Mazie woke before dawn. It had been her turn to take watch, but Claes had continued his shift, as he often did when unable to sleep. She listened as Saito told him the whole story of his faked death—rather than let his family face disgrace and penury for his desertion, the Geshna officer had set up a fraudulent demise, ensuring their collection of a generous annuity while disappearing into obscurity forever—and she wondered if his children knew the sacrifice he had made. She had never met, in Snake Bay, the notion of fathers loving their children half as much; some stayed and some left but, either way, problems went unsolved.
If saving everyone she loved required her death, she knew she would bring herself to do it, but if it required slipping into a living nothingness, as it had of Saito? She had no idea what she would be able to go through with it. Those sacrifices one survived, they were the nastiest kind.
She had, continuing a habit acquired in the desert, drunk too much water. She glanced at Farisa’s watch. It was five minutes to four, so she would need a lantern.
“I’ll finish your shift when you get back,” she said to Claes. “It was supposed to be mine.”
Claes laughed. “I might as well hold watch. No sleep for me tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of few things, but yes.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I am,” said Claes with a sad smile. “In more ways than one.”
Mazie walked off into the weeds. The night was cool and fog drifted. Wet leaves painted her arms with recent drizzle. The sky, with diffuse starlight, gave just enough of silhouette to indicate the true wildness of this place, with tree ferns rising thirty feet and broad shrubs that looked like wild tea plants. In less than three hours, sunrise would turn the falling dew diamantine, and bright flowers would be everywhere. Out here, day as well as night came on so fast, and the sun rose so high, every hour looked different from the last in a way she doubted she could explain to one who had never seen it.
She had come far enough from camp to suit her need for privacy, and had finished her business, when her lantern flickered out.
“What the...?”
A cold wind swept over her. The campfire, she could see through the trees, had gone out as well. She found herself lethargic, as if her limbs weighed half a thousand pounds each, though she did not need to sit or lie down, nor was she in any pain. The leaves rustled. She wanted to run, but her feet refused to move, as if stuck to the ground.
A voice came in a language she did not recognize.
“I don’t understand,” she tried to say.
Words formed in her mind. I will not hurt you. I am here to collect the Powder. That’s all.
Two human forms, fully adult but no taller than four feet, emerged. She could not tell their gender, and they seemed to produce their own cool light. They chiseled at a brain-shaped fungus—in the daylight, it would have been orange-yellow—that had formed near the base of a wide palm tree.
Mazie asked, Is that stuff edible?
Only in small amounts. It is a hazardous substance, but we cannot defend ourselves against orcs without—
Without what?
The two sprites looked at each other, as if they were unsure Mazie could be trusted.
We mean you no harm, Mazie assured them. We are just passing through, to the south.
Their gestures suggested they considered her no threat. I believe your kind calls it Flare.
Magic?
A sapiomancy connected to fire, metal, and thought. If it has not died out, that is.
I suspect it hasn’t, Mazie mused, unsure of whether they could “hear” this thought and knowing well a person who possessed it.
We lost our abilities five hundred years ago. We eat this, and a little bit comes back.
The two sprites chiseled the tree’s burl of fungal growth until it was gone; Mazie had been in their captivity for at least an hour when the sprites had finished their work.
Sorry to have held you still. I thank you for understanding.
One of them put a clump of fungal powder the size of a pea in her palm.
This is our typical dose. Use no more, unless in mortal danger.
Mazie ingested the offering. It dissolved quickly in her mouth. She put her finger and thumb an inch apart and a turquoise electric arc connected them.
Be careful, my dear.
Her lantern turned itself on; the sprites disappeared. There was enough dawn light for Mazie to see the tent by its sentinel shadow against the morning sky. She wandered back, shaking her head in vexation as if she’d had a childish dream until she realized she was holding a velvet pouch she’d never seen before. She looked inside and saw an orange-white powder.
#
Farisa guessed they were above eighteen thousand feet on November 26 as they crossed a mountain pass. The untas often wheezed, probably due to altitude—this place seemed to stretch the animals’ ability to adapt—so no one rode. She and Mazie would sometimes escape into the wild for a spell of affection, but not as often these days, due to exhaustion and a sense of foreboding. Runar’s sense of an approaching presence, though they all hoped it would amount to nothing, cast a pall over them as they worked their way south.
