Paulo had not left Gerick's side all night and demonstrated no intention of falling asleep, despite my admonitions and avowals of good intent. He paced; he hammered his hands on the rocks; he fumbled with cooking pots and tack and spent hours grooming the horses we'd tethered where they could crunch the stiff grass. Gerick was never out of his sight.
As Paulo wouldn't allow me to do anything more for his friend, I had little to occupy my time once I had filled the water flasks. Thanks to his skillful manipulation, I could pretty much move my right arm as I wished, but I had him bind it tightly to my chest again to ease the constant ache. My fingers were only gradually regaining sensation. Being one-handed for very long was going to drive me to distraction.
The sleepless night and my aching shoulder made our ration of dried bread and greasy meat, no matter how well preserved, singularly unappetizing. I tried again to sleep, but could not find a comfortable position. Not a wisp of a breeze found a path into the old watercourse. The afternoon was stifling.
Only after the wretched day had long expired did Paulo succumb to exhaustion. His head lay wedged between two rocks—an entirely appropriate place as far as I was concerned—and his long body blocked the way in and out of the sheltering overhang. He would have been more comfortable farther back under the rocks where it was sandier, but I couldn't move him by myself, and I had no heart to wake him.
Though Gerick's fever yet burned, the sepsis in his foot had not worsened in the past few hours. I kept the water going down him, and soaked the rag in the smallest puddle and laid it on his forehead. With too little to distract me, I thought a great deal about the rescue and about what we had left behind in the ruins. No matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise, no matter how terrified I became at the thought that insisted on planting itself in my head, I could not shake the sense that our work was dangerously unfinished.
On the next morning, while Paulo yet slept, I rummaged through Nim's hoard of metal objects and picked out a shovel and a sword with a broken tip. Then, with much swearing and difficulty, I unstrapped my arm and saddled my horse.
"What do you think you're doing?" A bleary-eyed Paulo stood at the edge of the overhang as I fastened the implements to my saddle. He looked more filthy and bedraggled than threatening—though I would have thought more than twice before challenging him.
"I'm going back to retrieve the oculus. We can't just leave it there where anyone can find it. Innocent people like Nim—I promised to protect her—or others like real Zhid, or the one who put it there . . ."
"Absolutely not. You can't—"
"I'll not bring it anywhere near him." I jerked my head toward Gerick. "I've no desire to participate in your friend's nightmares again. I'll take it down, bury it where no one can find it, and be back by nightfall."
I verified that the two water flasks in my rucksack weren't leaking, crammed an empty bag of thick canvas in beside them, and fixed the pack on my saddle, anxious to get going before he got some notion of stopping me.
"I thought a person couldn't touch the thing," he called after me, stepping out into the sunlight. "I thought it would hurt you. I thought you didn't have power enough to deal with it."
"Then you won't have to worry about me killing him any more, will you?" I yelled back at him.
Neither phantom nor villain came anywhere in sight as I descended the ridge and crossed the searing plain into Zhev'Na. Yet even with no imminent physical threats, I felt jittery and sick as I entered the charred chamber with the rubble-strewn stone block in the center of it. The oculus still spun in the air above the stone table, weaving its horror from the light of my torch. All the bravado I had donned for Paulo evaporated. I had no confidence at all that I could do this.
With only one able arm and no talent to work with, everything took far longer than it should have. I tried every simple unlocking and detaching spell I'd ever heard of to loosen the enchantment that held it suspended, but none of them seemed to work. Finally I climbed onto the table, kicking some of the debris onto the floor. Taking as firm a stance as I could hold, I held the broken sword in my left hand and used my right arm to brace it. Then I stabbed upward to snare the ring, fighting to keep the thing from sweeping me off the table. I held on, and after a few moments, it dropped onto the sword with a clang. I pointed the sword downward and let the ring slide to the floor. Shuddering, I bashed the sword hilt against the shellstone that had already formed a brittle rim around the sole of my boots and jumped down from the slab.
More than ready to bolt, I slipped the oculus into the canvas bag without touching it or even looking at it more than necessary. I didn't start breathing again until I had left the ruin behind, and even then I whined and moaned with each exhalation like an ailing child. No use muffling it. No one was about to hear me. The vile device shredded my spirit like an overseer's lash. Cringing and shuddering in the saddle, I managed to get only halfway up the ridge before I yanked Pesca to a halt in a rubble-strewn clearing. Though still within sight of the ruins, I unstrapped the shovel and began to dig. I had to be rid of the thing. Though I, as every Dar'Nethi, knew the basic steps to destroy an object of enchantment, the power required was well beyond my poor capacity.
Two sweat-soaked hours later the oculus lay buried in a deep hole in the gravelly dirt. Feeling much relieved, I sat on the shield-sized plate of red rock that I had heaved, lurched, shoved, and levered over the spot, and took a few lukewarm sips from my water flask. Suddenly, the rocks beneath my feet shuddered. A few pebbles danced down the cliffs.
Pesca whinnied anxiously. I jumped up and stroked her neck, speaking soothingly as I'd watched Paulo do. After making sure her reins were still wrapped securely around a narrow column of rock, I scrambled up a boulder pile to get a good look at the sky. Desert storms could be fierce, the lightning deadly, and the track across the ridge to where Paulo and Gerick lay was steep and exposed. The desert sky was cloudless, but across the plain a thin column of dark smoke rose over the ruins of Zhev'Na. A broken tower crumbled into dust just as a flash of blue lightning blazed from the heart of the ruin. Moments later another muffled rumble shook the earth again.
"Miffed, are you?" I said.
But my bravado was only skin-deep. I slid down the boulder pile and drew Pesca into a deeper notch in the rocks, huddling there until the tremors had ceased. Only after making sure the sky over Zhev'Na had cleared did I ride up and over the ridge. By the time I got back to the ancient riverbed, the shadows were long and my hands had finally stopped shaking.
"Well?" said Paulo, after giving me a decent time to flop on the ground, pour the brackish dregs from my water flask on my head, and let the throbbing in my shoulder ease.
"The device is safer than it was," I said. I curled up on one side and supported my arm on my rucksack, despairing of finding any position that was comfortable. "Hidden. No one's going to happen onto it by chance." No one who could cause minor earthquakes with her anger.
"Where is it?"
I glanced over at the sleeping man behind him. "You don't need to know that."
Trust wasn't any easier for me than for Paulo.
By the third day in the dry riverbed, I was getting anxious. We needed to be on our way back to Avonar while we still had food and water. The vision of the city's fall festered in my heart the way Gerick's wounds inflamed his flesh, and I would not rest until I saw the city again, walls intact.
Our patient continued to sleep like the dead. Neither dressing his injuries nor pouring water down his throat prompted him to open his eyes. I couldn't blame him for that. He wasn't going to wake a happy man. Assuming he ever woke. Paulo refused to talk about that possibility.