Mazie’s turn had to come to sit for the morning watch, and Farisa had been up for a while, so they watched the campfire dwindle.
Farisa scratched her ankle. “Sunrise. I guess it’s not my birthday anymore.”
Mazie laughed. “If we were to go by midnight, it hasn’t been for five hours.”
“How old were you when you realized that, to the rest of the world, your birthday was just an ordinary day, not a holiday?”
Mazie put her arms around her knees. “I never thought it was more than an ordinary day.”
The sun rose quickly and, as every day, they were off. By eight in the morning it was hot, but there was enough tree cover for them to make a good pace: twenty-six miles was the day’s total. To suggest the continuation of a healthful climate, low-flying parrots and pepper-shaped fruits dotted the way. The high air didn’t hold much heat, so by sunset, Farisa had put on a sleeved shirt to block the wind.
“Twenty-one and one day,” said Runar. “Full adulthood. I’d suggest we celebrate, but...”
Farisa laughed. “Say no more.”
If they had liquor, it was Kanos’s moonwater, which would go forever unused. Instead, they drank coffee—the trail had tired them enough to give them the luxury of having as much as they wanted; they’d still be able to sleep—and played cards till ten. In a game of ehrgeiz, Eric scored two Slams and won.
The next day, they crossed a brushland littered by boulders of pink-and-white marble. They skirted around a ravine whose bright desert bottom, redolent of the Ashes, struck the eye as a scrap of another world sewn into this one. To their east, mountains rose quite high, a few peaks bearing white streaks that might be glaciers. As they walked south, the soil grew rustier; the striated sandstone boulders, in the sunset’s gold light, glowed like fire.
On October 4, they came to a turbulent river—long before they could see it behind the stones on each bank, they could hear its churning noise—and guided their animals through a maze of rocky crevices, dodging knee-high cedar bushes that had taken purchase in the red stone. At the shore, they found that fording would be impossible—the river’s speed, against protruding rocks, had split its surface into rushing white foam. Claes tested its depth with a ten-foot pole and found no bottom.
Farisa grabbed a pair of field glasses and climbed the highest boulder she could find.
Claes said, “Do you see anything?”
She looked around. The raw red wilderness was beautiful; the eye could get lost in this place. Holding the other hand steady on the spyglass to keep her sight, she pointed. “We have to go that way.”
“How far?”
“Four miles at least.” She had looked up and down this river, finding no safe place to cross but a natural arch, cut through crimson sandstone.
It took them all morning to get there. As no one had any desire to go back through the badlands, they walked along its stony beach, animals unnerved by the water’s rage and volume. The arch itself was wide, flat-topped, and easy to cross, so they had their animals and packs on the other side by early afternoon.
“With those miles behind us,” said Claes, “I suppose we have earned ourselves time for lunch.”
They led their animals to a secluded field where they too could graze, and then walked back a quarter mile to the arch, where they ate. No one had expressly suggested going there; it was just the obvious place to rest, with a crashing noise that cleansed the mind. As trail meals themselves were repetitive, variety had to be taken in the form of beautiful places to have them.
The river a hundred feet below had such force one could almost hear the rocks straining to hold place. Brick-red stone and pale-green brush, at levels low and high, surrounded the seven. Atop mountains, thicker forests’ sunlit canopies shone. The sky was cloudless and the air so clear that, as an eagle flew overhead, Farisa could see its feathers with her naked eye.
Mazie said, “It’s sad.”
Farisa asked, “What is?”
“So many people, their entire life, never see a place like this.”
Farisa rested her head on Mazie’s shoulder and shut her eyes; she tried to remember if the girl in the haunted castle, when she had shown a map of this Road, had indicated a river would be here.
Mazie got up to refill her canteen. The sun’s reflection had come into a relatively calm part of the river, an oblong patch in the middle where, rather than breaking, it shimmered.
Andor, finishing a strip of cured meat, sat next to Farisa. “Mazie told me you’re a Lorani princess. Is that true?”
Farisa laughed. “Mazie says a lot of things. No. It’s not true. My father did have money once. He... I suppose that’s a story for another time.”
“So, what brings you with us misfits?”
“You’re joking.”
Andor brushed away a desiccated leaf, which fell into the river. “Feel free to laugh, but I’m not.”
“You must know what I’m famous for. I’m Farisa.”
“I know that that’s your name.”
“The Globbos—the Geese, as you call them—have been after me for years.”
“Oh,” Andor said. “My sympathies.”
“You don’t know this already?”
“Assume I know nothing.”
“Well...” Farisa told her life story to Andor, who listened with genuine interest and concern. When she had finished, he said, “That’s quite a tale.”
“You had never heard of any of this?”
“I knew about the Patriarch’s son, that something had happened to him, though not such details. Aside from that, no. It’s all new. The mage-of-obsession in my part of the world is a blonde—in Salinay, this would make her exotic—named Lapianne Cardell. Is that name familiar?”
“Not at all," Farisa admitted. She scratched her neck. “God, I hope she’s safe.”
Andor sat back, arms behind himself. “How long do you think it took for this arch to form?”
“I don’t know. Half a million years?”
“I think it’s five million years old at least.”
“It could be.” Farisa’s legs, bare except for boots, dangled over the river. She put a hand on her forehead to block sun from her eyes. A pair of swans, white except for black heads, passed overhead, one flying due south while the other trailed in a sinuous pattern. “Some part of me would like to stop here and live on what the wild provides.”
