Moonscatter (18 page)

He made a face at her back, stepped reluctantly into the mud and began weaving through the grass hunting for the ax.

Hern poked through the shell fragments in his palm, searching vainly for any more nutmeats. He brushed the shell away and eyed the pot. “Any stew left?”

Serroi glanced into the pot, shook her head. “Trail rations, Dom.” She lifted the kettle from the dying fire and poured the last of the hot water over the already soggy leaves in the bottom of her mug. “You're too fat anyway, short rations will be good for you.” She took a sip of the weak cha, sighed and held out the mug. “Want this?”

“Better than nothing.” Sipping at the hot pale liquid, he watched her rinse out the stew pot and scrub the interior clean, dumping the used water onto the grass. She broke a few dry twigs from one of the branches, blew on them until she had a small but briskly crackling fire, then added more twigs and some larger branches. She sat back on her heels, yawned, her eyelids drooping, her shoulders sagging.

Hern spat out a cha leaf, picked another off his lip, drank again from the mug, watching with weary amusement as she rose, brushed herself off and moved to the groundsheet. She pulled her boots off, wiggled her toes, sighed with relief, met his eyes and smiled at him. Unbuckling the heavy weapon-belt, she laid it out flat on the blankets beside her. “Come here, Dom, and let me work on your feet.” She laughed at the expression on his face. “Don't be a baby, I'm not going to hurt you.”

He got to his feet. “I don't see why you weren't strangled at birth.”

Her face went still. “I nearly was, Dom. Not strangled, but given to the fire when my grandfather saw this.” She touched the eyespot on her brow, spread out her hands to remind him of the odd color of her skin.

“Damn.” He eased himself stiffly down beside her. “I didn't mean it.”

“I know. Never mind.” She worked one of the belt pockets open, brought out a small pot of salve. Holding it, she looked around, wrinkled her nose. “Hang on a minute, I need water.” She fetched the waterskin and knelt at his feet. With gentle hands that still managed to hurt when she touched the broken blisters, she washed his feet clean of heavy dark dust and the stains from the meadow muck, then spread the salve on the abrasions and the blisters, worked it patiently into the stone bruises on his soles. He flinched and fisted his hands at first, then sighed with pleasure as the soothing balm eased the pain from his sores and the heat of it penetrated his bruises. He lay back and closed his eyes, was almost asleep when she finished. She sat on her heels gazing at him with something close to affection. After a moment she rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hands, crawled up on the groundsheet and shook him awake. “You want to take first watch or second, Dom?”

They rode undisturbed along the track for the next three days, the quietness and solitude of the mountain slopes easing the tension from both of them so that by the time they reached the Greybones Gate late on the third day, the bad beginning was almost forgotten.

A hot leaching wind with a dry musty smell like the dust of dead fungus blew against them from the Gate, a tall narrow crack between fluted cliffs of dead stone, wind-carved into elaborate convolutions, singing an eerie, ear-piercing melody. As they sat on sidling nervous macain, blinking away dust-generated tears, somewhere in the Gate before them there was a sharp crack, the clatter of stone against stone, an over-stressed section of cliff breaking away. Cupping a hand over nose and chin though that wasn't much help, she blinked furiously, felt herself beginning to float. She lost touch with arms and legs, swayed in the saddle, had to grab the ledge with both hands. She turned to Hern, started to speak but her words were lost in the singing of the wind. She caught his eyes (glazed and wandering like her own, slitted in a slack face) jerked her head toward the track, back along the way they'd come. He nodded and followed her away from the Gate.

