Ariah (40 page)

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring east. At some point, Tamir stumbled out of his tent to relieve himself. He was bleary eyed and bad tempered and grumbled a hello as he passed me. When he was done and returning to his tent, he was surprised to see me still standing there, still staring out east. “Professor, are you all right?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. I barely heard him.

Tamir stepped directly in front of me. His gaunt, scarred face filled my vision and blocked the nagging eastern horizon from view. He took my face in one hand and peered at me. “Sunstroke,” he said.

“
There is something in the east,” I said.

“
Let’s get you in the shade, Professor. How long have you been standing out here?”

“
Something in the east is watching me,” I said. All at once my eyes focused on his; Tamir came into sharp focus. I grabbed him, desperate, my fingers digging into his arms. “There is something in the east!”

It was like something had reached through the organs and gristle and taken hold of my spine. The monstrous, invasive pull dragged me to the edge of camp. I shoved Tamir out of the way and went east. Tamir yelled for Shayat to wake, shook her tent to and fro. She stumbled out, blinking in the bright light. “What? What is it?”

“
Something’s wrong,” Tamir said. “Look at him.”

Shayat ran to me, barefoot, in just a shirt and leggings. “Ariah!”

I took her hand and pointed to the empty horizon. “The east! There’s something watching us. Don’t you feel it? The pull?”

She looked me over, her face hard and closed. “Tamir, you don’t think…”

“
I do think,” he said. He tossed her a knife and came up beside me. He held me by the upper arm, rooted in place, no matter how hard I struggled against him. Shayat let out a stream of curses and slipped back into her tent. “Ariah, you are counting,” Tamir said. “Where are they?”

“
East!” I pointed to the crest of dune, a place that gnawed at my mind, consuming it piece by terrifying piece. “There, something there.”

Tamir fished a scope out of the pocket of his robe and held it up to his good eye. He thrust me behind him, towards my tent. “Wake up your friend,” he said, “and both of you stay out of the way. Shayat! Bandits.”

The word shocked me back into myself. “Bandits?”

Tamir shoved me. “Wake up your friend. Stay out of the way.”

I took two steps towards my tent before that wretched pull tore me east again. There was this compulsion to go east, to meet the bandits where they were. They watched me, and I was tethered to them. It was Shayat who ended up waking Sorcha. Sorcha ran up to me, tried to pull me back, but I wrenched myself free of him, drawn east, drawn to bandits, drawn to death. I saw the flicker of a shadow on the dunes, a mote of black marring the gold landscape. “There! There!” I cried, and broke into a run.

There was a faint whistling, and then sharp, blinding pain.

I heard myself scream before I knew it was me screaming. Shayat knocked me to the ground and slammed her hand over my mouth. The pain killed the draw, broke me mercifully free of the count. “You’ve been shot. Stay here, stay quiet.” I nodded, and she slunk away from me, soundless and agile as a desert cat.

Sorcha cursed, loudly, and ran to me. Shayat caught his arm and pointed at the camels. “What? Fuck the camels! He’s got an arrow sticking out of his chest!”

Shayat wore authority, command, effortlessly. She gave him one look—a single glance of muted impatience. Sorcha frowned and sighed and cast worried glances my way, but he coaxed the camels to him, caught their reins, and led them west into a hollow between dunes. Black figures appeared on the dunes, and a volley of arrows struck the ground where the camels had been moments before. Tamir dodged one arrow by mere inches. Shayat and Tamir exchanged glances, a whole conversation without words. Tamir whistled into the east. “Parley!” he shouted. “Parley!”

Shayat crouched low and crept along the dunes. Tamir pulled me upright, and I wailed. As I’ve said before, I do not handle pain well, and even less so when it is such a traumatic and unexpected thing as that.

A bandit slid down a dune to the south of us. He was a scout; he’d slipped into place some time before. He trained an arrow on Tamir. He was swathed head to toe in red-brown cloth, covered in sand. All that was visible of him were his eyes and his fingers. His skin was a deep brown, his eyes were human. He was a tall man, even by human standards, and lean. His visible skin was windburned and weathered. I cried out in wordless panic, and the bandit scout aimed his arrow at me. “We want the camels,” he said in Inalan, “and anything else you have.”

Tamir was quiet for a long while. “How long have you been tracking us?”

“
Camels, tinker,” the bandit said. He drew the bow, the glinting point of the arrow trained right at my throat. I wrenched myself out of Tamir’s grasp and ran. I ran blindly, stupidly, my back to the bandit. I heard the thunk of his bowstring. The arrow lodged into my calf, and I crumpled into the sands. “Camels,” the bandit said, “or he dies.”

Shayat’s voice rang out, clear and hard. “Give the elf your bow,” she said, “and you might be able to save your brothers.” She spoke Qin. The bandit translated her words slowly. First disbelief, then anger, then fear flickered across his face.

And Shayat laughed. It was a cold laugh, a cruel laugh. When I turned to look at her, I found her standing with a graceless, galling ease as she wiped the blood from a knife. There was a promise of violence in her carriage and in the smoothness of her brow.

The bandit pulled up his bow and aimed at her, but it was after two seconds’ hesitance and done too late. As soon as the bandit turned, Tamir had a knife at his throat.

“
You have this one chance to save them. You can stand here and fight us while they bleed out, or you can leave us be to tend our wounded while you tend yours.”

Shayat, bleeding from a gash across her forehead and covered in the blood of someone else, tossed her knife in the air. It spun end over end in a lazy arc. She caught it thoughtlessly, easily, ready to fight. Tamir let the bandit watch her do it. He let the bandit see, and then he let the bandit go. The bandit lowered his bow to the ground, whispered a prayer, and backed out of the camp.

