Tarek smoothed his thumb over the smudgy black spot on the southern edge of Degán’s map for the hundredth time, feeling the ache of long-distant friends. He’d felt a twinge from Kanga not too many days past, but he was so far away that the momentary spike could have just as easily been a bout of indigestion on the infuriating hunter’s part as anything more serious. He was still alive, and Tarek took some kind of comfort in that. It meant that Tavi, Bachi, and Zuli were probably all right too. Probably. Pahtl, on the other hand, felt like he was having a grand old time as best as Tarek could tell. He wondered constantly why the otter was so much further east than Kanga, but there were so many possibilities and so little information that all he could do was stew on it endlessly.
“You’re going to wear a hole in that,” Degán said mildly. He sat next to Tarek on the bench at the front of the enclosed wagon that had once been his and was now Tarek’s. He handled the reins of the tall, ugly beasts he called camels. Tarek took turns occasionally, but the truth was that Degán was much better at keeping them under control. There were no animals that large in Catori terrirory – he thought it must be due to the Land’s regular flooding – and they made Tarek a little nervous.
Tarek lifted his hand off the map. “That’s where home is, I think,” he admitted to the skinny, pocked slaver. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” He spoke in the other man’s native language; he called it Harsu. It was getting easier all the time, aided in great measure by the fact that Tarek’s magic gave him a perfect translation every time Degán opened his mouth. He rarely had to resort back to the tongue he’d grown up with anymore. It had only happened once today.
“That spot is nothing but ocean, and the perhaps most dangerous stretch of it, at that,” Degán said, leaning over to look at the shaded area of the map.
“I know that,” Tarek said. “Mists of Grief, it says.”
“Very good,” Degán said. “You really are learning at an incredible rate.”
“But if my friends are more or less here,” Tarek said, circling the landmass to the north of the inked-in ocean mists with his finger, “then we must have hit land right here, and we had to come through some very dangerous mists firsts.”
“A whole land full of people hidden where no sailors could ever reach,” Degán mused, smiling faintly. “Sounds like a penny romance I wouldn’t mind reading.”
“A what?” Tarek said. Despite his blood magic allowing him to understand the man perfectly, sometimes Degán said things he couldn’t quite understand.
“A made-up story meant for entertainment,” Degán said.
Tarek smiled. “I always thought it odd our loremaster never had any stories about any people beyond the mists. When someone told me that a wider world existed, I almost couldn’t imagine it.”
Degán peered at him as if suspecting him of a joke. “You truly think you came from within the Mists of Grief?”
Tarek nodded and gestured to the map again. “My Land is entirely encircled by mists, and I’ve been told by a reliable source it’s some kind of magic. Do you see any other spot that could be?”
The smaller man motioned for the map, and Tarek handed it over. He mulled over the parchment while deftly handling the reins with half a mind. “How large did you say this land of yours was?”
Tarek felt a twinge of uneasiness at the question. Degán was not a good man, and him knowing too much about Tarek’s power and past made the middle of his back itch. He’s my only source of information, though, and I’ve given him explicit commands not to harm me or tell anyone about my magic. He said it himself: he’s bound to me and might as well make the best of it. He’s been nothing but helpful since I took him. He’d even offered to let Tarek have more of his blood several times. It had been terribly difficult to say no, but Tarek kept reminding himself that he needed limits. The man’s cuts were only scabs when he’d asked; otherwise Tarek knew he’d have pounced regardless of his high ideals.
“I walked the length of the Land in roughly two moons, if you take out all the times we stopped,” he said. “Not every tribe we met was friendly.” The heavy scar in the middle of his back felt suddenly stiff and painful as he thought of his sojourn with the Iktaka and their torturer-entertainer.
“Fascinating,” Degán murmured, still absorbed in the map. “You think you’ve seen the world, and then one day another curtain gets pulled back. How many more times can it happen, and how do I end up surprised every time?”
Tarek nodded a hearty agreement. After Xochil’s revelations in the ancient temple all those moons before, he’d thought nothing could shock him, and yet his life since then had been nothing but one odd occurrence piled atop another.
They rode in silence through the heat of the day. Degán had taught him the trick of tying a white cloth over his head to deflect the worst of the sucking heat, and they both regularly dipped into the barrel of water sitting between their feet. Progget and Viselvet, the two guards, were driving the other two wagons and likely doing the same. Tarek interacted with them as little as possible – they were both full of rage even when they said nothing, and the fact that he was going to have to sell them to the slave market handlers in Besthura just to fund his journey to the south itched at his conscience. He’d long since decided to keep Degán with him for the trip rather than selling him. He’d said himself that he’d hardly be worth anything, and he was a useful man to have about. Having him handle most of their interactions with the locals would keep Tarek from making ignorant mistakes.
