Together, they wandered back outside and settled in the dirt before their tower. While they dug through their bags in search of food, she told him, “A civilization is its past and its present, right? Not just where it is, but where it’s been.”
“I think that’s probably true of many things,” he murmured, not meaning to.
Tactfully, the girl chose to let that pass. “This is the old heartland--”
“This?” he interrupted, startled. “Here?”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s so empty.”
“I guess that’s kind of what I’m saying. This was the, the heart of the old kingdom of Tabbaqera, where the people who began the Empire came from.”
Around a piece of cheese, he said, “So their language is the first, end of story.”
She scrunched her face up, and he decided Xar had been wrong to call her a ferret. She had thin, delicate features, but given a less tragically unflattering haircut, she could be pretty. Of course, another pressing prerequisite was that she give a shit, and it didn’t appear that she did.
“It’s not that simple, is it?” she demanded, and a fire had kindled in her eyes. “What about Hawlia? Hawlia was the first place the old empire conquered, it’s been part of the country for like four thousand years.”
“Which is a long time, but it’s still in second place.”
She shook a cracker at him. “But Tabb wasn’t an empire at all until we conquered someone, were we?”
Arrested by the idea, he said, “Huh.”
Qanath had twisted about to peer back at the tower and didn’t seem to notice she had cracked open his brain. “Nizerh is Old Country too and there are still a few really old buildings left, mostly temples and shrines. Nothing like this, though. I wonder what it was?”
“It’s funny it’s not built with local materials.”
“You think?”
“All the bridges we’ve gone across were made of sandstone. This is marble.” He shrugged. “I guess probably even ultra-rich empires don’t use expensive stone to put a bridge across a tiny stream, maybe that tells us nothing.”
“It tells us this building was important enough to merit expensive stone.”
Havec nodded, agreeing with her logic. “You can’t read what it says?”
She scowled. “I could have studied languages, but I didn’t want to waste my tuition on anything that wasn’t practical.”
He contemplated asking after it before deciding he wasn’t ready to plunge his hand into the basket of eels that was her relationship with her mother. Stuffing his last bite of cracker in his mouth, he laid down on his back and slung an arm across his eyes. Behind him, he heard Qanath rise and move away, going to pee or poke about in their tower.
The next time his eyes opened, it was dusk. He groaned as he blinked at the purple sky, pricked here and there by early stars. He felt as if he were on fire, burning from the inside out, and although there was a Horrible Mystical Thing he didn’t understand riding inside him, he didn’t think it was Kebbal: he felt like he was falling ill.
He pushed himself into a sitting position, noting that accidentally sleeping the day away had had one positive result: his feet felt slightly less awful than they had six hours ago. It was while he was peering around in search of the girl that he saw movement on the road. The sight of riders sent a jolt of anxiety through him, and he was suddenly wide awake. Hunching his shoulders instinctively, he watched what appeared to be two men coming around that hook where the road edged around the hip of this hill from the south.
He almost exclaimed aloud: he could swear those were their friends from yesterday, Hair-On-End and Smooth Guy. Both of them had their eyes peeled as they rode, squinting intently into the grass alongside the narrow highway in search, Havec feared, of them. Dirty and humbly-dressed, they didn’t see him sitting in the dirt amongst yellow grasses, not in the uncertain light of dusk. He kept his eyes on them until they vanished into the distance to be sure.
Only when they were gone did he let out a deep, slow breath. He had been sure, when they met those guys the day before, that they weren’t a threat, not in any straightforward sense. It was true he hadn’t learned much in the way of conventional knowledge in the last six years, but that didn’t mean he’d learned nothing. While Qanath went off to university to study civilization, he retreated to the animal world. Reflex, instinct, the honing of the senses. He would stand by his assessment that those guys were mostly alright.
He scratched at his scalp as he wondered what that told him. There had been a few odd moments in the conversation, hiccups where normal things should have been said and weren’t, but it was the very lack of awkwardness that made it strange. If they had been unnerved by the holes in her story, it would have felt natural; if they had been nervous, he would have stood up and revealed his presence, come what may. Instead, they had been guarded and polite, as if being lied to by a chance-met stranger on the road were nothing worth mentioning. As if they, too, had secrets and judged it bad form to pry at others’ lies.
He couldn’t think what to make of finding the fellows following them. Perhaps it had nothing to do with them and he was just being paranoid; he’d wondered at the time what they were doing out here and never come up with an answer. As he rose and went to wake the girl and have some supper, he decided not to tell her. Not given how frightened she’d been of those guys back before they had any reason to be.
