Black Jade (51 page)

Maram cried out again. .

'Oh, joy!' he called out. 'Oh, mercy and sweet succor! There is hope for us yet!'

In the hours after that, we pulled up many bucketfuls of sweet, cool water. We all drank to our deepest content. We let the horses quench themselves, too. We washed the dust from our faces and sticky old sweat from our bodies. All our waterskins we filled. Liljana was keen to set out her pots so that she might wash our soiled and stinking clothing, but we finally decided against this. It wouldn't do to waste the well's water, even if it did seem inexhaustible.

We slept contentedly that night if not very long. Again, we roused ourselves well before dawn and made our preparations for the next leg of our journey. After leaving some coins by the well to pay for the water that we had taken, we set out into the cool desert. The stars, twinkling brightly, pointed out way. We all dreaded the rising of the sun. That day was very much like the ones that had preceded it: dear, hot, dusty and dry. As Maram had said, with every mile that we rode toward the west, the desert grew even drier. Here the hardy grasses yielded to ursage and thornbush, and the herds of antelope and gazelle vanished, to be replaced by a few scrawny ostrakats and wild asses who ran away at our approach. The flies, however, still filled the air in abundance. They buzzed most fiercely around Maram and swarmed around his bandages, drawn by the smell of blood.

For two days we rode straight across the cracked red earth toward the second well. We sucked down the water from our leather containers, and the burning air sucked the water from us. I looked to the sky for any sign of rain, but the immense blue dome above us showed only a few wispy white clouds, drifting toward the north. Kane told us that in the Red Desert, it never rained in the month of Soldru, nor in Marud or Soal.

We found the second well with mounds of sand blown against its stone walls. As we all feared, it proved dry.

'It's been many years since I came this way,' Kane said, 'so it shouldn't be a surprise that
one
of these wells has failed us.'

'No,' Maram said, rubbing at one of his bloody bandages, 'I'm not surprised either. Why should anyone be surprised by his fate?'

'Take heart,' I said to him. 'The next well will be full.'

'Full of sand, most likely,' Maram muttered. 'And what then?'

'It
won't
be full of sand,' I said to him. 'Believing it will be will only make our journey harder and thirstier.'

Maram sighed as he wiped the sweat from his eyes and stared out into the hot, ruddled plain to the west. He said to Kane, 'How far then, to the next well?'

'Eighty miles,' Kane said, looking that way, too. 'Perhaps ninety.'

'Ninety miles!' Maram groaned. 'Will our water take us that far?'

Liljana licked her dusty lips and said, 'If were careful. And careful we'll be as long as I'm in charge of the water.'

With a heaviness pulling at us, we resumed our journey. We rode long into the night before we encamped by a great outcrop-ping of stark, red rocks. Our dinner that night was meager- battle bread and dried apples and a few handfuls of old nuts. Liljana told us that the body requires much water to digest its food. The Ravirii it is said, eat nf meat when they are unsure of their water, and when it falls very low, they do not eat at all.

For the next three days, we pushed on into the deeps of the desert. The Soldru sun grew ever brighter as tip angle of its searing rays steepened toward the height of summer. The air grew hotter and even drier. We did not make good distance, for the children had a hard time of things, and Maram weakened by the mile. Master Juwain kept changing Maram's bandages, and came to fear that he would soon run out of cloth to bind his wounds. He confided to me that they were not healing as they should. Maram needed rest, shelter and fresh food, all of which, in this terrible journey that seemed to go on and on forever, were denied him.

'I'm concerned about Maram,' Master Juwain said to me one night beneath a white, crescent moon. 'And not just about his wounds.'

'Don't worry, sir,' I told him. 'He's much tougher, than even he knows. In the end, he'll come thrown.'

For part of those three days, we plodded across a wide, gravel-covered pan. The stony ground bruised the horses' hooves and jarred our spines. Nothing grew there, not even ursage or bitter-broom. We saw only a few beetles scurrying along; even the lizards seemed to have fled this terrible terrain. No sign of the Taijii or any other Ravirii tribe could we find anywhere in the empty miles around us.