“There she is,” Degán said when the sun was four hands past the high point. “Besthura, the Bitch of the Desert.” They’ just crested the saddle between two high dunes, and he pointed to a glimmer on the horizon.
Squinting past the heat haze, Tarek saw a strangely shaped wall of painfully birght white topped with golden domes and slender brick towers. “Why a bitch?”
“She’s small, scrappy, and she bites whenever she can,” Degán said with apparent fondness.
“Small?” Tarek scoffed. “There must be a thousand people living behind those walls.”
The slaver’s mouth twitched like it always did when Tarek said something wrong. “Call it ten thousand and you’ll be far closer.”
Tarek blanched. “That’s impossible.”
Degán shook his head. “Someday you’ll see the City of the Paramount and we’ll have this conversation again.”
“How can so many people live there?” Tarek insisted. “I haven’t seen anything but sand in nearly three of your weeks. There’s no prey bigger than those ugly running lizards, and if they can grow crops, they must be magicians. Do all these people eat sand?”
“The poor ones do,” he said blithely. “The rest of us live on fruits and greens brought in from the oasis valleys. As forbidding at the Sarabe is, there are shaded spots with water bubbling up from the earth. The Paramount keeps them safe and distributes the food to the cities. And if you think there’s nothing bigger than lizards out here, the sand snakes would like to have a word with you. I’ve seen skeletons as long as all three of these wagons lined up nose to tail. The young ones make a tasty meal if you can catch them.”
As they crept ever closer to the city, Tarek tried not to gape as he saw the size of it grow. He’d thought the Kuruk stronghold to be more people than the world should hold in one place, and this place could have swallowed it without noticing. The Heart of the Song, the worldtree itself, could only have shaded a quarter of it. Buildings sprawled over a vast distance, built taller and broader than any structure he’d ever seen. Even the pyramid Xochil had showed him wouldn’t have stood out as exceptional among some of these towers and edifices. Strangest of all was the wall that shielded the western half of the city: it looked like a white wave frozen in the moment of cresting, reaching as tall as the towers within at its center point and sloping gradually around the curve of the buildings until it sank into the ground halfway around the circumference of the mighty city. The other half of the city had no wall at all.
“Why is it built like that?” Tarek asked.
“During the dry part of the year the winds blow hot and hard,” Degán told him. “Every city that wants to live until winter needs a windbreak or it’ll be up to its neck in sand.”
Tarek latched onto the first bit he’d said. “This isn’t the dry part of the year?”
“Oh no,” he chuckled mirthlessly. “Get caught out on the dunes two months from now, and if you go to sleep without a soaking cloth over your face, the heat and wind will suck so much water from you that you never wake.”
Tarek shook his head, baffled. “How is the wall made? It’s incredible.”
“Only the Paramount’s sages know the secret. It’s one of the ways he keeps the empire peaceful. The sand cities would drown and die without him, and they know it.”
The empire? Tarek gave Degán a respectful nod. “I’m glad you’re coming with me to the south. There’s so much I don’t know. I’d be lost without your help.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Oh, you’d be dead, not lost,” Degán said dryly. Then he gave a self-effacing shrug. “On the other hand, you’d have likely have ended in one of the flesh dens if I’d had my way, so perhaps the scales balance.”
Tarek shook his head. He liked Degán almost despite himself, but every now and then his blithe amorality reminded Tarek of exactly who he was dealing with. The fact that he admitted to such an awful thing without even the slightest twinge of guilt or anger made him all the more unnerving. “We should put the others in the cage before we get too much closer.”
The slaver nodded briskly and jumped down from the wagon, moving to carry out Tarek’s wishes without complaint or resentment. Perhaps it was the fact that he wasn’t the one being sold… or perhaps he simply had no sentiment at all.
“When we get there, you handle the sale,” Tarek instructed him before he got any further. “Remember, I’m your new partner, and you say no word about my power.”
“I have no way to disobey your commands,” Degán said. “No need to repeat them. Or does the magic lose power over time?”
Tarek tightened his lips. He felt neither hope nor anger from the man, but sometimes he asked probing questions that made him wonder just how settled Degán was in his new role. “The commands last until I say otherwise,” he told him. “I just want to make sure you’re clear on what to do.”
“That I most certainly am,” Degán said with a little bow. “Let me do the talking and we’ll be on our way southward in no time.”