Saito came to sit with them on Farisa’s other side. “There is so much life here.”
“There is,” Andor said. “The Ashes train you not to take it for granted. That was the eeriest thing—the lack of birds, insects...”
Farisa said, “You mentioned a squibbani.”
“I did see a few. The biggest one, forty feet high, was five miles from my southern record. It must have decided, since I had so little meat on me, that I wasn’t worth killing.”
Saito asked, “What do you think such a thing eats?”
Mazie, with a canteen full of coffee, had returned to sit with them.
Andor laughed. “I wasn’t eager to find out. What gets me, though, is that squibbani are no more native to the Ashes than we are. They moved into brackish wetlands from the ocean, then into the jungles and some caves, and now they’re in a place meant for no life at all—a desert that thwarted us.”
Mazie said, “What do you think, Farisa?”
Farisa watched as a river-borne tree limb slammed into a rock, breaking in two. The halves followed diverging currents. “Garet might know, but if there’s complex life, there’s simple life. My guess is that, somewhere under the Ashes, there’s a cave system with fungi or algal colonies that thrive in the heat.”
Andor flung a stone into the river. “That’ll be my explanation, then. I’ve no intention of going back to ask the thing.”
Claes had taken a short journey up ahead with Runar. When he returned, he said, “There’s an excellent camping spot, with a trout stream nearby, no more than a mile up. Does anyone object if we call the day early and camp there?”
No one did. Since Portal, they’d not had a day of proper rest. This place, with bright spires of red rock, the soothing sound of a river, and scents of fresh pine riding the southern wind, seemed the ideal place to linger and recover.
“I don’t,” Farisa said.
Runar said, “For the first time in a while, we are in no hurry.”
That afternoon, Saito and Andor went fishing. Farisa continued to watch the river—a golden-headed hawk dove from a red cliff, bearing west, until a watch of black-eyed shrikes scared it off—until she felt Mazie’s chin on her own bare shoulder.
“As a child, I never thought...”
Farisa bumped Mazie’s arm with a knuckle. “You never thought what?”
Mazie smiled. “Nothing. I’m just so happy to be here with you.”
Farisa took Mazie’s hand. “If our words ever reach the world we left, we’ll be the ones who get to name all these species.”
“Do you still think you’ll find your father down here?”
“I don’t know.” Farisa’s gaze fixated on a white-capped wedge where two currents met. “We traveled the Mountain Road. We did our part.”
A butterfly landed on Mazie’s finger. “Do you have the dreams?”
Farisa nodded. The mind-blanching heat of the Ashes had killed dreams as much as sleep; but as soon as they had returned to this climate, they’d all been having vivid ones.
Mazie knocked a lock of hair off her forehead. “It’s always the same one. I’m speaking to a crowd, as if I were in an Exmore coffeehouse, but this time it’s thousands of people.” She raised her right arm stump. “This is from killing a Globbo. I have credibility now.”
Farisa said, “In my view, you always did.”
“Huh,” Mazie said. They leaned together. “As much as I’d love to take this Road as far as it goes, see what’s in the South, maybe live down here... there is an aspect of me that wants to ride back and fix the North. Finish Reverie’s work, destroy the Company.” She chuckled. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”
“No.” Farisa set her hand on Mazie’s knee. “It doesn’t.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No more ridiculous than getting this far. Look at this place.”
#
The sky had fully darkened an hour ago. The others had gone to sleep early. Farisa and Mazie sat by the dwindling fire; Runar, on watch for the evening, was whittling a stick to replace a damaged tent stake.
“I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs,” Mazie said as she picked up an oil lamp. “The night is ours.”
Farisa smiled and stood up. “You want to go to the arch?”
“Where else? Grab a lamp.”
The night sky was so clear and clean, the galaxy cast a shadow. The tallest trees were mesquite and desert willow, barely twice Farisa’s height and well-spaced, so there was little worry about getting lost, and the way was not hard to find.
“It’s beautiful.” Mazie looked up as a meteor crossed the crisp sky.
Farisa elbowed Mazie’s side. “Be careful raising those eyebrows. You’ll get wrinkles.”
Mazie chuckled. “Already got ’em. Enough to share.”
“You’re twenty-six. You’re still young, and even when you’re old...” Farisa squeezed Mazie’s arm. Their hands locked. “Even when you are old, you will still be—I will still find you—”
Mazie kicked a stone out of their way. “Do you think the G-Comps are still after us?”
“We’ve killed so many, I don’t think they’ll forget.”
Mazie stopped. The night air had freed itself of the day’s heat, but sweat was on her face. “What happens if we’re wrong about the Road, and there’s nothing at the end of it?”
Farisa had spent the afternoon rereading A History of Wytchcraft and was more convinced than before that they were on a real ancient highway. “I’m confident that the Mountain Road doesn’t ‘just end.’ We’re right on course to reach the City of Honey, Malisse, forty miles north of the equator.”
“Do you have any sense of what’s there?”
Farisa shrugged.
Mazie said, “As long as I’m with you, I’m happy.”
“As long as I’m with you, I’m happy.”
The sounds of insects, chirping in the brush, faded into the crash of the river as they approached the sandstone arch. Mazie removed her shoes and walked the natural bridge. “No one will hear us.”
“Do we have something to hide?”
“Some moments belong only to us.”