There was a shallow hollow in the barren stone, protected from the wandering dream-winds, death-winds, behind a screen of scraggly stunted brush with tiny leaves whose unassertive green was dusted to a dead gray. Serroi hitched her mount to the brush, shook it clean of dust in case he wanted to browse and settled herself in the hollow to wait the cessation of the song in the Gate which would mean the dropping of the wind. Shadows raced into long distorted shapes that were swallowed by the dropping night. She gazed out over the Plain and saw the gathering of thick dry clouds, dust clouds not water bearers, yellow-tinged even in the pale, bleaching light of the rising TheDom. The edge of the Plain marked the edge of the clouds. They were there, she knew, to keep heat pressing down on the land, a blanket spread by her Noris. Serroi wiped at her sweating face, the sun-heated rock behind her still holding the day's warmth. The sky over the Vachhorns was clear, it'd be cool soon enough, cooler than she liked. She thought about the cloak still tied behind her saddle, made no move to fetch it, lassitude heavy on her arms and legs and sitting like sleep in her head. She couldn't keep still; itches ran along her legs and played on the inside of her knees, worse when she scratched at them. They ran along the sides of her back and in between her shoulderblades where she couldn't reach. A tic jerked by the corner of one eye and the inside of her nose tickled. She thought of trying' to sleep, but was afraid to sleep, afraid of the dreams that would haunt her in this place.

What Hern was thinking she couldn't tell. He sat toward the front of the hollow, turned away from her—all she could see of his face was the convex curve of his cheek, the jut of his brow. He sat very still, his square rather beautiful hands resting lightly on his thighs (she saw one and assumed the other from the shape of his back). There was a quality of repose in him that she'd hadn't expected, another jolt to her image of him. Briefly she envied that repose (scratching with industry at an itch on the inside of her thigh) then she wondered what he was looking at, shifted onto her knees and crawled over to him, followed the direction of his eyes.

Beyond the Gate the mountains curved north, wave on wave of wind-carved stone, naked and barren and eerily beautiful, their patterns of dark and light slowly oh so slowly changing, evolving as the great moon rose higher pulling the smaller moons after him, like a dance in slowtime requiring infinite patience to know all its cycles.

Still the wind sang, sometimes so loud it raised echoes from the slopes around the Gate. The rock leaked its heat away into a clear and cloudless sky while the yellow clouds boiled and tumbled above the Plain. Serroi and Hern waited without talking for the tedious vigil to end. About two hours after midnight the windsong died to a whisper. They gave the macain all the water they would drink, then rode warily into the Gate.

The rutted, wrinkled floor of the pass was littered with rock fragments and more rock fell before and behind them, small bits clattering loudly from bulge to bulge to shatter into smaller bits on the rocky floor. It was very dark inside the Gate. TheDom was on the far side of the sky, his light touching only the upper few feet of the eastern cliff. The Jewels of Anesh floated overhead, three small glows the size and tint of copper uncsets, their feeble light only adding to the confusion among the shadows at the base of the rotten cliffs. Hern and Serroi rode straining to hear the crack and clatter that would announce a major fall, their uneasiness transmitted to the macain, already unhappy and moaning with distress at the sharp bits of stone pressing against their tough fibery pads.

The Gate wound on and on, undulating up and down, never straight anywhere for more than a dozen macai strides, up and down and around, until Serroi was dizzy with the switches, suffocated by the dust kicked up by macai paws, near screaming with frustration at the slow pace—and still the ride went on.

After two more hours—or a small eternity; both perceptions being true—she saw a pale deep vee ahead, and heard a tentative moan from the walls as wind began to tease at her curls, wide-spaced tentative tugs. Then it blew a cloud of grey dust around them and she no longer saw the exit ahead. The faint starlight reaching them, the only light they had now, was eaten by the dust and they rode blind, dependent on macai senses, battered by moans and whistles and howls from the fluted stone around them.

All things end at last and they came out of the Gate into the faint red light of the earliest hint of morning. Hern pulled his mount to a stop on the flat space atop a cliff, wiped at his face, scraping away a layer of grey dust, leaving streaks behind. He fished in his pocket for the cloth he used to clean his sword and scrubbed it hard across his face, searching by feel for the burning streaks, growling with distaste each time he inspected the rag and refolded it for a bit of clean surface.

