In
the blistering, windblown desert of the F’kari, Brother Brine was making tracks
of his own. They were slow and ponderous tracks, tracks that seemed to take
forever as they weaved through the brutal and incessant wind, but tracks none
the less. What was more, considering this was his second day on the trail, and
that he’d been delayed yesterday by his woman-friend, Miriana—not to mention the
hoard of disciples who’d spied him leaving the Rock and couldn’t help but
notice his pack—he was happy to be making any tracks at all.
But Miriana and the grand inquisition
aside, the natural elements of the desert hadn’t done him any favors, and
neither had his traditional Amian garb. Designed for concealment and modesty,
his heavy beige robes did a magnificent job of hiding him from the sun and a rather
miserable job of radiating his heat and slicing through the wind. At times, it
felt like he was wearing the equivalent of a fabric oven, one with the aerodynamic
principals of a man-sized windsock.
The sand, however, was the worst. For the
other two obstacles, he’d learned to drink plenty of fluids and simply lean
into the wind, but there was no compromising with the sand. It was all or
nothing. Either walk with a forearm across the mouth and eyes, or prepare to
inhale sand and go blind from the grit.
Eventually, he discovered that he could
see, but only if he kept the sleeve of his robe over his lips at all time and
only if he peeked at the landscape. He could do this by lowering his arm
very quickly and squinting through his lashes, keeping the grit at bay and
navigating in glimpses.
This meant that he spent the majority of
his time with his sleeve across his face and his feet trudging along blindly,
but it wasn’t as though the desert travelers needed to worry about leaving the
arrow-straight path or tripping over the flat and sun-baked trail.
No, there were only two reasons for anyone
to subject their eyes to the flying detritus of the desert and they had nothing
to do with losing one’s way or falling on one’s face. They had to do with the
two landmarks in the F’kari referred to, tenderly, as the Butcher’s Gultch and
the Grand Cut, the two massive canyons that rutted the land somewhere between
the Valley of the Rock and the Kingdom of Lathia.
Thinking of these chasms, Brine lowered
his arm and surveyed the horizon once more, giving it another squinty-eyed look
and seeing a vacant gold smudge below an empty blue smear. But clear or blurry,
he could tell there were no sudden drops over the next quarter of a league and
that was all he needed to know.
He
put his arm back and kept trudging, trying to remember where the first gorge
was located and finding that the answer eluded him. It was like trying to
remember a particularly frightening dream from the night before and finding
that all he could come up with was the awareness that there had been a
dream. By the same token, Brine knew the chasms were there—sprawling and deadly—but
he could not recall what they looked like or when he would reach
them.
He experienced the same wealth of
obscurity when trying to remember the details of his destination, the land that
had birthed him and housed him for the first eight ages of his life. It was up
there, he knew—and he could recall the names of its regions and the general
outline of its borders—but the landscape itself had faded to the point of
oblivion, as had the details of its subjects.
For example, he could see the outline of a
woman—the swell of her body, the shape of her head—and he could see she made a
living by imparting knowledge to others and that in the evenings she tended to her
garden, and he knew her name as surely as he knew his own, knew as well that
she enjoyed a steaming cup of brew like nothing in the world, but as for her
face, everything from her chin to her forehead, he saw nothing but shadows and a
hazy brown blob.
It’s been a long time, he mused,
lowering his arm and squinting at the angry old man standing in the path.
Brine screamed and threw himself back,
scrambling away from the scowling stranger in a spray of blowing sand, expecting
to feel, at any moment, the bite of sharpened steel or the weight of his
attacker’s body. When neither of those sensations came, he slowed his mad dash
and shot a glance at the path.
The glaring geezer was still there, but he
hadn’t moved a muscle, his icy stare matched only by his icier stance, the look
of a man who’d had his heels sharpened and his legs driven into the sand, his
back as straight as time and his hands clawed around his cane.
There was something else wrong about
this man, something other than his austere disposition, but Brine couldn’t see
what it was, not without his lens. He knew only that it had something to do
with old man’s wrinkled skin and ivory hair, but as for the specifics of the
oddity he couldn’t put—
“Are you finished?” the stranger
snapped.
Brine jumped, startled by the cutting tone
in the old man’s voice. He waited for his shock to pass, not trusting himself
to speak until it did, and said, “I’m sorry?”
“You’re theatrics,” the old man said,
motioning at him with the head of his cane, “are you finished with
them?”
Brine glanced down at himself, noticed his
hand clasped at his chest, and released it. “Oh. Yes,” he said, brushing at the
sand on his lap. “I’m terribly sorry about that. I was just a little startled.
I didn’t see you there.”
There was silence as Brine cleaned the
debris from his robes, then the old man said, “Didn’t you?” And the
petulance in that voice made the disciple look up.
Brine studied the stranger, searching for something
he’d missed. “No,” he said, his voice a whisper. “I didn’t.”
“Are you certain?”
Brine shrugged. “Well, sort of,” he said,
picking himself off the ground and surveying the desert, searching it for a
clue that might explain how this brightly-dressed man had appeared from out of
nowhere. The longer he stared, though, the stronger his original suspicion
grew. The old crone’s slippery blue robes were twinkling in the sun like chips
of shattered glass, gleaming so brightly that just one look made Brine think of
cascading waterfalls and sunsets on the ocean.
