Where were the others? Had they set out knowing a storm was on the way? Even in this area a storm this severe gave some warning. . . .
In this area? Where was she? There was nothing to tell her—nothing but sand and wind roar and darkness. And . . . who were they? She could not remember—she would not have set out alone—even a guided party had to take care—in the last few years the storms had grown more violent and less predictable—parties rarely went mounted any more—she—remembered—
Perhaps she slept; perhaps she fainted. But there were hands upon her—hands? Had her party found her again? She tried to struggle, or to cooperate. The hands helped her up, held her up, from her wind-battered, sand-imprisoned crouch. The wind still shouted, and she could see nothing; but the hands arranged the veil over her face and she could breathe a little more easily, and this gave her strength. When the hands lifted her so that one of her arms could be pulled around a set of invisible shoulders, and one of the hands gripped her round her waist, she could walk, staggering, led by her rescuer.
For some time she concentrated on breathing, on breathing and keeping her feet under her, tasks requiring her full attention. But her arm, held round the shoulders, began to ache; and the ache began to penetrate her brain, and her brain began to remember that it didn’t usually have to occupy itself with negotiating breathing and walking. . . .
It was still dark, and the wind still howled, and there was still sand in the heaving air, but it pattered against her now, it no longer dragged at and cut her. She thought, The storm is still going on all round us, but it is not reaching us somehow. She had an absurd image that they—her unknown rescuer and herself—were walking in a tiny rolling cup of sand that was always shallow to their feet just a footstep’s distance before and behind them, with a close-fitting lid of almost quiet, almost sandless air tucked over them.
When the hand clutching her wrist let go, she grabbed the shoulder and missed, for her hand had gone numb; but the hand round her waist held her. She steadied herself, and the second hand let go, but only long enough to find her hand, and hold it firmly—As if I might run off into the sandstorm again, she thought, distantly amused. She looked toward the hand, the shoulders—and now she could see a human outline, but the face was turned away from her, the free hand groping for something in front of it.
She blinked, trying to understand where the light to see came from. She slowly worked out that the hand was more visible than the rest of the body it was attached to; and she had just realised that they seemed to be standing in front of a huge, rough, slightly glowing—wall? Cliff? For it seemed to loom over them; she guessed at something like a ledge or half-roof high above them—when the fingers stiffened and the hand shook itself up in what seemed like a gesture of command—and the wall before them became a door, and folded back into itself. Light fell out, and pooled in the sand at their feet, outlining tiny pits and hummocks in shadows.
“Quickly,” said a voice. “I am almost as tired as you, and Geljdreth does not like to be cheated of his victims.”
She just managed to comprehend that the words were for her, and she stepped through the door unaided. The hand that was holding hers loosed her, the figure followed her, and this time she heard another word, half-shouted, and she turned in time to see the same stiff-fingered jerk of the hand that had appeared to open the door: it slammed shut on a gust of sand like a sword-stroke. The furious sand slashed into her legs and she stumbled and cried out: the hands saved her again, catching her above the elbows. She put her hands out unthinkingly, and felt collarbones under her hands, and warm breath on her wrists.
“Forgive me,” she said, and the absurdity of it caught at her, but she was afraid to laugh, as if once she started, she might not be able to stop.
“Forgive?” said the figure. “It is I who must ask you to forgive me. I should have seen you before; I am a Watcher, and this is my place, and Kalarsham is evil-tempered lately and lets Geljdreth do as he likes. But it was as if you were suddenly there, from nowhere. Rather like this storm. A storm like this usually gives warning, even here.”
She remembered her first thought when she woke up—if indeed any of this was waking—Even in this area a storm this severe gave some warning. “Where—where am I?” she said.
The figure had pulled the veiling down from its face, and pushed the hood back from its head. He was clean-shaven, dark-skinned, almost mahogany in the yellow light of the stony room where they stood, black-haired; she could not see if his eyes were brown or black. “Where did you come from?” he said, not as if he were ignoring her question but as if it had been rhetorical and required no answer. “You must have set out from Chinilar, what, three or four weeks ago? And then come on from Thaar? What I don’t understand is what you were doing alone. You had lost whatever kit and company you came with before I found you—I am sorry—but there wasn’t even a pack animal with you. I may have been careless”—his voice sounded strained, as if he were not used to finding himself careless—“but I would have noticed, even if it had been too late.”
She shook her head. “Chinilar?” she said.
He looked at her as if playing over in his mind what she had last said. He spoke gently. “This is the station of the fourth Watcher, the Citadel of the Meeting of the Sands, and I am he.”
“The fourth—Watcher?” she said.
“There are eleven of us,” he said, still gently. “We watch over the eleven Sandpales where the blood of the head of Maur sank into the earth after Aerin and Tor threw the evil thing out of the City and it burnt the forests and rivers of the Old Damar to the Great Desert in the rage of its thwarting. Much of the desert is quiet—as much as any desert is quiet—but Tor, the Just and Powerful, set up our eleven stations where the desert is not quiet. The first is named the Citadel of the Raising of the Sands, and the second is the Citadel of the Parting of the Sands, and the third is the Citadel of the Breathing of the Sands. . . . The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Watchers are often called upon, for our Pales lie near the fastest way through the Great Desert, from Rawalthifan in the West to the plain that lies before the Queen’s City itself. But I—I have never Watched so badly before. Where did you come from?” he said again, and now she heard the frustration and distress in his voice. “Where do you come from, as if the storm itself had brought you?”
Faintly she replied: “I come from Roanshire, one of the south counties of the Homeland; I live in a town called Farbellow about fifteen miles southwest of Mauncester. We live above my father’s furniture shop. And I still do not know where I am.”
He answered: “I have never heard of Roanshire, or the Homeland, or Mauncester. The storm brought you far indeed. This is the land called Damar, and you stand at the fourth Sandpale at the edge of the Great Desert we call Kalarsham.”
And then there was a terrible light in her eyes like the sun bursting, and when she put her hands up to protect her face there was a hand on her shoulder, shaking her, and a voice, a familiar voice, saying, “Hetta, Hetta, wake up, are you ill?” But the voice sounded strange, despite its familiarity, as if speaking a language she used to know but had nearly forgotten. But she heard anxiety in the voice, and fear, and she swam towards that fear, from whatever far place she was in, for she knew the fear, it was hers, and her burden to protect those who shared it. Before she fully remembered the fear or the life that went with it, she heard another voice, an angry voice, and it growled: “Get the lazy lie-abed on her feet or it won’t be a hand on her shoulder she next feels”—it was her father’s voice.