Part 24 (1/2)
Just forming the words in her mind was like the earth breaking open beneath her feet, dropping her into a void that had no end.
Tears leaking down her face, she whispered, ”Papa's only going to use me again and again and again, until there's nothing left of me. He doesn't mean to, but he will. I have to get out.”
She fell into Opal's arms as the smaller girl leaped to her feet, rushed to her side, gathered her into a desperate embrace. For a time nothing existed for her but tears and pain and the knowledge that her own a.s.sessment of the situation was correct: that her father loved her dearly, and would use her like a spear until she broke in his hand.
He would never forgive her defection.
Raeshaldis survived this, she thought.
I can, too.
She whispered again, ”I have to get out.”
”Rider coming,” said Rat.
Shaldis, clinging to the saddle bow of her stumbling horse, barely heard. Her eyes were half shut against the hard horizontal glare of the sinking sun and with the light trance of listening, scenting-searching for that elusive flicker of blue in all the wasteland of empty rock and wind-scoured sand.
Except for the shortest possible rest at the worst of the nooning, they had ridden through the day, blazing heat that crushed horses and riders like an invisible hammer. The teyn-and the nomad Crafty-seemed a little closer. They had stopped, too, for a time, or at least the scent and movement of the indigo speck in the distance had seemed unmoving to Shaldis's straining senses. But many miles still separated them. With the coming of night the scent of the indigo would be stronger, but sooner or later they would have to rest.
”Camels,” added Rat.
Shaldis drew rein, dared withdraw her mind from the quarry, turned to blink at her companion. ”What?”
”Camels. Four of 'em, heading this way.” He pointed. The sinking sun, setting behind the near-invisible trace of the distant Dead Hills, drenched the dust cloud with light. Shaldis could make out black, swaying shapes amid the swooning heat s.h.i.+mmer that seemed to hide the horizon in an incandescent curtain. She whispered, ”Jethan,” half disbelieving. But when she fumbled the scrying crystal from her purse and looked within it, the young guardsman's image was clear: dust covered, veiled against heat and glare, and as stiff in his saddle as the gait of his mount would permit.
Two of the other camels carried waterskins. The third bore an empty saddle. The ta.s.sels and trappings were green and orange, the colors of her grandfather's house.
”The king needs you at the aqueduct,” was the first thing Jethan said to her when he came near enough, almost half an hour later. ”Two laborers there have gone mad in the past two days. Lord Soth will be going on there from Three Wells, but they'll need a true mage.”
”I'm delighted to see you too, Jethan,” replied Shaldis in a tone of exaggerated cheer. ”And, yes, thank you, I'm in the very pink of good health. How are you?”
Jethan drew himself up in rigid indignation, like a statue wrought of dust. Then he relaxed, tapped the camel down to its knees, and sprang from the saddle to stand before her, where she stood dismounted beside the exhausted horses. ”I'm well,” he said quietly. ”But I'm very tired and very frightened, for the king's sake and that of my lady. Though I am the better for seeing you safe.”
Shaldis replied, meaning it, ”And I you.”
”I have water,” said Jethan. ”At your grandfather's house they said you took enough for two days, but in this heat . . .”
”Thank you,” said Shaldis. ”I appreciate that. Rat will, too, when he takes the horses back-they can't go on into the desert this way. Tell the king that I'm pursuing a nomad Raven sister into the desert, the Raven sister he and I spoke of, who can control the teyn. Maybe who can control wind as well. What tracks we've found were nearly erased by wind, but we've barely felt any-only a stream of it, sometimes, flowing near the ground. Not enough to raise dust in the distance. They're almost half a day ahead of us. I hope to overtake them tomorrow.”
Without turning his head, Jethan said, ”You hear that, Rat, is it? Tell the king that, when you get to the aqueduct. I'm sure your master back in town will understand the delay in your return with his horses.” He didn't take his eyes off Shaldis, blue as jewels in the mask of dust. ”Please rea.s.sure the king that we'll both be with him when he rides back to the city four nights hence for his jubilee.”
Shaldis's head was pounding with the heat and the glare of the sun-blasted emptiness and with the need for sleep. She could have fallen on Jethan's shoulder and cried, as she'd fallen yesterday on the king's. She only said to Rat, ”Rest until the sun's down. That dust cloud in the north is the workface of the aqueduct. Once it's dark you'll probably be able to see the lights of the camp.”
”You're not going on now, miss?” The driver stepped between her and the saddled camel as she reached up to take its bridle to mount. ”Without rest? You've rode since midnight, barring the nooning stop, and if you slept, then by the look of you you didn't get any good of it.”
In fact Shaldis ached as if she'd been beaten. But she said, ”In my grandfather's house last night I saw green mists, the same green mists Foxfire has said she's seen around her grandmother's house in the hills-and that Jethan and I saw near Ahure's house. I don't know whether these have anything to do with my grandfather's madness or with the gla.s.s this woman is trying to take from him or with what's happened in Three Wells or with the woman who's been crying to me in my dreams. What I do know is that the woman out there ahead of us has some answers. The only answers I've encountered so far. And as far as I know, she and her teyn are still moving. So we need to move, too.”
