The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1) (22 page)

However much he drank, he was still thirsty, his stomach
desolate as the grave. However often he laughed and kept to the company of
friends, he still worried, fretting about both home and the way ahead in equal
measure. Though morale remained high, his burden increased every time one of
the men fell sick. A week away from teaching the younglings had made his skin
suppler than it had been in a long time, but when the anxiety overtook him, he
still gripped his reins so tight it made the skin crack.

Beguli lurched beneath him, stumbling over a faulty patch of
ground and falling onto one knee. Raith tipped forward over the saddle, and
when the animal righted itself, its long muscled neck snapped back and
clobbered him on the forehead. Raith managed to stay in his seat, but a ribbon
of red pain wrapped itself around the back of his skull and pulled tight across
his temples.

Hastle Beige laughed, seeing Raith avoid what could’ve been a
more serious accident. Raith laughed a little too, at first, until he realized something
wasn’t right. The horizon began to twist upward, reset itself, repeat. His
heart quickened. He tried to grip the reins and squeeze his thighs together, but
his arms and legs had turned to mush. The horizon twisted one last time before
falling away into a sea of blue. He was weightless, and blue was all he saw
apart from the dust clouding the edges of his sight.

Hastle Beige broke the plane of the pure blue sky and
crouched down on towering legs. Jiren Oliver came after him, then Theodar
Urial, the old apothecary. A crowd had gathered before long, their eyes
reflecting the daylight on the sand like frozen yellow sparks. Above the faces,
their mouths vacillating, saliva glinting between chomping teeth, was the blue.
Eternal blue; great ridges and paths and formless globs, a gradient that faded
to the palest hue before exploding into full white where it met the face of the
rising light-star.

Raith wound down, his heartbeat throbbing slower. It was a
sensation he’d felt before. It should’ve alarmed him, but he was lost in the
sky. Beautiful, endless, clear and bright and full of possibility. He forgot
his despair, his foreboding, his longing to admit defeat and turn back toward
home. None of that mattered now that he understood the meaning of the sky. It
was the absence of struggle; a surrender to fate. Under the bottomless,
unfathomable sky, everything withdrew, until his worries were far beyond the
realm of his control. None who wrestled with the fates could hope to change
their whims. It was a fool’s hope that drove men to seek victory over those immovable
forces.

Several of the men lifted Raith onto one of the flatbeds,
turning his warm bed of sand into an unrelenting wooden slab. Then they took
the sky away from him, pitching a green nyleen tent over his head, folded and
creased from longtime storage. He wanted to see the sky again, but his limbs
were too dead and cold and useless to struggle free of his prison.

Hastle Beige came under the tent and covered Raith’s eyes
with his palm. Thumb and middle finger latched onto each of Raith’s temples,
rubbing as they warmed. The black skin smelled of leather and char and horse
sweat. Raith felt them working, sending him charge. The surge dispersed across
his eyes and crackled over his scalp, proliferated along his neck and piped
through to the rest of his body. The ticking of his heartbeat came back smooth
and steady, no longer a wild, panicked throbbing. Exhaustion came over him and
his eyelids closed against his will, losing their strength just as his limbs
had lost theirs. He was feverish, the sweat cold on his brow and gathering
around Hastle’s fingers like condensation. Then Hastle was gone.

When the flatbed began to move again, Raith let his head roll
to the side so he could look out the tent’s mesh window. The tent next to him blocked
out all but a thin strip of sky. Thunder ached in the distance, and he dreamt
it was the sound of the wind gargants’ footsteps as they roamed the Farstrands,
grumbling through waves of foam, pushing gales out to sea like goatherds
ushering their flocks. Raith was a boy again, his head brimming with wonder and
imagination. Every unexplored corner of the Aionach was his to discover, the
songs and fables his only guide against the perils that lay in wait.

Raith couldn’t remember when it was that he’d lost his sense
of adventure and suffered the fear that came as its replacement. Perhaps Cord
Faleir was right; it
was
cowardice that kept Raith’s hopes holed within
the safe sphere of Decylum, instead of allowing its people a chance for better.
Maybe Raith had led these men into the desert to die. Or if not to die, then to
achieve some goal that seemed noble but fell short of their greater purpose. The
outcome of this journey was beyond Raith’s ability to foresee. For now, he had
neither the strength nor the will to rise. He could only lay helpless as he
felt the waking world dissolve. The sleep of the gifted took him.

