Black.
“You don’t have a light?”
“I can see just fine.”
“Oh.” The Eye. “Right.”
“Follow me. We can lock arms if you want.”
“Of course.”
“Watch your head.”
“Thanks.” Pause. “How far do you think this goes?”
“No idea.”
Footfalls stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
“He died for me.”
“For all of us.”
“For all of us, but I’m the one who can’t go back. I’m in debt to him.”
“I’m as pinned to the end as you are.”
“It’s so much. I owe so much to that man.”
A longer pause.
“I never thought... I always felt, if one of us... I’d go first, you know?”
Bats, somewhere.
“I already miss him.”
“You will, Farisa. You always will. So will I until, well... who knows, right?”
“The other side. The other, other side.”
#
The air cleared, no longer perfused with that acrid odor of flashfire, as they walked up a slope. A spot of color, a shade amidst shadow, caught Farisa’s eye. Night had fallen outside, but low light stood against none at all. The air grew hot as they walked toward what turned out to be Claes’s oil lantern, and this heat as well as the discussion they would soon have to have—this admission to an unthinkable loss—created resistance, so that every step toward the outside world felt like a kick against a current.
The world was still, from Farisa’s perspective, washing around itself when Runar told Claes about Garet’s death.
Claes’s face took readiness for tears, but straightened itself. “We’ve got miles to make,” he said, as Garet often had. “We’ll mourn when we rest.”
Farisa noticed the untas had been relieved of their saddles.
“No one rides,” Claes said. “We cannot overtax them out here, so we’ll go on foot.”
They walked south; the stars spun overhead. As they continued to lose elevation, the heat thickened, though the lack of sun meant, oddly, that one did not feel seven-flag heat as one did during the day, as a direct burn; it was nevertheless true that one who did drink every hour felt a pressing headache. Wind warmed the skin rather than cooling it. Inessential provisions in the huskers’ wagons had been discarded long ago to make room for water, which comprised three-fourths of the weight.
The world had rolled through midnight by the time Eric started panting. Farisa could see him holding back tears.
Mazie said, “Perhaps he should ride?”
“No,” Claes said. “We can slow down, as our bodies require.”
Runar said, “What do you weigh, Eric?”
“About eighty pounds,” Talyn said.
“I can carry you.”
“Thanks, Runar,” Eric said. “I can keep going.”
“You’re doing great.” Mazie touched his cheek. “Drink. It’s normal to feel like hell. We all do.”
“You hide it well,” Eric said.
Farisa and Mazie looked at each other, trading smiles.
“How hot is it?” Runar asked.
“Seven point six,” Claes said.
Runar whistled in a sort of miserable appreciation; they had seen numbers like this between the hours of noon and three, but not never in the middle of the night. As they walked south, terrain turned smooth and winds picked up. The sand reflected the blue-white glow of the stars; the treeless flat stretched ahead as an oppositional mockery of a winter scene.
Farisa looked at her watch; it was one thirty in the morning. She wondered how much water they had; she counted their animals.
She asked Claes, “Did we get another unta?”
“We found a pair of abandoned yearlings in the cave.”
“We found two? Then where’s...?”
“We also lost one,” said Saito. “Direct drampf hit. Busted ribs, punctured liver. There was nothing I could do.”
Farisa, as they kept walking, checked the other untas, who had fallen a hundred yards behind and smelled awful, having sprayed urine on their legs to stay cool. The three huskers were struggling to keep up, too, mouths open as they panted. The group did not seem to be moving faster than two miles per hour, as this kind of heat punished exertion, but even at this languid pace, the animals were struggling. She decided she would look after them every couple of hours.
After a long silence, Mazie said, “I’ve never seen the stars so clearly.”
“It’s been a long time since I have.”
Farisa remembered Tevalon; she remembered Medvesziget, where one took the northern lights for granted. “One easily forgets there are so many.”
“I bet you know them all by name.”
“Only a few.” Farisa pointed to the northwest. “I believe that one is...” She checked her watch: 2:20 in the morning. “Alfad Sophya.”
Mazie pointed straight up. “What’s that one?”
