Lobat's Tears (I)

"Anisca" (Princess Francisca, Second Princess of Lavradio)

"There's good soil under here." Riculta and her shovel had dug a neat square of ground to half a meter deep. "It needs work and water, but … " The horned woman dusted her hands against the brown overalls she wore for work and smiled her hopefulness at Anisca. "Someone cultivated this place for a long time. When they left they must have seeded it with all of this."

All of this was mischus, many hectares of it. The hardy stuff wasn't a single plant but several kinds, succulents and thick-leaved shrubs and tall cacti that sprouted limbs without needles. The mixture was grown for appalons and gurantors. Animals grazed on the mischus and left behind droppings that were useful as fertilizer and fuel. It also held the soil in place, retained water, and was home to many small animals. The only attention it required was suppressing undesirable plants and keeping animals from overgrazing any one section. Every calique garden was surrounded by an expanse of mischus.

Nexus had found Lobat's Tears, an abandoned garden mentioned in Clintus's text. The settlement was easy to find thanks to the tall butte standing over it. There were a handful of such massive stone towers in that part of the desert, standing like sentinels in a line ten kilometers long. Nexus sent fast riders to all of them to search for the (possibly apocryphal) lost garden and found what they were looking for in under a day. Mahzad and Riculta had been dispatched to take a closer look at it, while the advanced riders kept advancing. Anisca, unwilling to be left behind while Nexus made use of her personal farmer, insisted on coming along.

She had endured hours at a jolting pace by appalon. After days of riding pent up in a train car, and now enhanced by the spiritual arts for speed and endurance, her animal was enthusiastic about the excursion. But it had never been trained as a bulwark mount so its stride was a horrible jarring wobbly experience. Brother Mahzad and his two bulwark, her and Riculta's minders for the trip, rode animals with months of experience handling the enhancements, and they looked quite comfortable, gliding smoothly over the desert without any of the side-to-side pitching. Soon they were deep in the desert while the trains were far behind, resting on the main trade road until they received word from Mahzad that Lobat's Tears was habitable.

Now she was too sore and too hot, but at least she wasn't bored. How could she be, after finding a Calique garden, mysteriously abandoned? Lobat's Tears had been easy to identify because it was so thoroughly shaped by human hands. The butte was three hundred imposing meters tall. The first hundred meters of rise was a steep slope of scree and fractured sandstone, and above that it was a vertical rise to a hard capstone layer on top. The base of the butte was roughly triangular, the longest side being nearly a thousand meters wide and faced east by south-east into the rising sun. On the sunrise face, the scree slope had been conspicuously carved out, leaving a sheer vertical surface for the entire height of the tower.

The dwellings of Lobat's Tears were carved directly into the face of the butte. It was divided into three massive sections, center, east, and west, each one seven stories tall. Apartments, shared kitchens, meeting halls, storehouses, shrines, and who knew what else were piled up in layers. The first two levels were grand facades, carved with palm trees and birds and garden plants and desert animals. The higher levels were plainer, deeply set back into the rock, the rooms smaller, and appeared to be living areas. The three sections were separated by thick boundaries of stone, narrowed at the upper stories to form gigantic arches. The grand lower facades were arch-shaped, as were the progressively smaller colonnades lining the upper walkways. Wherever there were windows, they too were arches. The overall impression was three giant arches, themselves made of progressively smaller arches, with yet more arches set inside them.

On the desert floor, a tall berm surrounded the area immediately around the town, likely built from all the spoils left over from the town's excavation. It enclosed the entire area where the oasis had been, nearly a square kilometer butted up against the butte. The mischus grew everywhere, inside the berm, over the berm, and beyond the berm to a distance of nearly two kilometers.

"They faced their town into the sun," she observed, "didn't they get hot?"

"The garden would need full sunlight," said Riculta.

Mahzad pointed at the upper levels, the ones that looked like apartments. "See how the higher levels are recessed so deeply? It shelters them from the hottest part of the day. They could also hang up cloth to block the sun. In the winter you could take them down to get the full sun. Desert temperature swings are supposed to be huge."

By unspoken agreement, the group moved towards the base of the butte and the town. There were very few plants there, and sections of bare pavement peeked through the layers of dirt. It looked like a broad avenue once ran along the face of the town with a large square in the center, now covered by several centimeters of blown sand and dirt. The grandest facade in town overlooked the square. Predictably, there was a large well in the center. The low stone wall looked like it had been bored from a single block of gray rock, topped with a cover of the same red sandstone that towered above them. The cover was held down by more rocks, and a thin layer of dirt.

They cleared the rocks and dirt, and moved the stone, to find a perfectly dry hole six meters deep. The first meter and a half was solid gray stone, an artifact of art, either ancient or disciple. The rest was made of bricks without mortar, slightly spaced apart. The water should have seeped in freely through those cracks, but the only thing at the bottom of the well was little skeletons, remains of animals that had burrowed in or fallen in and died there in the dark. Poor things.