As soon as the bandit disappeared from view, Tamir went to fetch the camels from Sorcha, and Shayat came to me. She stabbed the bloodied knife into the hard earth of the Lost River and helped me sit up. She inspected my wounds. I took shallow breaths, my hands hovering uselessly around the shaft of the arrow. It was surreal, seeing it there, jutting out of me. Shayat pulled off her belt and handed it to me, pushing it into my palm and closing my fingers around it. “You’re going to want to bite down on this, Ariah. This is going to hurt.”

“
No, no, I…”

She took the belt back and slipped it into my mouth. She closed my jaws around it and looked me in the eye. “This will hurt.” She leaned me forward, taking much of my weight on one of her shoulders. She snapped off the fletching; the force of it jostled the wound, and I howled into her belt. She placed one hand carefully on my back and took hold of the arrow with the other. “Breathe,” she said. I didn’t. I couldn’t. “Breathe,” she said again, and then she forced the shaft all the way through my shoulder: through muscle and sinew, all the way from one side of me to the other and through. I thrashed with the pain; I let out muffled screams.

Sorcha appeared beside me. He pulled the belt out of my mouth and took my face in his hands. “Ariah! Ariah, shh!” He tried to charm me, but he was scared, too, and the magic wouldn’t flow. He stroked my cheek, made me breathe in rhythm with him. “You’re all right, you’re all right, Ariah.”

“
He’s not all right yet,” Shayat said. “We have to get the other one out, too.”

“
Fuck!”

Shayat inspected my leg. The arrow was not in deep. She told Sorcha to hold me, and I felt her strong, travel-rough hands on my leg, holding it down, holding it steady. Methodically, slowly, she worked out the arrow. Tears streamed down my face and into Sorcha’s shirt. I held on to him so tight I left marks.

“
Can he smoke?” Sorcha asked.

Shayat studied me for a moment. “Yes. He can’t count right now anyway, not in pain like this. Pack him a pipe.”

Sorcha cooed at me, stroked my hair, and slipped away. Tamir brought Shayat her pack, and she pulled out a small bottle of red elvish whiskey and clean bandages. She washed my wounds, and stanched the blood flow. She cut off my shirt with her vicious knife and gently, tenderly, wound the bandages around my chest. She was bandaging my leg when Sorcha came back with the pipe. I smoked hungrily, desperately, and I smoked a lot.

Tamir and Sorcha broke down the camp while Shayat looked me over one last time. She saddled my camel and helped me onto it. I nearly toppled off when the camel rose, but she caught me and kept me in the saddle. She whispered to the camel and stroked its neck to calm it. “Shayat,” I said. She looked up at me. “You saved my life.”

“
We’re even, then,” she said. “We would have been slaughtered had it not been for your gift.”

* * *

I was in bad shape when we reached Iyairo. The wound on my shoulder was deep and vengeful, and the meager supplies we had did little to help me heal. I spent days in a fever. The desert, I found, is a terrible place to have a fever. My memories of those days are hazy, but I know at one point, delirious and frightened, I wandered down the River alone while the rest slept. I was found half-naked and badly sunburned. I know one night as we rode I was taken by shakes, my teeth chattering a
clack clack clack
that echoed through the night. I shook so violently I had trouble staying on my camel. Shayat drove us hard, and the last two days we traveled as far into the burning heat of the day as we could before fatigue got the better of us and the camels.

We reached Iyairo soon after dawn, roughly six days after the bandits’ attack. The Lost River hides Iyairo from view until the last possible second. Iyairo was a small, dusty desert town, which sprang up on the banks of an oasis. Its fortunes have waxed and waned according to trade routes, and when we passed through, the rails were still only about five years old. They were new enough that Iyairo was not yet the bustling trade stop it is today. We came up via the Lost River, through these impossibly tall dunes. The River turned us sharply to the west, the dunes opened, and there was Iyairo. Qin patrols stopped us before we entered the town.

Sorcha tells me I nearly got us all detained. I remember very little of it, but I am told I refused to let the patrolmen see my papers, and that when I was ordered down off my camel I laughed at them and spat at their feet. I am told I spoke to them in High Qin, and that when I did so, I quoted their scriptures to them, belligerent and mocking. They tried to arrest me, but Shayat intervened and showed them my wounds. She made them feel the burning heat of my skin. Eventually, she bribed them. They took two of our camels.

Tamir knew a healer in the east reaches of town. She was another person with a mysterious debt to Tamir, and she agreed to provide treatment and lodging at no cost. She agreed to it, but it stretched the relationship she had with Tamir to its limit, and in exchange he had to promise not to call on her again. Sorcha tells me he stood there for a long time, minutes ticking by, his face tight and hard before he finally agreed to it. The healer brought the fever down and cleaned my wounds. It took three days for my mind to clear. I woke to the soft slap of a game of djah. Sorcha sat on one side of the narrow bed, and Shayat sat on the other. They threw cards down in the hollow behind my knees.

“
Hey, Shayat,” Sorcha said. “Hey, he’s awake. Ariah, you awake?”

“
I’m awake,” I said. I moved to sit up. Sorcha took my hand and my shoulder and guided me upright. Shayat moved a pillow behind me to support me. “Are we in Iyairo?”

“
Yeah. How’re you feeling? Should we get the healer?”

“
We should get the healer,” Shayat said.

“
No, no, I feel all right.” My left shoulder felt tight, constricted, but when I moved it the pain was a dull half-forgotten thing.

Sorcha had not released my hand. He stared at me with this openness, a pure transparency of feeling: relief, hope, worry, happiness all right there on his face. It embarrassed me a little, not because Shayat was there but because I could not understand how I was the root of such strong emotions in someone else. It embarrassed me to see how much I mattered.