“The bright one? Rhazyladne. It’s called the Storyteller Star, but it's actually a galaxy.”
“Do you think it’s the galaxy, as in the Vehu spiral-and-star?”
“I don’t think anyone knows.” Farisa looked back; they had strayed from the others. “No one knows how people in the Bronze Age even knew what a galaxy was. It would be two thousand more years before Lorani astronomers invented a proper telescope.”
“Huh.” Mazie smiled, looked up again, then wrapped her arms around Farisa. “I love you.”
“Aye, Mazie. I do too.”
The night passed. The group continued to spread and drift; in the distance, it was hard to tell whose light was whose, but there was no risk of their losing each other—one could see for miles on this flat plain.
Mazie, as the eastern sky showed its first hints of light, stopped. “I can’t believe Garet’s gone.”
“I can’t either,” Farisa said. “I was there, and... I still can’t.” She paused. “Do you know what his beliefs were? Religion, funeral customs, anything of the sort?”
“I wish I could say I did. Where I come from, you don’t talk about things like that.”
They walked over to Claes, toward whom the others had also begun to drift as day broke. Farisa asked, “Was Garet religious? Do you know what he believed in?"
“We never talked much about gods or heavens,” Claes admitted. “Or hells.”
Farisa said, “If we owe him prayers, we ought to know which ones.”
“I wish I could tell you.” A tear fell from Claes’s eye. He turned his face and wiped it away.
Saito said, “I’m not much for words, but I hope the love we feel suffices.”
“I’ll miss him so much,” Mazie said.
They continued walking. The eastern light rolled further over them, like a slow serpent. The cusp of morning had come; their breath was hot and they were covered in sweat, but this was the coolest it would get, and the sun would start its climb in less than an hour, so they kept using the time they had.
#
The low temperature on the morning of September 23, according to a dyed-alcohol thermometer that had once belonged to Garet, was 6.3 flags. The sun did not rise at the timid, civilized angle it used in the north; instead, it shot up like a rocket. Twenty minutes into its arc, it was sharp enough to sting skin.
Daylight did not offer much more for the eyes than night had. The sand, deceptively the color of a silk bedsheet, could blind one who looked at it from the wrong angle. Dunes could be spotted in the east. The only topographical feature of note or interest was the Ilyzian Ridge, now thirteen miles at their back.
By seven thirty, it was too hot to keep going due to the absolute lack of shade, so they set up camp. They filled their canteens from a metallic barrel that had been designed to deflect as much heat as possible, but the water inside it was already tepid. In a day or two, they would be sipping it like tea or coffee, still able to keep cool by sweating, but unable to ever get comfortable. They readied themselves for a hot, dusty daylight sleep.
Farisa, atop her sleeping bag, closed her eyes and prayed for Garet. She did not have a specific god in mind; in a place like this, one entreated whichever were available.
Saito seemed intent on finding something as he looked out over the landscape. To the south, there were small catches of brush.
Mazie said, “You’re looking at something.”
“Another party has come before us.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It probably isn’t good. See those?” He pointed to a pair of eviscerated pipe cactuses, fifty yards away and the nearest plants. “If we run out of food, we’ll be eating them, but that patch has been picked clean, and so has every other one I can see from here.”
Runar said, “Could it have been squibbani?”
Mazie added, “Or this Dark Man of the Desert everyone’s scared of?”
“Unlikely,” Saito said. “Look at that one. The cuts were made with a blade. Squibbani know how to use tools, but they don’t need to. They would eat the whole plant.”
Kanos pointed west. “If food might be an issue, we should walk along the ocean. It’s only about ten miles away—”
“There isn’t such a thing as only ten miles out here,” Claes said.
“We could fish.”
“We can’t,” Farisa said. “Not this kind of ocean. Even the hardiest fish die at seven flags. We’d find some poisonous jellyfish, but that’s it.”
Kanos scoffed. “Did I ask her?”
“You should get some rest,” Runar said.
“We could all use rest,” Claes added. “Sunset’s in nine hours.”
Farisa looked at their tent. It had been set up to give shade; she wanted to be sure it would provide this function for most of the day.