Mahzad knelt by the well and put his hand flat on the ground. A rapid prayer spilled from his lips but his mind was far away, delving into the earth, spreading outward to sense what was below them. He stayed that way for a few minutes. During that time his bulwark faced away, scanning the mischus that used to be Lobat's garden, watching for threats.

The abandoned town offered good soil and ready-made shelter, but what they needed most of all was water. Without it, nothing else was possible. Disciples could pull water out of thin air by condensing what was already there. It looked miraculous, but the amount of air they would have to process would be enormous. Anisca started scratching out numbers in her notebook. Assuming fifteen grams of water per kilogram of air, and an average of three liters per day required per person … the numbers kept getting worse the longer she worked on them. She couldn't assume the condensation process would perfectly extract everything in the air, and Nexus had large animals that needed water. And all of that was just for drinking. Growing crops would require far more water.

They needed wells. According to Clintus there were aquifers under the desert, fed by snowmelt on distant mountains. Water ran in torrents down the mountainsides and disappeared into underground caverns, or washed out into the desert to sink into the soil. The occasional desert rains would fill wadis to bursting, only for the water to vanish overnight. None of the water was truly lost but moved invisibly underground. Anisca added "desert hydrology" to her long list of fascinating topics for future study.

Mahzad began to walk in measured steps, his gaze still distant, as he paced the distance to the next nearest well. He stopped a moment there, then carried on, heading further south. Soon, they were deep into the mischus, what used to be the garden proper, and now that she had seen a second well, the slightest rise of grayish stone capped with reddish rock, she saw them everywhere. The garden had enjoyed a plentiful supply. The smaller wells were spaced among the mischus for convenience, so all the garden could be watered. She followed him to the berm's edge, the bulwark close behind them.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Brother Phillip," said Mahzad, as he touched the silver cuff resting on the helix of his ear. He waited a while in silence, but then a chip of orange gem, the cuff's only decoration, winked and sparked in the sunlight. "I know why the wells ran dry. Disciples did it. There's plenty of water here."

Now they had to wait, while the slow-revolving sun pricked their skin with rapidly increasing heat. The trains would travel slowly, as disciples had to smooth the ground for carriage wheels and gurantor feet. Riculta was in her element, out of doors in a straw sun hat custom-made for her upturned horns. She had her paper notebook out and drew pictures of the plants, leaf and stem and tangled root. She filled her hole as she had dug it out, each layer in its place, every plant restored. Then she changed locations to find some more. In time she would have them all, every kind of plant that lived within the mischus, and all the creatures too.

Mahzad's guards had set an awning in the middle of the town's square to keep the sun at bay while they waited. They pushed away the dirt and sand to reveal a layer of stone untouched by desert heat and set a roll of carpet down. There was space enough for six to sit, with dried food and warm water to sustain them. She had a book to keep the time, yet Anisca's eyes had gone astray.

As a girl, she had explored the rooms beneath her palace in Lavradio. Deeper than most people knew, their contents plundered long ago, their carvings chipped away by Enclave priests too jealous of the ancients to leave their final remnants alone, often made of the same unbroken stone as this abandoned garden's wells, they had been her finest source of mystery. Gazing at the fractal arches set above her now, she felt that thrill again. How deep into the butte did these chambers go? How were they supplied with air? What goods were left behind by those despondent people, forced to leave their homes when all the wells ran dry? Had they carved their names into the lintels, or scored the walls as children grew? Were records of their lives left behind, lingering in forgotten rooms?

"I'm going to explore," she said, standing up.

"No you're not," said Mahzad.

"Excuse me?" People didn't often tell her no, and never in such blunted terms. Yet as an exile, she had heard it often from the mouths of Brother Phillip and his minions.

"It could be dangerous," he said, "the cautions must be followed."

The disciple and his bulwark stood and bowed their heads, as he silently prayed over them. Enhancements were built in layers, custom-tuned to each receiver's need. "Stay here," he said when he was done, "until we know it's safe. Shout if something happens." They crossed the buried plaza to the smallest door of the western wing, and disappeared into shadow.

Riculta joined her while she waited, pleased and sweaty from the midday sun. "We need help to do this properly, Miss Anisca. We can grow a crop of barley from the grain we have, with water and disciples' help. But Calique gardens need different seeds than any we've brought with us. And we would greatly benefit from a gardener's expertise. Until we've tested all the crops and every mischus plant, our knowledge won't be complete."

Mildly soothed by Riculta's courtesy, Anisca penciled numbers in neat columns. They needed so much space, disciple-powered light, planters, earth, and water. The sun above was turning hostile, not only in the sense of a fast-advancing desert summer day, but year-by-year spilling magic onto their world, or 'mana' as Taylor had once named it, the same raw stuff that powered all disciple arts, and the ancients' arts before them. Several hundred years from now the power of the sun would peak, and then decline, in precisely measured celestial time. From peak to peak, eleven hundred years and nine.

