At the Edge of Waking (21 page)

He was looking around him as if he expected policemen with whistles, huntsmen with dogs. He was out of breath, and his shoes were even muddier than hers.

“Graham.” She caught one of his hands, hot and damp with sweat. “Stop a moment. Please explain. Where have you come from, who are you talking about, where to you want me to go?”

“There’s no time,” he said, but his hand closed around hers and he hunkered down beside her where she sat on her carved and crumbling stone. “Are you all right? I didn’t expect to find you wandering about on your own. You look awfully pale.”

So did Graham, but in the sunlight his eyes were the same dark amber as his favorite beer. A lovely color, in fact, which Lucy had never noticed before. He was otherwise entirely himself, and wonderfully alive and real in this—now that he was here she could think it—dreary graveyard of a place.

“Not exactly on my own,” Lucy said, “but on a long leash, I think. Graham, I know why I’m here, but I haven’t a clue where you come into it. Did they find out about the notes I left for you? Was it the Marshal’s men who brought you here?”

“Yes, but not on his orders. Listen, they seem to think there’s something dangerous about you being here. I mean, not just dangerous for you, but for everyone. Damn!” He looked around again, his hand tightening on hers. “There’s really no time. I’m supposed to help get you away from him, but I’m not sure I like our chances much better once I have, so I thought, if we could slip away without them . . . We should just
go,
Lucy, and save the talk for later.”

“But I don’t—” —
want to.
She bit off the end, but her hand had gone limp in his grasp and the telepathy of touch must have told him. He stared up at her.

“They said he’s going to sacrifice you. To raise the old gods. To bring the world back to the way it was.”

“They’re wrong!” she said fiercely, and twisted her hand out of his. “Whoever ‘they’ are. They’re completely wrong. It’s the other way round, it’s exactly the other way . . . ” She balked, catching a glimpse of something she hadn’t quite seen before.

“Which other way?” Graham said, impatient.

“He . . . ” Lucy balked again.

“Listen.” Graham reclaimed her hand. “Lucy. I think we should just go. We should just get out of this, this whole thing, whatever it is, just get the hell out and—”

“And let everything go on as it has been.”

“Yes! Holy fires and all, Lucy, do you hate this world so much you want to bring it crashing down around our ears?”

“No!” Lucy was shocked.

“Do you want to die for that?”

“But I’m not the one—And it’s
change,
it’s not—”

“Let’s just go.” Graham stood, pulling Lucy to her feet. “Lucy. Please. Let’s just go.”

She was caught, by the desperate pleading in his voice as much as by the hard grip of his hand, and it seemed as though that instant was the deciding one, as though, if she had not hesitated, if she had just moved, or spoken—but it was only a seeming. She could have changed nothing in that moment. It was only a pause before all the rest that was going to happen, happened. She looked up at him, at Graham, who was burning with impatience and determination, and then someone stepped into the archway on the sunny side of the courtyard. They looked. One of the Marshal’s men, the big young man who had escorted Lucy off the train.

“Oh dear,” Lucy said, feeling a guilty lick of humor at being caught.

“Oh damn,” Graham said, in another tone entirely, and he pulled at Lucy’s hand, turning, trying to move her, put her behind him, she wasn’t sure. In any case, she stumbled against the fallen masonry she had been sitting on, and it broke, or something did, a crack that shook the air, and Graham was pulling her, very clumsily, so they both half-fell to the ground.

“Damn!” Graham said on a gasp. “Lucy. Go. If you can.” But his hand was still holding hard to hers, and somehow, perhaps through that same telepathy, she realized he was shot, he had been shot by the large young man who carried not a book, but a gun.

Lucy looked up at him, but he was already dead. The Marshal of Kallisfane withdrew his sword with a meaty sound, and the large young man, looking stupid in his dead man’s surprise, fell in a heap to the ground.

“Treachery,” the Marshal said in his ordinary voice. “This is a good place for it.”

Graham was falling, too, a slow continuation of the motion that had put them on their knees. His mouth was open as he fought for air. He still held Lucy’s left hand very hard in his right. She used her free hand to grope under his jacket until she found the small hot hole in his side. His breath seemed to be stopped wetly in his throat, but still he managed to speak.

“I loved you,” he said. “I never said. I never said.”

