding lamp oil, because even though the oil fields had dried up decades ago, kerosene remained in abundance and was one of the few commodities fairly priced. The trick was, instead of going to the market, which would not be very active until the sun was an hour from setting, to visit each house and offer fresh silver, straight from Ettaso. Most of the people who lived here had never seen the First Continent, so coins with the current Patriarch’s face held a certain prestige and traded at a ten percent premium. Offering a fair price in plain language, rather than haggling, worked. She had gathered several gallons of fuel by eleven in the morning, and while only Claes and Garet knew where the huskers were—they weren’t taking any chances—their wagons were easy to find. She had moved all the canisters into them by noon.
Garet had allowed each of them to spend fifteen grot on personal effects. She suspected the others found this allotment to be spare, but she considered it generous, because no one had ever trusted her with this kind of money before.
Due to a spell of cloud cover, there were more stalls in the market than Mazie had expected. She noticed that one woman had put for sale a pair of shaded glasses.
“How much are these?” she asked as she reached for them.
“No, no, no,” said the merchant, an old woman with a missing bottom tooth. “No touchin’ less you’re buyin’.”
“I have the money,” Mazie said. She slid a silver coin across the table.
“They cost more’n that.”
“Call it collateral. May I try them on?”
“I suppose.”
Mazie looked behind herself. Everything in these desert towns was so blindingly white—the light that nothing wanted bounced around and around, making the air itself bright—so she had taken a habit of avoiding glances in most directions, but the smoky lenses made it tolerable to look up, as long as she wasn’t staring right at the sun. I bet they also look fantastic on me, too. “I’ll buy them. What are they going to cost me?”
“Twenty grot.”
“Twenty?” Mazie took the glasses off and put them on the table. “I’m flattered that I look like a wealthy person to you. That isn’t a confusion I face back home. I haven’t got twenty, but I think these things are worth....” She paused. “Thirteen.” Precision would suggest prior calculation, even if none existed. “No, more. Thirteen and forty-five.”
“Thirteen and forty-five,” the woman muttered. “I suppose it walks.”
"Walks it does," Mazie said as she handed over the money, glad she could, when she needed to do so, drive a bargain.
With a grot fifty-five left to spend, Mazie sauntered around until she found a bookstand. She bought a couple pulp novels—serious literature was not on offer here—and a new deck of cards because the old one, of “slum game” infamy, had been missing its five of coins the whole time, which—come to think of it—had thrown her off several times that night.
The others weren’t back yet, so she ate lunch—a cake of dried berries and smoked meat, surprisingly tasty—at a shaded table about a hundred yards away from the town’s center. She tried to read, but found it too hot to concentrate, so she leaned back and watched the market crowd, as much as about a hundred people could be called one, bustle.
No one moved fast in this kind of heat, so the panicked boy stood out—Eric was not running, but his walking speed drew alarm. Mazie recognized on Eric’s face the same expression of pure fear that she would see on Farisa’s face when the topic of the Marquessa came up and, scared that the boy might collapse all alone amidst strangers, she ran toward him and waved her arms overhead.
“Eric! Come over here!”
He was pale and sweaty by the time he got to Mazie. “It’s t-t-too hot. I’m going to die out here.”
Mazie put a hand on his forehead. “I don’t think so.”
His hands shook. “I have heatstroke.”
“You don’t have the signs,” Mazie said. She’d seen fatal heatstroke in Snake Bay, where end-stage laudanum addicts could be found languishing in the summer sun, faces red and pupils constricted to pinholes. “If you had heatstroke, you’d stop sweating, and you haven’t, but let’s go get some water.”
Eric’s body started heaving.
“Eric. Eric.” She snapped her fingers. “Are you with me?”
Garet came over. “What’s going on?”
“I think it’s just anxiety,” she whispered. “I’m not entirely sure, though. Get us some water.”
“Of course. Wet towel as well?”
“Please.”
Mazie steadied her hands. She was quite scared, but to show fear would worsen Eric’s.
“My throat hurts,” the boy said. “I’m going to choke. Please make it stop.”
Mazie reached into her shirt pocket for the pack of cards she’d bought. “Water’s coming.”
Garet brought over a metal water tankard and a small glass.
“Thank you so much,” Mazie said.
“Don’t mention it.”
“I have a friend who gets the same attacks. They’re hell, but you will survive. I promise.” Mazie poured water into the glass, spilling some. “Drink,” she said to Eric.
“I can’t swallow.”
“I bet you can.” Mazie realized the boy needed a distraction from his own thoughts. “Hey Eric, do you know how to shuffle a deck of cards?”