Farisa glanced over her shoulder. Their campfire, a reddish flicker, could barely be seen. Mazie sat down. Her denim-clad legs and bare feet dangled over the river.
“Don’t sit there,” Farisa said. “You’re too close to the edge.”
“I’m not going to fall.”
“It scares me.”
“My balance is impeccable, even with half an arm gone.” Mazie looked back. “Also, the ledge is safer than it looks. There's a trick of light here, but it goes out ten more feet."
Farisa, hand to her racing heart, stepped forward to see. “So it does.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Many things do.” Farisa sat down beside Mazie. “You know that.”
Mazie leaned her head on Farisa’s shoulder and, with a sandstone wall at their backs, they watched the sky. A green meteor tore north, bright enough to color the sky for an instant, then left an orange trail. Farisa knew they were two-thirds of the way to Malisse, but on nights like this, she didn’t want their journey to end. What if the new world discovered after all these southward miles had the same failings as the old one? It would be better, if such a fate were true, to remain in this state of hopeful transit forever.
They watched the sky with an almost reverent silence, until Mazie broke it. “Promise me something, Farisa.”
“What?”
“If I kiss you, you have to kiss me back. Always.”
“What if I get you first?”
Farisa ran a hand through Mazie's hair, cupping the back of her head. They kissed, they fell into a world of tongue and squeezing hands and hastening breath. The electricity spreading through Farisa’s chest and belly was almost painful; she sucked on Mazie’s lower lip.
“Slow, girl.” Mazie smiled. “We’ll have plenty of time for that.”
“No. I want you.” Farisa stood up. She laid a blanket over a flat region of the arch. “Get up here.”
Blouses were getting in the way of hands and mouths; they were removed. They could smell each other’s necks and shoulders now and could not help themselves but be close to each other, skin on skin. Farisa, taken by the sight of Mazie’s torso—those perfect breasts; that deep moving navel; that handle of flesh on her side when she twisted her body a certain way—found herself losing control, wanting to put Mazie’s everything in her mouth at once. She licked areola, nipple, underside of breast. Pants came off. Farisa removed one sock, then the other, digging her thumbnail into the sole of her own foot while Mazie was kissing her neck. Then Mazie’s tongue and lips crashed, like the river beneath them, into the inner curve of Farisa’s breast; she heard Mazie’s voice whispering her own sibilant name—Fa-riss-sa, Fa-riss-sa; her lover’s delicate breath tickled her skin. Their arms tensed around each other; it almost hurt. Farisa, fully naked, squirming, felt Mazie’s tongue going lower, lower, as if dotting a line... jabbing the flesh around Farisa’s navel, causing it to flatten and fold, and the sight of her lover’s lips using her skin in this way caused her legs to feel light and her feet to flex of their own accord.
Worried she would black out from pleasure and miss the best part, she propped herself up on her elbows, legs locked around her lover’s head. Mazie’s lips rolled over the pinch of flesh between navel and waistline. Color drained from Farisa’s vision, her left arm ached from supporting her weight while her right hand’s fingers had mixed into Mazie’s wavy black locks, guiding her mouth lower, lower… and when Mazie’s tongue hit Farisa’s clit, an explosion of fire and light tore through her belly and hips, causing her thigh muscles to clench. The night air flashed hot and cold, both extremes at once, from her scalp to the inner arches of her feet; her arms broke out in a tingling sweat. Mazie, eyes ravenous, brow slightly furrowed, kept licking, fingers expertly nestled in the flesh of Farisa’s flank, while Farisa’s own thumb found a nipple and, and...
“Don’t stop, Mazie. Don’t, don’t stop.”
A shuddering fire connected Farisa’s skin and heart to the night sky and a million beautiful miles. The blanket beneath them moved; the harsh ground abraded the backs of her shoulders and her heels but she felt no pain—only heat, only friction. She was wetter than the river crashing against the world below them, so gushingly wet that she would have felt this extremity intolerable if it had come from anyone else, but from Mazie, it had become the pulse of her life, the drumbeat backing her twenty-one-year march all this time, though she had never heard it before.
The puddle that had been Farisa said, “I fucking love you. I always will.”
Mazie put her hand on the sweat-soaked hollow of Farisa’s chest, still rapidly rising and falling. “I fucking love you too.”
Farisa smiled. She had nothing to say—there was a desire to hear and smell the night, because what did the world look like on the other side of this?—but a growing desire to return the favor, when she had collected herself, when she could.
Mazie turned around and rested in Farisa’s arms, back to chest. “I wish I still had two hands.”
Farisa said, “You did very well with one, a girl can say.”
She lay nude under the night sky. Farisa pressed her legs together when the wind turned chilly on her wetness. She had, for half a year, thought she would never have an orgasm again—she believed the Monster of Cait Forest, whatever it had been, had taken that from her—but, not only had she surprised herself with this rebirth of ability, she had never felt anything like that. As the rising moon’s light mixed with Mazie’s dark locks and olive skin, Farisa’s skin hunger increased; she wanted every inch of her body in contact with Mazie, nipples to nipples and navel to navel, rapacious hands squeezing muscle and supple fat, until they had mixed like the waters below them.
“I’m on top this time,” she said as she grabbed Mazie’s hips to adjust her position, then climbed over her. “I want you so, so, so much, Mazie. I want you so much.”