The sand maples thinned out; trees had become less common with every climb, and up here there were none. They were parallel to an orcish trail, which they often intersected, but here the natives seemed no threat compared to the mountain clans north of Switch Cave—human in size and scale, rarely armed, averse to confrontation.
At such height, they found little food. The local streams were muddy, devoid of fish, and the mosses and lichens that grew up here were not appetizing. Their stocks of flour and dried meat were nearly out; their rations had been cut to bare subsistence. They had been setting traps every night, but catching nothing.
“Let’s hope for better terrain in December,” Runar said.
“Aye,” Farisa replied.
The air was thin enough that one never felt fully right; walking felt to the lungs like running, and real exertion was impossible. The thin wind felt cold; Farisa had come to prefer, in the world’s true tropics, the range from twelve to fourteen thousand feet—this place was altogether too high. So she was thrilled, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, when the trail dropped substantially, though the low terrain was less like a forest than a bog, so the lack of food did not abate.
Indeed, though the altitude and temperature were comfortable, the air seemed to combine the worst of four seasons—the uneasy buzz of spring, the moist heat of summer, the passionless decay of a rain-blunted autumn, and—if one looked up—the flat clouds of winter stasis. Objectively, the sights were no worse than in any other wetland, but they had been foraging for long enough to know that food should exist here and the lack of it was infuriating, desaturating color and thickening unpleasant odors, and....
“Quiet,” whispered Claes.
Saito fired a crossbow bolt as a rustle traveled through vine-covered bushes. “Shit. I almost—”
“You did,” Andor said, pointing at a blood trail. “You hit it.”
Claes and Saito crept forward, Farisa following. The animal, despite its wound, ran quite far—through deep yellow weeds, over a ridge, and into a wet field, green and unnaturally bright; were they not in orcish territory, Farisa would have taken it for a rice paddy, but though she knew orcs preferred meat and subsisted on plant matter only when desperate.
So what is this place? Orcs have no use for grain.
The boar—a small one, no larger than forty pounds, gave them a good run, but its loud labored panting worsened and it eventually collapsed beside a mound of yellow grain and broken animal bones. Farisa had been trapping for long enough to recognize bait.
She noticed a six-foot orc running right toward—
“Claes!”
—who was helping Saito butcher the boar, thus did not see the figure until the last second. In response to Farisa’s shout, he dodged the orc’s falling bludgeon and drove his knife into its leg. Saito got up and stabbed it in the kidney. Its face contorted in pain before it crumpled like a bag of rocks.
“There’s probably more,” she whispered.
They fell quiet, backs together to face all directions. She hoped the other four—Mazie, Runar, Andor, and Eric—who remained with the animals and supplies had not been attacked; it did sound like something had caught them, but they were a quarter mile away. She heard a branch break from on high, so she suspected an owl or eagle had taken flight, but soon saw an ogre—fifteen feet tall, two tons heavy—emerge. As it charged, Saito aimed his crossbow.
Farisa doubted the bolt would penetrate the ogre’s leather-and-bone armor, and a second one was coming right behind it, so she closed her eyes, formed between her hands a white-pink sphere of light, and launched it with pure will at the assailant.
Light struck her blind. A blast wave detached her heart from gravity. Her arms stung and singed; the skin was red and would blister soon. Claes shouted something she could not hear. Saito’s jaw hung open. The ogre collapsed and a pillar of orange flame had mounted its corpse. Its partner ran off with a scared holler.
Claes’s hand was on her shoulder, and Saito had come over.
“I didn’t smell it!” Claes yelled, compensating for his own rattled hearing. “Did you?”
“No!”
Saito added, just as loud.“I didn’t either!”
Claes said, “Let’s get back with the others!”
She nodded, severely unnerved. Flashfire could be found aboveground here. A new fucking thing to worry about.
#
On the way back to join the others, Farisa’s arms had taken blisters even worse than those she’d had in April. The ones on Claes’s face were beginning to yellow already, and Saito’s arms and neck had reddened.
“I can do something about that,” she said, feeling responsible for their burns.