Creatures of Myth and Legend
They spent the whole of a second day at the marble tower, dozing in the shade. Havec had a horrible sunburn thanks to their accidental nap; Qanath had nodded off within the tower, but he’d slept sprawled outside in the full light of the afternoon. Suffice it to say, his pale skin hadn’t appreciated it. The sunburn-fever made him tetchy and even more churlish than usual, but he napped most of the day, so she wasn’t really bothered by it.
The only real contretemps they had was over water; both of them were thirsty and Havec in particular was dehydrated. Qanath proposed to backtrack a bit to the last stream they’d crossed and refill their one canteen. Havec had no problem with the idea but insisted on accompanying her. When she told him he should stay out of the sun, he hissed. Too weary and thirsty to attempt to follow his hopscotch thought process, she let him come along.
He was still miserable the next day, with brilliant stripes of scarlet down his nose, across the center of his brow, above the bones on either cheek. It looked agonizing, but Qanath didn’t argue when he suggested they move on. They set off north again along their lonely stretch of road, and while they walked, she wondered how exactly she meant to achieve her goals. She had been apprenticed to the last Avatethura Master, and now here she was, companion to his heir. Who, whatever protests he might make, very clearly had no problem with her presence.
How was that helping her, though? He had thawed toward her on a personal level but hadn’t changed his position on giving her what she wanted. He could teach her if he chose to; she’d watched him charge into battle half-dressed and half-asleep, outnumbered three to one, and at the end he’d stood there looking startled. Like it should have been more difficult.
She wouldn’t argue against his homecoming. He had a life held in abeyance, questions that needed to be asked and a score to settle. He carried inside him the spirit of primal vengeance, and only a total fool would set herself in its path. But if they walked back into his little kingdom to the cheers of a grateful populace and they handed him the throne, it left her in an odd position. In a children’s tale, they would fall in love along the course of their journey and get married and live happily ever after. If she was looking to get crowned the Queen of Bupkis, though, she was following the wrong man.
They had been walking for several hours when they entered a hillier area. The bones of the planet were frequently exposed along jagged cliff-faces where the land cut was by deep clefts. Where there was soil, the trees grew densely, pressing close to the road. The road itself twisted constantly, twining through the hills as best it could. It felt as if they had wandered into a secret world, all those distant horizons shrunk claustrophobically close.
Only maybe half an hour after they entered this area, what had perhaps been inevitable occurred. Lost in the tiny purple wildflowers climbing the nearly-sheer banks on either side of the road, Qanath didn’t note the sound of hooves. Havec took her sleeve, looking urgent.
His nerves infected her as she understood what was happening. Her companion had already come to a decision and set off trotting down the road with a meaningful nod. Grimacing, she grabbed the straps of her pack and took off after him. At first, she thought they were running without a plan, but then she noticed the percussion of moving water coming from ahead.
The hoof beats were practically upon them, maybe only a single bend behind, when they finally came around a curve in the road to find a steep-sided gulch. About eight or ten feet deep, a stream bounded furiously between its lips, and the road crossed it over a short span of bridge. Dragging Qanath behind him, Havec made for the eastern balustrade. The stone face of the stream bank was reassuringly solid and knobby with handholds, but slick with condensation and covered in a sheet of lichen as smooth and seamless as cloth.
He went over first, but she was only a step behind, moving fast and jittery with nerves. The instant she set her feet on the wet rocks, she slipped. It was sudden, unexpected, and by the time she knew she was falling, she had already landed spread-eagled on her belly on the rocks. As she fell, she kicked Havec in the shins and he fell too, weight slamming onto her. In a pile, the two of them slithered down the rock face, steep enough they were still practically standing up. They didn’t have far to fall, and a moment later, they slid to a stop.
Havec pushed himself off her the second they stopped moving, but took hold of her waist, pulling her up and then steering her back upstream. Qanath was too shocked to protest and in too much pain. She tripped, and one of her feet went into the water, but he didn’t let her fall. Once she was under the bridge, he released her. She sat down at once, hunched around her middle, arms crossed loosely across her chest. She was shaking, crying silently, and absolutely did not care she had an audience.
Her companion ducked beneath the shelter of the bridge right behind her, crouching in the stream’s verge with the low ceiling only just clearing his head. His face was rigid with tension, and he pulled her left arm away from her chest, palpating cautiously along her upper and lower arm as if searching for something. He had passed on to her bloody right hand by the time the riders arrived.