She hooked her toe onto the kneeling camel's leg and sprang into the saddle. The camel groaned in protest, then lurched to her feet, mumbling and grousing as camels do. Jethan unhooked a pair of waterskins from one of the spare camels and laid them in the dust beside Rat and the horses. ”Tell the king we will not forsake him,” he said softly. ”If we do not reach the aqueduct camp before he must leave, we will not fail to be in the city on the day of the new moon.”
Shaldis glanced worriedly at him as he swung on his camel again, tapped it to signal it to rise. Behind his shoulder the dwindling crescent moon stood clear in the saffron sky.
She'd watched it from night to night, but its thinness struck her anew, and filled her with despair. Wasting, draining away. Like Summerchild's strength. Like the king's life.
Jethan caught her look, but didn't respond until they had started off again with long swaying strides toward that half-guessed dot of blue in the landscape, that elusive whiff of indigo.
Then Jethan said softly, ”But if we come not to the city till the day of the new moon, I fear it will be to find the lady Summerchild dead and all hope at an end.”
THIRTY-NINE.
Most curious.” Oryn made a move to step closer to the man who sat in the stuffy brown shade of the little goat-hair tent, hands bound before him and leg-shackled to the tent pole. Ykem, foreman of the aqueduct camp, made what might have been a move preliminary to catching his sleeve, but of course a foreman didn't do that to a king.
”Watch it, sir. He's quiet enough now, but this morning he was like to kill the fellow who came in to change the latrine bucket. Lunged at him, screaming and clawing, he did, and we thought he'd snap the tent pole. We had him chained in the quartermaster's store tent, but the men wouldn't have it, sir. Said he'd put a Bad-Luck Shadow on the picks and shovels, and they'd turn in the hands of them as used 'em.”
Oryn glanced back at the sunburned little man when he used that nomad term, then looked back at the shackled workman. The man looked like any of the rangeland villagers, wiry and dark, unremarkable save for the expression of mad bliss on his face as he sang.
”Been singin' like that since night before last, sir,” added Ykem. ” 'Cept when he sleeps, which he does every few hours. Even when he attacked Nam this morning, if you can call it singin'.”
”Oh, it's singing, all right.” Oryn folded his arms, watched the madman's mouth gaping, flexing, tongue quivering and curling as it gave shape to the sound that poured like a wailing river from his throat. ”I've made a study of music-one can only watch dancing girls cavort day in and day out for so long-”
Ykem looked at him in startlement, then saw the joke and laughed.
”And that sounds a bit like what the deep-desert nomads do to bring on trances. Does he have nomad blood? Or nomad family?”
Ykem shook his head. ”Hates 'em,” he said shortly. ”He's from the City of White Walls. Said he'd never been out of sight of the White Lake, till he came here.”
Oryn murmured again, ”Most curious. And did he know the other man who went mad? Were they friends?”
”Probably knew him. They worked the same gang. n.o.body says they was particular friends. Both of 'em, these three, four days now, the men say they'd been sickenin' for somethin'. They'd eat their food and sneak off to their barrack the minute they could, and their mates'd find 'em sound asleep in minutes.” Ykem nodded toward the rough, open-sided shelter of canvas-roofed poles that stood on the edge of the camp. ”Deep sleep, dead sleep, they say, but that might be hindsight, the way men do. I asked around among the foremen, and they say five or six other men are startin' to do that. Startin' to claim they're sleepy right after they come off, and sometimes not even stay for the food. But I talked to 'em and they seem all right.”
”Or they wanted you to think they are, at any rate.” Oryn took another look at the madman, with his lolling head and eyes fixed enraptured on nothingness, wailing words-they had to be words, thought Oryn, there was a regularity in them that went far beyond random sounds-in a language he had never heard before. He wondered what Soth would make of it. Though Earth Wizards were as a rule less scholarly than Sun Mages, Soth had studied ancient tongues, both the languages of dimmest prehistory and the tongues of those alien mages learned through the scrying crystals.
He ducked his head, pushed through the tent flap and out into the slanting heat, the sun-saturated dust of late afternoon.
”And none of the men have reported disturbing a tomb? Finding jewels they shouldn't have or pieces of mummies?”
”Pieces of mummies, my lord?” Ykem stared at him, baffled.
Oryn's head ached. Resting in the heat of yesterday's brief nooning, and riding on through the night, he felt his mind circling again and again to what Raeshaldis had told him about her grandfather and his connection with Noyad the tomb-robbing jeweler, about the howling man in Little Hyacinth Lane, and the burning of the White Djinn Tavern.
The royal cavalcade had followed the line of the aqueduct through the Dead Hills and into the desert. Last year, when the engineers had been constructing the raised waterway across the flat rangelands to the city, he had always felt a lift of hope and purpose in visiting the face camp. Every day had brought the end of the stone trough on its high stone piers closer to their goal, to the rocky, pale shoulders of the Dead Hills. Progress had been visible.
Then he had been able to tell himself, We will reach the Oasis of Koshlar, and the deep waters of its springs will flow cleanly to the city and the fields.
It was hard to remember that now, looking out across the waterless expanses of the desert. A hundred and sixty miles, the surveyors said. It would go faster now, of course, since they were only digging and covering. . . .
If he lived to push it through to completion.