Late on the third day, one of our remounts and two of our pack-horses collapsed and died. It seemed that we had made their burdens too great while giving them too little water. We all feared that soon we would share their fate.

And then on the fourth day out from the dry well, the desert broke up into a series of long rocky ridges running north and south. It was all torment and treachery to work our way over these fractured, knifelike formations. At the top of one of them, late in the day, I caught wind of a faint sensation that I dreaded almost more than any other. And as we crested the next ridge, farther to the west, Kane came up to take me aside. He pointed out into the wavering distances and told me that he thought he had described a flash of a white cloak and the bound of a white horse. I sat up straight as I held my hand to my forehead; if a rider was moving along the western horizon, the dust and glare hid him from my sight.

'So, I think we are alone no longer,' Kane said to me. 'That might have been one of the Taiji.'

'Or someone else,' I said, pressing my fist into my belly.

Kane turned his attention from the burning horizon to me. He looked at me deeply and said, 'Morjin?'

'Or his droghul, at least.'

'Are you sure?'

I closed my eyes as I let the currents of hot air sift over me. My blood seared my flesh like molten lead. Then I looked at Kane and said, 'No, I'm not sure. Since the Skadarak, Morjin seems to be everywhere - and inside me most of all.'

'In the desert,' Kane said, 'it's easy to mistake a mirage for a mountain. Perhaps you're only suffering a mirage of the soul.'

'Perhaps,' I said to him.

'Well,' he told me, looking out into the west again, 'if it
is
the droghul, fate will find him soon enough. But let us keep our swords ready tonight.'

Kane and I said nothing of our discovery to the others, for we had no choice but to continue toward the next well. Our water-skins were nearly empty. It didn't matter if the droghul - and all the armies of the Red Dragon - stood between us and it.

We camped that evening within sight of a stark, lone mountain rising up out of the lands to the south of us. I had little appetite for the food that Liljana set before me; it hurt to swallow the water that she rationed into my cup. A sickness began eating into my belly. Late in the night, as I stood guard with Kane, looking out at the moonlit land to the west, I opened myself to feel for the droghul's presence; the exercise of this strange sense of mine was something like sniffing the air for the taint of rotting flesh or listening for a hideous scream along the wind. All of a sudden, a wave of agony swept over me. I cried out as I grabbed at myself below my heart and fell writhing down upon the ground. The others woke then and gathered around me. Liljana feared that I might have been stung by a scorpion or perhaps the even more deadly black-ringed spider. Maram, though, took one look at my face and said, 'Ah, surely this is some magic of Morjin's. Surely it is the working of the Black Jade.'

It was Master Juwain who apprehended the real cause of my torment - and my great peril. He moved quickly to draw my sword and place it in my hands. He knelt by my side as he told me: 'Shield yourself, Val. Now, before it is too late!'

I tried to grip the seven diamonds set into my sword's hilt; the shimmer of my sword's silustria in the starlight seemed to envelop me like a silvery armor. I fought to breath. With the valarda I had reached out blindly, as of an open hand into a hornet's nest-now I withdrew this hand of my soul and made it into a tight fist that I pressed over my heart.

'Val.' Atara knelt above me and pressed her cool lips against my forehead, whispering my name.

Her deep regard for me, along with the radiance of my sword, proved a magic of its own. After a few moments, I was able to open my eyes and look at her. With Kane's and Maram's help, I sat up. 'Thank you, sir,' I said to Master Juwain. Then, 'Thank you all. I... almost died.'

'Died?' Maram said to me. 'But you haven't slain anyone, not for many miles! Died of
what?'

'Died of death,' I said to him. I pointed out into the desert. 'Somewhere, near here, there is so much death.'

That was all I was willing to say then. After that I tried to sleep but could not. I failed even to meditate, as Master Juwain prescribed for me. I dreamed terrible waking dreams. Two hours before dawn, when it came time to rise and break camp, I could barely force myself to climb on top of Altaru. With my friends on their horses behind me, I rode toward the still-shadowed lands to the west as if moving into a black cloud.