They entered the city just before sundown. The heat was still brutal even without the sun beating down overhead, and the stench of animal and human waste rose in his nostrils as they rolled into the hive of humanity. Tarek had a hard time not clenching his fists on the seat. Degán would take care of the sale of the other two men and the purchase of their travel goods – Tarek had been specific about that – but the noise, the heat, and the smell all conspired to make him deeply nervous. People shouldn’t be heaped up together like this. It might as well be an ant nest.
He could see the tail end of the western wall curving toward them in the distance as they rolled into the outskirts of the city, the other two wagons tethered to their rear. “Shouldn’t there be a wall on the other sides too?”
“Not allowed,” Degán said. “The Paramount may not want the sand cities drowning on him, but he doesn’t want them able to keep his armies out, either. You don’t keep charge of the whole known world by being overly trusting, is what they say.” He nodded pleasantly to two heavily armed and armored men standing watch in the street at the outermost edge of the city. They hardly seemed to take notice of him. People milled about pushing hardcarts, holding jugs of water overhead, or merely squatting in the doorways of their homes. Every glance looked either bored or mistrusting, and where the buildings rose higher nearer the center of the city Tarek could see such a crowd of people that it seemed impossible that their wagons could pass. Everyone was sun-dark, dressed in long, flowing robes with white headdresses. The sheer amount of movement in front of his eyes made Tarek feel ill. The smell of shit now mingled with that of roasted meat and strange spices. His stomach twisted, and he looked down at the floor of the wagon to ease his overwhelmed mind and rising gorge.
“More than you’re used to, hm?” Degán murmured. “Sit tight. Five streets in and we turn off to the markets. I’ll handle everything, just as you said.”
Tarek closed his eyes and nodded gratefully. I never could have done this on my own. I’d have been caught out in a heartbeat.
Little peeks showed people pressed around the wagons on all sides as the river of people flowed around them. People stepped out of the camels’ way without seeming to hurry or much care that they might get stepped on. The crush of people slowed their progress, but after perhaps a fingerspan Tarek was able to open his eyes. His chest was a little less tight and his stomach a tad less sour. He didn’t like this place, but he could adapt. We won’t be here long.
Sure enough, it was only a hundred heartbeats later when Degán turned them onto a side street that led to a great open square set with tables and raised platforms. Men and women stood bound and sullen in lines around the edges of the space, and men with spears and leather armor milled in every direction. People in robes of blue, orange, yellow, and red stood clustered around the platforms, and at two of them Tarek saw a captive being displayed as the brightly colored crowd called out numbers and questions. One of the bound individuals was a little girl of no more than eight. Tarek looked away, sickened. It would have been me. These men deserve it. It’s the only way I can reach Tavi and the others. If I make a fuss here, it will ruin everything. He was still mightily tempted, and more than a little disgusted with himself that he was able to resist the temptation.
Degán pulled the camels to a halt in front of a low table that had a richly-dressed man scribbling with a slender metal stick on clay tablets. Four men with stout clubs and metal chest plates flanked him. The erstwhile slaver jumped down from the wagon.
“Greetings, noble Barrund,” he said, bowing. “Let me introduce you to my unexpected partner Tarek, a newcomer to these parts.” His left hand flickered in some kind of sign Tarek couldn’t quite follow, and suddenly the man at the table sat up straight, looking very attentive. “Be a dear and have your men hold him. Stuff his mouth closed as soon as you can.” Then he jammed his fingers in his ears and started making loud nonsense noises with his eyes screwed tightly shut.
The four armed men rushed to the wagon, and Tarek jumped to his feet. “You can’t do that!” he screamed at Degán. “Protect me!”
It seemed the slaver couldn’t hear him over his own babbling with his ears plugged up. Tarek cursed himself for a fool and focused on the men coming toward him. Two were on his side of the wagon and two on the other. All had their clubs in hand, and they looked like a mean bunch.
Heart racing, Tarek waited until the one man had his foot on the step of the wagon and a hand on the rail before hurling the half-empty cask of water in his face. The man barked a curse and swept a hand across his eyes, which gave Tarek the moment he needed to punch him in the nose, push him backwards, and leap over him toward freedom. The exit to the square was only a stone’s throw away. If he disappeared into the press of the crowd on the main street, perhaps he could lose the others.
The second club-wielder on his side of the wagon wasn’t just going to let him dance away, though. He closed fast, swinging his club hard. Tarek deflected the blow with the meat of his left arm, angling it just right so most of the force would glance off. It hurt like blazes and his hand went immediately numb, but he kept his feet. He stepped in close to the man and brought his forehead down on the man’s nose. He heard a crunch, and the man fell backward, shouting in pain and anger.
“Don’t damage him too badly,” the man at the table shouted, his words slurred and accented.
