Sands of the Soul (29 page)

Tazi stood up and faced north.

How many more miles? she wondered. I have to face him with a blind woman and a dying mage, no water, and only one sword. And all I have to do is keep him from presenting my friend’s soul to a goddess as some kind of gift.

She shook her head and almost laughed at the absurdity of the picture she had painted for herself.

Turning, she told Steorf, “You are absolutely right. I have to cut my losses.”

He closed his eyes almost gratefully at her pronouncement.

“I knew you’d see the merit of my words,” he finally said.

Tazi squatted in front of him and replied, “How can I argue with logic?”

Fannah turned with a worried expression, and Tazi leaned across to pat her on her forearm comfortingly.

“I’m going to need your help, Fannah,” she told her blind companion. “Could you take Steorf’s sack?”

Fannah didn’t say a word, but she did accept the bag that Tazi helped remove from Steorf.

“It’s the only choice you have,” he told the Calishite.

“Now,” Tazi added, “If you grab his right arm, I can get his left and we’ll get him to his feet.”

“What?” Steorf exclaimed.

“You are absolutely right,” she told him gravely. “At this stage, I cannot afford a single liability. And you are hardly that.”

“But, Tazi…” he implored.

“No,” she cut him off. “Don’t waste your breath. We will have only one chance to defeat Ciredor. Our strength lies in our unity, and that is how we will face him: together.”

Tazi took Steorf’s left arm and laid it over her shoulders as Fannah took his right. He shook his head but when the women tried to stand, he struggled to help them. They rose, as one, from the bloody sands.

Steorf had been passing in and out of awareness for the past few hours. He spoke less and less coherently to Tazi and started, instead, to mumble strange words and phrases as she and Fannah had helped him across the wasteland.

“The desert nomads say there are six stages of thirst in the Calim,” Fannah said. “First, there is the clamorous stage. I think it is fairly obvious that is what he is entering.”

Tazi leaned slightly forward of Steorf’s dangling head to look at Fannah.

“I think you’re right. What else can we expect?”

“If there was not the worm toxin to consider, the next stages, in order, would be: cotton mouth, swollen tongue, shriveled tongue, blood tears, and finally, living death. I am not sure how the desert

worm’s sting will change any of it, other than to hasten the steps.”

Tazi shook her head and found all she could say was the obvious, “We have to find him some water.”

“We all need to find some water, Tazi,” Fannah reminded her. “This is our fate as well, given time.”

Tazi didn’t even want to ponder that. She had already begun to feel the painful beginnings of dehydration herself. Her eyes were slowly pulling back in their sockets, and her nose felt like some small, foreign object hanging from her face. She could feel other subtle, and not so subtle, ways that her body was trying to conserve water as well, but the insidious fact was that to do so, her body was picking and choosing what parts of her were expendable and what parts were not. She was not in control.

Steorf s head rolled back, and that motion snapped Tazi from her dreadful realizations. She could see that his eyes opened slightly. He looked at her and Fannah, and Tazi saw an unreadable expression spread across his face. She started to motion to Fannah to slow her pace even more when Steorf had a small burst of strength and shook himself free of the two women.

“Get away from me!” Steorf shouted at Tazi and Fannah.

He stood swaying in the sand. With one hand he rubbed uselessly at his desiccated eyes. His eyelids had dried, and Tazi had noticed how difficult it had become for him to close them. He had taken on a blank stare because of it. He flailed his other hand out in front of him, desperately trying to ward off his imagined attackers.

“What’s wrong?” Tazi asked him.

“It’s all right,” Fannah tried to soothe him, somewhat more aware of the confused state of mind Steorf was slipping into. “We’re here.”

Neither of the women’s words had their desired effect on the failing mage. He staggered a few steps back from them and started to fumble around with his tattered shirt.

“Where’s Tazi?” he demanded of his apparitions. “What have you done with her?”

Before Fannah could stop her, Tazi started to move slowly toward Steorf.

“I’m right here,” she tried to convince him.

“Don’t,” Fannah warned her. “He no longer knows who we are.”

Steorf tugged at his ripped shirt, and Tazi was startled to see that he was struggling to remove it. Without thinking, she reached over to him and tried to stop his jittery fingers. The moment she touched his hot, dry skin, Steorf swung a fist in her direction. The only reason it didn’t connect was because Steorf was so disorientated that his aim was off. Tazi herself was too stunned to move out of his way. ‘ Steorf staggered a bit more from the momentum of his badly executed punch but recovered enough to yell, “Where is she?”

“He needs to be stopped before he hurts himself,” Fannah exclaimed, closing in on him from one side as Tazi finally made a move from the other.

Or hurts one of us unintentionally with either his fists or his magic, she thought.

Steorf was clawing at his sword’s scabbard. She sprang at him, all the while trying to be careful of his open wound. Tazi hit him in the shoulders with her outstretched hands, and as they both tumbled to the ground, she tucked herself up to somersault away from him. As soon as her feet hit the ground, Tazi scrambled around and slipped her right arm around his throat. Kneeling behind his prostrate form, she grabbed her left shoulder with her right hand and secured him in a headlock. She slipped her left forearm between her chest and the back of his head and applied increasing pressure until he became still, her chokehold the gentlest way she knew how to take him out.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she relaxed her hold on him, certain he was unconscious.

She even allowed herself a moment to pass her hand through his hair. The strawlike quality it had taken on was simply one

more reminder of their predicament.

“Are you all right?” Fannah asked her.