Dawn brought a glowing beauty to the harsh, sculpted terrain of the desert at odds with the ugliness that I knew lay ahead of us. The sun rose higher and flared ever hotter and more terrible. As we approached the third well, I nearly retched to espy a dark cloud hovering low. in the sky a couple miles ahead of us. It was not a rain cloud. We drew closer, and the cloud broke up into hundreds of vultures circling above an outcropping of red rocks. Atara, I thought, was lucky that she could not see them.

Soon many tents came into view. Perhaps forty or fifty people lay on the rocky ground between the tents and the single, central well. They did not move. We shouted out to scare off a few hyenas who had already gone to work on them, then rode up ever closer. I feared we would find slashed throats and pierced bellies, but I could see no mark on any of the bodies, a few of which were stripped naked. They were, I thought, a tough-looking people. The men, though slight of stature, seemed hard as whipcord, with curly black hair and beards, dark skins and chiselled features as stark as the desert rocks around them. The folds and fissures of one old woman's face could only have been burnt by a lifetime of wind and sun. I tried to look away from the rictus of agony stamped into the countenances of a young boy and girl who lay near her. Kane dismounted and found more of the dead inside the tents. By the time he had gone about the encampment, making a count of them, I was ready to retch up the little water that I had drunk an hour before - either that or to kill whoever had killed these poor people.

'Sixty-four,' Kane said, walking up to where I sat stunned on my horse. His eyes picked apart the jumble of rocks farther away from the well. 'We might find more of them out there.'

So many dead, I thought, as I stared through the burning air. I wondered what their names were. I wondered how it was possible to slay so many innocents so wantonly just to strike vengeance into the enemy.

'Oh, Lord!' Maram said. 'Oh, my I too bad, too bad!'

The rest of us dismounted. Master Juwain examined a young man whose body and limbs were covered in a dusty white robe. He said, 'He is nearly twelve hours dead.'

'Dead of what then?' Maram asked him.

Maram, I saw from the dread that worked at his face, knew well the answer to this question. So did we all.

'Poison,' Master Juwain said. 'I'm not sure which one.'

Liljana joined him kneeling beside the man's body. After shooing away the flies, she sniffed at his open mouth and ran her finger over the whites of his eyes. She said to us; 'I believe it is zax. It is a slow poison but a certain one.'

'Who did this?' Maram suddenly raged, kicking at the ground. 'Who would poison all these people to get at us?'

It was a question that answered itself. It came time to tell of the rider that Kane had seen the day before, and this I did. When I had finished, Maram drew his sword.

'It
is
the droghul,' he said. 'It is surely the second droghul.'

He offered his opinion that the droghul must have ridden into the encampment last evening and either charmed these simple desert-dwellers or enchanted them with one of his illusions. And then somehow managed to pour his evil poison into the well.

Liljana confirmed that the well was indeed poisoned, walking over to lean down into it and sniff its water far down in the dark earth below. Atara stood looking at nothing; I wondered if she had seen this terrible moment in one of her visions. Kane went about collecting waterskins, from the tents and the many horses that stood about not knowing what to do. He pried them from the very hands of the dead. All the skins were empty. It seemed that the droghul must have poured their water into the sand.

'So,' he said, gripping his fists around one of the skins. 'I'd hoped we'd find at least a few of them full of untainted water.'

Maram brought his sword up to his face and stared into its mirror-like steel. I heard him murmur: 'Ah, you're thirsty, aren't you, my friend?
Very
thirsty, and that's a very bad way to die, isn't it - the very worst?'

I asked Liljana how long our remaining water might last if we were
very
careful, and she slowly shook her head. Her voice trembled and nearly cracked as she looked at the children and forced out: 'Another day, perhaps.'

'And the next well?' I asked Kane.

'So. So,' he said, gazing into the burning land to the west. 'It is another seventy miles.'

'Seventy miles!' I wanted to cry out. We could not make such a distance in a single day, not with our horses worn to the bone and Maram nearly ready to drop from loss of blood. I could not let into my mind the meaning of Kane's words; the horror of what had happened poisoned my soul and nearly paralyzed me. Death was suddenly upon us. A short while before we had been looking forward to drinking our fill of cool, sweet water, and now we found ourselves sentenced to die. So it always was. Death always hovered behind one's neck like a great, black vulture, watching for its chance and waiting.