Hammerfall

“Norit!” Hati shouted.

“Camp here,” Norit said.

Pressed to invention, they and the slaves unburdened all the beasts and contrived to stretch canvas from a stack of baggage to a few anchoring stakes, lashed down so it would shed sand that accumulated from hour to hour.

That gave them a measure of comfort. They slept, but slept by turns to go out and keep the two entries clear. The sand-fall, no longer blasting, but a general murk in the air, went on and on into true dusk, then a night so deep and so cold they huddled together, men and women, freemen and freedmen together.

When morning came creeping through the murk, there was no talk of moving on. Those habituated to the desert were used to waiting out storms, and were schooled to patience even this near a goal. So they waited, deciding finally that the ground had stopped shaking enough to try the pegs. They pitched their tent for comfort, and salved the animals’ seeping windburns, which were crusted over with sand.

At that, they and the beasts alike had proper shelter, and they rested wrapped in double robes against a cold unlike any they had ever felt.

“I’ve never seen the like,” Hati swore, shivering. “In the deepest desert I’ve never seen such a storm.”

“Tomorrow the sand-fall will be less,” Norit said.

There was no question in Marak’s mind that Norit knew exactly what would happen. Norit crept close to him and then Luz shoved away. Alone, Norit bowed her head and wiped her eyes in silent tears. There was no solution he could give. He offered his hand, and she jerked away. It tore his heart to watch her.

Hati shook her head as if she could read his thoughts, and rubbed his shoulders, making him realize his muscles were set like stone. She had clever fingers and knew where to press. He stretched out finally and slept, and for a few hours the dreams left him in peace.

On the next day the storm abated somewhat; but the taste in the air was that of sulfur. The wind stank, and it burned the eyes. They ate beneath the canvas, and carefully shielded their food from the foul stuff that blew in from the sky, under a yellow murk in which the noon sun was a spot in the haze.

“The grass and the grain will wither,” Norit said. “All the west is ruins. But that’s not the worst.”

Kais Tain was in the west. All his father’s household was in the west. Marak wanted to strike her senseless. He had done all he had done, he had survived all he had survived, and Norit told them calmly that nothing lived in the west.

Marak, the voices said in the midst of it all, clamoring for his action. Marak.

Norit said, aloud, “We should go now.”

“When did she become god?” Tofi cried. Their voices had become raw and unpleasant from the dust, and Tofi’s voice broke on the shout.

“Obey her,” Marak said wearily. “Where else will you go?”

“To hell,” Tofi said bleakly. “We’re all going to hell.”

But Tofi roused up the freedmen, who moved about loading their baggage and getting the beasts up.

As they were packing up, a small thing that lived in buried rocks came out and hissed and dived back again. One of the men threw a rock at the burrow in the Besh Karat.

“It will die on its own,” Norit said.

The bitter spring was covered by deep sand. It would not flow again until the vermin dug it up. The beshti themselves, water-short, still showed no disposition to seek it out.

What Norit prophesied haunted Marak as they rode away from that place.

Should even the ill-tempered creature in its house of stone perish?

Should winds like that cover the wells? From that small comprehension he truly began to grasp the height and depth of the devastation, east to west, from the highest to the lowest.

He wished he had stayed at the white tents. He wished he had told Hati to stay. He wished he had never undertaken this fool’s errand with Norit. There was no way out of this. There wasno safety. He was a fool, and he had led them all to their destruction.

But he had lived before by imposing strict conditions on his death.

He would not die and leave Hati and Norit alone to face what came. That was his underlying resolve. He would not die without speaking to the Ila and relaying what she had asked to hear. That was his mission; and it was not that far. They would at least attempt the return, whatever the Ila did, and if, in the Ila’s wrath, he could not, theywould go back to the tower. He would put the fear in Tofi and have him promise that.

Both these things he promised himself, while he roused Osan to his feet and turned Osan’s head toward the holy city.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said to him. By noon, they passed bones that jutted up from the sand, a besha’s carcass already stripped by vermin. They came to others, four and five, and the bones of two men on the other side of the caravan track, but those bones were gnawed for the marrow and scattered, dug up by some creature after the sand had covered them. A scrap of canvas lay against a distant rock, looking as the wind had carried it and bunched it around the base of the boulder. It might have sheltered a man, but if it did, that man was dead by now, beyond their help. And the visions were now of fire, fire flowing like water from a broken spigot, fire coursing through land and eroding it.

They found other remnants of passage, as if bit by bit the whole caravan before them had come to grief, overwhelmed by the wind and the sand. Other debris was blown up against the rocks, far from their path, which now was as smooth as if no caravan had ever gone before them. When the desert destroyed, it both preserved and obliterated, even this close to the holy city.

But the day-early mirage that usually heralded the holy city failed. The sky was dirty yellow, and the air was cold. They doled out a little water to the beshti, and wondered what was ahead of them.

He contrived to speak to Tofi alone, riding side by side with him for a space, while Hati lagged back with the au’it. “I have a proposition for you,” he said. “We both have a promise to the Ila. But she may reward you. If things go badly for me, as they may, take Hati and Norit and go back as fast as you can.”

“To the tower?” Tofi asked.

“There,” Marak said. “There’s no safety here. You know that.”

“I already know,” Tofi said unhappily. The young man who had thought at the begi

“We had warning. They didn’t. Wehave Norit. Listen to her.”

“The question is, what’s there? Is it any better there than here?”

“Norit will know,” he said. “I think she knows as well as anyone what the state of the tower is. If anyone can get you back there alive, she can.” He thought of the Ila’s promise to save his mother and his sister, and now he knew that calling the Ila into the tangled affairs of his family might have put Hati and Norit in danger, and if things went wrong in the Ila’s eyes, and she decided to blame him, he knew that she would never release those related to him: that was not the pattern of the Ila’s justice. He could not ask Tofi to save his mother and sister in that case: there was no likelihood at all that Tofi could pry them from the Ila’s hands and far less that Tofi could rescue him. But Hati—Hati was not a name the Ila even knew about.

“Don’t let Hati come with me once we reach the city,” he said. “If you have to carry her off by force, do it. Claim her as if she were yourfamily.”

“Can you argue with her?”

“I’ll give her that instruction. I’ll tell her to take care of you. Go along with it.”

“I’ll do my best,” Tofi said, and joined the scheme to get the most of them back. “If the Ila’s men ask, I’ll lie and say she’s my wife.”