Serroi cleaned herself with less fuss and gazed around. They were on a kind of lookout, a flat area edged with boulders whose orderly array hinted that intelligence rather than chance had set them in their places. She looked at the boulders and remembered that this was the Sleykyn road, the way that most of those assassins and torturers took to reach the mijloc, Oras and across the Sutireh Sea since Skup was closed to them, their own southern coast was impenetrable marsh and their northern reaches swept by hostile nomads. The eastern sky was rapidly brightening into conflagration, the sun's tip a molten ruby resting between two peaks. The mountain dropped steeply from the lookout, its dead stone and long dead vegetation layered over with large grey-green crystals that caught the red light from the east and turned it into a purple-brown murk. On the floor of the basin the lake was a shimmering bloodstone, muted green water with trails of bloody decay winding through it. And on the basin floor shimmering short-lived dust devils walked the desolation, continually dying, continually reborn. If she looked at them too long she saw eyes in the dust that gazed back at her.

With Hern ahead (she was in no mood to dispute leadership) they wove back and forth down the slope in the exasperating tedium of a dozen switchbacks. The trail was crumbling, neglected and starting to melt back into the mountainside, a result of the Gather storms when passage through the deadlands became impossible, the mijloc protected from more Sleykynin by Air and Earth herself, matron face of the airy Maiden, Mother Earth Who brought forth her fruits for the delight of man. Delight not Duty. Dance in the moonlight for the joy of it, the joy, dance the two-backed dance for the Maiden's delight the Matron's joy, drink down the wine and warm the spirit, warm the body with cider hot and spicy, foaming headily in earthenware crocks, in earthenware mugs, splashed to celebrate the earth, sloshing in human bellies, leaping in the dance, laughing the water music, watch the moth sprites dance, spin the light-lace on the water … Hern stop … Hern dance with me, the two-backed dance … make joy with me.… Serroi blinked and tugged her hazed mind free, blushing, hoping rather desperately that she hadn't said those things aloud, that Hern hadn't heard her. She swallowed. Her mouth felt dry already but she knew better than to drink here.

They reached the basin floor without incident though twice more Serroi had to discipline her wandering mind and body and stiffen herself against the insidious influence of the ever-present dust. The road across the basin was marked at intervals by large cairns and scraped flatter than the seamed surface on each side, the crude finishing of the surface overlaid by a deep, muffling layer of grey dust. Dust devils danced thick on the road and blew to nothingness against them. Serroi began to hear whispers in the wind despite her efforts to deny them, voices whose sibilant syllables were almost clear enough to gel into intelligible words, whispers that teased at her to listen harder, just a little bit harder, there were secrets to be heard. She scolded herself out of listening again and again but always the temptation returned. Beginning to feel a little frightened, she kneed her mount to a faster gait until she came up with Hern. She let the macai slow to a walk, the two beasts matching strides again, content to move side by side. Hern was staring intently at the dust devils whirling through their brief lives ahead of him. She wanted very much to talk with him, using the commonplaces of ordinary conversation to hold her raveling mind to ordinary paths. “Hern,” she called, then coughed and spat as dust flew in her mouth. He didn't seem to hear and she didn't try again.

The macain paced steadily on, perhaps seeing their own visions, hearing their own spectral sounds. As the hours passed the whispers came closer, grew louder and more insistent though she still could not understand them. Sometimes she thought she heard her name, though she couldn't be sure. She blinked now and then at Hern, wondering if he heard the same. There was a dazed dull look on his face, a touch of pain in it and self disgust. She turned quickly away, feeling like an intruder on his privacy.

The dust thickened and lumped into half-formed creatures that loped or undulated or slithered beside her. She tried to ignore them. At first they were little more than blurred lumps with indeterminate outlines, but gradually the outlines sharpened as if she herself, by looking at them, acted on them. She looked away, but always looked back again, drawn to look by a force within herself that beat down her feeble attempts to assert her will.

Tayyan rides beside her, a sketch in grey and black, a blur at first but even so Serroi knows her by the tilt of her head, and angular grace of her body. The wind whispers now in Tayyan's voice:
Serroi. Serroi. Serroi
. Serroi weeps, tears cutting runnels through the dust mask on her face.

A tall form comes drifting in the dust between Serroi and the dust Tayyan, an elegant black form with pale face and pale hands and a shining black ruby drop hanging from one nostril (the black ruby bothers Serroi for a moment but she forgets it when the scene evolves). His mouth moves and the wind's whisper takes on the dark music of his voice:
Serroi. Serroi
.