“The divers. I found the information in a dozen notes and messages left between the wastes and here. Someone blew up the walls with bombs.”
The Poet raised his hand to his head, pressing on his wound, feeling for the pain. “How long have I been out?”
“Excuse me?” Peary asked. “You have to talk over the wind, old man!”
“How long have I been with you?”
Peary shrugged his shoulders. “I found you the night before last. Took a long time to get the bleeding stopped, especially once I got you hydrated. I had to stop the sarfer every few miles to check your wounds and give you water. I watched over you all last night. I didn’t think you’d make it to sunrise, to be honest. I dripped honey water into your mouth, making you swallow it, on and off until morning.”
The Poet just stared at Peary. For several minutes he just watched as the sailor/diver handled the sarfer like a professional. It seemed to him, for the longest time, that there were no words to say. Perhaps the blood loss…
“Got going early this morning,” Peary said. “Carried you to the sarfer just hoping you weren’t going to die on me.”
“Why did you save my life?” the Poet asked.
Peary stared back at the old man and narrowed his eyes, then looked back at the dunes. “I don’t understand the question.”
“Why did you save my life? You have your treasure. You have riches.” The Poet rubbed the hard cases and then looked back at Peary. “All you needed to do was leave me there to die and head home. Where is home, by the way?”
“Low-Pub.”
“You could have just gone back to Low-Pub and not risked your life and wealth on me.”
Peary just shook his head.
The old Poet pressed him. “Why did you save my life?”
Peary looked at the man again and sighed. “Because it’s a life, man. Besides, you would have done the same for me.”
At that, the Poet felt a chill. It ran right down his spine and made him look away. Now he held up the electric-orange fabric again, looking at the image emblazoned on the bright cloth. It looked to be a horse’s head, with a fiery mane flowing back—as if the horse were running at full gallop. There were words below the horse’s head, and having learned some of the old world words, the Poet recognized the bottom one.
Danvar.
The writing was odd-looking, and the word was spelled with a couple of funny symbols, but it was clearly recognizable as the word Danvar. The poet touched the print with his hand.
D E N V E R
The word below the emblem of the horse and above the word for Danvar… that one the Poet could not decipher. It was in larger symbols that stretched all the way across the cloth. Peary, and then the whole sarfer, leaned into a high dune, and as they climbed it, the Poet’s finger traced the old symbols.
B R O N C O S
The sarfer sped southward, and in the wind, when he paid attention, the Poet could hear his driver still talking.
“…and when we get to Low-Pub, I know someone who’ll move all this for us… Maybe we make two coin for every ten it’s really worth, but even at that we’ll be rich and no one will know we are. I’ll get Marisa… pack up and head west… you can come along if you’d like…”
Knot 2: Salvage.
Relics
Chapter Nine
Circling around from the north took time, but with a priceless case of salvage from Danvar one can never be too careful. Peary brought the sarfer in toward Low-Pub from the Thousand Dunes, instead of from the north, from the direction of what used to be Springston. This was the long way around, but once word got out that there really was salvage hitting the market from Danvar, every single detail would be analyzed. Every action leading up to Danvar relics appearing in Low-Pub or anywhere else would be sifted; connections would be made. Every diver and merchant and pirate would start trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The location of Danvar was a riddle that everyone in every hovel and shanty would be working to solve.
Peary was relatively certain Marisa’s uncle Joel had the right connections. He should be able to get the stuff into the black market without dragging Marisa and Peary into it, but that privilege was going to cost plenty, and until the stuff was out of his hands, Peary knew to be on his guard. The life of a diver—or of anyone else, for that matter—meant nothing to those who wanted to capitalize on the greatest discovery ever in all the land of the sand.
Twenty miles out, Peary pulled up in an area where he used to practice diving with Marisa. No sense trying to make it in tonight. Be dark soon. People might notice. They might wonder if he had a reason to press so hard, and when relics from Danvar show up in the black market soon after, maybe someone remembers. Hard to tell what might happen then.
To Peary, fame wasn’t as alluring as it once was. He’d seen dead men gripping riches, but with no life left to spend. What’s fame to those men? Men who had reached for it, who were now forgotten by time and everyone in the land of sand.
As a young diver, regaled with stories of diver-gods who became legends, Peary had been captivated by the possibility of being a great discoverer. Of being the first to find Danvar. Free drinks at every pub, they’d say, just so dreamers can hear stories and losers can breathe the same air as the living gods. But in the last year, Peary had learned differently. A diver newly rich and famous could be safe only if the location of his find instantly became common knowledge. It was that window between nobody knowing and everyone knowing that was the danger. The trap that could kill as surely as coffining in stonesand.
And the word was already out that someone else had found Danvar. Confusion and competing claims didn’t bode well for anyone’s safety. Now there was word that Springston was gone. No one knew what to think of that. The only reason he’d be trusting Joel was because, for all intents and purposes, Joel was family. Blood and water and all that nonsense. Although whoever came up with that blood being thicker than water thing probably wrote it down in something other than blood. No man could be trusted when Danvar was involved, but Joel was the best Peary was going to get.
And then there was this: in a month, or maybe three months, the goods he’d gotten from Danvar would still be valuable, but a whole lot less so. Right now they were priceless—because they were part of the trail, and as far as he knew, they were likely to be the first to ever hit the market. The information that Peary held in his brain—the precise location of where he found the goods—was information a whole lot of people in the salvage business would kill for. And killing is the easiest transaction in all the land of sand, because not even a grieving momma sifts the dunes looking for a dead diver. The Lords don’t care and neither does the sand.
As Peary tied down the sarfer, the old man in the haul rack groaned but didn’t fully wake. This man who called himself “the Poet” had been in and out of consciousness for the entirety of the last day’s sail. Maybe he was just healing, or maybe an infection had him. Peary felt the man’s forehead and couldn’t discern any fever, but he didn’t look too good, either. He carried the old man from the sarfer and laid him down in the shadow of a dune.
Good thing the wind isn’t blowing. Another night in the dunes was going to be bad enough, but it would be miserable if the sift was up and stinging like needles. Thankfully the evening was still and the temperature was pleasant. And after tomorrow, he’d have enough coin to never again spend another night out in the dunes unless he wanted to.