Ariah (36 page)

“
I know.”

“
You remember what I said.” Tamir’s voice had a coldness in it. I glanced over my shoulder, and I read him. I have a peculiar way of doing it—given it’s so steeped in red war magic—that eliminates most of the expected burn. I think it’s a matter of drawing the other person into me rather than invading their minds with mine. I drew him in and felt the utter disdain in which he held me. I felt nothing that suggested he realized I was there with him, that I was a shaper and using my gifts. There was a deep, prickly fear eating at him, a thing that cast the world in shadows and danger. I blinked and turned away.

“
Ariah?” Shayat frowned at me.

“
Yes?”

“
Answer my question!”

“
What question?” Beside me, Sorcha laughed.

“
Professor, honestly, you’d think you’d listen. This is not an easy trip,” Shayat said. She pulled the pan off the fire and cut an acidic glance my way. “The drain, professor. Do you know about the drain?”

“
I don’t.” I looked over at Sorcha. He sat stretched out, languid. He smelled of Bardondour herb. He shrugged.

Shayat sighed again. “There is no magic in the badlands. None at all. It is…unpleasant to be in a place so lacking in magic,” she said.

“
It’s just land,” Sorcha said.

“
You’ll see what I mean. Take it slow, and stay careful. The drain eats at you and makes you careless. There are things out here—rahksa, the brambles. Bandits are out there. I know the route well, but past Bardondour it becomes dangerous. So, you have to know that going forward. It’s dangerous, and there is the drain, and you need to know that going in.” She glanced over at the pipe I held in my hands. “You may want to stop smoking that until we’re out of the badlands. Best to keep your wits about you.”

“
If what you’re saying about the drain is true,” Sorcha said, “and I believe that it is, it sounds right awful. Best to have something on hand to dull it down, eh?”

I felt, rather than saw, the way Tamir stiffened. He let out a noise, which was half growl and half laugh, and slipped into his tent. “Shayat,” I said quietly. “Can I ask you something?”

“
It better be about the trip, Ariah.”

“
It is, I think. Or might have been once.” She gave me an exasperated, irritated look. I stood up and walked to the ledge, far away from Tamir’s tent. I waved at her until she came over, and Sorcha followed quickly on her heels. I stood staring out at the empty badlands while they walked over. It was strange to me that a place so empty, so open, could hold a thousand dangers. I felt with the openness of the land I should be able to see them coming. I am a man prone to such false senses of security. Sorcha appeared on one side of me, and Shayat on the other. I looked over my shoulder at the mouth of Tamir’s tent. The tent swayed slightly with his movements within. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Shayat, you know I have the gift.”

“
Yes, I do.” She cast a wary look at Sorcha.

“
For fuck’s sake, I know he’s a shaper. I live with him. He reads me all the damn time.”

“
Shayat, Tamir…he seems to have…”

She frowned at me. “You read my cartographer.”

“…
some, uh, well…Tamir has an apprehensiveness about the journey, I think. And I was wondering what is out there that is bringing that on?”

She was cold and haughty. She gave me the look a Semadran gives a shaper who has stepped out of bounds: a look of disgust, of impatience, of carefully tended walls. “If it was any business of yours, professor, you wouldn’t have had to eavesdrop for it,” she said.

She turned and started back towards camp, but I caught her by the elbow. Her face swung towards mine, surprised. There was a heavy pause, one where I tried to decide whether to let her go and she tried to decide whether to stay. “Shayat, I only ask so I don’t stumble into something awful.”

She chewed her lip. She cast a quick look at Sorcha. I shoved him back towards the camp. He grumbled but left us there alone. She watched him walk back to the fire. “Did you know all crews that go through the badlands have a shaper? There’s a reason for it. Ariah, can you count?”

“
Peripheral counting?”

She nodded.

“
I…I don’t know. I haven’t trained for it. Bandits?”

“
And rahksa. Tamir lost an eye to rahksa. He was training with a cartographer whose crew lost their shaper at the border and pressed on anyway. Half the crew died, and he was left half-blind. He refused to come with me until I told him you were a shaper. He won’t cross the badlands without one.”

“
You…Shayat, you didn’t.”

She looked at me, and her face was absolutely open and perfectly calm. “You need a route, I need him to take you, and he needs a shaper.”

I hid my face in my hands. “He does not trust me.”

“
Well, no. You’re a shaper. Can you count?”

“
I suppose we’ll find out together.”

I tried to brush past her, but she grabbed my arm. She pulled me towards her, pulled me close. She had in her an inescapable authority. “You can’t count if you’re high. In the badlands, we’re never safe. Not when we’re on the camels and not when we’re camped. Be Semadran just for a little while.”

“
I will feel everything.”

“
You have been trained.”

I sighed. I looked out at the badlands. “All right. You have my word.”

I made a move to leave, but she held me in place. Her free hand drifted to my other arm. She caught my eye and smiled. “I trust you.”

“
You trust me? Trust me to do what?”

“
I trust you not to get us killed.” She grinned. “Don’t crack under the pressure, professor.”

* * *

We picked our way through the badlands very slowly. The tension rattled the air and shattered any sense of direction I might have had. I have no clear memory of what the badlands looked like, just what they felt like to me. There was the drain: an appalling emptiness, a vicious, needling lack. It sunk into my bones and crouched there, eating me from the inside. The drain makes magic unstable. With no ambient magic to draw from, something goes wrong with our minds. The control I’d worked so hard to develop in Alamadour leeched away into the mundane sands.