His grasp weakened. Lucy clutched his hand hard, as hard as she could, pressing it with both her hands against her side, but still he let go, he let her go. She leaned over him to catch his gaze, but she could not, he was gone.

She was very conscious, in the silence, of the beating of her heart. If she had stopped the world, one minute ago, five minutes ago, an hour ago, he would be alive, forever and always. Graham. Who had loved her. If she had. If she had only known how.

“Perhaps now you are ready to try again,” the Marshal said. His sword was smeared with blood—not dripping, only smeared, like her hand.

Would she say no because Graham who had died for her would want her to? No. She would say yes, yes, because only
yes
would end the deadlock of a thousand years, the deadlock that had killed him and all the untold others. Yes.

She was very slow, but he was patient. It was hard to let go of Graham, but it was really time she wanted to hold, and she could not, the moment was past. She stood, and looked at the Marshal, and wondered what he had really stopped, what impulse had died in the last emperor’s brain. He tried to hand her his sword over Graham’s body and she waved him brusquely away, back toward the broken fountain. But when she had followed him there she took the warm hilt again in her hand.

Her heart pounded out a fierce and primitive rhythm. If there had been words for it, they would have run something like,
you won’t stop me, you won’t bury me, I won’t let you end me here.
The great weight of the Marshal’s presence could not stifle it. She did not know what it was. Not magic. Perhaps only life in the face of death.

He knelt, as he had in the chapel, his eyes narrowed against the sun. Looking down, as she had looked down at Graham, Lucy saw his eyes were not black but brown, a dark tea-colored brown without red or gold to lighten them. He opened his shooting coat and shirt to bear his scarred breast. Lucy set the sword’s point there and stopped, seeing how her heartbeat trembled in her hands.

“Tell me your name,” she said.

He told her. She drove the sword home.

He choked once, as Graham had, and died.

The world changed.

Virgin of the Sands

Neil came out of the desert leaving most of his men dead behind him. He debriefed, he bathed, he dressed in a borrowed uniform, and without food, without rest, though he needed both, he went to see the girl.

The army had found her rooms in a shambling mud-brick compound shaded by palms. She was young, God knew, too young, but her rooms had a private entrance, and there was no guard to watch who came and went. Who would disturb Special Recon’s witch? Neil left the motor pool driver at the east side of the market and walked through the labyrinth of goats, cotton, chickens, oranges, dates, to her door. The afternoon was amber with heat, the air a stinking resin caught with flies. Nothing like the dry furnace blast of the wadi where his squad had been ambushed and killed. He knocked, stupid with thirst, and wondered if she was home.

She was.

Tentative, always, their first touch: her fingertips on his bare arm, her mouth as heavy with grief as with desire. She knew, then. He bent his face to hers and felt the dampness of a recent bath. She smelled of well water and ancient spice. They hung a moment, barely touching, mingled breath and her fingers against his skin, and then he took her mouth, and drank.

“I’m sorry,” she said, after.

He lay across her bed, bound to exhaustion, awaiting release. “We walked right into them,” he said, eyes closed. “Walked right into their guns.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sounded so unhappy. He reached for her with a blind hand. “Not your fault. The dead can’t tell you everything.”

She laid her palm across his, her touch still cool despite the sweat that soaked her sheets. “I know.”

“They expect too much of you.” By
they
he meant the generals. When she said nothing he turned his head and looked at her. She knelt beside him on the bed, barred with light from the rattan blind. Her dark hair was loose around her face, her dark eyes shadowed with worry. So young she broke his heart. He said, “You expect too much of yourself.”

She covered his eyes with her free hand. “Sleep.”

“You can only work with what we bring you. If we don’t bring you the men who know . . . who knew . . . ” The darkness of her touch seeped through him.

“Sleep.”

“Will you still be here?”

“Yes. Now sleep.”

Three times told, he slept.

She had to be pure to work her craft, a virgin in the heart of army intelligence. He never knew if this loving would compromise her with her superiors. She swore it would not touch her power, and he did not ask her more. He just took her with his hands, his tongue, his skin, and if sometimes the forbidden depths of her had him aching with need, that only made the moment when she slid her mouth around him more potent, explosive as a shell bursting in the bore of a gun. And he laughed sometimes when she twisted against him, growling, her teeth sharp on his neck: virgin. He laughed, and forgot for a time the smell of long-dead men.

