“Well,” Kaulas said. “Do you know where to find her?”
“Underground,” said Salamander. “If I am any judge. But that leaves us a lot of options.”
Kaulas laughed, though the joke hadn’t been that funny. The Wizard Salamander regarded him curiously.
“Well,” said Bijou, making a show of turning away. “I guess we start walking. Unless anyone wants to ride? No?”
She took her second long look at the disregarded city of Ancient Erem, cast out like a series of sand castles around the rim of the bowl-shaped valley. Sand castles cast in stone.
Erem had not been built so much as mined. In the moonlight, the starlight (seeming stronger now; that dusty mauve sky was fading to black violet) Bijou saw the empty doorways and windows of houses carved in terraces from the streaked stone. She knew the contrasting bands of dark and light were a red like dry blood and a white like exposed bone, for she had seen them in the first light of Erem’s terrible dawn—before she and the others fled with their captive, the Alchemist Assari.
Now, it all looked gray and faintly blood-tinged in the light cast by the bloated red moon. Depth and distance fooled the eye in the twinned moon-shadows; one object bled into the next, and it was hard to tell what was real and what was illusion.
Beside those carven houses were larger buildings—or ‘minings’—tall pillared faces presenting every appearance of having been constructed until you realized that at their edges, the walls merely blended into the stone behind. Bijou was minded of the blind faces of kittens pushing through the birth membrane, or—with their gaping doors like desperate mouths—perhaps the faces of the Bey’s enemies as they were drowned in bags of silk.
She only thought of that, she told herself, because the scent of water hung so heavy on the air: a musty sharpness that promised life, relief, comfort despite the burning sands.
She knew it was a lie.
“Right,” she called out. “If we should happen to come down by the oasis—don’t drink the water here.”
“Why not?” asked Salamander—genuine scientist’s curiosity, Bijou judged. Not a challenge to her authority. Their eyes met, and the ghost-pale woman smiled at her.
Bijou felt a snap of warmth and camaraderie that erased any faint, lingering jealousy and replaced it with something else. Not a romantic interest—Bijou had ever been cursed by a preference for men—but a sense of welcome belonging. A lonely ache reminded her of just how long it had been since she’d had a friend of the heart, another woman to share secrets and sister-stories with.
“Cursed,” Bijou answered, killing her torch since they had the moonlight now.
Salamander tipped her head from side to side, that strange bone-straight hair moving over her ears. “Good reason,” she said.
She crouched down and dug her fingertips into the sand. Although Bijou was not familiar with the form the white Wizard’s magic took, it was plain to anyone that it was magic she was working.
Something scurried across the sand to her, a pale body like a lump of butter, borne on eight fat legs. “Camel-spider,” Bijou said, when Salamander raised her eyes questioningly.
“Nice and big,” Salamander said. She drew a pin from her collar and pricked her thumb with it: the blood dripped, and Bijou was about to cry out a warning not to let it touch the sand when Salamander caught it neatly and smudged a dab on the spider’s nose. If spiders could be said to have noses.
“She’ll help us,” Salamander said, standing. The spider raced away, vanishing over the rippled sand with a speed Bijou could hardly credit. “Follow her!”
But as she leaped forward, each footstep kicking a divot in the sand, Bijou heard something from the shadows of the cliffs that was not the rising wind or the rustle of sand on stone.
“Stop!” she called, and Salamander listened, skidding to a halt some ten canes ahead.
Prince Salih, beside her, must have heard it too. He lifted his head, turning, sniffing, eyes half-lidded in concentration.
“What was that?” the prince asked.
Bijou lifted her head to the wind in imitation of him, as if that could make her hear or smell better. “Something chittered.”
A chitter—or maybe the rattle of claws or something else hard, one upon another: it was hard to say definitively. But Bijou was pleased to note that Riordan and Maledysaunte fell neatly into the back-to-back circle that she and her own partners established. The prince left his rifle slung across his back, but an automatic pistol appeared in each of his hands. Bijou knew those were not the only weapons concealed in the voluminous drape of his robe.
As they made their defensive circle, Salamander backed slowly towards them, her hands raised and empty. Bijou knew there were Sorcerers in the east who could throw light and fire, manipulating energy directly in a manner that no Wizard of Messaline had ever mastered. It was a different school of magic entirely, though one with its own roots in science. These northern barbarians were supposed to have derived their arts from the writings of medieval Messaline and Uthman Wizards—they even took their craft-names after the Messaline or Uthman fashions—but watching Salamander now, Bijou wondered.
“I see them,” Maledysaunte whispered. “Dog-men. Along the cliff faces.”
“Ghuls,” said Kaulas. “They’re more like jackals, actually.”
“Oh. We don’t have jackals where I come from.”
Bijou risked a glance at the woman, a vanishing shape in the moonlight. “I’m going for Salamander. They’re less likely to come after two.”
Curtly, Maledysaunte nodded. Something gleamed darkly in her hand—a pistol Bijou had not known she was carrying.
“Whatever you do,” Bijou said, in a louder voice, “don’t bleed on the sand.”
“Because it’s cursed?” Riordan asked.
Prince Salih answered matter-of-factly. “Because it draws more monsters.”
Riordan moved right, closing the gap as Bijou called Ambrosias to herself and stepped forward. “I guess it’s a good thing we’re monsters too.”
At least he has a sense of humor about it. The dead horses and the ass were still slumped upon the sand behind them. Bijou reached out with her will and raised them, bringing them forward to flank her. It was harder to maintain the necessary concentration with her every sense straining into the darkness, but she did it. Ambrosias led her forward, its zills shimmering an incongruously cheerful sound within the cage of his jeweled skeleton.
The moons had not moved, but the shadows of the cliffs spread across the earth in inky blackness. Pooling. Reaching.
“Coming up behind you,” Bijou said to Salamander. Prince Salih fanned out to her left, toward the nearer cliff, his scimitar snaking moonlight along the bezel like a bead of mercury. He’d have her flank. He always did.
Bijou said, “Have you a torch?”
Sand whisked in the gloom of the reaching shadows. They seemed to writhe forward. Bijou knew it was ghulish sorcery that made it so.
“Two,” Salamander answered, without turning her head. “Should I use them?”
“If the ghuls come at you,” Bijou answered. “The bright light will dazzle them. That shadow-weaving trick protects them from the suns, somewhat…but it can be pierced. Otherwise, don’t use the torches. Who knows what they would attract?”
“Right,” Salamander agreed, quite reasonably. “One nightmare at a time, then.”
Her calm courage sent a pang of respect through Bijou. If she were to compete, not for Kaulas, but for Salamander’s friendship—