He was pretty sure he’d have seen them the
last time he peeked at the horizon, or even the time before that. The
pinched-faced stranger could have been hiding from him—it was possible—but
as he scanned the desert behind and beside the aged stranger, he found only a
handful of dog-sized rocks, a solitary cactus, and a collection of knee-high
sand dunes tha—
From out of nowhere, a wave of nausea
rolled straight through the disciple, the sensation of worms in his belly and warm
fluid in his head. He felt his knees buckle, saw the ground sway, and had a
moment to think, Where did that come from?
He hadn’t eaten since this morning and it
had been a piece of jerky and a handful of dried berries, none of which looked
spoiled. But even if they were spoiled, they’d have affected him before
now.
Above him, as he came back from his faint,
Brine heard the pinched-face stranger saying, “…understand is how you could
overlook a man my size standing in the midst of a barren desert? A man of my
height and stature, dressed in eye-catching robes such as these?” The old man paused,
probably to gesture at his attire, then said, “Or do you believe I was hiding
somewhere along the path?”
Brine, of course, saw none of this. As
soon as the dizziness passed and the heaviness abated, he was clawing at the
seeing lens and prying it from its pouch, shoving it in his eye and directing
it at the desert.
Through the magic of the monocle, rocks
exploded with pores and cacti sprouted needles. On the old man, his scowl developed
wrinkles and his eyes turned hard. His cane appeared to be a springing cat,
forepaws and head in the knob, hind legs and tail in the base.
And it was blue—bright blue—the
delicious blue of a thousand tropical seas. As Brine put the seeing lens back
in its pouch, he saw that the blue lingered in the cane, saw it remain against
the F’kari as the details faded.
“I should have seen,” Brine said, shaking
his head. “I know I looked and I would—”
“Enough,” the codger snapped,
clamping his hand back to the cane. “I care little for your lies, Dreamer,” he
added. “I care only that you tell me why you’ve come.”
Brine took another unconscious step back,
the hairs on the nape of his neck rising in the air. What kind of question
was that? he wondered. Where did this old man think he was?
Resisting the urge to look around at the
scalding vacuity of the F’kari—just in case he wasn’t standing in a desert—Brine
said, “I’m…traveling.”
The old man’s eyelids drew together. “And
your travels,” he said, “they lie north?”
Brine leaned to one side, peaking around
him. “Is that north?”
“It is,” the old man said, his voice low
and forbidding. “It’s Drugana.”
Brine tried to look surprised.
The old man said, “I hear they’re calling
it something else these days…,” he rubbed the head of his cane with one long
thumb, “…but it is still Drugana.”
Mesmerized by the old man’s thumb, Brine
said, “Really?”
“Oh, yes,” the old man said, “it’s quite real,
as is the evil that dwells there.”
“Evil,” Brine mimed, slipping a sandal
from the path.
“Beyond comprehension,” the old man added.
“Well, then,” Brine said, “I’ll, uh…I’ll
be sure to be careful, then. Thanks—Thank you.” He was completely off the path now,
working his way around the stranger. “Thank you for the, um…for the advice.
I’ll watch my step. I promise. And may you be well,” he said. “May you be well
in His eyes and may your—”
The
old man said, “Was it the letter?”
Brine stopped, the look on his face so
full of disbelief that it seemed to bend the air around it. What the old man
had just said was not possible—Absolutely not possible. He was willing
to accept that the creepy old fellow had cornered Miriana at the Rock and
badgered her into tell him about the trip, and he was even willing to accept
that the old man had intercepted him along path—even though Brine had a head
start on him and the stranger looked as old as death, and apparently traveling on
foot—but Brine was not
willing to accept that the old man knew about the letter.
No one knew about that letter.
Brine had opened it, read it, went to sit down before passing out, and
then—once his nerves had settled—he’d fold it up and placed it in the bottom of
his satchel. So if this stranger really knew about the letter…
“Please,” Brine whispered, no longer
angling back to the path, but pressing out into the desert.
The stranger said, “What did the letter say,
Dreamer?”
“I…I’ll just go.”
“What did it say,” the old man
pressed, and then he was pirouetting in the sand, not turning with his legs or
spinning at his waist, but pivoting like a statue on a swivel.
Brine’s face crinkled like dried leaves,
withering in horror at the old man’s impossible movement. Then, as the geezer began
gliding towards him, Brine spread his mouth wide and the wrinkles smoothed
flat.
“St-Stay back!” he cried, shoving forth
his hand. “Back!”
The old man kept coming.
“Back! Back, or I’ll—I know magic!
I’ll use it! I swear to my God, I’ll turn you and this whole—” the second wave
of nausea came much harder than the first. Not worms in the belly, but
full-grown snakes, all of them writhing and squirming and pressing him down.
There was something else, too, something long and sticky like the eye of a
snail, something slithering up his robes.
The old man’s pinched expression softened.