She had imagined herself taking it slow, like Mazie had done, starting with gentle nibbles of the shoulders and neck, but as soon as she was within kissing distance of Mazie’s navel and that faint crease below it, she lost all control. She grabbed Mazie’s hips and pressed herself in. Rain on me, Mazie. Gush on my lips. Oh I fucking want you, I fucking want you to wrap your legs around my head and smash my face with your everything and I want, I want no telling what is you and what is me—
“The taste may be...”
Amazing. Amazing, love. Tongue suck kiss clit where have you been, where have you been my whole life, you beautiful, you fucking beautiful—
“Don’t stop, don’t stop, Farisa... Farisa!”
Mazie’s thighs quivered, squeezing Farisa’s head so tight she could not hear, leaving her face wet with lover's musk. The world was Mazie, Mazie in all directions, Mazie in Farisa's mouth and on her face... the world had dissolved in desire... they could have been in the center of the sun, for all she cared, so long as they were together.
Mazie’s scent had fully conquered Farisa’s face by the time her tongue tired out.
There was a long silent embrace. Mazie tapped Farisa’s belly with two fingers. “Ye’re a damn natural, girl. Am I really your first?”
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“For us, it can be a sliding scale, but I would say yes.”
They could never get enough of each other, so even as they tired out they kept talking about nothing and everything because, considering what they had done, they had been strangers before in comparison—fascinating strangers who had met six hours ago but had also, in some sense, always known each other.
The eastern sky turned pink; dawn had come too soon.
Farisa sat up first. It took her more than a minute to gather their clothes—garments had been thrown every which way. She worried that a blouse or sock of hers had fallen off the arch into the river, but to their luck, nothing had.
Thus began October 5. They returned to camp with silly, guilty smiles on their faces. If the others had suspicions, nobody said anything, nor asked how they had spent the night. They simply packed up camp and made their southward miles, as every day before.
Over this and following days, it would often happen that Farisa and Mazie would look at each other, as they crested a hill or crossed a stream, and share that rare brand of humor in which no one got hurt. As an afternoon’s shadows lengthened, the sight of Mazie’s neck or her windblown locks would catch Farisa’s eye, or the scent of purple wildflowers would brush the inside of her nose, and she would be able to think of nothing but rubbing Mazie’s neck, arms, breasts, belly, and clit all over herself as soon as night fell. It would come soon; it would be worth the wait.
On one of those perfect nights, as Mazie lay in Farisa’s arms, she looked up into the other’s eyes and said, “You know, you’re my first too.”
Farisa laughed. “You’re twenty-six, and I’m your first? I don’t believe it for a second.”
“What I mean is...” Mazie looked back at Farisa. “Maybe I shouldn’t say it.”
“Well, now you have to.”
“You’re the first person I’ve ever fucked with my whole body.”
“I was never good at taking compliments.” Farisa laughed. “That one is entirely beyond my social abilities.”
Mazie turned and put her hand on Farisa's shoulder. “Just shut up and fuck me again.”
#
After dinner on October 9, Runar watched as the two women snuck off into the darkness. He knew what they got up to, of course. Everyone knew. There were no secrets out here, in a place like this.
He had grown up with the traditional prejudices against those who took with their own sex, but time had convinced him they were no worse than anyone else. He wished the two of them nothing but the highest happiness. Happiness was not easy to find, here or anywhere. He hoped theirs would last forever.
That said, from his perspective this journey had soured. His new talent, this Eye of Sophya, was—sometimes literally—a headache. The colors and symbols could be intense, and he was till unsure what they all meant. Would he have been able, if he’d learned to read those signs faster, to prevent the orcish assault that had caused the death of Garet, the soft-spoken former constable, the only policeman Runar had ever liked? Would he have spotted Kanos’s betrayal in time to prevent it?
The going, contrary to Farisa’s and Mazie’s sunny mood, was not easy. It rained every day, and while these rains were not the all-day overcast affairs of the northern climate they’d left, these downpours came in such volume to turn the ground soggy in a few minutes. Their carriage wheels constantly got stuck in mud. He and Claes had developed enough skill in reading the terrain to avoid the worst bogs and mud pits, but from time to time, one their animals would realize, as if all at once, the ground's untrustworthy solidity and go into a state of panic, freezing in place until guided through the swamp by a slow and gentle—slow the operative word—hand.
Aweek had passed since crossing the arch, and they’d barely made sixty miles.
Food, at least, had become less of an issue. Many of the plant species down here were beyond their world's knowledge—but their huskers seemed to have a good instinct for what could be eaten, and they managed to find enough forage to survive. Saito had been finding ample game: rabbits, frogs, and a flightless blue-headed bird that looked like an overfed dove. The presence of healthy nature suggested nothing too bad lived here, though they did occasionally find an orcish artifact—usually, an iron tool too rusted for human use.
There were no signs of a real “Road” except for a map Farisa had found in a book, one that had not led them astray thus far, but that had minimal credibility given that it had surely been hand-copied dozens of times between last exploration—thousands of years ago, if at all—and now. He, Claes, and Andor would spend at least an hour every morning testing various paths. Often, what seemed a solid grassy field would give under one’s feet; one could sink into mud easily.
Although this Eye of Sophya remained enigmatic, he was glad to have the talent, or it had kept them out of danger. When he closed his ordinary eye, the blind one shot white and the center of his forehead seemed to mix with the brilliant abyss, and what had once seemed a flurried chaos, the protest of optical machinery dispossessed of its prior purpose, was increasingly legible. He could tell, often, when orcs with bad intentions were about, and steer the group away from confrontation.
