"How does one earn such love?"
"You give everything," he said. "No matter what the cost."
His knee moved ever so slightly against his horse's flank, and I was soon looking at his sweat-soaked back again. But I couldn't think of anything else to say anyway.
We'd come more than a hundred and fifty leagues from Avonar. Our maps said we were within a night or two of the ruined fortress. When the sun was halfway to its zenith, we found a bleak outcropping of barren rock and stretched out our square of lapaine for shade, spreading our blankets on the sand and pretending we were sleeping through the worst of the heat. I tried to arrange my limbs so that no part of my body had to touch any other. The sweat still dribbled off of me, tickling and itching, stinging the places where the saddle had rubbed me raw.
A hot wind billowed the strong, gauzy lapaine. We had tied the fabric high enough to let the air move underneath. Tired and drowsy, I held perfectly still with some vague hope that the breeze would bring some relief.
Odd. Even when the lapaine shelter fell limp, I heard a soft, purposeful rustling somewhere beyond my feet. Paulo's hard hand crept over my own, and I brushed his thumb to let him know I was awake. While my right hand moved carefully toward my dagger, he poked three fingers firmly into my open palm. Then he tapped one finger, two fingers. . . .
As his three fingers struck my palm, we rolled in opposite directions and leaped to our feet. Sunlight glinted on metal just beyond our patch of shade, and I yelled, "To your right!" Paulo leaped onto a bent, dusty figure as it scurried out of our tent. Keeping my back to the rock pile, I shifted left, holding my knife ready and scanning the shady shelter and the sunny strip beyond its border for other lurkers.
Though a great noisy clanging accompanied the combat, Paulo seemed to have no trouble with the invader. Only moments elapsed before he dragged a bundle of brown rags into the shade. He dropped his captive onto the sand and stood there breathing hard, bent over with his hands on his knees, sapped more by the oppressive heat, I guessed, than the ferocity of his opponent. His sunburned face was beaded with sweat. "Others?" he said harshly.
"No sign of any."
"Scavenger." He waved his hand tiredly at the sand beyond our shelter. "Half a kitchen spread over that dune out there, including our cups and pots and who knows what all. Other junk, too: bits of chain, harness, broken blades . . ."
The heap of rags on the earth before us quivered as if it were freezing instead of baking. I had yet to see just which portion of the dusty mound had a mouth that might answer a question or two.
"We won't harm you," I said. "Tell us who you are."
The heap's quivering subsided a little.
"Do you need water?"
The quivering took a distinctively negative turn. Good enough.
"You're hunting for metal. Why?"
A pair of dark eyes peeked out of a totally unlikely spot, and one knob of rags was revealed to be a tangled mass of brown hair. A dusty voice said, "Shan t'sai. " .
"Ghost metal?" I wasn't sure I'd heard it properly.
"The demon lords return to the dark fortress. The metal is to bind them."
Paulo and I glanced at each other, for once sharing a common sentiment—profound disquiet.
"The demon lords . . . you mean the Lords of Zhev'Na?" I said carefully. "The Lords have been dead for five years. Who's telling you they've come again?"
The heap of rags and hair had slowly resolved itself into the figure of a toothless woman, withered to leather and bone. Not as old as she looked by a long way. No gray in her mat of hair.
"They've come with their legions. We've seen their death fire. We find metal for the kaminar, hoping she will return and forge chains for binding the demons."
"A fire spirit?"
Kaminars were creatures from our creation stories. Legend said that Vasrin Creator had brought forth beings of flame to cleanse the world of imperfections— chaos, ugliness, and skewed, misshapen, or corrupted matter—before Vasrin Shaper formed the earth and the sky and those of us who peopled it. Many believed that the detritus from this cleansing had collected in the Breach when it was formed after the Catastrophe. Storytellers always included kaminars in their tales, ensuring their visions were replete with color and light, fire, glory, and innocent frights.
"When we freed the kaminar from the demons' prison, she promised to protect us always. We brought her offerings, and once she returned to us in her garments of blue fire to thank us. But now we've seen the demons and the Worships. We're so afraid, and she's not come again."
"Worships," I said, wishing our tale could be as innocent and hopeful as a creation story. "Were you a Drudge then?"
The Drudges were servants or laborers long descended from those who had wandered by accident into Gondai from the mundane world, back in the days before the Catastrophe when there were many portals between. The Lords had used the Drudges for mindless, menial tasks, breeding away curiosity, initiative, and intelligence. Only Drudges called the Zhid "Worships."
The woman nodded, and I offered her a waterskin. "What's your name?"
"Nim."
"Tell us about the kaminar, Nim, and about the demons and the Worships."
"Many turns of the moon since we found the kaminar …"
After the fall of the Lords, most Drudges had chosen to stay on their desolate farms or to continue working the mines in the Wastes under the more benevolent direction of Dar'Nethi supervisors. But some had wandered away into the desert, scrabbling for a living as they could.
Nim said that she and several companions lived in the ragged ridge of red cliffs that lay between us and the hard-baked plains where the ruined fortress and the deserted war camps lay. While scavenging in the ruins, they had come upon a stone vault with a broken hasp. They had thought the vault might hold treasure, as it was buried deep beneath the fallen stones, but to their amazement they had found a woman sleeping there in the darkness, not dead, though she wore the very likeness of death.
". . . and when we touched her, she woke and broke Mut's arm with her wildness and burned Dila with her eyes. She kept saying not to kill her, please not to kill her; she was sorry, sorry, sorry. We offered water and food, but all she wanted was metal. To bind the demons, she said. To give her power that was lost. When at last we made her not afraid of us, she said she was a kaminar, and if we would bring her all the metal we could find, she would use it to bind the demons so they could not harm us ever again."
"And you did so?"
Nim sipped from the waterskin. "Three turnings of the moon she stayed, living as poorly as we do until we found her the metal she wanted. It made us sick to touch it. Fal went blind from it. Kyrd burned for three turnings of the sun and died in madness. Cith went screaming into the desert, and we could not find her. But the kaminar said the sickness was caused by demons that didn't want her to have it. She took the bits of metal, and when she had enough, she went away. But she said that someday she would return to comfort us."
I described D'Sanya to the woman and asked if she could be the one they called kaminar.
Nim's sunken eyes were filled with wonder. "You've seen her, too, then, with her noon-sun hair and eyes like sky-waters. She came back to us one night in blue fire so that we knew she was a fire spirit, and she blessed us with food and wine and water. But now the demons have come to the fortress. Mayhap if we gather more metal for her, she'll come back again and chase them away. Perhaps if you see her, you could tell her of our gathering and she'll come."