"It must be very frustrating to try so hard with such little result."
Weariness turning to wariness when Akashia craned her neck toward him.
"Just curious. Didn't mean to disturb you."
She sighed, tucked storm-tangled hair behind her ears, and faced him with the hint of a smile on her lips. "Are you sure you're not Just-Curious Pavek instead of Just-Plain Pavek?"
Embarrassed for reasons he couldn't decipher, he shook his head and retreated. Her almost-smile broadened into a grin, then faded. Ruari's shadow-long, lean, and reinforced by his longer, leaner staff-fell between them.
"It's no use," Akashia repeated. "I cannot heal it, and it begins to suffer. Help me?"
There was no mistaking the question in her voice, or the need. Pavek thought he understood. Templar healers could kill without hesitation either on the battlefield or, afterward, among the wounded. A druid, whose powers did not flow from a sorcerer-king, might feel differently. Ruari seemed to have a sufficiently cruel temperament to enjoy what others might call mercy.
But Ruari laid down his staff. He sat opposite Akashia, carefully arranging his knee with his hands as he did. The joint was functional, but obviously sore and delicate. For a moment Pavek felt sorry for the troublesome half-wit whose life he'd saved, then everything was lost in astonishment. They pressed their pains together above the kank's head.
With her eyes tightly closed, Akashia began a droning, wordless chant The complex rhythms passed through her swaying body to Ruari, who began an eerie countermelody. Pavek's mind filled with thoughts of death and desperate flight, but his curiosity was stronger, and he remained where he was while the pair wove a spell to end the kank's suffering.
The insect had no eyelids to close over glazing pupils, no proper lips or nostrils through which a dying breath might pass; nonetheless, he knew the moment when its spirit departed. An inhumanly piercing wail seemed to emerge " directly out of Akashia's heart before she went suddenly silent and limp. Ruari held her wrists until he finished the chant with another ear-splitting wail.
So, Ruari was a druid, too.
Pavek hid his slack-jawed surprise behind a hand. His thoughts leapt to a comforting conclusion: if that sullen, vengeful scum could summon Athas's latent magic, then there was hope for a determined ex-templar who'd already learned the words and lacked only the music.
And he needed a full measure of hope later that day.
Within hours of settling himself among the remaining water jugs and empty racks on the soldier-kank's cargo platform, he looked across a landscape where there were no streets or walls.
No signs of life at all.
The gentle sloshing of the water jugs was a constant reminder of mortal vulnerability to the elements. He put his faith in the wheel and closed his eyes.
They traveled steadily, uneventfully, from sunrise to sunset for two days. On the third day, for reasons Pavek could not guess and the others would not explain, they made camp early. Their journey-bread was almost gone and more than half the jugs were empty. A man could survive out here beyond the city, if he was well-prepared and cautious. But not forever, not long enough to get back to Urik, even if he knew the way.
The only creatures that thrived in the parched badlands were the carrion-eating kes'trekels, always circling high overhead, vigilant for opportunity. Maybe the druids were lost. Maybe they'd realized there wasn't enough water to get them where they were going. Maybe Akashia and Ruari would hold their hands over him as he slept, and he'd never wake up again.
He resisted sleep until the moons, Ral and Guthay, were both above the eastern horizon and his companions were snoring softly. Then, remembering that the kank had not suffered, he let his eyes close. He wandered alone through a dreamless sleep and was still alive when morning came. The druids were alive, too, though their expressions were as bleak as the land around them.
As he'd done on the other mornings, he helped Yohan secure the dwindling number of full jugs onto the cargo harness. Out of sight and earshot, on the far side of the huge soldier-kank, he asked the dwarf where they were going and when they'd get there. The dwarf answered: Quraite, and added nothing more. In frustration and rising fear, he asked Akashia the same question and got no answer at all, though Ruari, typically, had snarled an ominous: "You'll see when you get there, templar. If you get there. If the Fist of the Sun doesn't squeeze the life out of you first.''
They'd left the badlands for something worse: a natural pavement of dazzling white that extended from the claws of their kanks to every horizon. The plain was featureless, except for glittering powder swirls, fueled by the sun and darting through the utterly still air. The spirals collapsed without a sound or warning, as suddenly they'd appeared.
One passed close, spattering Pavek's face with sharp-edged grains. His tongue touched his cracked lips and tasted salt.
Yohan and the druids covered their faces with thong-tied chitin shields. Each shield had a narrow slit over the eyes to reduce the glare and a chin-length veil that blocked some of the stinging dust. Pavek assumed the otherwise careful druids would have packed an extra shield somewhere, but Ruari insisted that there were none to spare. Neither Yohan nor Akashia corrected him. So he raked his hair forward and pulled his shirt up over his head.
Heat wrapped itself around him. Even the kes'trekels shunned this place: the Fist of the Sun. Precious moisture leached through every pore of his itching skin. He thought he might die and feared the druids would abandon him here with the soldier-kank, whose flesh was inedible, and a few jugs of water. All water would buy him was a few days of ever-increasing agony before he died.
When the air cooled, he thought that he had died, but it was only the sun setting.
They watered the kanks, ate the last of the journey-bread, and filled the waterskins that Akashia, Ruari, and Yohan carried with them on their smaller kanks, leaving the last water-jug half-empty. Then, as the first bright stars appeared in the lavender twilight, they remounted and continued their trek. Pavek didn't need to ask why they hadn't made camp on the salt plain: either they escaped the Fist of the Sun before it rose again, or they died. He cradled the last water-jug in his lap, listening to the precious liquid slap against the clay, a counter-point to the six-beat rhythm of the kanks' claws and the pounding of his heart.
Pale silver Ral and golden Guthay made their nightly journey through the stars. The faintest stars faded, the eastern horizon took on an ominous glow, and the crusty salt plain still stretched endlessly in all directions. He allowed himself two sips from the jug before pulling his shirt over his head.
He wished he'd stayed in Urik: King Hamanu's wrath could be no worse than the next few hours would be. He prayed that his mind died before his body. Then his mind emptied, and he waited to die.
"As ever and always-a sight to make your heart sing in your breast!"
Yohan's voice drifted through the emptiness. The heat was gone, and with it, the scrunch of salt beneath the kanks' claws. Had his final wish been granted? Had his parched spirit slipped through the cracks in the Sun's Fist? But, surely, the veteran dwarf would not have chosen to accompany him into the trackless afterlife.
Shrugging his shirt back to his shoulders, he shook the hair from his eyes, looked up, blinked and blinked again. Scrublands with their dusty grasses and waxy, thick-leaved shrubs had never looked so vibrant, and full of life, but the scrub paled before a swathe of rich, deep green directly ahead of them, as large, he guessed, as mighty Urik and crowned with clouds. Not the ugly, mottled harbingers of a Tyr-storm, but rounded hills as white as the salt plain behind them. Or was it behind them?