What I remember most is Tamir. He was a raw nerve; every sound, every shadow, opened old wounds. He rode ahead of us, slow, careful, and terrified. His one good eye searched the landscape for a path, and it saw death at every turn. I lived inside his anxiety, drinking it in, drowning in it. I could not see past it. I could not shake the feeling that if I could count—and I wasn’t sure I could—that I was useless, as trapped as I was in Tamir’s mind. We traveled in the high summer heat. We forced the camels onward through the wretched noon sun. Sorcha and I were grateful for the robes and head scarves, but that kind of heat claws at you, crawls into your lungs and burns you from the inside. Travel would have been easier on us and the camels at dawn or twilight or during the night, but Tamir refused to travel when he could not see the horizon. I remember the taste of my sweat, the way the salt of it never left my mouth, and how it tainted every precious sip of water. I remember the sound of my teeth grinding in rhythm with Tamir’s. I do not remember much else.

Sorcha kept a close watch on me in the badlands. He took to charming me to bring me back to myself enough to eat. He slept curled around me, protective, like a living shell of trust and empathy. He gave me some respite from the horrors lurking out there in the dead lands beyond the tent.

There were times Sorcha pulled me out of the fog of Tamir’s moods, and I found Shayat studying me from across the campfire. Tamir himself did not understand what was going on. He, I think, thought me childish and weak. When he looked at me, there was no sympathy or concern, no hint that he realized we were in this together, just disdain. And anger. There was anger in him directed to me, and I can’t say for sure why I sparked it, but I suspect he saw me struggle and thought it meant I had fallen prey to the heat and stress of travel.

There was a day when Tamir saw something in the rocks that sent him reeling. He was a nest of old fears and new worries. Something to the east of us, I think, but I can’t tell you what it was that touched him off. He pushed us hard that day; we covered a lot of ground, and he kept us going until after dusk, driven forward until he felt safe enough to stop. He spoke only once, to tell Shayat he was adjusting the route. Sorcha says the only reason he knew Tamir was in a state was because I was crumbling. I rode the camel hunched over, doubled up. The sun was too bright, the air too thick. For hours I felt like I could not catch my breath. I was constantly on the verge of that same panic that had plagued me in the early days of my training with Vathorem. That night, I smoked.

Tamir ate and retreated to his tent. Shayat lingered with Sorcha and I, vaguely curious at first, and then with a honed and pointed attention when Sorcha brought out the pipe. “What are you doing?” she hissed.

“
I need it.” She moved to grab the pipe from me; I darted away. “Without it I will be useless tomorrow. He wouldn’t have stopped if he wasn’t sure we were safe here. He doesn’t trust me to count, Shayat. I won’t be able to tomorrow without it.”

My frankness embarrassed her. She opened her mouth and closed it again. She peered at Tamir’s tent. “The shaper in my crew does not smoke,” she said quietly.

“
Not in front of you,” I said. Sorcha laughed.

“
What?”

“
Shayat, if it’s not herb, then it’s alcohol. If it’s not drink, it’s sex. Or rahna. Or violence. We have to cope. It’s overwhelming. It’s a secret of the gift: you use what you can to take your life back sometimes. I am telling you I am stretched thin. I am telling you he has run me ragged. I will be no use tomorrow without tonight to myself.”

She stared at me open-mouthed for a second. She blinked. She was deeply, deeply unsettled. I felt it crawling beneath her skin, this revulsion, this fundamental wince at all the taboos I’d just flouted. All the things I’d just admitted. “Ariah,” she said finally, “you are careless with honesty.”

I laughed. “Well, yes. I am. I suppose that’s true.”

And she laughed. Her hand flew to her face as if to trap the laugh before it snuck out into the night. The quality of the air changed. I felt her eyes slide over the planes of my face; I felt a knot form between us. Emboldened by the careless honesty I’d already indulged in, I grinned and I caught her eye. Sorcha placed the pipe in my hand, kissed me on the cheek, and took his leave. Shayat tried and failed to look away from me. I felt…I believe in that moment I felt something like a pure shaper’s instinct, a desire and a will to draw her to me. A confidence that I could. It scared me. I broke the eye contact and lit the pipe.

She watched me draw on the pipe. Smoke curled up and blended with the sparks from the campfire. Shayat sat down next to me. “Can I ask you something personal?”

I nodded. I could feel her looking at me.

“
The City, Vilahna. Are you running from the gift?”

Now, there are times when a shock knocks the gift back, just like there are times where a shock forces the gift into play. Her question was so direct, so incredibly personal, that I lost the thread of everyone else’s moods. Suddenly I was very much alone in my own mind. I looked over at her, eyebrows raised. “I don’t know,” I said.

“
You don’t know?” She was skeptical. She looked at me like I was leading her into a trap.

“
I don’t. Yes? Well, no, I didn’t…the City was different. And Vilahna, it was for training, so no? I wasn’t running from it, not in that sense, I…” I laughed. I felt my face burn, and I laughed again. “I can’t believe you asked that.”

“
Well, you don’t have to answer.”

“
I want to, though. The way you ask makes me want to answer.” I felt that knot again, and it scared me. I didn’t know what it meant, what it entailed, if I knew something to which she had not yet admitted and might never. I smoked the pipe. I smoked until I was well and truly stoned; I smoked the magic into a deep slumber so I would not be able to eavesdrop. “It’s late,” I said. “We should sleep.”