The Order War (27 page)

The two silver-haired women—the age of the older distinguishable from that of the younger only by the darkness behind her pupils and the barely visible fine lines radiating from the corners of those too-wise eyes—stood on opposite sides of the sand table. Neither spoke.

The older woman concentrated, and a replica of the Stone Hills appeared in miniature in the sand.

The younger woman, her hair falling but to her shoulders, concentrated in turn. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Her lips tightened, and her eyes closed, but her hands remained by her side, seemingly relaxed.

A faint smile creased the lips of the older woman as she watched the other’s efforts.

In time, a small portion of the bas-relief map churned momentarily, and a small spike of sand appeared on the northern edge. The woman with the shorter hair smiled broadly for a moment. “He’s there.”

The other nodded, sadly, and raised her eyebrows. “He is strong, but is he strong enough?”

“I think so,” answered the younger, “but we never know. Not until…”

“Yes…only a handful ever endure the Stone Hills for more than a few days. Are you sure you want to go?”

“Yes,” answered the younger. “My sending, my duty.”

The older woman released a deep breath, and the sharpness of the relief map subsided into vague and rounded contours. “Your duty…it may be long.”

“You regretted yours? I have always enjoyed his songs.”

The older woman’s faint smile faded. “He has lost much. So do we all. And the times apart are hard, especially if you must share him.”

“That will not be so.”

“As the Angels will.”

The younger woman nodded, and her fingers brushed the other’s before she turned to begin gathering what she needed for the trip ahead. She had little time to waste, not if he were already in the heat of the Stone Hills.

Eldiren glanced across the half-dozen charred heaps that had once been living beings. “Those five were Sarronnese hill-fighters.” He pointed to the figure stretched closest to the mine road. “That was the Black engineer.”

“Weren’t we supposed to capture him?” ventured the lancer sub-officer.

“I doubt that Beltar and Zerchas will be that unhappy to learn that he is dead,” said Eldiren dryly. “Not after he dragged us almost into the Stone Hills. He nearly made it—we couldn’t have followed far into the hills.” The White Wizard laughed. “Though I doubt he would have lasted long out there, either. Still…would you want him around to make more of those cursed arrowheads?”

Three of the closest lancers shook their heads vigorously.

“Was he the one who touched off the cannons?” asked the sub-officer, nervously glancing at the ramshackle and weathered timbers of the mine buildings on the flat behind the White Wizard.

“Most probably,” admitted Eldiren, raising his hands.

Hhhssttt!
The white fire played over the four bodies closest to the mine structures until they were white ash.

The White Wizard turned toward the mine buildings, and fire splashed across the structures. For a moment, the wizard watched. “That should get rid of this pesthole.”

Then he turned to the remaining body and nodded. “He led us quite a chase. May their good ones all die so young.” His hands lifted again, and the white fire incinerated the corpse. Only a few white ashes and a dark splotch on the sandy ground remained.

“Let’s go.”

“Yes, Ser.” The sub-officer turned to the half-score of lancers. “Mount up and head back. We’ll water at that stead again.”

The White Wizard turned his mount back toward the hills and saluted. Then he wheeled the white horse after the lancers.

Justen missed the mare, and not just because his feet were sore. She had given him her best, and had probably done the same for the dead Iron Guard. And what had been her reward? Death, by an arrow meant for him.

He trudged along in the thin shadow of the gully, trying to keep heading south while staying out of the direct sun.

Looking back, he could see dark smoke circling into the sky, a sign that the Whites had fired the old mine buildings. That would give him more time. He shook his head. More time for what?

The Whites wouldn’t chase him any farther. Not without a road, or any possible water for a score of lancers and their mounts. And especially because they probably doubted that he could survive the Stone Hills.

Justen’s eyes flicked from stone to stone along the dry depression. Everything looked shriveled, even the cacti, and the only sounds were those of his raspy breathing and his feet crunching on the hard and sandy soil.