He had also noticed, before the others, the summer-colored bands of limerence (with spurts of white-red lust mixed in) that joined Farisa and Mazie. Saito’s guilt about his past, colored in desaturated blue, hung about his neck like a sagging frill. Claes’s emotional colors were orange and yellow; he had yet to understand what those were about, but it seemed to worsen in the early evening. It wasn’t malice, he knew, in part because Claes was a good man, but also because he discovered malice’s color to be the flat, foggy green of a rotting olive. He wished he had recognized it as such when he had first seen swirls of it around Kanos; it had been so pervasive in Switch Cave that he had not recognized it until now as extraordinary. A few lights in that worrying color stained the northern horizon now, coming closer, even though Runar and the others were moving south as fast as they could, so it struck him as odd that they were still approaching.
By the evening of October 11, he could tell they were three in number, coming at the speed of a cantering horse—maybe faster.
#
Farisa heard Runar’s voice. “Wake up. Now.”
By a lantern already lit, she checked her watch. The dial said it was three ten in the morning.
Claes rubbed his eyes. “Something out there?”
“Whatever it is, it’s getting close.”
Farisa put on her camisole and socks before sitting up. Mazie roused Eric.
Andor said, “I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s still just a hunch,” Runar admitted. “But it’s a solid one. Three of something, or three different things, are moving fast. They’ve just crossed the arch.”
Claes looked down. “That’s still seventy miles behind us."
Andor looked at Runar. “How do you know?”
Saito said, “He’ll explain later.”
Claes said, “Seventy miles should give us time.”
“Not much, though,” said Runar. “They’ve picked up to gallop speed.”
“That means they’ll be here by sunrise.”
Farisa, exhausted by the hot exertion of recent nights, did not want to rise for a false alarm. “You’re saying they’re doing more than twenty miles per hour, through a bog that slowed us down to one? How?”
“I have no idea, but terrain does not seem to be slowing them down at all.”
“We’ll make defensive preparations,” said Claes. “In case you’re right.”
“I hope I am not,” Runar said.
The men packed up and corralled their animals. Farisa tried to imagine what creature could account for the distressing lights Runar was seeing. She was sure there were dangerous animals, but the Eye picked up intent, not hazard, and certainly nothing capable of intent that she had encountered—no person, no orc—was adapted to this terrain. An orc on horseback? Unlikely.
They set up their unused spare tent—it had been their original tent, until the skrums had torn it up several hundred miles ago—as a decoy camp, then hid themselves in bushes or behind trees, except for Runar and Andor, who had hitched to a tree a hunter’s platform on which they lay prone, rifles pointed north. All of them kept their breathing constant and quiet as flat morning light gathered.
Farisa whispered to Andor, “Do you need another set of eyes?”
“It’s probably not a bad idea.”
She climbed up the platform with a spyglass and lay down between the men. The pink of dawn covered half the eastern horizon by now. They kept waiting, silent. Morning birds sang, and then they ceased. The interlopers could be heard before they were seen.
Runar, knowing where to look, was the first to spot them. “That’s them, but I have no idea what the fuck they are.”
Farisa followed his cues to spot three figures on massive vehicles. “They look like bicycles, but they’re not pedaling them.”
“Motorcycles,” Andor said. “I’ve built one myself. And what’s riding them?”
“The one in front is an orc,” Farisa said. The other was harder to read; its face was colorless as a corpse’s, but he wore the Global Company’s crossed knives on his helmet, and—as he swerved around obstacles—seemed capable of operating the machine.
“Geese,” Andor said. “G.C., I mean.”
Farisa, despite discomfort, held herself still because a slight shift of her weight would ruin Andor’s or Runar’s shot.
The Globbo’s chest painted itself red and the vehicle slid out from under him.
“One,” said Andor.
The orc sped up, firing a gun of some kind, but too far away to score a hit. A seeming eternity later, she heard Runar fire. The cork tire of the orc’s motorcycle cracked, causing the vehicle to buck forward, throwing its rider airborne until a tree branch separated head from body.
“Two,” Runar said.
“One left,” said Farisa.
The third figure, running and humanlike, had no vehicle beneath it, and sped up to the pace of a charging bison. Andor’s center-mass hit put a visible hole in the creature. The hole closed up, but the flesh regenerated; it kept running. Claes jumped out with a two-handed machine gun and shredded the air with noise. The running body mended holes as fast as they were made.
Saito said, “It’s a ghoul.”
Farisa asked, “How do you kill a ghoul?”
Saito looked away. “In my experience...”
“Yes?”
“You can’t.”
#
Saito, if there was one thing he despised about the new environment into which they had come, it was the absurdly high angle the sun reached in midday. It reminded him of Camp Prosperity, south of Mount Alma.
The men who ran that place—like him, they were all doctors—were deranged. They had spent months swapping and transplanting eyeballs of identical twins into each other to see if, by aid of injected spinal fluid and histamine, reattachment and restoration of sight could be achieved—it never worked—and even men who did this, men who gave chlamydia to five-year-olds for the knowledge it might provide, feared ghouls.
A zombie or thrall had no strength or speed than in life; ghouls had five times their living strength and could outrun wolves. Their power of regeneration was unmatched by the living. They could not even be drowned or burned—a ghoul could douse a flame upon it by pure will, if what lived inside it could be called such.
