Reawakening (21 page)

D
AWN
FOUND
them gathered in the wadi. The sun had not yet cleared the mountains, and they all huddled into cloaks against the cold bite of the morning air. Myrtilis had come to see them off, with Ia and Sethan.

She brought over three men in Selar robes, who greeted Gard with familiar nods. “Here’s the rest of your party, my king. Namik and his sons Raif and Zeki. Namik knows the city.”

“My father was a scribe in the Shah’s palace before the Savattin rose,” Raif, the older of the sons, said. His voice was soft, accented with the Selar lilt. “They did not care for his poetry, and he went to the Selar when I was but a child and my brother not two years old. He does not speak trade tongue, but Zeki and I will translate where there is need.”

“We are glad for your help,” Tarn said, bowing in greeting. “Perhaps, if we have time on the road, you will translate your father’s poetry for me. I have not heard a poet sing for many years.”

“Tarn’s less of a thug than he looks,” Gard commented, descending on the startled youth with a smile. “I’m glad to see you safe, Raif. Zeki, have you caught any more cats by their tails lately?”

“That was years ago!” the younger brother protested, his cheeks flushing. “Why won’t anyone forget?”

His father looked over and smiled at Gard, asking a quick question. Young Zeki answered, gesturing fiercely with chagrin in his voice, and his father laughed and held out his hand to Tarn.

Tarn grasped his arm in greeting and broke out all the Selar he had learned to say carefully, “Peace be with you, and all your kin.”

He was rewarded by Gard’s splutter and a slow pleased nod from Namik. Raif laughed a little and made a teasing comment to Gard before he turned back to Tarn. “I’m sorry. We have all known each other too long to watch our manners closely.”

“Apology appreciated,” Cayl said, coming over to join them. “I’ve got trade tongue and Latai, but not much Selar, and Tarn here only really speaks dead languages. Are the camels yours?”

“They are, for our baggage, but let Zeki or me load them. They’re temperamental.”

“What camels aren’t?” Cayl asked, and Tarn eyed the odd baggage beasts with curiosity. He could smell them from here, and they looked as bad tempered and twice as haughty as most of his dragon kin.

“Do they bite?” he wondered aloud.

“Oh, frequently,” Gard complained. “Is this all of us, then?”

“Aye,” Myrtilis said. “Say your good-byes.” She came to Tarn first, rising on her toes to kiss his cheek and murmur, “Come back safe, old friend. I don’t want to lose you again so soon.”

His good-byes were said quickly, because he’d never seen any merit in lingering over these things, but others had more serious things to say. Namik and his sons went to see to the camels, and Tarn leaned on a rock and watched Sethan kiss Cayl, their arms locked tightly around each other.

He was more surprised when Aline cupped Myrtilis’s face and kissed her queen with a slow tenderness that said it was far from the first time.

“Did you know about that?” he asked Gard.

Gard rolled his eyes. “Of course. It’s been going on for centuries. I’m beginning to feel left out. Why isn’t anybody kissing me?”

“I keep offering,” Tarn pointed out and didn’t even try to dodge the elbow that rammed into his side. “Where’s Esen?”

Gard wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I’m not going to kiss Esen. She’s a baby.”

“I know that,” Tarn said, with exaggerated patience. “I just thought she’d want to say good-bye.”

Gard sighed, shoulders slumping. “She’s cross with me. She doesn’t think I should go.”

“I like her more and more,” Tarn observed and caught Gard’s elbow in his hand before it hit his gut. “You could show your affection more gently. I prefer kisses to bruises.”

Gard muttered at him but kept his elbows to himself for a while.

Soon, they were on the move, their horses picking out a careful path along the canyon as Tarn and Aline watched for the dead. Tarn knew that, behind them, Myrtilis was sealing the citadel, raising the hoists that connected the caravanserai to the lower levels and positioning spyglasses and mirrors to watch the approaches. They had passed the pyre of the twice-slain dead as they rode out, and Tarn wondered how long it would be feasible for Myrtilis to burn the dead. If they came in numbers, it was easier to let them fall and block the path of the next wave.

“In the palace,” he said to Gard, “how high do you think the windows are?”

“What does it matter?”

“The dead,” Tarn said, making a stacking gesture with his hands. “They pile high.”

