Chapter 25: Fiend of the Desert

What would have been a two-day walk for Wirrin was closer to a five-day meander as she travelled with the shyolg clan called Vaulgat. The elephants didn’t like the loose sand of the proper desert and so the route they took wound between patches of firmer ground where the odd tufts of grass and trees grew.

They stopped often to feed and water the animals and people, and stopped early to set up firm bedding so that the elephants didn’t sink into the sand as they slept. Most of the clan took the opportunity of these early stops to practice with swords and bows, refreshing themselves for what seemed like an inevitable fight with the Church.

Wirrin joined in the sword sparring. She’d learned how to fight with the shyolg’s forward-curved swords when she was last in the desert, and she preferred them to the thin swords favoured by the Church and, therefore, most of Nesalan.

She’d refused the gift of a sword last time she was in the desert because it would draw too much attention. Most of the swords were at least the length of Wirrin’s arm and they were much bigger than any swords people outside the desert might carry. But when Taug suggested she take a spare on the third day into the sand, she agreed.

Most of Wirrin’s training and fighting experience thus far had been with her fists or with knives, which were favoured in Ettovica where it was still extremely difficult for the citizens to arm themselves.

Though she still carried Leran’s small sword, she had no more intention to use it than she ever had.

Wirrin found that she remembered enough of her training from five years ago that she wasn’t completely useless with the sosun pattah. But even the teenagers were reliably beating her by the late morning of the fourth day, when they spotted the Church’s camp out in the sand.

The Church’s camp consisted of only two tents, but Wirrin could feel eight people moving around in the soft sand. When they spotted the camp, two mages in their heavy, grey robes were standing, waiting, between them and the tents.

Under the camp, exactly between the two tents, was a statue.

Ulvaer’s statue was deeper than Naertral’s had been, easily thirty metres deep in the soft sand, resting on the harder sand and soil of the water table. It would be much easier to lift, Wirrin thought, despite its size, since it was buried in sand rather than mud and dirt.

‘If you alert the Church, it will make things much more difficult,’ Mkaer rumbled.

‘What else am I supposed to do?’ Wirrin thought.

‘I am simply stating the obvious.’

‘Try stating something helpful, Mountain,’ Naertral burbled.

‘The sand may be soft to walk on, but it could well become a flurry of knives at high enough speed,’ Mkaer rumbled.

Wirrin snorted.

As Vaulgat and Wirrin approached the Church camp, the rest of its inhabitants wandered out of their tents to greet them. Wirrin wasn’t so surprised to see Ketla was one of the two non-mages, wearing a big cane hat to keep the sun off her face.

Saush called Vaulgat to stop a few hundred metres from the camp, and Osga approached with Wirrin. Herdok had been forbidden from coming in case he started a fight too soon.

‘We already told you to go around,’ a man with a solid gold symbol of a sun over swords told Osga the moment he reached speaking distance.

‘I see you haven’t taken my advice, Ketla,’ Wirrin said.

‘You know, if you weren’t so suspicious, I would be in Epatlok writing reports about how to convince people that staying in the Church was good for them,’ Ketla said.

‘Suspicious, me?’ Wirrin smiled.

‘First you go into the mountains with Heran’s three children,’ Ketla said. ‘You come back without them and the word is they died in an avalanche. Totally believable. If you hadn’t gotten that map for Heran in Esbolva, we would have gone back to ignoring you, you know?’

Wirrin chuckled. ‘That’s what I get for trying to have sex with an academic.’

‘You follow Heran’s cousins into the wetland, totally believable behaviour for you,’ Ketla continued. ‘But you’re already suspicious, so I had to wait around for you to get back. I kept telling Baras that you were being honest, you know? Just coming to spend the winter in the desert where it’s not so cold.’

‘And what makes you so sure I’m not doing just that?’ Wirrin smiled.

‘Did you know some old ruins recently disappeared from the Esbolva wetland?’ Ketla asked.

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‘Hubris, is it?’ Wirrin shrugged. ‘Here I thought I was hiding it from more of Heran’s kin.’

‘The problem is just how you hid it,’ Ketla said.

‘Vekt eshaug olgtok,’ Herdok shouted from the camp.

Wirrin snorted. She leaned over to Osga. ‘Do you want to talk to him, perhaps?’

Osga turned on her heel and walked back to where Herdok was standing at the front of the assembled shyolg.

‘What did he say?’ the man asked, frowning. He looked around at the assembled mages: two War mages, including Baras, two Light mages, one Work mage, and one Growth mage. He was met with a round of shrugs.

‘This is what I meant, Ketla,’ Wirrin said. ‘It’s the lack of respect that gets to people. You propose to be part of people’s lives, but you don’t know the languages they speak.’

‘What did he say, Wirrin?’ Ketla asked.

Wirrin smiled.

Ulvaer’s statue burst from the ground in a blast of hot sand and rancid water.

‘He said just kill them already.’

The Growth mage and one of the Light mages collapsed to the ground, writhing and groaning as poisoned water seeped through tiny cuts in their flesh. Behind the Work mage a perfect rectangle of sand, sharp corners and straight lines, had shielded him and the other Light mage from Ulvaer’s arrival.