Claes continued. “I presume the rules, if that's the term one would use, of this place are self-explanatory. One: stay out of the sun if at all possible. Two: during the day, move as little as you can. Three: drink, even if you’re not thirsty. Four: for watch, we use the same schedule as before, but shifted twelve hours, and when you’re on watch, you should be checking each of us every hour, and our animals every two. If someone’s sweating, that’s good. If they can complain and they do it coherently, that’s even better. We’ve discussed what heatstroke looks like. Prevent it.”
Time passed. Farisa fell into a doze, woke up to drink tepid water, then slept again until Runar, who was on watch, checked her heartbeat. “Vitals good.” It seemed that much of a day had passed; hoping that the worst heat was over, she checked her watch. Nine thirty.
She closed her eyes. Sleep was not hard to catch, but shallow—surrender, not slumber. The ground was getting hot; even in shade, this stifling unfriendliness of the air and everything one looked upon sapped the will.
Farisa had learned by now that her body produced several distinct kinds of sweat, each with its own smell. Moderate exertion in mild outdoor heat—the four- and five-flag days of summer in civilization—had produced a clear, anodyne scent. Worry made for an ashen, crusty odor. Serious exertion left a perfume, sexy and pleasant at first, but prone to sour after about thirty minutes. Sweat from slightly sunburnt skin had its own odor, leathery but otherwise not so bad. Some sweats were feminine; others were masculine. Some were enticing; others were repulsive. The kind produced by this alien heat was new and sharply unpleasant—it smelled like nothing but damage.
Her eyes often opened, as the lids did far too little to shut out light. Birds flew overhead, so high she could not make out their kind. Mazie, at least, had been able to catch real sleep. Farisa had never heard the woman snore, but this dry air had weathered her throat, and she did. At this moment, the sky held two sun-marked clouds that it hurt to look at; otherwise, it was bright blue, washed-out blue, furious blue. To breathe deeply hurt the mouth and throat. She continued drinking water, now tasteless and almost hot, to wet her lips. She let her gaze remain unfocused; the bright ground punished those who gave it serious sight.
The temperature, according to Garet’s thermometer, was eight-point-nine. She considered reading, to pass this sleepless time, but could not muster the will to get up, let alone walk to a carriage and rummage around for a book. Hoping the heat of the day would soon be behind them, she checked her watch again: eleven fifteen.
She had no memory of closing her eyes, nor sense of having dreamt, but she had evidently buried her face in the crook of her elbow, face perilously close to hot sand, when a gust of wind swatted her. Her tongue and mouth had no desires at all, but hunger’s acid fury was building in her stomach, and the sense of malaise on the side of her face told her she needed salt. Hardtack would do. It took her five minutes to convince herself it would be safe to get up and, as she stood, she felt light and her arms tingled. Once she had convinced herself she would not faint, she set off for the husker carriages.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
As soon as she stepped into the sun, a wall of heat smashed into her face and neck. She struggled to push herself forward, as if she were forcing herself to walk straight into a fire, though there was no flame and the air was not actually glowing. She got herself into the husker carriage’s shade, panted to catch her breath, gathered a handful of dry salted bread for herself and to share with others, and filled her canteen.
Claes was awake; as he moved a husker’s wagon to keep the animals shaded—lethargy seemed to be weakening their sense of self-preservation—he did not look up.
It was three o’clock now. Morbid curiosity led Farisa, when she returned to the tent shadow with the others, to check Garet’s thermometer. Even the instrument’s glass casing burned her fingertips, so she held it through a cloth.
Mazie was awake now. “How hot is it?”
“Nine-point-three.”
“Fuck.”
“For the heat of the day here, this is below average. Let’s hope it lasts.”
Mazie rubbed her brow. “It gets worse? Throats of the gods.”
“The sun’ll be down soon. That’ll help.”