Saito’s team had, only once and by pure accident, produced a ghoul. Two of his men had been using undue cruelty on a pair of little girls, the elder sister a mage, who had been taken from a nearby fishing village. In the mage’s tortured last spell, she resurrected her slain sibling, but that tiny body seemed to take no soul. Instead, the gray-faced girl swept a grown man’s legs out from under him, pummeled him senseless, and then began to eat his flesh, starting from the neck. Saito watched from behind a glass wall as six men’s machine-gun fire tore through her body, but the bullet holes had no effect. The wounds closed up as fast as they formed.
Saito donned full-body leather armor and, with a two-handed sword, split the ghoul’s body in two. The pieces pulled back together before either hit the floor. Anger twisted her face. She dove and bit into his thigh, teeth going right through his armor, inflicting a wound so painful he could no longer fight. The monstrosity tore through the laboratory, killing more than thirty before the then-young doctor, reeling from his bite, devised a strategy requiring four men. Two of them, with swords as Saito had, severed body parts. The third carried the pieces to an open shaft, thirty feet deep while the fourth poured concrete. Regeneration and reattachment could not be prevented, but arms, legs, and torso writhed as the dismembered creature fought to escape the hardening muck.
When the concrete hardened, only a tiny hand, two fingers discolored and the third degloved, stuck out. Saito, who had blacked out from pain by this point, required a three-month hospital stay—most of that time, he had expected to lose his leg. Years later, he placed his ear to the concrete block in which the ghoul had been entombed and could still hear its teeth grinding inside.
Even at the Global Company, one did not take the undead lightly.
#
Farisa jumped from the hunter’s platform. The ghoul charged Mazie, who swung a sword with her sole arm, severing one of its legs. The creature somersaulted as the leg spun through air and back into place. The abomination darted east, not seeming to have a clear target until Farisa realized...
“It’s going for the huskers!”
Claes, best positioned to intervene, discharged his machine gun. His fire did no real damage, but the creature seemed to have some sense of pain because, as its separated guts swarmed back into place and its regenerating skin patched up, it chose to run off in another direction.
Eric said, “Is it gone?”
Saito said, “No. Distracted. It’ll eat something else, but it’ll be back.”
Bushes rustled. Farisa heard a high-pitched squeal—a wild animal, not one of theirs—that angered her so much, she said, “I’m going to kill it.”
Claes called her name, but his voice seemed to come from a mile away. She had lost all sense of others’ presence, because her rage at the animal’s suffering could not be ignored.
She heard her own voice again. “I’m going to kill it, because only I can.”
She unholstered her pistol, and her mind divided itself in confusion. What would a gun do against a ghoul? Nothing. Why had she drawn it? She realized her reason on seeing the ghoul’s bald head in the guts of a doe, its hooves kicking hopelessly. She fired to end the animal’s misery.
The ghoul looked up. Though its hair had rotted off, Farisa could tell the corpse had been a woman’s, and that she had not died long ago. It snarled and charged.
Saito was calling for her. “What are you doing? You can’t kill—”
Farisa, as if she had always known what to do, took the pea-sized stone—the Lith of Sophya—she’d acquired in the haunted castle and threw it at the ghoul. It collided with the undead’s leather jacket, one of recent fashion, and landed in the dirt.
A pebble? I thought I could kill that thing with... a pebble?
Farisa, broken by terror, turned around to flee, but fell face-first into the ground as the ghoul’s bony hands grabbed her shin.
She yelled, “Please don’t!”
The creature let go. She turned around to see its eyes had rotted out, leaving only the evil false vision of the undead, but its hearing seemed close enough to true that it must have recognized a human voice. The ghoul’s face no longer showed hunger or hatred, but sadness.
She made a waving motion with her rotting hands to indicate that Farisa should step back. The ghoul fell forward on the Lith, the tiny stone Farisa had tossed, making sure it connected with the flesh of her neck. A column of white flame erupted and a shockwave thumped Farisa’s chest. Her ears rang. The ghoul’s flesh melted and bubbled as if doused with acid, then melted into an oily puddle crowned by an ordinary orange fire, which Runar and Mazie put out with water.
“We survived...” Farisa, leaning over with hands on knees, panted. “We survived for one reason.”
The others looked at her, as if she were about to explain the tiny magic stone she had used, but that was the lesser of two reasons why this encounter had gone in their favor.
“We survived because she used to be—”
Claes said, “Talyn.”
#
As the morning light gathered, Farisa felt increasing gratitude toward whatever knot of Talyn’s humanity had remained inside the ghoul, bringing it to self-sacrifice. Had Kanos been the one to come in such a form, the outcome would have been dreadful.
These Liths of Sophya did not seem hard to make—a mage’s tears, cedar foliage, and sand were all easy enough to find. She had thought little until now about the difficulty of using them. The object’s tinyness reduced its range, and ghouls came at a racehorse’s speed. It saddened her to realize that the taint of an old world—a Globbo on an orcish motorcycle, Talyn’s reanimation—had already come into the new one.
Rather than eat breakfast, she sat on a fallen log, the weight of her shoulders pulling her into a slump. “We’re going to ruin this place, aren’t we?”
Saito sat down beside her. “This is not our fault. We are not the ones who disturbed the dead.”
“Talyn found her way to us," Farisa said. “The Company will, too. It's only a matter of time. If there's life in the South worth protecting, then we, to it... are invaders. We’re like orcs.”