“No,” Saito said. “I will. You conserve all you have. We’re far from out of danger.”
They reunited with the other group.
Andor said, “What happened?”
“There’s flashfire,” Farisa said. “We’re high up, so it’s hard to tell by smell, but it’s here.”
Saito produced the blackened husk of the boar carcass.
“It seems dinner is already cooked,” said Runar.
Claes said, “I heard some trouble over here.”
“Orcs, of course,” Andor said. “They dispersed after the...”
Farisa raised a stinging, reddened arm. “Explosion?”
“They were after our animals, not us,” Runar added.
“We don’t have many left to lose,” Farisa said. “Two huskers and three untas, still underweight. It’s a good thing we’re less than three hundred miles from Malisse.”
Saito put the boar carcass in the husker wagon. “We’ll cure this overnight, but it’s best to make distance while there’s daylight.”
They looked at Claes, seeming to wait for him to say something, and finally he did.
“Flashfire’s heavier than air, right?”
“It is,” Farisa said.
“We won’t be setting fires. No guns and”—he looked at Farisa—”no fireballs. We should also, while we’re in this bog, camp in the hills, because flashfire is bad for the lungs.”
“That makes sense,” said Farisa as she scratched an itchy spot above her elbow, wincing when her fingernail struck a blister.
They walked a few miles. In some places, the flashfire was thick enough that, despite being outdoors and at altitude, they could smell its sulfurous odor. When they did stop, two hundred feet above the marshy valley in a beech forest that seemed almost like the ones back home, the burns on her arms were painful enough that she was glad for the rest—even the movement of air across her skin was unpleasant.
Runar said, “We should be careful, but I think we’re safe here.”
Once camp was set, Farisa spotted a yellow pebble, and when she picked it up, her eye caught another, which led her to a third such stone, which led to a fourth...
She heard Claes’s voice behind her. “What are you looking for?”
She showed him what she had collected. “These.”
“I’d like to come with you.”
“I won’t go far,” she said. “I’ll be back before nightfall.”
Claes picked up a tiny orange stone. “Like this, right?”
Farisa nodded.
Once they were away from the others, his tone turned apologetic. “I haven’t been my best, of late.”
Farisa found herself uncomfortable. “You’ve done all you can.”
“I let emotion get the better of me. I really thought your father might be alive.”
“He still might be,” Farisa said.
“We’re not going to find him down here, though.”
“No, probably not, but that’s no reason to give up.”
Claes shook his head. “Discovering him alive would mean so much. It would clear your name. It would humiliate the Company. He was a good friend and a good father.” He looked around, then crouched when he found another yellow stone in a patch of rough ground. “We haven’t found him, though. All we’ve found is... a swamp.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Farisa was usually the last to touch another person unbidden, having never figured out the rules, but after Claes stood up, she put a consoling hand on his leather-clad shoulder and pressed her forehead on it, saying nothing.
He asked, “Do you think I’ll see my family again?”
“Of course you will. Saito will, too.”
“I hope so. We made a real mistake today.”
“I did,” Farisa said. “The fireball was mine.”
“Not that. You made a quick call and it may have been the right one. I’d rather be alive with a second-degree burn than dead and pretty. A pistol would’ve had the same result, and we had no chance of fighting that thing—”
“Ogre.”
“—by hand.”
“I wonder...” Farisa stooped to pick up another yellow stone, this one as long as her thumb.
“What?”
“It is an easy thing, to make fire with magic. We’ve seen that it can be effective. Fire is something we already know how to make, but if there were a magic of cold, that would be safer.”
“Why isn’t there one?”
Farisa lifted a rock and found four more of the yellow pebbles. “I do not know. I suspect the physics of heat plays a role. There was, classically, held to be a symmetry between heat and cold, but it isn’t the case at all because heat is, at a microscopic level motion—a measure of aggregate speed, and since there’s no such thing as negative speed, there is a limit to it, breaking the symmetry. Cold is not an entity but an absence—a slowing of motion. What color is a shadow?”
“Black.”
“No. A shadow is a darker version of the color it is cast upon. It neither has nor is a true color, but is relative. Cold is, one could argue, such a non-thing, and the absence of this non-thing keeps the hemispheres separate.”