The first hill was gentle enough, but the sunlight on the far side struck him like a firebolt. He squinted out at the dryness and the gray stone before him. Somewhere to the south lay Naclos, somewhere beyond the hills—as if he could ever get there with only a half-full water bottle and no real skills for enduring in a stone desert.

One thing was clear, very clear. He couldn’t travel during the heat of the day. He needed a cool spot where he could rest. His eyes darted down the hillside, looking for something sheltered, and hopefully uninhabited by anything that would regard him as dinner.

From what little he knew, none of the bigger mountain cats lived in the hotter regions, and the killer lizards needed more water than the Stone Hills provided. But snakes and spike rats could be dangerous enough.

He took the slope one easy step at a time, squinting against the light, until he reached another low point between what seemed endless hills. Instead of climbing yet another rise, he followed the depression to the east, toward the westernmost spur of the Westhorns—well beyond his vision. But the Stone Hills widened the farther south they flowed.

He trudged for nearly a kay until he found a large boulder with two grayish lumps tucked under the eastern side. Each wrinkled lump was the size of a small bucket and bore hard brown spines. Justen nodded and looked at the overhang provided by the boulder. Then he took out the blade he had lugged across Sarronnyn and poked around, trying to scrape away the loose sand and to see what else might be in the cool shade. A reddish insect scuttled out, and Justen stamped on it and scuffed it away into the full sunlight. He scraped some more, down to a mixture of hard red clay and sandstone. Nothing else appeared. He unrolled the blanket and used some rocks to hold one edge of it in place on the rim of the boulder, forming a rough awning.

After that, he studied one of the gray cacti. Finally, he used the long blade to cut a slice from one side. A sticky substance clung to the blade.

Sitting down under the boulder and behind his blanket awning, he took a deep breath and studied the slice of cactus, first with his eyes and then with his order-senses.

The sticky, saplike substance held water, and his senses indicated that he could probably lick or eat the gooey stuff. He touched his tongue to the grey pulp.

“Oooo…” The pulp was more tart than an unripe pearapple, and more bitter than fresh-harvested brown seaweed. Justen took a tiny nibble and sat down to wait and see how his empty stomach reacted.

If he were to get across the Stone Hills, he was going to need more water and more food, and there was no one out here to bring it to him.

He half-dozed, half-dreamed, until he could feel the air
begin to turn cooler. Then he slipped out from his awning, to realize that the sun had almost set, with an orange glow coming from the west. The air was still warmer than in Nylan in mid-summer, if far cooler than it had been at midday.

He looked at the cactus, then sliced off a larger chunk this time, forcing himself to take a mouthful. It tasted like sawdust mixed with rotten seaweed, but he gagged perhaps half of the bite down. He decided not to eat more for the moment and began to roll up the blanket.

A faint chittering began to echo along the depression, indicating that at least some insects existed. With a small swallow from the almost depleted water bottle, Justen began to walk southward again, trying to avoid climbing when possible, and looking for anything that might resemble food or water.

He saw several of the gray cacti, but decided against trying any more until his stomach decided whether they were as edible as his senses insisted they were.

A brown-gray rodent skittered from a crevice in a rock, then dropped back out of sight as Justen’s boots crunched in the sand. The slightest hint of air brushed across his still sunblistered face, and he took a deeper breath.

Maybe…

…and maybe not.

Justen tried to move, knowing that the heat of yet another day had nearly passed, but his eyes would not open. His fingers explored the puffiness, and he gently worked the gunk away. Three days of eating various types of cactus hadn’t killed him, but his face was bloated, and he felt dizzy most of the time.

He’d hoped to follow the dry streambed until he could sense water under the sand, but the water was either not there or too deep to sense. As one eye and then the other opened under swollen eyelids in the light of late afternoon, he tried
to moisten his lips, but both tongue and lips were dry. There just wasn’t enough water, and he’d had to tighten his belt so much that his trousers would have flapped loosely around his waist and legs had there been any real wind.