Faster than Wirrin could see, Baras and the other War mage had grabbed up Ketla and the man and dashed them to the sides, out of the way of the eruption. The War mages both drew their thin swords as they put their charges down a good four hundred metres to either side of where they expected the fight to happen.

Wirrin felt the sand gather in front of her as a shower of arrows left the shyolg’s bows behind her. She pushed the sand back down and was honestly surprised when the Work mage and the second Light mage were skewered with arrows as the barrier failed to rise.

Both War mages lunged from their four hundred metre distance and Wirrin ducked into an awkward forward roll, narrowly avoiding being stabbed through both kidneys.

The simple followup was stymied by the first group of sword-wielding shyolg arriving to back Wirrin up. The War mages were too fast, and one woman was bleeding on the ground before Wirrin could do anything.

While surrounding the War mages was probably the best strategy, it meant Wirrin couldn’t blast them with sand for risk of hurting her allies. As the rest of the mages bled into the sand in front of her, an idea struck.

Though the work mage was quite dead already, he was included in the wave of sand that flung the dying mages toward the statue of Ulvaer. Wirrin sprinted in that direction and still didn’t have time to process what the statue looked like as the distraction worked and the War mages broke through the shyolg to chase her.

Not one of the dying mages reached the statue of Ulvaer. The War mages were too fast. All four were quite certainly dead when they hit the sand at the feet of the War mages, swords and knives stained with blood.

A torrent of sand and rancid water had the unexpected effect of carrying the War mages up into the air. Both landed almost immediately, cratering the soft desert with unreasonable weight.

Wirrin’s head was throbbing as sand blasted at the War mages from all sides. They were fast, but there was no escaping unscathed from traps they had created for themselves.

Wounds bled through tattered robes as the War mages seemed to simply appear several hundred metres away.

Those shyolg who had not abandoned their bows grasped the concept of the distraction, at least, and fired on Ketla and the man. The war mages were faster than the arrows and had their charges further to safety in the blink of an eye.

There was a moment of peace. No one moved. The only sound was water bubbling from under Ulvaer’s statue, where Wirrin had created a small spring. The War mages dripped blood onto the ground. A young man held pressure to the wounded woman’s sternum. Lights pulsed behind Wirrin’s eyes.

Fast as they were, the war mages couldn’t cross the kilometre they’d put between their charges and the shyolg archers before Wirrin could react. Sand blasted them toward Wirrin and a thin blade stabbed through her chest for her trouble.

Baras glared out from under his tattered hood. But he’d missed. The hilt of his sword was pressed against Wirrin under her right breast, The blade stabbed through her right lung, missing her heart and her spine.

‘I should have killed you sooner,’ Baras rasped.

Wirrin spat in his face. He was silent as his flesh boiled and his eyes melted out of his head. Wirrin grabbed him and, with a great deal of help from the damp sand, hurled him into the statue of Ulvaer.

The other War mage, busy fending off a hail of swords, his own sword protruding from the mouth of the young man who had been attempting first aid, failed to reach the statue in time.

Baras’s sword stayed in his hand as he hit the statue and the blood started to flow from his body.

The second War mage’s knife was too short for a manoeuvre that would have very much killed Wirrin if he’d done it with his sword. He stabbed from above Wirrin’s shoulder blade and into her left lung, knife-point leaving a good couple of centimetres to Wirrin’s heart.

His grip failed on the knife in Wirrin’s left lung as water seeped from the sand into the cuts on his legs. Wirrin just managed to make it to the statue as blood filled her lungs.

She wondered how much faith she had in Taug and Osga. But she couldn’t bring herself to worry about it. She had enough faith to ignore the blood in her lungs.

Ulvaer sat with crossed legs. Massive and corpulent. Rolls and folds rendered in perfect detail. The head of a hyena, mouth open somewhere between a laugh and a snarl, exquisite fur ready to rustle in the breeze.

The statue felt soft and warm under Wirrin’s hands as she collapsed onto it.

A voice like the rattling and thumping of vultures, like the yipping and cackling of hyenas, like the rasping of a sandstorm. ‘Oh, you certainly are hungry.’

And Wirrin was hungry. She was starving. It filled her lungs like blood, turned her guts in knots. She had never been so hungry in her life. Starving in the snow, in the mountains, she’d never been so hungry.

At first, it seemed there was nothing to eat. Nothing to satiate her rattling, cackling, rasping hunger. Except that there was fresh meat right here, wasn’t there? In Ulvaer’s lap, a fresh body already drained of blood.

Nothing had ever been so appetising.

It wasn’t the blood that filled Ulvaer with colour. It was the eating.

The dark skin of a desert local spread from the statues legs, up into the heaving stomach and pectoral fat that could just have well have been breasts as not, up into the gently rustling fur of the hyena’s head. Next came the spots and stripes until Wirrin could have reached up to pat the soft fur and grinning face of the statue.

Last were the colours, veins and arteries in all sorts of colours so painfully familiar traced their way across and through the statue. Wirrin was so certain that she had seen those colours before. But she was far too hungry to remember were.