CHAPTER 21

To Get Lost

Daxin sat on the lumpy pillow with his back against the
wall of the cave. It was hard and rough—not the least bit comfortable—but he
had begun to notice it less and less. “My wife is a very bright woman, and wise
beyond her years. She’s brought me a lot of happiness. We met the day she came
to Pleck’s Mill. She’d hitched a ride in with one of the indie trade caravans.
Looked like she’d been through a lot, bruised up and thin as a rail, but she was
the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. We were married three months later. My
grandparents were thrilled, even though I was eighteen at the time and Vicky
was… much older. The year after that, she gave me my daughter Savannah.”

“How old is your daughter?” Ellicia sat facing Daxin at the
far end of the ragged blanket, legs crossed, hands resting in her lap. Her eyes
shone like pale jade in the morning light, framed by the long wisps of dark hair
that had escaped her messy bun and fallen alongside her face. Her brown woolen
robe was worn, smudged with dirt, and fraying along the hemline. She’d drawn a
thin shawl about her shoulders, and Daxin could see the sheen where the exposed
skin became softer below her collarbone. He made himself look away before his
eyes wandered lower.

The waking sounds of the villagers had begun to liven the
cave. The traps had started working, and as their yields of fresh game began to
escalate day by day, so too had the refugees’ spirits.

Daxin rubbed the sleep from his eyes and yawned. “Savvy will
be seventeen when the long year changes. She wanted to come with me, but I left
her back home in Pleck’s Mill. It’s way too dangerous out here.”

Claiming Pleck’s Mill was his hometown was the third lie
Daxin had told. The first had been his name; the second had been the reason for
his travels. Luther Sicarus was a rancher from Pleck’s Mill, Daxin had told
them. He was on his way north to take delivery of a herd of cattle in Elcombe
when a gang of common bandits had attacked him. Like Daxin Glaive, Luther
Sicarus had a wife and a daughter, but Luther’s wife hadn’t left him. The
masquerade was just close enough to the truth to suffice.

“Seventeen, wow,” Ellicia said. “You did get started young.”

“Sure did. It’s hard to believe she’s grown up so much.
Gotten so much more independent, you know? But yeah, I miss them both. You have
kids?”

Ellicia’s mouth turned up at the corners, a smile of things
remembered—or wished for, perhaps. “I never had kids, but I had a husband. We
tried for years, but children weren’t in the cards for us.”

“What happened to your husband?” Daxin asked.

“He still lives in Unterberg. I guess you’d say we’re
divorced. Whatever it is you call marriage these days, without a piece of paper
from the Ministry to make it official.”

“You don’t need a piece of paper to promise someone you’ll
always love them. And by the way, the Ministry’s downfall is one of the only
good things to come out of the Heat.”

“Okay, well I don’t like politics, so let’s not get into
that. Let’s just say I was married, as officially as you can be, these days.”

“Sure, I understand. So what happened?” Daxin was more
interested in keeping the attention off himself than hearing some long, drawn-out
tale. The less often he had to lie, the better.

“We were coming up on ten years, and then one day he decided
he didn’t want to be married anymore.”

Daxin waited for her to continue, expecting to hear her spout
off some contemptuous tirade about her former husband. He figured she’d outlined
every problem in the relationship and embedded it within a network of complex
over-analyses wrought amidst years of bitter hindsight. After all, that was
what he’d done. How else did one cope with the inexplicable?
If I hold out a
little longer
, Daxin told himself,
she’ll find herself wanting to spill
every detail, and the floodgates will open
.

They didn’t.

“That’s the whole story,” Ellicia said.

Daxin was surprised, but he left well enough alone. “I’m sorry
that happened to you.”

“Don’t be. So do you think you’ll still make it north in time
to pick up your cattle?”

“Not a chance. The entire herd’s liable to die of old age
before you people let me out of here.”

“Okay, mister sarcastic. You can stop being so…”

“Sarcastic?”

