The man had walked to the elven marketplace. For days and days, he had kept his distance. He had started to feel stronger, better able to control the impulses that had led him there so many other nights. For the first few evenings, after the time he had almost been seen, he had stayed at home, surrounded by family, and told himself that this was all he needed. All he wanted.
For several nights after that, he knew he had been wrong. He wanted what he wanted. It was wrong, he knew that too, but he couldn’t help the wanting. All he could do was not act upon the desire. That demanded strength of him, only strength. He was a strong person. He could do it. He could want, and deny himself, at the same time.
Having arrived at that realization, he had been better. For the next days and nights, the elf women and their human companions had barely entered his mind. When he did think of them, it was only to dismiss the idea of acting again. The acts he had committed, that he still wanted to commit, simply weren’t that important to him anymore. His family, that’s what was important. And to have one was to resist the other. If he gave in, returned to the bazaar and watched once again for elves and humans to go together into the dark recesses of the Hill District, then he might lose his family. If he kept his family, it would only be by losing his once-unstoppable lust to kill.
For three days and nights, he had believed himself cured. But then, he had chanced to see an elf female on the street, beautiful, tall and rangy, dressed in attire that showed off her curves and her long legs and her wild, unkempt hair, and he had looked at that face, a face that spoke of pure animal sensuality, and he had known he was not cured at all. He was as lost as he had ever been.
Since then, he had come to the marketplace each evening, before the day’s heat had entirely dissipated. This was when the elf females could show off what they had to offer, when night’s bitter cold had not yet forced them to wrap themselves from head to toe. This was the time of day when the bazaar became a marketplace of flesh as well as of goods.
On this night, a dry, chill wind tore through the alleyways, beating the market’s canopies like drums. The man watched as elf and half-elf women strutted and displayed, and males—human, elf, and other races as well—made their selections and went off with them.
His fingernails dug into his palms. His mouth was dry, his lips bruised from being chewed on. He wanted to act, to strike like a serpent of retribution. Of justice.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t dare. He had risked too much just coming back here. To fall back into that old pattern would invite disaster.
Back home, the other members of his family went about their evening’s pursuits. That’s where he belonged.
With one last look back at a particularly striking half-elf woman, he spun on his heel and stalked toward home.
The first night out, Aric thought the cold would surely kill him. In Nibenay, he had shelter at night. There were those early days, after his mother’s death, when he had been on his own, but even then he’d always managed to find some nook or hole to escape night’s full brunt. And since reaching adulthood, he’d had the shop, its forge heating it excessively by day but keeping the interior pleasant at night. On the long journey to Akrankhot, there had been campfires and the shelter of the argosies.
Out in the open desert, however, there was no shelter. The temperature started dropping as soon as the sun went down, and once the stored heat fled the desert sand and the nighttime winds howled, every step was agony. They had surreptitiously carried skins of water and their furs and leathers, the same things that had provided relative comfort on the road, from the argosy to a building near the edge of the city. Myrana and Sellis had their own things, carried with them since they had left their caravan. But even they had not tried to travel at night.
As soon as the sun went down, while the others gathered for the evening meal, Aric, Ruhm, and Amoni joined Myrana and Sellis and struck out into the desert. They didn’t know when Kadya might notice they were gone—possibly not until morning. Before that happened, they needed to cover as much distance as they could. Kadya might send a search party after them. It would not be a large one, as she wouldn’t want to spare the laborers. And since the assumption would be that a nighttime trek across the desert would surely kill them, the party would not look hard, or for long.
That was their hope, at any rate. Aric knew that Kadya’s mind was capricious, that she might decide on nothing more than a whim that there was no goal more important than finding them and destroying them, or else imprisoning them and taking them back to face Nibenay’s justice. For all he knew, her magic, or Tallik’s, might allow her to seek them out from the comfort of her own fireside.
So he trudged on, even though he was sure his blood would freeze in his veins. The bits of flesh exposed to the air, around his eyes so he could see where he was going, had gone numb, but not before giving him the feeling of having daggers driven into his brain. The fur over his nose and mouth had frozen where his exhalations had dampened it. His extremities screamed with pain, his limbs protested every effort demanded of them.
Once during the night he saw streamers of light in the sky that illuminated people he had once known: his mother, customers from her stall in the marketplace, children he had played with, even Rieve and her grandfather. They were huge, spread across the sky from horizon to horizon, and he was walking toward them. It wasn’t until Ruhm slapped him and shook him into consciousness that he realized he had been hallucinating.
He touched the scar in his eyebrow, but his hand and face were both numb, so he didn’t feel it. “Why did you hit me?”
Ruhm pointed toward the others, off in the distance, silhouetted against starlight on the top of a low ridge. “We’re over there. You were wandering off by yourself.”
Aric pointed toward the sky, but the streamers were gone, and so were the people. “I was … I was seeing things, I think. My mother was there. Rieve. Other people I’ve known. I was walking toward them.”
“Walking toward the dead,” Ruhm said.
“Rieve’s not dead!” Aric protested.
“You would be if I hadn’t noticed you weren’t following behind.”
Aric understood his point. He would have become hopelessly separated. They never would have found him in the dark, and by morning his trail might have been erased. If they spent time looking, they all might have been caught by Kadya’s soldiers. “Thank you, Ruhm,” he said. “It’s … it’s just so cold out here. I don’t know if I can go on.”
“Must,” Ruhm said simply. He led Aric to the rest. They huddled together for a few minutes, sharing body heat none of them had to spare, and then continued.
He didn’t think he had ever been so happy to see the sun rise.
After sunrise, they risked sleeping for a couple of hours. Then they started out again. They killed a greater boneclaw that day, providing them sustenance, although they could not make use of its carapace and had to leave it behind.
Every time they reached a high point, they stopped and checked their back trail. If Kadya had sent pursuers, they were not yet in view. They didn’t dare follow the path they’d taken to Akrankhot from Nibenay, because Kadya and her party would doubtless take that same route home.
Late in the day, they narrowly escaped notice by a monstrous sand worm, watching covertly as it slithered and burrowed and humped its way across the desert. Ruhm wanted to tackle it, but the others argued that they couldn’t carry its meat, tasty though it might be, in addition to that of the boneclaw they already had. And a sandworm was a far deadlier foe than a boneclaw. Should the five of them engage it, every likelihood existed that some would perish in the trying.