As the man with the bloody nose went down, Tarek snatched at the knife hilt sticking from his belt. His own weapon was stowed inside Degán’s caravan. He’d thought that looking like a harmless trader was his best bet for escaping notice and interaction. How did Degán do this? I told him he couldn’t harm me! How did he escape the magic?
With a knife in hand, he reached down and flicked the blade through the fallen man’s sleeve even as he stepped away and fell into a run. A lick of the blade and he’d have another fighter on his side.
He brought the blade to his face, seeing a blurry line of red in his periphery as he focused on the street beyond the square. He’d yell over his shoulder for the man to fight the others and be gone before they could react.
Something hard hit his shins, tangling in his legs, and he went down in a heap before he could get the blade to his mouth. The knife skittered away across the cobblestones. He looked down and saw a long club by his feet. The man he’d knocked down with the water cask had thrown it at just the right moment and tripped him up. Desperate, he sprang to his feet.
He hadn’t even gotten turned around before one of the guards that had been on the far side of the wagon barreled into him, knocking him to the stones again. His ribs creaked in protest under the man’s weight.
“Wait,” he said, holding up a hand, but the man batted it aside and brought his club down hard across Tarek’s forehead. He saw a burst of light, and his head screamed pain both front and back. He must have smacked the back of his skull on the pavers when the club hit him.
His vision swam and his thoughts blurred. Hands grabbed him and hauled him upright, and he felt a rough, dirty cloth forced into his mouth and bound in place with some kind of rope. This can’t be happening. I have to go find Tavi. Degán, how did you do this?
“This is going to sound strange,” he heard the skinny slaver say, “but you need to cut him a little, put the blood on something soft, and force it into my mouth. I’ll fight you, but make me do it. Yes, I know how it sounds. Please?”
Tarek gasped as a line of fire traced its way down his forearm, and his eyes cleared enough to see another rough fellow wiping a knife wet with his blood onto a cloth. More guards had gathered, and two took Degán by the arms as he nodded to them enthusiastically. He began to struggle and squirm as the cloth with Tarek’s blood approached, bucking against the ones holding him. I told him not to take my blood. I never told him he couldn’t ask others to force him to take it. Clever little rat shit. I shouldn’t have let him know it was important.
The tussle only lasted a few moments as the much larger men wrestled the slender man onto his back and shoved the cloth into his mouth. As soon as the red-soaked rag touched his tongue, he relaxed and patted the arms of the ones holding him.
“That’s quite enough, thank you, gentlemen.” He sounded perfectly calm. Tarek realized that not once in the last fingerspan had he felt anything but detached curiosity and amusement from the man. He’d not given a single hint of what he was planning.
The guards backed up warily, and Degán stood, dusting himself off. That done, he bowed again to the richly-dressed man. “Your assistance and powers of perception are impeccable as usual, Barrund. I’ll explain everything in just a moment.”
The tall, hawk-eyed man nodded, eyeing Tarek with something that looked like avarice.
Degán approached Tarek with a smile. “I’ll leave that gag in place until we get a bit of your blood into Viselvet and Progget. Can’t have you calling them in for a scrum. I hope, though, that you’ll extend me the courtesy I showed to you while I was under your thumb. You’re such an interesting fellow, and now that the scales are righted I can’t wait to have some very interesting conversations with you.”
“How?” Tarek shouted, struggling against the men holding him. The gag made it nothing but a formless howl, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Degán seemed to divine his meaning. “You need to be a little less trusting, dear,” he said. “You were so careful to tell me I couldn’t tell people about your powers and that I wasn’t to harm you, but I didn’t raise a finger, did I?” He smiled genially. “You really should have told me I wasn’t allowed to lie. That would have made things much harder.”
“And now,” he said, picking up the fallen knife Tarek had stolen, “I believe I said something a while ago about cutting you. Nose to kneecaps, wasn’t it? That sounds nice.”
He struck like a viper, and Tarek tensed helplessly, waiting for more pain to bloom.
It never did. Opening an eye, he saw Degán straining uselessly with the knife’s point a hair’s breadth from Tarek’s stomach.
“Fascinating,” the slaver said, easing up. “You’re an endless font of surprises, my friend. We’re going to have such interesting talks. But for now…” He flicked his eyes to the guards standing on all sides. “Beat him a bit for me, gentlemen. Nothing too permanent or disfiguring, mind you. I’ve got some important people to whom I want to introduce this young fellow. Just give him a little something to remember.”
He patted Tarek on the cheek. “See you soon, dear. I’m afraid your friends in the south will have to keep missing you. You’re going to make me a lot of money, and I expect it will take the rest of your life.”
He moved away, and Tarek screamed at him again, raging and helpless. Then the circle of men closed around him, and the beating began.