By five thirty, the others were able to stir and move. Saito and Claes seemed to have aged two years in a few hours. Runar had to adjust his balance for cramps that had become obvious, despite his noble efforts to conceal them, as he packed up the tents. They ate what passed for breakfast—no one had much appetite—as the sun set. The sky seemed to darken quickly enough, but the temperature was still closer to eight flags than seven, and it was more noticeable than before that the ground was radiating that hostile invisible shining called heat. Metal was still too hot to touch with bare skin. As they started walking south, they did not light lamps. The stars were out again, giving enough natural light to walk in the only direction that mattered.
It had been dark for about three hours when lucid thought returned to her—it struck her, really hit her square in the chest, that none of this had been a dream. They had been far from the civilized world for some time, but they had walked by their own will into a place where no law of nature said human ingenuity must triumph and, indeed, evidence was stark that it could not. One who dozed in the sun for an hour or two would die. One who forgot to sip water, though the languid need did not feel quite like thirst, would die. Each step felt important, because each step was progress toward the end of this sterile expanse, but it was objectively true that the Ivory Ashes could just as easily go on for five hundred more miles as for fifty.
And Garet was gone. His knowledge and memories and good spirits, from the perspective of this material plane, had been packed up and sent somewhere inaccessible.
Tears, though they rapidly evaporated, blurred her vision, but she could not stop walking. A minute of delay consigned all of them—seven other people, ten animals—to sixty seconds more in this dangerous lowland heat. She missed the old man’s good humor; it had made the riding and hiking and daily chores and cold rain and hot sun so much easier to bear. She needed him—they all did—as they walked south, toward unnamed places under unnamed stars—stars meant never to be seen—through this stale heat left by a twelve-hour solar blast. In a place like this, idle thoughts were rarely kind, and silence sapped a person as much as anything else. One thought about the visible misery of the animals. One thought about the fact of a fifth of the group’s water having been used already. One thought about how, even though the desert plain was flat, the heat made for a sort of resistance that made every step feel like a climb.
Farisa had faced difficult circumstances before and, to propel herself through them, had indulged the ridiculous notion that, rather than a real but insignificant person in a vast indifferent world, she was in fact the artifice called character inside the entity called story. It was an absurd thing for an adult to believe, that she was—despite all evidence to the contrary—a protagonist within a narrative carefully made, rather than a denizen of endless chaos. It was distressing to picture herself as a mere scared animal, scurrying out of one fire and into another—as the perennially rejected misfit she had, thus far in life, been. Such thoughts might end the desire to step forward, leaving her to fall forward in the hot sand and never rise. It was, if not accurate, useful to consider herself a sort of storybook heroine, and she had the right to believe this, because the life she was living was, if nothing else, hers.
As Rhazyladne had said, “Your mind is the place you make it.”
The others, she realized, needed the same distraction. It would not suffice to say they were important figures, because the laws of thermodynamics, as their bodies struggled to stay cooler than their environment by a ridiculous margin, had other opinions. To simply speak on the importance of their quest would do little, because every mile was natural evidence that they might be going nowhere. How could she convince these people, growing languid and tired as she also was, that some important mission was served by this endless hot walk? The rational mind knew that all of them would die and be forgotten within a few hundred years. Even those prophets and playwrights who were remembered—perhaps this was why the Ignae considered it literally infernal to be remembered at all—suffered (in absentia, and perhaps in oblivion, but who knew?) the perversion of their messages. She could make no argument to support her irrational belief that this journey had greater purpose, but perhaps she did not need to do so. If she could convince them, through the telling of stories, that such a thing as one existed at all, she would have done the first step. Whether the others placed themselves inside this thing called story, rather than deeming themselves suffering animals moving slowly across a hot white plain of chaos, wasn’t up to her.
The others were beginning to spread, but had not gone so far as to be out of earshot. “Mazie,” she asked. “Have you ever read the Tales of the Sixteen Winds?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Good.” Farisa clasped hands behind herself to stretch her arms. “These’ll all be brand new to you. That means that if I change a few things, you won’t mind.”
“I wouldn’t even know.”
Farisa decided that she would tell a version in which Rhazyladne was not the prize of a murderous dlayo—she would tell that story, the frame story, a different way. She had come up with several alternative endings, and there would be time, the desert ahead of them being vast, to decide which one fit best.