His back was sore, and he didn’t want to think about the blisters on his feet, or on his face. Instead, he rolled forward onto his knees and managed to rise. He rattled the water bottle—still empty—then replaced the blade and scabbard on his belt. The blade was useful for cutting the cactus sections to begin with because with it, he could avoid the long thorns, but both his knife and blade had acquired sticky edges that no amount of wiping seemed able to remove.

He rolled the blanket as tightly as he could and strapped it into place, then started downstream, or at least downhill. The curves in the sand indicated that at one time there had been water in the dry streambed. Besides, downstream was roughly southward, roughly toward Naclos, although Justen could see no end to the stony slopes and valleys.

His eyes opened more as he walked, and he watched for the type of cactus that was greener rather than gray, the one that had more water and was, of course, rarer. But neither green cactus nor obvious stream or pothole appeared in the ever-dimming nightfall.

He kept trudging, trying every so often to find some sense of water, some hint that the Stone Hills were not so dry as he had heard they were. By now, he could identify the rustle of the spike rats, and the hiss-click of the red insects with the nasty-looking tails. Even a spike rat would be tasty, but the rodents never got close enough for either his blade or a stone.

The dry sand was everywhere—in his boots, in his festering blisters, in his ears—and where it didn’t itch, it burned. He stopped to slice a corner off of a gray cactus, the only one he could find, with barely any moisture in the pulp. He chewed as he walked on under the stars.

He finally slumped against a boulder in the middle of the river that probably hadn’t held water since before the founding of Recluce and let his feet rest, looking over at a dark patch on a slab of rock beside the dry wash.

He let his senses drift to the rock, then straightened and
lurched over to the rock, feeling the dark moss. Moss? He pulled the knife from the sheath, then stopped, letting his senses, shaky as they were, probe the softness beneath the darkness that would have been green in the light.

He uncapped the water bottle and put the top in his purse. Then, carefully, his fingers trembling, he began to cut away the top layer of moss, clearing it from the edges of the narrow fissure. He began to dig inside, and dampness touched his fingers. He bent over and licked the stone, oblivious to the muddy and mossy taste: Then he edged the knife in deeper, and a thin stream of water began to trickle out. He bent down and began to lap it up, certain that it would be gone in instants. He kept lapping, until the fullness of his stomach told him that he could hold no more.

Then he put the bottle against the stone, but the flow oozed past the top. He twisted the knife blade deeper, and the scraping echoed across the sandy stream bottom. But a thin line of water spurted ever so slightly away from the stone, enough that he could press the water container against the edge of the stone and listen to the water trickle inside.

His fingers were shaking when the bottle was full and capped, and he filled his mouth again, and again. Not wanting the water to escape, he pushed some of the moss back into the fissure, reducing the thin stream back to an oozing flow.

Then he searched for a place to rest, to let the water help his body renew itself.

Three times during the night, he drank as much as he could hold.

In the dull gray before dawn, he sat up, his blanket drawn around him. How long should he stay by the dribbling water? How long would it last?

He walked back to the rock for another drink, unplugging the moss, but only a slightly increased oozing greeted his efforts, and his senses could not penetrate the rock far enough to see if more water lay deeper and beyond the reach of the knife.

“Have to find more…somewhere…” he mumbled to a spike rat, which vanished behind a hump of sand.

After rolling the blanket and shaking the sand from his
boots, he lapped at the thin, oozing line of moisture from the rock, trying to get the last driblets. Then he loosened his belt a trace and started back down the streambed, roughly southward, to see how far he could get before the sun turned the sand and rock back into an oven.

The little water cache in the rock had bought him some time, and his step was firmer, his head clearer, although his guts felt heavy. He walked on the exposed rock floor of the wash where possible, since the soft sand dragged at his boots.

As the sun climbed, turning from orange to white in the ever-clear, blue-green sky, even the faint rustle of scattered insects vanished and the heat and stillness grew.