“Well, aren’t you a cheerful conversationalist?” Gard grimaced at him and then moved his horse forward. “I’m going to talk to Namik about poetry, because we are civilized men, he and I.”

“Civilization needs fighting men to protect it,” Tarn tried, but he was talking to Gard’s retreating back. Sighing, he rode on alone.

They began to meet significant numbers of the dead after a few hours, in the foothills on the southern edge of the Riada. Gard called a stop after Tarn blasted a whole troop of them into ash, which left his hands trembling from channeling such power through a human body.

“We need to cover our passage,” Gard said, his face unusually grim. “If I raise a sizable storm and put us in its eye, that will cover our scent and make it hard for them to reach us.”

“Will it also make us easy to track?” Aline asked. “Sandstorms usually develop and fade. One which heads straight for Tiallat might attract attention.”

Tarn shook his head. “The Shadow doesn’t think like that. It will have sent the dead out to do its bidding, but the dead cannot think. They cannot draw conclusions from what they see or predict what will happen next. Unless it gets a human ally out here, in exactly the right place to realize that the storm is unnatural, we can get as far as the borders of Tiallat without attracting suspicion. How long is the journey?”

“Sixteen days in the desert, at a safe pace for the horses,” said Raif. “Then another ten or twelve across Tiallat to the capital, depending on how bad the spring floods were this year.”

“Then let me raise the storm,” Gard said. “The sooner we start to ride, the better.”

After the pleasant shelter of Myrtilis’s palace, it felt strange to have the wind start to raise rasping sand around them again. The horses shifted uneasily as the air began to blur. Gard’s face was taut with concentration, his hand raised slightly against the push of the wind. Slowly, the sand began to rise in thin surges, trickling into the air and outward, building a wall of whirling sand between them and the desert.

“Take your bearings now,” Gard said, his voice rough. “Once the sand is flying, you will only be able to see the stars.”

Raif and Namik conferred hurriedly, though young Zeki was watching Gard with awe in his eyes. Slowly, the walls of sand grew, moving outward until they stood in the eye of the storm, a circle of clear air as wide as one of Tarn’s wings. There was just enough space between them and the whirling sand that its roar seemed faintly dimmed, as if Tarn was half asleep.

Gard was still frowning, and Tarn wondered uneasily if he had the strength for this. Gard was still bound to a limited form, after all. Quietly Tarn moved his horse closer, intending to offer a little of his own fire to support Gard’s spell.

“If you disrupt the balance of this before it’s set,” Gard snarled, “I will hurt you.”

Chastened, Tarn dropped his hand and swallowed back the hint of fire he had called up. He stayed close to Gard, though, because Gard didn’t look entirely steady in his saddle.

The sky grew darker as the sand thickened, everything shaded strangely blue. Namik raised his hand and pointed out across the desert, and slowly they began to ride, the storm moving around them, the very air full of the noise of rasping sand.

Chapter 22: Roaming

G
ARD
SEEMED
to relax once they were moving, the sand turning in a steady curl around them. He rode by Namik, talking to him and Cayl, with young Raif interpreting, and left Tarn to chat to Aline and Zeki. Zeki seemed to find both of them intimidating in equal measure and soon reverted to riding behind them. It was good to use the hill tongue again, and Tarn discovered that Aline had been born only twenty years after he entered his sleep, and she remembered many of the people and places he had known.

“I even saw you once,” she admitted, laughing a little. “My old gran took me up the mountain to pay my respects. I was, oh, all of fourteen and thought I knew everything worth knowing about the world. Took one look at you and insisted that you weren’t a real dragon, just a statue of one, or that if you were real, you were dead.”

“As good as,” Tarn commented, fascinated despite himself. He had slept through so much.

“So Gran whups me round the ear for being a cheeky little madam, but the old general, Lord Killan, he’d come out to meet Gran, and he took my hand. He put it against your side, like this.” She held out her hand, putting on a face of world-weary exasperation that he recognized from every teenager in his hoard. “And you were warm, right through the scales, so that I felt it down to my bones. ‘There,’ he said. ‘His flames still burn. The dragon lives.’ And he smiled.” She shook her head, eyes soft. “I never forgot that. ‘The dragon lives,’ he said, and so you do.”