“Finest military intelligence in the world,” Colonel Tibbit-Noyse said, “and we can’t find their blasted army from one day to the next.” His black mustache was crisp in the wilting heat of the briefing room.

Neil sat with half a dozen officers scribbling in notebooks balanced on their knees. Like the others, he let his pencil rest when the colonel began his familiar tirade.

“We know the Fuhrer’s entrail-readers are prone to inaccuracy and internal strife. We know who his spies are and have been feeding them tripe for months.” (There was a dutiful chuckle.) “We know the desert tribesmen who have been guiding his armored divisions are weary almost to death with the Superior Man. For God’s sake, our desert johnnies have been meeting them for tea among the dunes! So why the
hell
—” the colonel’s hand slashed at a passing fly “—can’t we find them before they drop their bloody shells into our bloody laps?”

Two captains and three lieutenants, all the company officers not in the field, tapped pencil ends on their notebooks and thumbed the sweat from their brows. Major Healy sitting behind the map table coughed into his hand. Neil, eyes fixed on the wall over the major’s shoulder, heard again the rattle of gunfire, saw again the carnage shaded by vulture wings. His notebook slid through his fingers to the floor. The small sound in the colonel’s silence made everyone jump. He bent to pick it up.

“Now, I have dared to suggest,” Tibbit-Noyse continued, “that the fault may not lie with our intel at all, but rather with the use to which it has been put. This little notion of mine has not been greeted with enthusiasm.” (Again, a dry chuckle from the men.) “In fact, I’m afraid the general got rather testy about the quantity and quality of fodder we’ve scavenged for his necromancer in recent weeks. Therefore.” The colonel sighed. His voice was subdued when he continued. “Therefore, all squads will henceforth make it their sole mission to find and retrieve enemy dead, be they abandoned or buried, with an urgent priority on those of officer rank. I’m afraid this will entail a fair bit of dodging about on the wrong side of the battle line, but you’ll be delighted to know that the general has agreed to an increase in leave time between missions from two days to four.” He looked at Neil. “Beginning immediately, captain, so you have another three days’ rest coming to you.”

“I’m fit to go tomorrow, sir,” Neil said.

Tibbit-Noyse gave him a bleak smile. “Take your time, captain. There’s plenty of death to go ’round.”

There was another moment of silence, this one long enough for the men to start to fidget. Healy coughed. Neil sketched the outlines of birds. Then the colonel went on with his briefing.

She had duties during the day, and in any event he could not spend all his leave in her company. He had learned from the nomads not to drink until he must. So he found a café not too near headquarters, one with an awning and a boy to whisk the flies, and drank small cups of syrupy coffee until his heart raced and sleep no longer tempted him.

A large body dropped into the seat opposite him. “Christ. How can you drink coffee in this heat?”

Neil blinked the other’s face into focus: Montrose, a second-string journalist with a beefy face and a bloodhound’s eyes. The boy brought the reporter a bottle of lemon squash, half of which he poured down his throat without seeming to swallow. “Whew!”

“We have orders,” Neil said, his voice neutral, “not to speak with the press.”

“Look at you, you bastard. Not even sweating.” Montrose had a flat Australian accent and salt-rimmed patches of sweat underneath his arms. “Or have you just had the juice scared out of you?”

Neil gave a thin smile and brushed flies away from the rim of his cup.

“Listen.” Montrose hunkered over the table. “There’ve been rumors of a major cock-up. Somebody let some secrets slip into the wrong ears. Somebody in intelligence. Somebody high up. Ring any bells?”

Neil covered a yawn. He didn’t have to fake one. The coastal heat was a blanket that could smother even the caffeine. He drank the last swallow, leaving a sludge of sugar in the bottom of the cup, and flagged the boy.

“According to this rumor,” Montrose said, undaunted, “at least one of the secrets had to do with the field maneuvers of the Dead Squad—pardon me—the Special Desert Reconnaissance Group. Which, come to think of it, is your outfit, isn’t it, Neil?” Montrose blinked with false concern. “Didn’t have any trouble your last time out, did you, mate? No unpleasant surprises? No nasty Jerries hiding among the dunes?”