“Long ago, when Loran’s Blue Pyramid was still blue, there lived a dlayo of all the sea can see...”
Saito and Claes and Runar and Eric and even Talyn gravitated, as they moved south, toward the two women. No one here needed to walk alone.
#
The sun rose, as even a staunch optimist would not have conceded that it would. The harmless red mark on the horizon became a punishing torch; they stopped for what would have to qualify as rest at an unremarkable spot on a white sandy plain.
The second day in the Ashes proved hotter and worse than the first. Farisa convinced herself, laying atop her sleeping bag too hot for real sleep, that if she brought her mind as close to the impossible state of thinking-of-nothing as she could, memory’s trickery would compress these painfully heat-addled but mostly similar moments into one. This was how one made time go faster.
Eric spat on the sunlit ground and it sizzled.
“Don’t do that,” Mazie said. “You can’t waste a drop of water.”
Farisa, nursing a headache that had conquered her forehead over the past six hours, looked at Garet’s thermometer. It had become inadequate to measure the heat—the highest mark it had was the one for ten flags, but she would have guessed it was a quarter flag hotter. The animals were wheezing with every breath. A flying insect, unlucky enough to have strayed a few thousand feet below its natural altitude, and now ill enough of judgment to land, never rose. No one could sleep well in this slow broil—the heat pressed on the chest—but no one stirred, because even to flex a muscle in preparation for slight movement hurt like hell.
Mazie’s eyes closed and she snored again. Saito was having another of those nightmares in which he mumbled, “Sayuna, draw white.” Eric’s eyes were closed; Talyn’s were red and open. Kanos was on watch for the midday shift, but Claes was also awake.
Think of nothing, think of nothing, think of nothing. It had become Farisa’s trick to pass time. She could not be bored if she had no preferred activity; she could not be miserable in the heat if she never thought about what it had been like to be cool. Think of nothing. Asleep. Think of nothing. Awake. Nothing. Asleep. Nothi—Awake.
Mazie’s fingers were twitching like a napping cat’s paws. The animals’ eyes were all closed, though they remained standing, except for Ouragan, who had curled up next to Eric.
Farisa was in a white place she would have to call sleep when she heard Mazie’s voice. “Where’s Runar?”
Talyn rolled over. “He’s on watch.”
“But where?”
“I think he’s getting water.”
“Alone?”
“I suppose so.”
Farisa’s reaction seemed instantaneous to her, though it might have been languid in truth; the sun had moved and the day’s heat was fading. She stood up.
“He shouldn’t be alone. I’ll go join him.”
In the distance, she could spot a blot of white denim moving amidst brush. If he had found water, she ought to collect some as well, so she—careful to glove her hand before touching the metal handle—grabbed a bucket and walked toward him. The desert’s play of distance frustrated her—he had not seemed far away, but it took forever to reach him.
Runar’s white shirt was covered in sweat. “Hi, Farisa.”
Farisa lifted her bucket; her machete clattered inside. “Can I help?”
“Of course.” The man hacked a pipe cactus with his own blade. “Let me show you how to do it.”
He dug a gelatinous substance out of the fallen plant, and the thick fluid fell on a white cloth that he rolled around it and twisted like a croissant. A milky substance fell to the ground. “That’s the part you don’t want to drink, so get it out first.” He then squeezed a few hundred drops of water into the bucket. “You don’t get much for your efforts, but it adds up. Garet told me it’s best not to squeeze too hard, as that'll bring out more of the bad stuff. If the water starts to look cloudy, start on another plant.”
“Thank you,” Farisa said.
She swung her machete at a cactus. This was a lot harder than cutting wood in Cait Forest—the plant’s rind was tougher than it looked, and the weather was horrid—but she was happy to be hot and busy, rather than hot and anxious.
“I’m glad you joined me,” he said. “We might need to use more water than we thought. The animals aren’t doing well.”
“No, they aren’t.” She scooped out the plant’s flesh and twisted the towel. “Like this?”
“That’s right.” Runar whipped his cloth to dislodge cactus pulp. “It’s tough work in the heat, but you get a hang of it.”