“Right,” Claes said after a pause. “Don’t stay out here too late.”
Farisa gathered about sixty more of the yellow pebbles before returning, grinding them together in her palm and smelling them to be sure they were what she had meant to gather: sulfur. Then she looked for camp, which was hard to find as there was no fire—they were probably a hundred feet clear of any flashfire up here, but being cautious.
The next day, they all started to feel that malignant aerial presence that Runar had detected with his prophetic Eye. Nothing about the forest itself, its wind or noises, suggested a new hazard had entered. The clear sky, from dawn into the morning, looked no different than before. Still, they had been in the wild for long enough to know that when a plant or animal conceived of itself as prey, its behavior changed; they knew communications of danger in primal languages they could not understand, nevertheless, occurred across distance. Something evil was coming—they felt it, the world felt it; they would confront it soon.
#
Twenty minutes after sunrise on November 29, Andor was the first to spot, as the others were packing up camp, what appeared to the naked eye as no more than a speck, reddened on its eastern face by sun and notable for its stillness as it hung over a northern mountain range. The balloon-lifted vehicle seemed to be working its way west, not in much of a hurry, so the group suspected they had not been spotted yet.
They ate breakfast and agreed to stay under canopy cover, hoping the forest would remain thick. They avoided clearings at all costs. They all understood that it was everyone’s duty to check the sky as often as possible. No reminders were required; they all just did.
As they took the long way around a lake, large enough that they could not see land on its other side, Farisa asked Saito, “Did Geshna ever try to build airships?”
Saito pulled the reins of an unta, lest it wander into an open field. “Not to my knowledge.”
“They considered it in the Sixties,” Claes said. “We know this from your mother’s work, in fact. They canceled the project because an airship is too slow to be useful in war. If there’s one sixty-pound cannon in the whole city, the thing can be taken down before it has time to do any damage.”
Farisa said, “Alas, we don’t have a sixty-pounder.”
“We barely have enough bullets to cover two months’ hunting,” Runar added.
“We don’t know that it’s Geese,” said Andor. “The motorcycle was orcish. That airship could be after anyone, or anything.”
As they walked that day, they changed clothes according to terrain, wearing dark colors when ferns and cycads were abundant, but donning tan leather when they had to move through dry vegetation, like the brush stands, two stories high, that dominated the afternoon’s terrain. That night, they ate cold cured meat and hardtack, since they could not afford a fire. As their white tent risked visibility from above, they slept under the stars, hoping it would not rain.
The next morning, Farisa woke and saw a dark splotch on the dawn sky, one she mistook at first for a cloud until she realized that it was not moving with the others and that its edges had not changed for several minutes. By sunrise, the airship had worked its way over to the western horizon, seeming not to have taken notice of them.
Saito handed his spyglass to Mazie. “You have the keenest eyes. Tell me what you see.”
Farisa held the glasses for her. Runar and Claes were also trying to examine the target. No one got a clear view until the ship, turning around to head south, rolled its gondola toward them.
“Not orcs,” Mazie said.
Farisa said, “People?”
“That’d be my best guess.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Farisa noticed that their husker had wandered into a field where trees were sparse. She and Andor rushed out to bring the animal back under cover.
“We’ll keep moving south,” Claes said. “Quickly, but carefully. We’re worse off if we stay in one place.”
“We’re getting closer to Malisse,” Farisa said, hoping it would give them calm and hope, but also knowing she could give no guarantee of what they would find there.
As morning light gathered, they walked south, constantly checking the sky for motion. The land turned drier and hotter as they lost altitude. When they got to a sparse flat savannah, they clung to a lake that held a ribbon of thick woods around it—no more than two hundred yards from shore, one would find open grassland that gave no cover at all, making this rainforest vegetation the anomaly. The airship circled around, searching; around ten thirty that morning, its shadow darkened the ground in front of them, but swept on by.
Farisa said, “If the center of their circling is indicative of where they expect to find us, they still think we’re a few miles to the west.”
As they continued, the airship receded. They heard a rumble, softened by distance. Farisa raised her field glasses, to see that a wake of vultures—black specks, barely visible, had fled in all directions.
Eric said, “What was that?”
“Machine gun fire,” Claes said.
“Why?”
