Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran

“They’re on the move, but keeping their distance. Small bands of not more than half a dozen apiece. They’re afraid of us now.”

“Just as well,” Creed muttered. He yawned. He thought perhaps the lack of water bothered him less than the others-in the Keutta quarries there had never been a lot to go round. “Shall we wake them?” The others looked corpselike in their exhausted sleep, save that every now and again a flicker of emerald light would peep from under Gallico’s eyelids and the pupils within could be seen moving under the skin.

“Give them a minute yet.”

“Would you have killed him?”

“Who? Bartolomew?” Rol smiled unpleasantly. “I hadn’t thought of it. It was something to say.”

Creed studied his face. It was still that of the young, bearded first mate of the Cormorant, but something in the eyes had become indefinably colder. He looked away. “They will desert you at the first opportunity. Perhaps not Jude Mochran, but the other two, certainly.”

“And you, Elias Creed, convict, pirate, what about you?”

“I will follow you. You are going to the place I want to see above all others. And I have nothing but life to lose.” He met the cold eyes squarely. Rol nodded.

“You’re like me, then. All right, let’s get them up. We need a lot of miles under our belt ere the dawn.”

The men ate some fish and drank their meager water ration without speaking, though they all watched Cortishane as though he were some breed of dangerous animal that was padding about in their midst. Gallico seemed in much better condition. He refused their support with one of his old grins, and limped along under his own power. They made much better time as a result. Creed watched the sky and found Gabriel’s Fist, then tracked half left until he found the Compass-Star. They followed it north like pilgrims set upon some crackbrained quest. No one spoke, and Cortishane walked at their rear as silently as a ghost, his strange eyes gleaming as they caught the light of the rising moon.

“Have you ever traversed these Flats before?” Creed asked the halftroll.

“Not all the way. I have never been to their heart-I doubt few men have. But I have been some distance in from both north and south.”

“Why-why would anyone want to come here? It makes the Keutta quarries look like a garden.”

“The Bionari have chased me in here from time to time, or rather I led them. It is a good place to lose people, if you can make good speed and are well provided with water. Not everyone has a mariner’s knack for sniffing out the compass points, or for following the stars.”

The party walked all night. By the end of that time Gallico was flagging and they had to take turns supporting him again. Rol called a halt just before dawn and they collapsed to the ground as if their legs had been cut from under them.

“I need to sleep,” he said quietly to Creed. “Take a watch, will you?”

But Creed was exhausted also. He nodded in and out of sleep like a fever victim, finally succumbing a little before daylight. He was woken some time later when the sun leaped up above the flat eastern horizon and smote his forehead, levering open his crusted eyes and dazzling his fuddled mind. He cursed himself, lurched upright like a stiff-limbed marionette.

“Rol, Gallico,” he croaked.

They came awake slowly, fighting their way out of sleep.

“They’ve gone. They took the water.”

The waterskins had been tied to Cortishane’s wrist. The lashings had been cut free in the dark. The hard earth held no sign except a few scuffed bootmarks.

“Mochran too?” Rol asked, blinking stupidly.

“All of them. They took the water.”

The trio stood up and scanned every direction under the white glare of the morning, squinting. There was no sign of their erstwhile comrades.

“They’ll have taken off for the south,” Rol said wearily.

“Then they’re fools-we’re over halfway now. How do they think they’ll get past the Ur-men?”

“Perhaps they think them cowed. Perhaps they fear me more. I am sorry about Jude Mochran. He was a good man. Gods of heaven, I slept like the dead. I felt nothing.”

“No use crying over it,” Gallico said. “They have taken their chance, now so must we. We’ll not last another two days without water. We must get off the Flats by nightfall.”

They stood, momentarily paralyzed. It would be very easy to lie back down on the ground and bury their heads in the dark of their arms. “Come on, then,” Rol said at last.

Creed had marked out their course by the stars the night before with an arrow of flaked earth. They set off now three abreast. In the scant minutes before the heat haze leaped up to dance on the lip of the sky, he thought he saw the blue shade of high land to their front. Then it was just the tantalizing mirage of nonexistent water-shimmer again, the silence of the blasted waste about them. Not a breeze stirred; the very air seemed cowed by the glare of the sun.

They plodded on doggedly all that day, their throats parched into uselessness. Creed staggered like a drunk man, walking at length with his eyes screwed shut against the awful glare, one hand on Gallico’s forearm. They did not halt or rest and seemed to have agreed by some form of osmosis that they would walk till they dropped.

And Creed did drop. It felt like flying, like being whirled around in the heat of an oven. He dimly felt his face hit the earth and knew there was grit in his teeth, but was completely detached from the beginnings of his own death. When he opened his eyes he could see nothing but whiteness. A voice said Drink, and he felt himself raised up. His lips touched hot flesh, but it was wet and dripping also and he sucked on it without conscious volition. The liquid he ingested was not water, but it allowed his tongue to move against his teeth again. There was something else in that coppery fluid. It seeped into him like a draft of good brandy, but was cool as a fountain on a summer afternoon. The white blindness receded and the stabbing pains in his head faded away. He saw Cortishane leaning over him. He was being cradled like a baby. Cortishane’s forearm was dripping blood, and Creed knew now what the taste was. His gorge rose feebly but he had not even the strength to retch.

“What in God’s name-”

“Don’t speak. Gallico will carry you for a while. It’s not long now, Elias.”

He was lifted up onto the halftroll’s lacerated shoulder and had not the will to protest. It was like perching upon a moving tower. He could see more clearly than before-he felt as though Cortishane’s blood had chilled the bubbling heat of his arteries and veins, allowing his mind to cool, to work again.

Their shadows, attenuated and fantastic-looking, streamed out to their right as the sun began descending toward the mountains. The capering haze before them thinned out with the wearing on of the day, and Creed, nodding stupidly, saw something that had not been there before. A different color inserted between the broiling white of the Flats and the deepening sky above them. He stared at it for long minutes while bobbing up and down on the halftroll’s shoulder.

“Land ho,” he rasped at last, pointing with one corded arm. “Two leagues maybe. Dear God, I see-I see trees.”

“I wish you joy of the sight, my friend,” Gallico rumbled with something approaching humor. “Where there are trees there is water. We will make it yet.”

They stumbled off the Gorthor Flats as it came on to dusk. The white dry-packed earth ended in frozen breakers of stone and piled dirt, and the land rose beyond it with a browner hue, green in places. There were patches of sharp-toothed grass, stunted acacia and live oak, juniper bushes. They staggered uphill like creatures unable to halt in their tracks, this new country dipping and rising under their feet. Stone began to thrust up through the scanty earth, crumbling in avenues and tumbled hillocks. They found flowering things at the base of the rocks, and then heard the liquid rill of running water, sweeter than any music. A bright ribbon of water gliding and flashing between banks of gray stone. They fell to their knees before it, and drank on all fours like beasts.