“Nosebleeds?” Vedas asked without a trace of humor.
She started to laugh and caught herself. “No. No, I meant the air. You’ll get used to the air.” She stared at her feet, opening and closing her mouth as though considering her next words carefully. None followed, however. Eventually: “It’s even drier than I thought it would be,” Vedas said.
“They do call it the badlands,” she answered.
He frowned. “I didn’t make the connection.”
She shrugged. “That’s... understandable.”
Berun watched his companions carefully. He could see the thing between them, but not as if either yet recognized it. Their conversations were infrequent and stilted, though both kept at it. Churls and Vedas reminded Berun of certain individuals in the Seventeenth—men and women who, despite forming attachments, could not succeed in forming lasting bonds. The pressures of living and fighting together overwhelmed them.
Berun had never understood human sexuality. Then again, he had not given it much thought. He watched his companions because it interested him, but he himself had no intention of assisting. If Vedas and Churls desired awkwardness, they had it. If they desired more, they would need to broach the subject themselves.
The first day wore on with Dalan Fele straddling the horizon at their backs. The nearly treeless ground, red like pitting iron, stretched before them. Some geological process had tipped the floor of the world ever so slightly, and before long Berun ceased to notice they trod an upward slope. To either side barren, saw-edged hills rose, flanking them in straight lines.
“We walk on the bed of the river Zaos,” Churls explained. “It stopped flowing long before the birth of man, in the age of the elder.”
She walked easily, eyes watchful. She squinted ahead and shadowed her brow to stare into the sky. Berun wondered what she was looking for. He had not spotted a ground animal since they started, and the only birds rode the air so far above them they looked like specks. Golna had scavenger birds, too. They were not dangerous as far as Berun knew.
His curiosity finally got the best of him, and he pointed these things out to Churls.
“Those aren’t birds,” she answered. “It’s a trick of perspective. A wyrm could carry a man away in one claw, and probably tear even you apart. Fortunately, they come down only every once in a while. Adrash willing, it won’t be today.” She spat twice, an automatic warding gesture Berun recognized. “I’m being so watchful because there are animals that live below our feet. Earthmovers. They crest about as often as wyrms touch ground. If one does, it’s best to recognize the signs early.”
“They’re dangerous?” Berun asked.
Churls shook her head. “Not at all. But wyrms are, and they love earthmover meat. They don’t like men much, either, so I plan on being far away from one if it lands.”
Berun turned to Vedas. “Have you heard of this?”
Vedas grunted. Though he had started the day in good form, hours of exertion had taken their toll. His face was flushed and his breath wheezed from him. Still, he pushed himself, maintaining a quick pace on stiff legs, only stopping to eat or drink. Even when coughing fits doubled him over, he kept moving.
Again, Berun offered to carry his pack.
“Quit asking,” Vedas said. “I’ll get better by walking, not resting.”
Berun shrugged, by now inured to the man’s stubborn pride. Vedas would walk himself to death rather than admit weakness.
Churls, on the other hand, had gladly accepted Berun’s help. Instead of dividing the ungainly packs between the travelers, she let him carry the huge bundle of firewood and the eight two-gallon bladders of water. She had watched in fascination as he drew the cords of the luggage into his back, so that they appeared to grow out of his metal flesh. The extra two hundred pounds bothered him not at all.
When darkness fell, shutting off the light as though someone had blown out a candle, they simply stopped walking and set up camp. Churls dropped her pack with an audible sigh and unrolled her wool-and-down sleeping bag. Vedas lifted the firewood and water from Berun’s back and then watched as Berun punched a fire pit in the ground.
“Will that attract earthmovers?” Vedas asked Churls.
She shook her head. “Back when their magics were good, the badlanders used to try and raise the animals to the surface in order to hunt wyrms, but nothing they did worked. I doubt they never tried pounding on the ground.”
Berun could only sense texture and vibration, not temperature. He surmised that it must be quite cold, however, for Churls sat as close to the fire as she safely could. The muscles of her jaw jumped as she chewed her gammon. Vedas, forearms crossed loosely on his knees, stared into the fire and occasionally allowed a glance in her direction.
Berun regarded one, then the other, wondering who would break the silence.
“You aren’t cold?” Churls asked Vedas. She kept her eyes on the ground and spoke quietly, obviously more ill at ease now that night had fallen—now that she and Vedas were so close. It fascinated Berun.
“No,” Vedas said. “My suit keeps me warm.”
“Cool, too?”
He nodded. “It keeps me comfortable. Within limits.”
“It makes you stronger and faster, right?”
“A bit.”
“I’ve seen suited men before, of course, but never up close. The White and Black orders are less common in Casta and Stol than in Dareth Hlum, and those you see are almost always fully covered.” She looked up. “You can make it move, can’t you?”
Though he nearly always wore the skin-tight hood, Vedas had not yet covered his face in her presence. He smiled and the edges of the hood drew in around his features. In the shifting firelight, it looked like an illusion.
Churls’s eyes widened. “When I was a child, vendors sometimes displayed elder-cloth at the fabric markets in Onsa. They don’t let you touch.”
She leaned toward him, hand out. “Can I?”
Berun saw Vedas’s right hand tighten around his left forearm. The man nodded. Churls ran her fingertips over his shoulder, and then pressed her palm flat. In the firelight his suit took on the sheen of volcanic glass, and her hand stopped moving. It lay there, rooted to him, a part of him. The moment stuck, and Berun felt a faint vibration inside himself: the nearly imperceptible shudder of a spinning sphere deep within his chest. For an instant, it seemed that a hooded figure stood behind Vedas, hand raised in the air. Poised to strike. The gleam of silver metal.
The moment broke, and Churls’s hand dropped. She stood to ready her bedroll, and Vedas met Berun’s gaze across the fire.
“What are you looking at?” Vedas asked.
‡
Gradually, the earth became brittle. It cracked in tiny wavelets around their feet. The slope of the ground leveled out and the wind picked up. These subtle changes trickled into Berun’s mind, as did the fact that another traveler had not come upon them since leaving Nbena.
Churls took out her compass more and more often. Berun let her, though he knew they had been traveling south in a straight line for two days. According to his internal map, they were currently some twenty-five miles from Dalan Fele, roughly the same distance from the southern coast of Casta. Staying the course, they would reach the ocean in another day. The ruins of the stone bridge that had once linked Was Anul to the mainland were visible from this shore, men claimed. On a clear day, the smoldering crown of the island itself could be viewed.
While the possibility of seeing these sights enticed Berun, he could not understand why Churls had chosen this route. Even the deserts of Toma held life, but the coast between Dalan Fele and the Steps of Stol was rumored to be barren, waterless. Already, the foliage had petered out to the occasional thorny jess tree. The clouds, too high to form rain, formed an impenetrable grey roof over their heads.