Claes sat down on her other side.
Farisa put her hands on her knees, which wobbled as she sat back. She faced Saito. “Do the Globbos know anything about dragons?”
“Geshna wanted one. To what I know, they found nothing. There’s no evidence they exist.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, they do.” The meeting in Switch Cave with the dragon felt real, must have been real. “If the Company threw its worst at Switch Cave, and the place was defended by a dragon—a young one, half the height of an unta—and you were a betting man...”
She trailed off. She realized she had no desire to finish the question she was asking. Her right leg trembled, wanting to pace. Her fingers made fists and released.
“Damn it!” She stood up. “Fucking damn it! We will be at war as long as we live, won’t we?"
Runar looked at her with a respectful flat mouth. Mazie put her hand on Farisa's arm to console her.
“I don’t know,” Saito admitted.
“Nor do I,” Farisa said. “Nobody knows anything.”
“Rain’s coming in,” Andor said. “I don’t think we’ll be moving fast today. Would anyone mind if I looked at the motorcycles we took down?”
“That’s a good idea,” Claes said.
“I’d like an extra hand for this job.”
“If all ya need is one, I’ll come,” said Mazie.
“Great.”
Mazie looked at Farisa. “Are you...?”
Farisa smiled. “I’ll be fine. Go.”
“I’d like to see it too,” said Eric.
Saito and Runar went off to find water for the untas. Claes waited for the others to leave. With a dour expression, he said, “Farisa, I think you’re right.”
“So, we’re at fault for—”
“No, not fault. You can’t hold us culpable for the undead, or the Company. It’s not about fault. This isn’t going to be the last time we’re attacked from the north.”
Farisa extended her tense legs and exhaled.
“When the others come back, we’ll figure something out. Have you had something to eat?”
Farisa shook her head.
“You should. It’s going to be a day.”
On his advice, she nibbled a butterless biscuit made the night before from their dwindling flour stocks. It was bland, as always, but filling. Bird calls slowly returned to the trees.
Due to the morning’s lack of wind, she could hear the motorcycle long before she saw it—and when it arrived, it was louder than a man yelling. It had been built to accommodate two orcish bodies; thus, three people could sit comfortably. Andor, with Mazie and Eric behind him, steered it and coasted to a stop.
He said, “The other one was wrecked, but we were able to fix this one. It’s an elegant machine, truly. It uses an internal combustion engine, so it’s efficient, albeit loud.”
“Very loud,” Eric said.
Farisa looked over the vehicle. She had seen designs in Cait Forest for devices like this, including blueprints for steam-powered bicycles, but never one made solid. This one had no chassis—the orcish aesthetic did not demand one—but seemed almost proud to expose its pipes, gears, and sundry innards. Unlike the discarded orcish artifacts they’d found, this machine had been well care-for and was free of rust due to the copious tallow applied.
“Even the Geese don’t have these,” Andor said.
Farisa said, “I wonder how orcs made it at all. How would they work together to make complex devices like this, if they don’t have language?”
“Maybe they do,” said Andor. “What do we know of the orcs down here?”
Saito said, “That Globbo you shot, do you think he died before or after we killed him?”
Farisa and Claes looked at each other, sharing a silent remark on the absurdity there would have been in such a question, one month ago.
“I checked,” said Andor. “I wasn’t able to tell.”
“Shit.” Farisa crossed her arms. “We have to assume the worst, then, which means—”
Runar looked at her. “There are more coming?”
“It’s likely. The Globbos have a limitless supply of bodies—living but also dead—they can fling south at us. So...”
The others looked at her. No one filled the silence.
“Man, I hate this idea.” She looked at Mazie, then Claes. “I hate what I think we have to do.”
Claes nodded, understanding what she was about to say, but wanting her to say it—she understood this to be a test of her leadership, because he was as mortal as all of them and could be gone one day—so she continued.
“We have come this far from Switch Cave and encountered only one natural barrier—a river with one crossing, an arch we used as a bridge. If it were gone, how much time would it buy us?”
“A few days,” Saito said.
“That’s an eternity in war,” Claes said.
“I wish...” Farisa paced. She looked at Mazie. “I wish I had a better idea. Anyone?”
“We made some good memories there,” Mazie said.
“I know.”
“But if the G-Comps kill us, those memories die too. It is the right idea, and I don’t fault you for having it.”
“Right,” Farisa said before looking around. “This leaves us with the question of how. We don’t have any explosives, do we?”
Claes shook his head. “I could not get any. Not in Muster, not in Portal. Just to get a blasting cap, you need a letter from the Global Company.”
“Could we extract powder from our ammunition?”
“It wouldn’t be enough, and we might still need it.”
“Fuck.” Farisa paced around in a circle, then crossed her arms. “I guess I have to be the explosive.”
“You don’t mean—”
“I’ll survive it, almost certainly. Every stone has slips and faults that can be... worked... from afar.”
“I suggest we use the old trailer,” Runar said. “We’re not going to find another tame husker out here, so it’s been a waste to haul it. We can leave a real physical suggestion that we didn’t make it.”
“Like all the others?” Farisa said. “Nothing has thrown the Globbos off so far.”
“There are no perfect fixes,” Andor said. “A physical sight might erode morale.”
“It might. I suppose it isn’t a bad idea.”
“We’ll hitch it to the motorcycle, which we can use to get to the arch. If the trailer gets beat up on the way, that’s even better.”