“To protect their balloons from the birds.” Claes kicked a fist-sized rock off their trail. “They must know what kind of place they are in, and they’re taking no more chances than we are.”
The tall trees around the lake granted overhead cover, but they reached its southernmost extent around one in the afternoon and could go no farther—yellow grassland stretched in all directions—without risking visibility from the air.
Mazie wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. “What do we do now?”
Claes started. “We...”
Saito said, “We can’t go out there now. Once night falls, we’ll see how much natural light there is, since we won’t be able to use our own.”
“So we wait.”
Farisa touched her neck. Her heart was racing. This group had learned to scramble over rock faces and ford rivers; to ride untas at twenty miles per hour; to hunt, trap, and forage; to feel an ambush on the back of one’s neck. Of all the survival tasks they had learned, waiting was the one thing that never got easier. They were prey now; they were voles in a burrow.
At least the enemy airship had not found them yet, and seemed to be going away.
After some time, Andor took a risk and stepped out into the afternoon sun for a full-circle look.
Claes looked at him. “Well?”
“They’re gone, for now. We have the motorcycle. We could make a quick jaunt and see if there’s safety in the south.”
“I’d rather we not split up,” Claes said.
Saito raised his arm, still red from a flashfire burn. “The last time we did, it served us poorly.”
Claes said, “If we haven’t seen that thing by this time tomorrow, though, we’ll start moving south. The airship could just go away.”
Runar’s gaze fell to the rooted ground. “I don’t think it will.”
They pulled their five remaining animals together and gathered in a loose huddle. Claes looked for a spot where the canopy was thick enough to place their tent, since there was a risk of them having to wait for days. The sky was cloudless now, but the air was humid and buzzy with tropical rain, fixing to fall. Mazie, as they were low on food in both amount and diversity, decided to forage, but she found nothing but a green fruit, mostly rind and pith, whose repellent odor killed all appetite.
Nothing much remained to do but outlive the seconds, one by one.
There could be hope here, in this blue November sky. The airship might vanish and never return; a number of things might happen to it.
To pass the time, Farisa looked through the sheaf of notes that she, Mazie, and Eric had compiled in trying to crack the code of Jakhob’s Gun, but the cipher remained impenetrable and would not become easier in this heat. She considered looking for more of those yellow pebbles she’d been gathering, but she had enough to match their vinegar.
The vegetation at her back, though they were thousands of miles from Cait Forest, reminded her of foliage from two summers ago. To swim in the lake might have been tempting, were it not so exposed to sight from above.
Eric screamed. Farisa swung around to see him struggling, as if caught in a trap. Runar and Saito ran toward him. A green vine had curled around the boy’s arm. As Saito reached for his sword, a tendril encircled his waist. Mazie had snuck up, perfectly silent as only Mazie could, but the creature must have felt her footsteps through the ground: a tangle of thick, ropy appendages encircled her thighs and pulled her legs out from under her.
“Claes!” Farisa yelled. “I’ll bring you an ax!”
She ran to the wagon and retrieved two wood axes, both long-hafted for double-armed use. She handed one to Claes. The vines had taken Runar too, who was now prone. Eric’s face, as the tendrils tightened, was now purple. Andor, who had stayed back with his rifle, scored a couple shots before the vines reached him as well.
Claes asked, “Where’s center mass?”
Farisa dodged a swinging vine. “That’s what I’m trying to...”
A green vine as thick as her arm swung; she blocked it with her ax. She spotted a purple-red vase-like gullet with a ribbed rim and stony teeth, the body wearing a mat of soft foliage, like a bib, dotted with tiny pink flowers.
She pointed the ax.“There!”
Farisa, feeling the same anger she had experienced in the Cait Forest woodpile so long ago, swung with full force as a leafy limb flung itself at her. Cleaved off, it landed ten yards away.
Mazie, as the creature dragged her toward its maw, dug a rock from the ground with her fingers, rolled over on her back, and hurled the stone at the plant monster’s gullet. It shook, and its noise of protest sounded like a tree breaking in a storm. Eric, who had managed to stay on his feet thus far, fell facedown as thick green arms of vines dragged him too. The boy tried to grab earth, but failed.
