“No.” Dwyrin started walking. He had no stomach to remain in this place.
“This is dangerous land,” Colonna said, as they topped a rise and began hiking down a long grade toward, at last, a valley littered with green orchards and fields. Both the older man and the youth wore hats of plaited reed and grass, gathered from the banks of the last dry watercourse they had crossed. Dwyrin ignored the muttering of the Sicilian. After three days of traveling with the ouragos, he spent more and more time in his own head, wondering what the teachers at the school were doing. The lessons that they had tried so hard to drum into his unreceptive mind were filtering back up now, but whole in some way, complete. He practiced them while they walked.
“The sun will roast a man in his breastplate. The natives are of an evil disposition and will murder the man found alone, away from his unit. The nights are cold enough to freeze. The water is poor and will give you the runs.”
Colonna went on and on, his voice grating against Dwyrin’s ears with an endless litany of complaints. In some sense, Dwyrin thought, the old soldier was trying to help him by unburdening himself of observations made in decades of service. It made Dwyrin’s head hurt. He hoped that the city ahead was Samosata and they would, at last, part company.
“Poison asps crawl under the rocks and will creep into your bedroll while you sleep. You wake to the feel of their fangs piercing your skin. The fodder for horses is sparse and bitter-those animals not raised here will soon sicken and some will perish. The land hates men, so long has it…”
Dwyrin shut out the voice. He felt cold, despite the burning heat of the day. There was something in the dead rocks and parched soil around them that disturbed him. The city seemed far away, shimmering in the heat haze of the middle day. He stopped in the middle of the road and turned around, staring back up the road that wound out of the hills. He felt uneasy, a prickling sensation rippled along his arms. Something was watching them from the ridge behind.
Colonna had stopped too and was leaning on his walking stick. The soldier seemed old and weary. Dwyrin completed his slow circuit of the horizon. There was nothing.
“Funny feeling?” the older man asked.
“Yes, like hidden eyes watching us.”
Colonna nodded. “I feel that way most of the time. They are. watching up there somewhere in the rocks. Remember, the land hates us, and so do the people who live here. They only wait for a chance to murder us without cost to themselves.”
They continued onward, though now Dwyrin looked out on the barren tablelands and sparse vegetation crouched in the folds- and crevices of the land as if he were adrift in a hostile sea. Dark intent slid along under the surface, waiting for a chance to rise out of the depths with crushing teeth. The sun, unrelenting, filled the brassy white bowl of the sky with fire. At the edges of his othersight, dim greens and sullen red crept in at the edges of the road. In the flat, between fields of dusty tan plantings, they passed a broken building. White pillars, cracked and worn by the wind, leaned drunkenly, broken teeth in the raw red gums of the soil. Dwyrin shuddered as they passed the temple, moving to the far side of the road and keeping Colonna between him and the well of despair collected among the scattered bricks.
Colonna stopped talking.
Samosata was a sullen maze of empty streets. Native guardsmen passed them in through the western gate of the city without a word. The local men were wrapped in long turbans that covered their faces, leaving only dark crevices for their eyes. They had long spears and curved swords hung from jeweled harness and scabbard. Even their hands were covered with wrappings. No one could be seen on the streets. The houses were blank, gray-white walls with shuttered rose-red windows. There was a close, hot feeling to the squares that they crossed.
They stopped at the far edge of the city, having seen no one, but edgy with the sense of anticipation that had slowly filled the air around them like water seeping through a pin-hole into a bladder. A plaza, barely thirty feet across, butted up to the eastern wall of the city. Three-story buildings of heavily plastered mud brick pressed against the open space. A gate with two square towers cut the wall. There were no guardsmen to be seen on the wall or in the shadow of the gate embrasure itself. Colonna stopped at a well in the southeast corner of the square. Dwyrin stood behind him while the soldier drew up the bucket, facing back toward the narrow alley they had come out of.
Only the scrape and jangle of the bucket and the rope that secured it broke the empty silence in the square. Dwyrin leaned against his staff, hood drawn over most of his face. His eyes were closed and within the quiet of his mind, he felt the hidden air around them trembling with violence. The hot spark that always seemed to glow at the back of his mind sputtered and flame licked against the tinder of his fear.
“Keep easy, lad,” came Colonna‘.s voice in a whisper. The so-familiar nasal whine was gone, his voice quiet and professional. “I feel it too. Just wait.” The bucket rattled on the edge of the stone wall that cupped the well. Colonna thumbed the top off his waterskin and carefully poured the cold water into the grimy mouth. When he had filled the skin and stoppered it again, he raised the bucket and drank thirstily from it. Water spilled around the corners of his mouth, soaking the front of his cloak and pattering to the ground. Done, he passed the bucket to Dwyrin.
The boy took it, a heavy wooden thing, with a bent copper handle and bolts. It was almost empty, but he drank from it, heedless of the mud swirling at the bottom. The air leached any moisture from man or beast, making the taste of water an elixir. He put the bucket down. Two figures had appeared in the mouth of a street across the square. Dwyrin turned to face them.
Like the citizens of the city, they were completely covered by long desert robes-though these were pale baize and white. They bore no open weapons, but a sense of menace flowed forward from them like a fog. Dwyrin felt Colonna slide in behind him, and there was a tink of sound as the soldier swung his spear up. The desert men stepped out of the street, into the square, and stood aside from the opening. There was a sense of darkness there, filling the street. Dwyrin hissed in surprise.
“What is it?” Colonna whispered. “There’s something there?”
Dwyrin raised a hand. There was something in the shadow of the street. Something lame and crippled but filled with bile and a seething, dark power. A hint of the smell of burned flesh reached the two Romans, even across the length of the square.
“A?i… that doesn’t smell good.” Colonna shifted his stance, raising the spear into a throwing position. Dwyrin angled his own walking stick downward toward the flagstones of the square. Brittle red-black power trickled among the stones, and there was more in the deep blue-green of the well at his back. Using the staff as a focus, he began teasing the stones to yield to his will. It would not be much, but more than nothing.
The something in the street crept closer, its hate beating against Dwyrin like the heat from a bonfire. More of the desert men appeared. The power in the stones and the air and the water suddenly shifted its pattern, bending toward the mouth of the street like filings to a lodestone. Dwyrin began to sweat. The thing coming along the shadows of the street was very, very, strong. He prepared to let go the fire-spark that had swollen to an incandescent fury in his heart.
“Get ready,” he croaked at Colonna. “Cover your eyes and hide behind me.”
The rattle of a heavy chain falling, link by link, through a brass housing broke the tense silence in the square. The gate between the towers creaked and began to open. City men in dusky brown robes came out of the dark openings at the base of the towers and dragged the massive wooden doors apart. Dwyrin’s eyes twitched back to the opening to the shadowed street. The desert men had faded back and were disappearing at a trot into the other byways opening onto the square. The bitter hatred of the lamed creature receded as well. There was the clatter of hooves on flagstones.