Ellicia smiled, but she was glaring at him. “I can only
imagine what you must put your wife through.”

Daxin let out an uncomfortable laugh. It was a sound he tried
to make mirthful, but it tumbled over itself like a foal learning to stand, and
Daxin found himself having to repress the wave of grief that came over him. Speaking
of Victaria had been easy at first, but it had dredged up the memory of a
thousand isolated, perplexing days. “She puts up with so much of my crap,” he
said when he’d regained his composure. “She’s a fine woman to have by my side.”
Saying it made his throat tighten again.

He remembered the day he’d woken to find Victaria’s side of
the bed empty, the sheets still stained with traces of fluid. She never used to
get up before him in those days. Often he would rise early to care for her,
stumbling out of bed half-asleep to fetch fresh water and get a fire going
before daylight came. That day, he’d guessed Vicky was feeling well and was up
to surprise him with breakfast. But no fire had been burning in the hearth, and
there were no slippered feet shuffling across the kitchen floor.

The washroom and lavatory had been as empty as the den and
kitchen, so he’d jogged barefoot to the town square and descended the stone
staircase to Bradsleigh’s underground well, the only known source of good water
for a week’s ride in every direction. The tainted waters of Lake Veraeri and
every other surface body for horizons around were so contaminated that death
came quickly to those who drank from them. The well and the Glaive family’s
livestock gave the people of Bradsleigh everything they needed to survive, even
through the harshest of times.

Townspeople had been out in the pre-dawn stillness, bringing
buckets to draw water for the day ahead, gathering crops from the lowered beds
in the greenhouse, patching the roofs over their ramshackle homes with new
materials they’d bought from the trade caravan the week before. The top few
stairs had still been warm from the previous day’s heat, but each step grew
cooler as Daxin descended to where Infernal’s light never reached. He could
hear the familiar tinkling of the small, clear stream that ran across the
grotto and down another hundred or so feet beneath a great ledge of slanted
rock. At the far end, it waterfalled into a chasm whose bottom was deeper than
any man had discovered without giving his life in exchange for the knowledge.

There was barely enough space between the ledge and the
stream for someone to squeeze through without drowning. Daxin doubted his wife
had any desire or reason to do so, anyway. He had dashed back to the surface,
taking the narrow stairs two at a time.
High Infernal
, he remembered
thinking
. Where can she have gone?
Townspeople had waved to him as he
stumbled up the hill toward the family pastures, but he’d ignored them.

It wasn’t until he had reached the field that he began to
find the first evidences of her; the empty stall where she stabled her favorite
cob, the fresh boot prints in the muck. Jerichai, one of the Glaive family’s
hired hands, was just arriving.

“Weren’t you supposed to be up here overnight?” Daxin had
asked him.

Jerichai was confused. “Missus Glaive gave me the night off.
Said you all had it covered.”

“Vicky’s gone, Jer. You’re telling me nobody was here to
guard the livestock
all night
?”

The ruddy-skinned man had shrugged, lost for words.

“Coff it, Jer. Her cob is missing. Water my mare and check
the gates for tracks. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and I want you to tell me
which way she went.”

Daxin had returned to the house to find his daughter lounging
in the den.

“Mornin’ daddy,” Savannah had greeted him, rubbing her eyes.
“Where’s mom?”

Daxin had barely stopped to acknowledge his daughter as he
rushed downstairs to their bedroom. Vicky’s slippers had still been next to the
bed. Her outdoor shoes were gone, along with her boots, her cane, a few pairs
of denim, and some leathers. Daxin had pulled on a pair of trousers and a
tunic, plunged his feet into his boots, and sped up the stairs, stumbling to
finish dressing as he went. “Baby girl, I’m going for a ride. I’ll be back in a
few hours. Mind the house and I’ll see you midday.”

Whatever reply his daughter had given him had fallen into the
background as he shut the door behind him.

Jerichai had met Daxin at the stables after inspecting each
of the three gates that opened from the Glaive family pastures into the wide
scrublands beyond. Within a matter of hours, the winds had all but blown out
the tracks Vicky’s cob had left at the west gate, leaving nothing but tiny
ridges in the dust. The untrained eye might have missed them altogether, but
the hired hand had spotted them in no time at all.