She looked at the water she had extracted. It was little, but it was not nothing.
“Since we’re out here by ourselves...”
“You’re here to confess a bank robbery?”
“No.” She laughed. “We should talk about your new talent—the Eye of Sophya. It’s why, even in the absolute darkness of Switch Cave, you were able to see.”
“I have felt odd, of late. My sight is... textured.”
“The talent is rare, especially under the age of forty. It tends to stay locked up unless there are two factors. The first is a mage, such as me. The second is... trauma.”
Runar smiled before slamming his blade into another cactus. “Such as losing an eye to a jungle hellsquid?”
“Such as.”
Farisa squeezed a towel full of cactus pulp, and some water came forth, but not as much as she had hoped for.
“Have you seen things you otherwise wouldn’t?”
Runar looked aside. “That’s an excellent question. It’s hard for me to answer.”
“How so?”
“The special sight, I have noticed. At first, I thought I was imagining these things, and they aren’t clear indications so much as they are flashes and patterns, so I am still learning what they mean, but... is Kanos a mage?”
Farisa nodded.
“He hasn’t done a thing for us with it.”
Farisa smirked. “I suppose he hasn’t. I suppose I’m the good one.” She discarded a cactus she had opened up but found mostly empty. “Not to disparage your brother.”
“Half brother,” Runar insisted.
“I’m surprised he’s still here. I expected him to grab Switch Cave treasure and go home.”
One of Runar’s cactuses had produced a yellow scum that floated in the water bucket. He scooped it out and threw it aside. “I don’t think that’s his intention.”
“So, what is?”
“I don’t know. I look at him, and I see a lot of strange symbols, but I’m still figuring out what they mean.” Runar whipped his machete to dislodge cactus jelly. He pointed to the reddening sun. “We should get back to camp.”
Runar had filled his two buckets to the brim. Farisa had not been out here nearly as long, so hers was only half-full. They stopped about halfway back to camp. To Farisa’s chagrin, the dry air had already stolen an inch of water from each bucket, leaving a gray ring on each one’s inner side.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
Farisa’s gaze counted the paces to camp’s shade. “For what?”
“When I first met you, I underestimated you because—”
“I’m a short brown girl?”
“Hell no, not that.” Runar laughed. “The racial nonsense helps the Company. It gives them another way to divide us.”
“I hope it didn’t require a magical Eye for you to see that.”
“No, of course not.” Runar looked up for a moment. “I wrote you off at first because you’re a young girl. But, and you must take this as a compliment—”
“Oh, I must?” Farisa kicked sand across Runar’s jeans.
“You’re an old young girl.”
“Old young girl.” Farisa chuckled. “I like the sound of that. I suppose it fits. I’m twenty.”
“I remember twenty,” Runar said. “God, that was a year for me.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No.” Runar smiled. “No, I don’t think I ever will.”
“It’s an expression,” Farisa said. “As in—”
“I know that.”
“Garet died on his birthday. Sixty-four. My own is soon.” She took one of Runar’s water buckets. The man was strong enough that he could have carried six of those things under normal conditions, but out here, it was best to share all labors. They resumed walking. “I’ll be twenty-one on the first of October.”
“A nice time of year, back home. Probably not so nice here, though.”
“No, probably not.” She looked around. “Isn’t that when the sandstorms come in? October? Let me ask you something. Does your Eye give you a sense of how long the Ivory Ashes are—how far we have to go?”
“I wish it worked like that,” Runar said.
“Ten-flag heat...” The wind picked up and the air stung, but at least the desert’s red setting sun made for a pleasing sight, even here. “Shall be my birthday gift.”
“If we make it that long.”
“Right.” She laughed. “Of course, that.”
Her gaze tracked back over camp, where she saw something that caused her to drop her buckets and run.
#
The one she had seen fall was the second of that hour—two untas were gone. They had given them plenty of water, but it had not been enough. Farisa and Runar and Claes agreed that everything the former two had collected that afternoon would go to the living animals.
One of the huskers was panting. They discarded some clothes and spare wagon parts—just left them in the desert, as if some future archaeologist would want them—to lighten the animal’s load before setting out tonight.