“Ah,” he said, looking as though the mysteries of the universe were unfolding
before him. “I see.”
Brine went down on one knee. He felt the
invisible tentacle slither further up his leg, moving passed the navel and
around the ribs.
Somewhere above, the old man was saying,
“Dismal circumstances are never grounds for heroics, Dreamer. You are a student
in a religion sect. What possible purpose could you have in the land of
the old ones?”
But this must have been a rhetorical
question, because there was no chance of Brine answering, not with that
horrible revulsion creeping up his armpit and around his throat, caressing his
ear and teasing his hair. He could no more reply than he could sprint into the
dunes.
From above, he heard the old man groan in
disgust, then say, “The visions in our sleep, Dreamer, are to be ignored,
not acted upon. They are illusions and half-truths, the result of poorly
digested food. And only a small child chooses to act upon them.” Another
contemptuous groan, followed by, “Bhutaun, the one you call Father Boo, did you
not consult him on this matter? Because I can assure you, Dreamer, he will offer
you similar advice on the matter, the very same as…”
The old man’s voice faded from Brine’s
ears, fading beneath the pressure in his gut and the violation of his flesh,
fading as he lay there for what felt like an eternity and waited for the nausea
to pass. Eventually, though—by some miracle from on high—the nausea did
pass and he was able to open his eyes.
A dark blue blur was looming overhead.
“What say you?” the blur asked. “Shall we
put this foolishness behind us?”
For a moment, Brine contemplating telling
the old man yes, telling him anything at all if it meant putting this
episode behind him. But as he opened his mouth to speak, he finally realized
what was wrong with this man and every muscle in his body went stiff.
The stranger wasn’t sweating.
He was dressed in breezeless silk and
standing in the middle of the F’kari—heat vapors rising in the distance and not
a sliver of shade to be found—and there was not so much as a trickle of
perspiration on his cheek or a stain of
sweat on his robes, both as clean and desiccated at the sands about his feet, sands
which, now that Brine considered the matter, were as wrong as the old man.
The sands, like the insufferable heat, had
vanished from the desert. Brine felt them beneath the palms of his hands, saw
them all around him on the ground, but they no longer flitted and buzzed in the
air. They had left with the heat. They had left Brine to lay here in the F’kari
with this thing that could not possibly
be an old man, this thing that controlled the sun and the wind in the same way that
it controlled him, slithering through his mind and trespassing on his thoughts.
From one eye, a tear rolled down Brine’s
cheek and plunged to its death.
Seeing this, the old man made an
unflattering noise with his throat. “Bhutaun was right,” he said. “You are
bent on destruction.” He drew a sharp, haughty breath and exhaled through his
mouth. “Very well, he said. “Very well, then.” He reached into his robes,
withdrawing a section of folded parchment. “If you will not listen to reason,
then I’m afraid I must require of you a kindness.”
Feeling a little better, Brine pushed
himself up on his arms, his eyes locked on the creamy whiteness of the paper, on
the fine wisps of ivory that had been folded into squares.
The
stranger said, “Do you know a Mr. Dowel?”
Brine continued to stare, the purity of
the paper absorbing his attention.
“A mister Godfry Dowel?” the old
man repeated. “Tall, spindly gentleman, avid reader…,” he rolled his eyes to
the sky, “…probably sporting an enormous beard again.”
The disciple said nothing.
Undeterred by the slight, the old man
said, “Yes, well, I know for a fact that he is there and that you will
see him. So if you would be so kind…,” he held out the impossibly white
parchment.
Brine flinched.
“If you would,” the old man said again,
giving the note a little shake.
Brine’s head trembled in the sun.
The old man exhaled in disgust. “Nothing
is ever easy,” he said, and then Brine watched the silky fabric of the
stranger’s wardrobe as it began to twinkle like the stars. Not like before—like
a fine silk gown glittering in the sun—but like actual stars sparkling
in the sky, like a thousand points of light sparking and dying in the night.
With them, Brine felt the nausea return,
and with the nausea came the disorientation, and the old man changed into a
sapphire blur against a yellow smear, then two blurs, then three, then more blurs
than Brine could count. The landscape spun, the old man streaked, and slowly
the man and the desert became one.
Brine felt his right arm quaver, felt
something warm move against it, and looked down. His arm was reaching out and his
hand was taking hold of the note, withdrawing it to his chest.
The old man nodded curtly. “Tell him,” he
said, “that Olymun sends his best.”
Brine moved his eyes to the old man who
called himself Olymun, the shimmering stars had vanished from his robes and the
sickening defilement had passed from Brine’s mind. The disciple felt the
strength in his neck and head washing through his body, filling his arms and flooding
his legs. With a lurch, he scrambled to his feet and staggered past the old
man, making his way to the trail.
Behind him, Olymun was speaking.
“You don’t have to do this, Dreamer. You
can always turn back.” His voice was fading now, losing volume with each word.
Brine lifted his arm and tipped his head,
marching into the wind and sand that was forming all around him. At his back,
the old man’s voice became less and less substantial, like the sweat that once
again formed and dried on Brine’s body.
“…it is never too late…,” the old man called,
“…never too late….”
