So the days went. Walking, always walking, under a sun that pounded down without mercy. After that first night, no one even suggested continuing to hike in the darkness. Their route took them through vast, sand-filled valleys and over the rocky ridges intersecting them. The creatures of the desert were either predators or prey. They fought when they had to or when hunger spurred them on, and hid when necessary. The journey was neither glamorous nor the stuff of heroic ballads. It was long and arduous, but it had to be done.
Amoni, Aric noticed, seemed out of sorts. When they fought the boneclaw she was right there with them, even delivering the killing blow. But at other times, when making camp for the night or deciding on a route, she was quiet, doing what someone told her but taking no initiative. Once when Aric and Myrana were filling skins at a spring they had found, high up on a narrow shelf of rock, Amoni stood nearby watching but didn’t offer to hold any of the skins even when they threatened to fall over the side. Finally, Aric said, “Amoni, could you grab these before they fall?”
“Of course,” Amoni said. She picked them up, but seemed not to be aware that she could have simply done so, rather than waiting to be told.
That evening, he took her aside and mentioned it.
“You’re right,” she said. She looked away from him, at the streaks in the olive sky where the setting crimson sun painted it. “I am accustomed to doing what I’m told.”
“But you’re nobody’s slave now. You’re free.”
“That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”
“Only you have to act free. Aren’t you pleased to be owned by no one but yourself?”
She picked up a pebble, turned it over in her fingers, gazing at it as if it held secrets only she could detect. “It frightens me.”
“Why?”
“You’ve never been a slave, Aric. I can’t expect you to understand. I’ve lived their life according to someone else’s rules. It’s terrifying to realize that suddenly the only rules are my own. I … I am trying to accept my freedom. But at the same time, as long as you’re all here with me, often it’s easiest to just let old habits take over. I know you don’t own me. And I’m not saying that you act as if you do. It’s only me … acting as if you do. Acting as if I need you to tell me where I should stand or sit, what I should look at or not look at, what I should think.”
“They tell you what to think?”
“They try. That rarely works.”
“Well, you’re free now. Don’t forget it, and don’t let us spoil it for you.”
The next morning, Aric rose at dawn, starving. It had been days since they’d killed any prey, and their food stores had depleted severely. They had tracked a lirr pack for hours the evening before, but when darkness came and they lost the trail, they’d had to give up. Aric sat up, shoved off the skins he slept beneath. Ruhm, Sellis and Myrana were in camp, Myrana sleeping still, but Amoni was gone. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Gone when I awoke,” Ruhm said. “Hour, little less.”
“Are there tracks?”
Ruhm pointed to some, shallow depressions already being filled by blowing sand. They led away from camp and into the distance, but not in the direction they had been traveling. Not toward Nibenay.
“Would she simply leave us behind?” Myrana asked, sitting and rubbing her eyes.
“I … I don’t know.”
“She’s a slave, right?” Sellis reminded them.
Aric remembered her lack of initiative. She was accustomed to taking orders, not to doing for herself. The entire time they had been on the trip, he didn’t remember her ever coming up with an original idea. She was good at battle, good at self-preservation. She was strong and could carry great weights, in spite of her back injury. But when it came to making her own decisions, she had no experience. She had never had to do it. “She is. But she hoped to be free, and to live that way the rest of her life.”
“Apparently she’s free now,” Sellis said.
“She was free the minute we walked away from Akrankhot!” Aric snapped. “At least as far as I was concerned.”
“Perhaps she didn’t feel free, then.”
“Well, I wish her good fortune.”
“I wish she hadn’t abandoned us. We may yet have need of her.”
“I wish it too,” Myrana said. “I like her company.”
“As do I,” Aric said. He crossed his arms over his chest, but his momentary anger was made less dramatic by the loud rumbling of his stomach.
“Today we find game,” Ruhm said.
“We had better,” Aric agreed. They turned to the business of packing up their things.
But just as they were ready to depart, a figure appeared on the horizon, something with what appeared to be a massive head and shoulders on a body so slender it seemed it couldn’t support all the weight there.
It took another ten minutes before they were able to recognize Amoni, longer still before they could make out what she carried across her shoulders. It was a gray-skinned lizard with a colorful tail and a bright membrane around its neck—a lirr that must have weighed at least two hundred pounds.
“There are more,” Amoni said when she reached camp. “But I could only carry the one.” She ducked her head and heaved it from her shoulders into the dirt.
“You went off by yourself?” Aric said.
“I knew they were out there. We were hungry.”
“You saved our lives!” He went to Amoni and hugged her, hoping someone else would start cleaning and cooking the lirr while he did. Luckily, that thought had occurred to Sellis, and he was already busy. “I am so hungry.”
“I know we’re in a hurry,” Myrana said. “But next time we’re running low on food perhaps we should devote ourselves to finding more before we’re out completely.”
“There’s so much here that perhaps we won’t run out again,” Aric said. He knew even as he spoke the words that they were overly optimistic.
“We’ll run out,” Sellis said. He glanced at Ruhm, but he didn’t need to point out how much the goliath consumed on any given day.
“I suppose,” Aric said. He could cover the distance to Nibenay faster alone—faster even than the trip out, with the mekillots pulling the wagons at their slow but steady pace. Although only half-elf, he had still inherited some of the elven ability to run fast and with great endurance. Ruhm, with his long legs, could keep up with him for a while, but Aric would outpace him over any distance. And Myrana slowed the group down considerably.
But alone and on foot, the likelihood that Aric would survive the trip lessened considerably. It was not, he supposed, impossible for a solo journeyer to travel from point to point on Athas. But it was risky, and all the more so for someone who had not, until recently, ever left his native city.
No, his best hope was in staying with the others, praying that their head start meant they would reach Nibenay before the demon-possessed templar did.
If they didn’t, then they might never return to Nibenay at all. Aric had no way to know what Tallik, unbound and possessing a practitioner of defiling magic might do, but he imagined it would be violent and destructive. He had, in fact, wondered if the vision he had believed to be of the distant past had also showed the future. Although the Athas he knew was nowhere near as lush and serene as the one that had apparently once existed, it could still be unsettled, its institutions overthrown, whatever fragile peace existed shattered in an instant.
And from the sensations he had felt—when Tallik had tried to enter his own mind, and when he had touched Kadya’s—he had no doubt that the demon’s essence was the purest evil.
Evil, and a savage hunger, left to fester beneath Akrankhot for centuries.