“Good Killan,” Tarn said. “Was he happy, when you saw him?”

She pursed her lips, frowning in memory. “Aye, I think he was. I didn’t pay much attention—I was young, and within five summers I’d earned my sword and gone adventuring, but he always seemed to be exactly where he was supposed to be. I didn’t have any respect for it then, but he was as content a man as I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you,” Tarn said gravely and put the memories away as he saw Gard tense in front of them.

By the time he rode up, Gard’s shoulders had relaxed again, but he turned to say to Tarn, “Three of the dead, trying to reach us.”

“Are we in danger?”

Gard’s smile was vicious, toothy and a little too sharp, a reminder that he had been the caracal too, and the storm that almost destroyed them. “That wall of sand is dense and very fast. They will not be troubling any more travelers.”

“Good,” Tarn said and raised his hand, remembering what Killan had always said when they had cast down hoards of the dead. “Let their ashes fly and their memories not be tarnished. They lived once and were loved.”

Cayl lifted his hand in salute as well, approval on his face, but Gard said impatiently, “Their souls are long gone. There is no dishonor for them in how their bodies are used.”

“Call it a human quirk,” Cayl said. “Humans like to honor their dead.”

“I remember their names,” Gard said huffily, and Namik made a low ironic comment as Raif translated. Tarn left them to bicker and went back to find Zeki and demand a language lesson. It would no doubt have been more effective if the boy wasn’t stammering with nerves, but every bit of practice conversation helped.

Three times more before they camped for the night, Gard tensed. Twice though, Tarn spotted him casting puzzled glances at the sand. It happened again after they had stopped for the night, the sky growing dim and purple in the gap above their storm. Cayl was helping Aline put up tents, and the others were building a fire and settling the horses and camels. Tarn drew Gard aside and asked softly, “What’s wrong?”

“Something on the edge of the storm,” Gard said. “Something that keeps stumbling into the edge and retreating.”

“Not the dead?”

“They don’t retreat.”

“How many?”

“One. Small, as far as I can tell in this form.”

“If you drop the storm, how quickly can you raise it again?”

“Same as before. We’ve had no contact with the obvious dead for hours, though, so if there was a time….”

“Let me warn Cayl and Aline, in case we need their swords.”

Gard chewed his lip. “If it’s an animal, we’ll probably outrun it.”

“I don’t want any surprises on our flank,” Tarn said, and Gard nodded.

When the sandstorm collapsed, it was with a roar that made the horses buck and startle. On the other side of the falling sand, clearly silhouetted against the blazing sunset, Esen let out a startled shriek and fought to control her horse.

“This,” Cayl remarked, crossing his arms, “is the problem with storybook gambits.”

T
ARN
BACKED
away from the resulting argument once the yelling started. Esen was no kin of his, and she clearly resented him. He would win no favors scolding her. Let that fall to Gard, and to Aline, who seemed most put out of them all.

Namik wandered over to join him by the fire. The sand was flying again, though less neatly than before, and Namik paused to wipe his face before spitting into the fire and saying, in heavily accented trade tongue, “Other people’s children. Why scold them?” He tipped his head at Gard, who now seemed to be crosser with Aline than Esen, who was curled into the crook of his arm, her chin set stubbornly and her lip quivering.

“It never wins you anyone’s friendship,” Tarn agreed, but it looked like Namik had exhausted his store of trade tongue, because he just shrugged. Tarn hoped he was more fluent in his own tongue. Perhaps he merely wrote very succinct poetry.

Aline threw her hands up and stomped over to join them. “We can’t even take the silly chit back. Even allowing for exaggeration because she was scared, the dead are closing in on the court.” She pressed her lips together for a moment, lines showing around her mouth and eyes. “They’re besieged, and we can’t go back. The girl’s lucky to have made it to us in one piece.”

“How did she?” Cayl asked.

Aline gave a grudging smile. “She’s a damn good rider, even for a Selar, and her horse outran them. She’s taken some scrapes and bruises, but nothing worse. Under other circumstances, I’d throw her to a good combat trainer and see what we could make of her, but here and now, she’s a nuisance. I don’t know what she was thinking.”

“Her father is dead,” Tarn said. “Brutally so, and Gard is all she has left of him. She did not want him to ride out.”