Neither Farisa nor Claes could get close to the plant monster without risk of being ensnared, so Farisa entered the blue and heated his blade to a blinding white and took control of the weapon—in a dancing flurry, the sword slashed vines and charred green flesh—to free Saito. She pointed the sword’s hilt so Saito could grab it and continue the fight.
The shrub doubled its height, expelling a flurry of leaves and allowing Farisa to see inside the creature’s mouth—in the gum of a row of teeth, a sapphire-colored eye glared back and an orifice above it ejected a spray of dark fluid. A droplet hit Farisa’s eye, causing so much pain it shut. She flung her ax at the ground blindly. Runar kept struggling, while Saito slashed at more vines. Mazie screamed. Eric had been pulled less than a yard from the monster’s mouth when Claes, bellowing loud enough to wake a million ancestors, slammed his ax into the center of the gargantuan plant’s verdurous body, scoring a direct hit.
A loud crack shook the air. The fibrous green stomach ruptured like a potato dropped in a fire. Bones of birds and mammals, all cracked for marrow, spilled out on the ground along with a sizzling stew of leafy guts.
Eric, Runar, Mazie, and Andor tore off the now-limp vines that had entangled them.
They all watched each other, as well as the forest floor, for signs of motion. None of them felt any sense of safety until insects began to land on the body of the strange carnivorous plant, convincing them that it was truly dead.
Claes, using a long tree branch, sifted through the semi-digested muck. He batted away an orcish jawbone, a rib of some medium-sized mammal, and a living colony of beetle larvae before finding an object worth a closer look. They washed it with water from their canteens and a few crumbs of soap.
The velvet pouch had probably been quite fine in its day, which made Farisa curious who had once owned it. The only clue was the one silver coin inside. The coin’s back side had two curved notches—this seemed to be a numeral of some kind—and the obverse showed a face with a small nose and prominent forehead—orcish features—but that was also female and quite beautiful, which orcs never were.
“Who wants it?” he said.
There was no time to answer. Runar pointed at two bushes by the take that had begun to rustle. A vine swung and captured a butterfly. The tendril folded its wings together, then pulled it into a camouflaged mouth.
Claes asked Andor, “You said something about scouting on that motorcycle.”
“The company has no idea who I am,” Andor replied. “I might be able to find a safe place where can hide.”
“Right,” Claes said. “There could be shelter on the way to—what’s the name, Farisa?”
“Malisse.”
Andor said, “I will get the motorcycle.”
“Be careful,” Claes said.
“It is an honor to help.”
“You shouldn’t go alone,” Runar said. “I’ll ride with you. You may need a second gunman.”
“No,” said Andor. “You’re also our best swordsman. You and Saito should stay back, in case you’re attacked by another plant monster.”
“Then I’ll go,” Mazie said. “No longer much of a swordswoman, but I can shoot.”
“Are you—?”
“I insist. You need a second pair of eyes, Andor. We can’t lose you.”
Claes raised his hands as if he would put them on Andor’s shoulders, but Farisa knew men rarely touched in this way. “If anything separates us, we meet in Malisse.”
Andor, already straddling the motorcycle, nodded.
“We’ll be back before you know it,” Mazie said.
Farisa reached into her jacket pocket for her watch and handed it to Mazie, then kissed her on the lips.
She turned to face Andor. “It’s two thirty now. The sun’ll be down before six. When it gets to four, I want the two of you to turn around and come back. I’m not losing that watch, and I’m not losing either of you.”
#
In the late afternoon, thunderclouds streaked east to west across the horizon, dropping black curtains of rain. The storm clouds merged; the southern sky had become the underside of a stone giant’s boot. Rain battered the canopy with the fury of crashing aurochs. All of them watched the space behind them to be sure no plants—if that thing they’d battled had been a plant—were moving toward them.
With nothing on the southern plain to block airflow, wind buffeted Farisa’s face as she awaited Mazie and Andor’s return. The sun set unannounced, and it had been fully dark for some time when Farisa realized they were now an hour overdue. Farisa did not want to dwell on the terrible possibilities, but she used her fear and sadness to summon tears and make two more Liths of Sophya.
“Runar doesn’t think they’re hurt,” Eric said. The boy seemed to have grown four inches taller during this trip. “He would know.”
