Yama said, “They are coming down from the Gateway of Lost Souls. An army, Pandaras. I saw it in my dreams, but I do not think it was a dream. I do not think that I can dream here.”
Pandaras looked back toward the mountains of the Great Divide. The icy peaks shone high and far, seeming to float above the glittering desert.
He said, “It must have been a dream, master. Not even an eagle could see so far. Don’t worry about it.”
Yama shook his head violently. “I saw through the eyes of one of the watchers. The things which follow us also follow the army.”
That night Yama woke with a start, feverish and shaking. He turned toward Pandaras, but his reddened eyes were focused on infinity. “They have machines,” he said. “The fool brought machines with him as well as soldiers. He thinks that they are shielded.”
Pandaras wet a corner of Yama’s robe with a few minims of their precious water and dabbed at his forehead. “Hush, master. You dream.”
“No. No dreams now. Only truth. The desert burns away everything else. We become only what we are.”
At last Pandaras got Yama to lie down. He thought that his master slept, but after a while Yama said, “The soldiers are mounted and in uniform. They wear black masks with long snouts and round eyeholes of glass backed with gold. Their mounts are masked too. But I recognize the man at their head. It is Enobarbus. She has sent him after me. Things are coming together at last. Things are coming to a conclusion.”
Pandaras said nervously, “Is there any sign of the Prefect?”
“He… no, not yet. But I left sign enough for him to find us.”
“Then maybe he’s dead,” Pandaras said, although he did not believe it.
They had little food left, and less water. The dew still yielded only a few minims of water each night, and there was no standing water to be found, poisoned or otherwise.
The next day, the bact knelt down and would not get up, Pandaras, weeping in rage and frustration, beat at the animal’s withers. It closed its long-lashed eyes and ignored him. Sand blew all around; the sun was a glowering eye in a red sky.
Pandaras and Yama unloaded the supplies. Only one water bottle was full; another held only a few mouthfuls. They threw the rest away, and most of the remaining food.
“I will get us food,” Yama said. “Food and water. They are off the mountain slopes now, and coming toward us very quickly. They have good mounts.”
He was flushed and feverish. He was looking toward the distant range of mountains, and it took Pandaras a long time to get him turned around.
They had not gone far when they heard the bact scream. Pandaras stumbled back toward it through blowing sand, but stopped, shocked and frightened, when he saw the things which were tearing it apart.
They were like crosses between snakes and jaguars, armored in overlapping metallic scales or in flexible blood-red hide. No two were alike. One had a tail like that of a scorpion, tipped with a swollen sting which arched above its back. One had a multiple set of jaws so massive they dragged on the ground, another a round sucker mouth with a ragged ring of teeth.
The misshapen wild cats tore at the bact with silent ferocity. It was already dead, its neck half-severed and its bloody ribs showing, blood soaking the sand in a widening circle. Blood glistened on hide like chain-mail, on metal scales, on horny plates edged with metal, on serrated metal in snapping jaws. Two of the things had burrowed into the bact’s belly, shaking its body back and forth as they worked like a depraved reversal of birth. The pack ignored Pandaras until he raised the pistol, and then one turned eyes like red lamps toward him and reared up on its stout tail, waving a decad of mismatched legs tipped with razor-edged claws. Thick green slaver dripped from its long snout.
A hand fell on Pandaras’s shoulder; his shot went wild, swallowed by the sand-filled air. Yama shouted into his ear. “Leave them! They will not hurt us!”
The wild cat which had confronted Pandaras dropped to its belly and shuffled forward and groveled before Yama, although it kept its burning red eyes on Pandaras as he backed away into the blowing sand. Its fellows had not paused in their feverish butchery; the bact was almost stripped to the bones.
Yama and Pandaras drank the last of their water at noon, threw away the water bottle, and went on. Yama taught Pandaras that sucking a pebble could stimulate the flow of saliva and help keep thirst at bay, but the hot wind which blew sand around them drew moisture from every crevice of their bodies. Pandaras forced himself to stay awake, staring at each change in pitch of the streams of sand that hissed outside the tent, and Yama slept fitfully, waking before dawn and insisting that they go on.
“They are almost on us,” he said, “but it is not far. There is no chance of turning back now, Pandaras.”
“I had not thought of it, master,” Pandaras said. His lips were cracked and bleeding and he tasted blood at the back of his throat with each breath; the dust had worked into his lungs.
The air was filled with blowing sand. They left the tent behind and set off into it.
Shapes loomed out of the murk: towers of friable bones lashed together with sinews and half-covered in hide that flapped and boomed and creaked in the wind. A ragged picket fence of crystalline spines grew crookedly from a shoulder of black rock. Creatures were impaled on some of the spines. Some were men; the rest were like nothing Pandaras had ever seen, horrid chimeras of machine and insect, although surely no insects could grow as large as these. Most were no more than dried husks, but some were still alive and stirred feebly as Yama and Pandaras went past.
Pandaras did not pay much attention to these horrors.
He no longer felt fear, only exhaustion and growing thirst. Each step was a promise to himself that there would soon be no more steps: walking was an infinite chain of promises. The world shrank to the patch of ground directly in front of him. Its gravity seemed to vary wildly; sometimes it seemed to pitch like the deck of a ship and he could barely keep to his feet. But always he went forward, following in his master’s footsteps.
At noon, Yama stopped and turned in a half-circle and fell to his knees. Pandaras managed to get him to the shelter of a tilted shelf of rock. It was very hot. The sun’s bloody glare was diffused across half the sky. Sand skirled around crystal spurs, sent shifting shadows shuddering across reaches of bare stone. Pandaras was sweating through his thin robe. His mouth and throat were parched. He itched everywhere.
Yama stirred in his arms. Blood leaked from the corners of his closed eyes; Pandaras blotted it away with the hem of his robe. “I will bring water,” Yama said, and seemed to fall into a faint.
A moment later, thunder cracked high above and something flashed through the blowing red dust, chased by black shapes. It dived this way and that with abrupt turns and reverses, swooped low overhead, dropped something, and shot away as black things closed on either side. A sheet of green lightning; more thunder, then only the endless hiss of blowing sand.
Pandaras crawled out of the lee of the shelf of rock and retrieved what had been dropped by the machine.
It was a transparent sphere of spun plastic as big as his head, half-filled with cold, clear water.
When they were able to set off again, something like a storm of dry lightning had started up in the direction of the Great Divide. Flares of brittle light were half-obscured by curtains of blowing sand. Overhead, things chased each other through the sky with wild howls. Far off, something roared and roared on a single endless note.
“A lot of trouble for a drink of water,” Pandaras remarked.