Farisa asked Saito, “How sick is she?”
“Very tired. Other than that, I can’t tell.”
“What’ll it take for her to get better?”
“Elevation. Relief from the heat.”
“Shit.” Farisa paced. “We are down to—”
“Four untas, two of whom are yearlings, and three huskers.”
“This isn’t good.”
“Correct.”
Farisa's arms straightened as she screamed so loud her neck hurt. The animals were dying, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She checked on Ouragan—she had made a sacred promise to Nadia to protect that cat—and even she was glassy-eyed, sickly. The enemy, heat itself, was invisible and ubiquitous; it could not be defeated with any weapon. A fist-sized rock thrown at the heat would generate more heat. It had always been here; it would be here long after they were gone; this last breath and toppling of flesh was simply a risk one took when living things moved through a place where none belonged.
She worried about the struggling husker. Its will to survive was nearly depleted. It would surprise no one if they lost another unta overnight. She looked south and saw nothing but flat miles, and she dreaded the thought of a night’s march, but it would soon be time for exactly that because the sun was setting...
She hurried, grabbing Merrick’s watch and one of Garet’s notebooks. She wrote the numbers: 18, 5, 47. They didn’t look right; no, they surely couldn’t be right. The heat was twisting her perceptions, as much as it bent lines of light back on themselves to create puddles that had never existed. She checked again; she scanned the landscape for signs of atmospheric distortion. She remembered being on top of that mountain in Cait Forest in the winter and looking for signs of spatial oddity and finding none—it was much the same here, with nothing out of sorts, not even a shimmer... so why were the numbers so wrong? Perhaps she had misread the geared counters on the husker wagons, but she didn’t think so, and she checked again to find that they all agreed within five percent, confirming the expected place and distance.
As night fell, Claes called them to start moving. The dark plain did not seem to be cooling off at all; the black sky itself seemed to be blasting them with heat. Farisa hid a tremor in her voice as she talked the others through Rhazyladne’s fifth story—she had skipped the fourth one, about the search for a treasure inside a volcano, in deference to this current environment—and then the sixth, and the seventh, and the eighth. She found she could find more happiness in lifting the others out of misery than by trying to extricate herself alone.
Still, when they set up camp under dawn light, they realized they had covered a lethargic distance of fourteen miles. A husker urinated; the effluence was darker than coffee.
“We have to get more water,” Farisa said. “The more work we do, the hotter our bodies run, but my calculations show that we can keep ourselves and our animals alive if, starting today, every one of us spends three-and-a-half hours harvesting—”
“Three and a half hours.” Talyn scoffed. “How are we going to sleep?”
Farisa walked away from camp.
Claes called for her. “Where are you going?”
“Those hills,” Farisa said. “Those fucking hills.” She hurried; her legs pumped her to the incautious speed of a run. “They block the view.”
Claes shouted. “The view of what?"
“If I’m right, I’ll tell you everything.”
She was dizzy and sick by the time she got there. The sun rose inside a notch in a low but obtrusive ridge, a valley in which she believed the horizon matched the level of the world’s natural curvature, but could not be sure, so she told herself to remember to include a small margin of error. She checked her gold watch as the solar disc’s center reached eye level precisely twenty-three seconds before the onset of the six o’clock hour.
She wrote the numbers down, then looked at the pair.
18, 5, 47.
5, 59, 37.
She double-checked the watch, to be sure she had read it right. She considered the equation of time, atmospheric refraction and its likely variation over the course of the day, their own southward movement, and even the tiny shift of season that occurred within twelve hours, and she made adjustments before she wrote down a triplet of numbers she underlined twice.
12:02:53.
To reckon longitude, she had been keeping meticulous track of solar noon since Portal, but passing through Switch Cave had left her watch nearly three minutes fast, and even though no timepiece was perfect, this watch could not be off by so much unless a curse had been set upon it, which she considered so unlikely that it left another unlikeliness as the standing candidate for possibility. She hurried back to camp.
“Claes,” she said. “We’re not on the Mountain Road.”