Riculta and Anisca had discovered plants grew differently when grown by light infused with spirit. Some crops withered until they died, while others mutated until they couldn't be recognized as members of their own species. Their research would take many years, maybe even all their lives, but the implications were obvious for humanity: adapt with the sun, or die.

Mahzad returned in time, bulwarks flanking him, his face as grim as gallows. "Not safe," he said and set upon the ground a snake, tail first, coiling, coiling, coiling as he lowered it, all four meters of sand patterned length until the vibrant green head lay still atop the body.

Anisca stilled her breath and shaped her face to show neither astonishment nor fear. It was a reflex more than anything, the result of years of training, to deny the dread that ran through her.

"Aaloemon's Viper." Riculta's whisper gave voice to Anisca's fear. The snake was called that because its head was the same shape and shade as the Aaloemon leaf. "Very deadly."

Mahzad repeated his warning. "Not. Safe. So don't wander off."

"Thank you for your diligence, Brother Mahzad. Your efforts are appreciated." Anisca wished for a fan, or a teacup, or anything that could occupy her hands and hide her face, but all she had was her notebook. She stuck her nose in it and didn't come out for an hour.

The trains arrived early in the evening, and soon the grateful animals were in the mischus. The appalons were thrilled to be released from their transport cars, but the gurantors were more grateful. The six-legged behemoths gobbled up a large section of mischus, guided by Riculta. She knew which part of the settlement she wanted to farm first and would use the animals to do some of her work.

The trains were parked on the main avenue beneath the bluff, doors open and awnings spread to give some shade. Teams were sent into the center section to clear rooms and map the town. Taylor stood at the central well, holding hands with Mahzad and two students, so they could work as a cadre to break the hardened stone surrounding the well. Apparently, every well in the garden had been thus capped. But that was just the least of it, according to Mahzad. There was a layer of disciple-altered rock, harder than granite, just above the water table, all through the garden and past the berm, and into the fields of mischus beyond. Several square kilometers of land had been permanently sealed off from water.

"Mahzad can do the next one," she heard Taylor say, "and teach the students. Focus on the wells for now. We'll make stone-breaking a regular exercise, and someday the whole layer will be fixed." He could have done it all himself, but he liked his 'teachable moments'. He never did anything himself when he could teach someone else instead.

Anisca ventured near after the disciples left, and looked down. Water was in the well and rising, cold and tempting. Soon the troughs and buckets would be brought so gurantors could drink their fill.

Taylor took his reports on the steps of the Great Hall, which is how they dubbed the largest room at the city's center. He sat upon the highest step, framed by arched doors, framed again by the great arch of the facade, framed again by the arch of the center city. His guards stood to the sides, and Brother Mika stood two steps down to his right. Kasryn the former prelate stood with Mika, and then Vizana the librarian. Farr and his daughter Lilian, his chief fabricators, were on his left. Anisca and Riculta were a step down from them, followed by a clutch of students standing by to run errands.

"The serpents are the most deadly animals we've found so far," said Brother Montague when he reported, "but they're shy. The scorpions are the biggest nuisance. They gang up on anything warm. It works out for us, though. We can bait traps with warm rocks, and the scorpions fall right in. The scorpions attract the vipers, which makes them easier to catch. We should have the first three center levels cleared by sundown."

Minty offered Taylor a box of glass. "We kept one for you." Inside was a black scorpion twice as big as Anisca's hand, claws raised in defiance, tail raised over its head, ready to strike. It dared them all to try something (anything, no matter how small) a gangster arthropod with a chip on its shoulder. It struck at Taylor with its tail, twice, and left a smear of venom on the glass.

Look at me, it seemed to shout, I will kill you all!

"It doesn't seem like a good survival strategy," Taylor thought out loud, "just taking on anything and everything all the time. You'd think they would go extinct."

"Perhaps they breed quickly," suggested Montague, "anyway, it makes them easy to lure and trap."

Anisca's turn was next, and gave her report on the state of the soil and the mischus.

"You have a week," he said when she was done, "to plant as many crops as you see fit. It's a high priority, so coordinate with Kasryn for labor."

"We need to start our research too, Brother Phillip. There are hundreds of plants we need to investigate, and every generation takes time."

"It could be a few weeks before you can get started. Essentials must come first, and then we have to find or build suitable chambers for you. And, we need those Calique gardeners. You will travel with me when I greet the neighbors and see if you can entice someone away. Riculta should come too, if she thinks we can spare her. Even if your recruitment fails, there's a lot we can learn from seeing a Calique garden. After all of that's been settled, then you can start your research. I look forward to your discoveries."

She bowed to him in the Nexus style, one hand over her heart and a slight dipping of the head, more an acknowledgment than obeisance. On the inside, she was feeling her impatience. Between preparations for this journey, the slow and secret ride from the capital to the border, the rapid charge through all Ullidia, and then today, she had lost weeks of research time. And yet here she stood, one literal step above messenger boys, being told her efforts weren't a priority.

It was enough to drive a princess mad.