“I’m just worried.” Farisa wiped a tear from her cheek. “It’s what I do.”
“I know,” Eric said.
“They’re out there in the rain and mud and Goddess knows what else.”
Nobody ate dinner, and it was probably eight or nine in the evening when they heard Andor’s voice.
“You’re late,” Farisa said, with a smile.
Andor replied, “We had to limp the motorcycle back.”
“Couldn’t make any speed without lights,” Mazie added.
“Better late and alive than dead on time,” Claes said.
Farisa asked, “What happened?”
“Terrible soil, the first ten miles. Not bad for riding when it’s dry.” Andor cracked his knuckles. “The mud becomes thick, like clay, when wet.”
Mazie added, “We spent half an hour digging gunk out of the wheel well bare-handed.”
Claes said, “How far did you get?”
Farisa asked, “Did you see anything?”
Andor looked back. “We made it twenty miles, I’d guess. We found a small cave, empty except for an underground river.”
“That seems like a good place to wait out the airship. What direction?”
“It’s not hard at all to find. It’s due south of here.”
“You wouldn’t be able to miss it,” Mazie said. “There’s a hill, about a hundred feet high, nearby.” She described some of its features.
Farisa said, “Was it bell-shaped? Did it seem to come out of nowhere? Were there plants that looked like wild potato?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it looked like.”
“Holy shit,” Farisa said. She looked south. Soundless flashes covered the sky, but they excited rather than unnerved her. “That’s Lethe Tell. There used to be a city there.”
“I didn’t see anything like that.”
“Of course. It all turns back to soil—the timber, the mudbrick, the crop waste—after thousands of years, but it leaves a hill and if you excavated it, you’d find some pottery and tools. You said it’s a hundred feet high?”
Mazie nodded. “About that.”
“The cave is a quarter mile east of it,” Andor added.
“We should make for that place as soon as we can,” Claes said. “We’re not safe in these woods and we’re not safe out there.”
“It’s too wet,” Andor said. “We’d be lucky to do a mile an hour.”
“Right. It would do us no good to get stuck in mud, especially if that airship were to come back.”
Runar said, “So?”
“We wait here,” Claes said. “We hope the rain stops. We get across the plains tomorrow, dressed the same color as the ground, as fast as we can.”
Fog rolled in around nine thirty. Rain continued to fall all night. Farisa hardly slept; she woke up several times to look at the night sky for signs of an occluded star. She was furious to know that the Global Company was probably here, but beneath this anger and hatred was excitement—the thrill of discovery, eagerness to see the next day’s light, a hopefulness that would not slip off her heart no matter what stresses squeezed it because, while there was danger, Malisse—if extant, the first human city of this new world—was not far away at all. Compared to the distance they had traveled, it was just across that muddy field.
#
As the first dawn of December broke, Farisa looked across the scrubland. Rain had colored it differently from the day before; patches of green had mixed into its gold and gray.
Mazie put her arms around Farisa. “It’s a beautiful morning, love.”
Farisa looked back. Mazie’s breasts were bare. “Put a shirt on. You’ll scandalize—”
“No one’s awake but us.”
“Not true.” Farisa pointed ahead. Saito and Claes had walked out half a mile or so to check the terrain.
Mazie spoke softly in Farisa’s ears. “No time like the present for a kiss.”
Farisa turned around and put her arms around Mazie’s neck. “Let’s get ourselves in the sleeping bag. We’ll have what counts for privacy.”
“Yes, let’s.”
Once inside, Farisa removed her blouse. Mazie’s lips touched her shoulder, right where the scar was. They kissed. They licked each other’s necks, collarbones, and nipples with all the fervor they’d had that first time and more. Skin against skin, they embraced so tight, each heart bumped into the beat of the other.
“I love you so much, Mazie.”
“I love you too.”
“I never want to lo—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Farisa squeezed all the Mazie flesh she could, arm in one hand and flank in the other. She bit her lover’s shoulder, almost hard enough to draw blood. She circled the woman's breast with her tongue, savoring in view that perfect brown nipple, inhaling as much of Mazie’s scent as she could, like a bird taking its last nectar before a thousand-mile flight.