“She’s gone east,” Jerichai had said.

“I’m following her. Until I get back, the pastures are to be
guarded at all times. Make sure Hamish and Garlin get the word. You
understand?”

The first flecks of daylight were piercing the horizon as
Daxin’s mare bore him eastward. By the time he’d lost sight of Bradsleigh,
Infernal had been looming to his left, a gargantuan semi-circle cut along the
horizon’s edge. Rimford Springs would be five long days’ ride away, maybe four
if his mare held out.

He’d trudged home a week later, empty-handed, not knowing
whether Rimford Springs had been Vicky’s destination in the first place. Over
the years that followed, Daxin would journey to every city, town and settlement
in the Inner East. In all that time, he would never find her, and he would
never forgive himself for letting her go. His self-disparagement only got worse
whenever Toler berated him.

“
She
left
you
,” Toler would say. “Let her go.
Vicky made her choice, even if you don’t agree with it. She’s not important
anymore. Savannah is what’s important now. She needs her dad, and you’re not
around to give her the time of day.”

Daxin had known Toler was right, but he’d been too stubborn
to give up on Vicky.
Love is love, no matter the cost
. Family meant
something different to Daxin’s brother than it did to him, and it seemed they
would never stop criticizing one another for their variant brands of opinion.
Daxin felt guilty when he thought about it now—all the times he’d ignored his
daughter or pushed her needs aside. He had been so determined to find an
explanation for why Vicky was gone that he’d neglected Savvy. Admitting it was
true stung him like a switch.

Daxin pushed those memories away and swallowed the lump in
his throat.

Ellicia was studying him as if she could read what he was
thinking. If she could, she chose not to say so. “I’m sure she’s a fine woman.
Must be hard being away from her for so long.”

“It is. But when life takes you in a new direction, you make
the best of it.”

“Living down here has been a new direction for all of us.”

“This place isn’t
that
bad. Well, it’s pretty bad. But
it has potential.”

“I guess it does, now that you’re here to show us what to do
with it.” Ellicia’s smile set her green eyes alight.

“Yeah, if I don’t wake up with a second mouth first.” Daxin
drew a line across his throat.

“Oh hush. You’re afraid of Eivan and Duffy?”

“Afraid? Yeah right. But I
will
fall into a deep sleep
eventually, and when I do…”

“I’ll stand guard and protect you,” Ellicia said
matter-of-factly, straightening.

“You’d be my biggest hero.”

“I
will
be then, you watch.”

Their eyes met, and they shared a smile. These little moments
of silence between he and Ellicia were beginning to feel less like they needed
to be filled. Perhaps she was having that same thought, because she didn’t say
anything else for a long time. Finally, she said, “Where would you go if you
could travel anywhere?”

Daxin considered the question before he answered. “I’ve done
a good bit of traveling in my life already. Nowhere specific that I’ve always
wanted to go or anything. Sometimes I think I’d like to just… get lost.”

“Get lost?” Ellicia laughed, leaning back to rest on her
elbows.

Daxin liked her laugh. It made the walls of the cave sound
better than any stone he’d ever listened to. “Not so lost that I don’t know
where I am. Just enough that no one else does.”

“You want to live out here in the scrubs? This is no place to
make a life.”

“You all are making a pretty good go of it. Plus, the scrubs
don’t bother me. If I ever die out here, it’s nobody’s fault but mine. And then
I’ll be too dead for it to matter, won’t I? Infernal’s not going to care one
way or the other.”

“You’re a strange man,” Ellicia said, offering him a somber
smile.

Daxin tilted his head toward the others. “Not so loud. I
don’t think they know.”

“Oh, I think they do. They’re just being nice.”

“They’re doing a good job of it. With all the compliments I’ve
been getting around here, you’d think I was famous.”

The Glaives
were
relatively famous around the Inner
East; the name still rang a bell because of its association with HydroPyre and
the legendary desert cities. Wealth was hard to come by these days, so families
like the Glaives and the Vantanibles seemed to have fans and detractors in
every settlement from the Slickwash to the Horned Gulf. But there were other
things besides his name that Daxin couldn’t reveal to these people—less because
of who he was than because of who they were.