Eric shook his head.
“This would be the perfect time to learn.”
He looked as if she’d just said that one plus one was forty-seven. Nevertheless, she split the pack into two piles and performed a riffle shuffle.
“A slight bend does it. Now you try.”
Eric attempted Mazie’s same motion. The cards clumped more than they interleaved. “I’m not very good.”
“You’ll get the hang of it.”
“You shuffle perfectly.”
“Never say that,” Mazie smiled. “A perfect shuffle is cheating. A shuffle's supposed to be random. You know, Farisa told me that every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you create an ordering—a permutation, she called it—that has never existed in the world and never again will.”
“Is that so? How many orderings are there?”
“A lot,” Mazie said.
“More than a billion?”
“Far more than a billion. More than there are grains of sand on every beach in the world.” Mazie chuckled. “I don’t know if deserts like this are counted.”
Eric grabbed the water glass and drank some.
“Try to shuffle again. You’ll find that it’s a soothing sound.”
“I can’t keep my hands steady. I’m so scared, Mazie.”
“I’ll show you again.” She took the pack of cards and performed a left-handed shear shuffle. “Some day, I’ll teach you how to put any card you want on the top. I never cheat, but it pays to know a cheater’s tricks, so you recognize them at an unfamiliar table.”
The boy was still pale and shaking. Mazie tried to remember what Farisa had said about the number of possible orderings for a deck of cards: that there were fifty-two times fifty-one times fifty times forty-nine… all the way down to one. A big number with something like seventy digits.
“Eric. Hey Eric, have you ever played the multiplication game?”
The boy, whose eyes had gone out of focus, returned to true. “What’s that?”
“Ah, it’s simple.” She handed him the deck. “Draw two cards.”
Eric was able to control his hand enough to draw a nine and a six.
“So six times nine is…?”
“Forty-two.”
Mazie raised an eyebrow. “Try again.”
“Fifty-four.”
“Correct. Draw another.”
Eric drew a two.
“So, six times nine times two is…?”
“A hundred eight.”
“Good. Draw one more.”
Eric drew another card, a face card with the letter D. “What’s this?”
“Dlayo,” Mazie said. “A Lorani king. Thirteen.”
“So a hundred eight times thirteen is...”
“One thousand—” Mazie started.
“One thousand, four hundred and four.”
“Excellent. Draw another.”
Eric drew a seven.
Mazie frowned in sympathy. “When you play this game, you learn to hate sevens.”
“How long do you keep playing?”
“Till you can’t keep track of the numbers anymore. Then you start fresh.”
Mazie thought Eric was about to give up, but the boy fell silent, then said, “Nine thousand, eight hundred and twenty-eight.”
“Not bad at all. Draw another one.”
Eric looked at Mazie with exasperation. “It’s already over nine thousand.”
“One more.”
He drew another card, another seven. “Can I use paper?”
“That’d defeat the purpose of the game.”
Eric groaned. “Sixty-eight thousand and, uh… seven hundred and fifty-six.”
“Oof. So close. Seven hundred and ninety-six.”
“Fuck this game,” Eric said.
Mazie laughed.
“Sevens are pissing me off.”
Mazie said, “Now that you’re angry at the game, you’re not—”
Eric smiled. “It worked.”
Mazie tousled Eric’s hair. “Sometimes you need a break from your own head.”
“I just don’t like this place,” Eric admitted.
“You mean Obbela?”
“Uh-huh. Did you see those blue lights last night?”
“You know, I did.”
She had noticed the scanning blue spots on the clouds, and figured them to be just another odd atmospheric phenomenon, unique to the high desert, but their movement had been almost methodical, as if they were searching for something.
Eric asked, “Do you know what they were?”
“I have no idea. We’ll be out of here soon.”
“Thank you, Mazie,” Eric said. “I’m supposed to meet Talyn at three o’clock, so...”
Mazie smiled. “Go. Drink plenty of water.”
The first time in a long while, she had completed her day’s work early. Nothing pressing needed done; she had a bit of time to herself. Sleep on the trail had never fully felt restful, so much as a part of the necessary maintenance—of animals, of carriages, of equipment—the miles required, but out here, this afternoon, she had a pavilion’s worth of shade all to herself. She adjusted her knapsack to put her clothing on its top side, making it soft enough to be used as a pillow. Her sunglasses weren’t blocking all the daylight, so she inched her high-crowned hat over her face, holding the rim between two fingers as she kicked her shoes off.
She had earned a bit of rest, after all.