Farisa asked Mazie, “Do you want to come with us?”
Mazie shook her head.
“I’ll go,” Runar said.
Claes asked, “When do you think you’ll be back?”
Andor straddled the front seat and put his hands on the steering handles. “Round trip, it’s a hundred forty miles. I don’t want to take this thing very fast, given terrain, so even if we’re able to keep the bike the whole time, I’d bet on—”
“Sometime tomorrow,” Claes said.
“Right.” Andor turned a crank between the handlebars. “If we lose this thing and have to walk, then it'll take more time than that.”
Runar sat on the bike. “We’ll each have a compass. I’ll check bearings every half mile. Dead reckoning.”
Claes said, “We’ll stay put for five days, if needed. After that, we’ll search for you.”
“Let’s be off, then,” said Andor.
Andor turned the engine on. Runar sat behind him, and Farisa took the rear of the long seat. They rode north at a slow, cautious pace, preferring grassy hills where they could trust the ground. When they came upon a flat, they tested it by foot before riding across, to avoid the false mats that would mire them in mud or, worse, submerge their vehicle. Their speed, even on favorable terrain, rarely exceeded that of a horse’s cantor. They spotted a group of orcs fishing in a pond half a mile away, but managed to avoid confrontation; the orcs saw them, but the lack of interest seemed mutual.
The ride was never smooth, but they arrived at the arch, its sandstone red in the setting sun, without incident.
“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Runar said. “We’ll sleep under the carriage.”
Farisa found it morbid that they would sleep in this wrecked wagon hull with the purpose of abandoning it tomorrow, but rain clouds were coming in from the east, so they would need shelter. They had brought hardtack to serve as dinner, but when they unpacked it, they found worms and weevil larvae inside, so they tossed the biscuits and instead ate the cured venison Runar had brought.
“Farisa should get an extra portion,” he said. “She’s doing the hard part.”
“No,” she said. “We’re all doing the hard part.”
Overnight, rain drummed the tattered covering. Farisa struggled to sleep, because Mazie's absence stung on her skin and she craved her lover’s assurance that she was doing the right thing, because she could not convince herself that, in destroying a natural wonder to gain a few days’ tactical advantage, she was not doing the sort of thing the Global Company would do. She missed Mazie so much, she slept with her arms around a column of air.
Andor and Runar were already awake when Farisa’s eyes opened. It was shortly before sunrise and a rift between flat planar clouds made a blue overhead ribbon. The three of them detached the doomed empty wagon from the motorcycle and, to make the damage visibly severe, beat it with heavy branches.
Runar pointed to a rock in the middle of the river. “We should have it land over there. It’ll tell the best story.”
Andor probed the river’s depth in several spots with a stick, and used the drift of a leaf to assess its current. “Then this should be our launch point.”
In coordinated motion, the three of them carried the wagon to the river and hurled it. The rapids broke it into two pieces—all the better—and the smaller one, backed by the river’s force, tumbled onto the dry rocky island Runar had picked.
“The perfect picture of a failed adventure,” Farisa said.
“Indeed, it is,” Runar said. “You ready for your part?”
Farisa nodded. “I think so.”
“Are you sure it will work?”
“Not at all.” They climbed the slope, Farisa in front, that led them to the flat of the natural bridge. They walked over the arch for its last time. “I still hate that we are doing this. Who are we to destroy such a beautiful place?”
“We are animals, surviving,” said Andor. “This arch, given time, will fall to one natural process or another, and others will be created by rivers like this one.”
“You are protecting this world, not destroying it,” Runar said. He pointed to a forested hilltop. “If the Company found its way to those redwoods, they would all be made into charcoal for siege engines.”
Farisa’s gaze followed a flock of orange-headed pigeons flying downriver. They, too, would end up in soldats’ bellies if the Company ever came.
“I’m ready,” she said. “The two of you should fully cross before... you know.”
Andor and Runar walked over to the other side. The sky had cleared and the ruthless morning sun stung. Farisa paced, her booted feet falling gently on the stone.
“Here it is.” She sat down cross-legged. “There’s a fault in the rock, running this way.”
This spell would require more effort than a mage could exert while standing; it required full concentration, not a mote spent on balance.
She yelled, mostly to convince herself, “I’m going to start now."
In the blue, she let noise fade from perception. The sun’s warmth on her skin disappeared. She injected her mind into a smaller and smaller space, darkening like the world under a microscope, as she snaked through grains of stone, a network of tensions all balanced so nothing moved. There was nothing but vibration; the innards of matter felt like empty space in which there was no up or down, no outside or inside, no here or not-here, no discernible surface to cleave matter from void, or self from not-self, only lines and seams and fissures that erupted white in black space and disappeared as quickly, like visual artifacts that, with imagination, could be nudged into new forms and alignments. As she did this, as she moved the smallest bits of matter from one place to another, she felt warmth inside herself, resolving into ecstasy, like the first time she and Mazie—
“Farisa!”
Runar’s shout forced her exit from the spell. A rumbling sound flooded the world behind her. She leapt up and bolted. The cracking sound intensified to a crashing roar. She looked back, safe by a split second, and saw the red rock bridge break into slabs, like collapsing mountain snowpack, the boulders receding as they fell into the river, casting up furious white foam.
She was shaking. Her temples throbbed and her heart raced. “You saved my life, Runar.”
“You’ve also saved mine. It’s what we do out here.”