“Yes,” Tazi choked out, “but we can’t go on any farther like this.”

“Then this is where we’ll rest,” Fannah replied and kneeled down.

As Fannah began to scrape away a large layer of sand from in front of her, Tazi asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m removing the top cover of sand, which is the hottest. A few inches down,” she explained to Tazi, “the sand will be significantly cooler.”

Tazi fell to her knees as well and helped clear away the hot sands. When they had cleared a furrow large enough to hold Steorf, both she and Fannah dragged his inert body over and laid him in it. Tazi felt as though they were lowering him into a grave and tried desperately to keep that image from creeping back into her thoughts.

Tazi could only watch uselessly as Steorf suffered in mute torment. He came around shortly after being placed in the cooling pit, but he shook uncontrollably, caught in the grip of fever chills. When he faced Tazi, however, there was recognition in his eyes.

“What happened?” he asked weakly.

“You got a little confused,” Tazi explained gently. >

“And?” he prompted her.

Tazi wasn’t sure what offered the most temporary relief: that he had regained consciousness at all or that he actually appeared to understand the conversation they were having.

“I think this was your way of getting even with me for years of tricks,” she admitted. “You took a swing at me.”

“Are you all right?” he asked, his own eyes filling with concern.

She leaned closer to him and whispered, “Not even on your best day could you ever hope to touch me.”

Steorf tried to smile but instead stifled a cry of pain. Though he tried to maintain a brave front, Tazi knew with an abso-

lute certainty that he was dying. Her faint smile died on her chapped lips. She and Fannah busied themselves and tried to make him as comfortable as possible. Fannah removed her outer robe and pillowed it under his head.

“There is not much more we can do for him,” Fannah whispered to Tazi.

She looked more closely at him and saw that his wound continued to slowly seep. The discharge was a mixture of the worm’s milky venom and a trace of his own blood. What filled Tazi’s heart with dread were the red lines of infection that had spidered out from the original injury. Tazi knew that their inexorable march to his heart was *what spelled Steorf’s doom.

“I will not accept this,” Tazi said. She was filled with the absolute need to move. “There has to be something we can do.”

“I do not know of anything within the Calim that could cure him,” Fannah replied. She rubbed her forehead, tired.

“Think!” Tazi ordered the Calishite angrily. “There has got to be something here. Anything!”

“There maybe something that might at least alleviate his suffering somewhat,” Fannah recalled eventually.

“What is it?” Tazi asked, ready to grasp at any straw offered.

“Before the worm attacked us,” Fannah explained, “I had been telling Steorf about a plant that we might come across, and I had wanted him to watch for it. It is called the Calim cactus.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“The plant is rather unassuming; growing no more than three to four inches tall, and it provides very little nutrition. But it has an extensive root system that runs several feet across just under the sand.”

Fannah described the thing deliberately, accurately drawing a mental picture for Tazi with her words.

“How can this help us?”Tazi asked, a seed of hope growing inside her as she committed the description to memory.

“What the plant does to trap moisture is raise its roots above the sands and absorb what water there is before pulling them back underground.”

“So the roots are full of water,” Tazi deduced, growing excited.

“If we can find some that have buried roots,” Fannah cautioned her. “Only those will have liquid in them.”

“I will find them,” Tazi swore. “I want you to stay with Steorf in case he needs something.”

“I don’t know what I can do for him,” Fannah said, slightly flustered.

“You can be with him,” Tazi explained. “Let him know he’s not alone.”

Fannah nodded and moved back over to Steorf’s side. She gathered up one of his hands in hers and squeezed it tight. Tazi wasn’t sure what he was aware of at this point. She emptied the sack containing Ciredor’s writings and left them in Fannah’s keeping.

“I’ll need something to put the roots in,” she told Fannah confidently.

She stroked Steorf’s forehead, shocked by the heat that radiated from him. >

“I’ll be back as quick as I can,” she promised her two friends.

“We will be waiting,” Fannah answered.

Tazi turned and marched off to the west. The sun had reached its apex, and Tazi could feel her arms burn under its glare. With only her leather vest and pants, her arms were near to blistering. She occasionally wiped at her eyes, which had become bitterly painful. As she became more and more dehydrated, she could literally feel her eyes pull back in their sockets. Tazi realized that her orbs were mostly comprised of water and she was losing that at an alarming rate, so her body stole from itself. There was nothing to be done about it

other than finding the Calim cactus.

Part of her rational mind was convinced that they were going to fail. There was no other logical outcome. But deeper down, in her soul, she hadn’t quit, and that was the force that drove her on. It was as though the desert had burned away everything excessive that she carried and left her only her core intact, like a worn stone. The mild winds had smoothed and shaped her and left her determined.

“That’s why Fannah knew I needed to pass through the ritual successfully,” she said aloud. “Out here, we are nothing but our true selves, whatever they may be.”

A little farther to the west, Tazi saw what she thought was ‘some scrub and rocks.

“Please,” she whispered in a voice rapidly becoming hoarse, “let that be real. No more illusions.”

As she trudged closer, the scrub did not fade from view or remain in the distance. Tazi realized she was actually gaining on it. Heartened, she picked up speed, and soon enough she was in the middle of a small area of brush. Though it was mostly insignificant piles of rocks and quick-moving lizards, there was a little plant life.

Everything she saw was dead. Tazi slumped down on the ground and dropped her head in defeat. She wanted to scream but didn’t possess the energy.

Shaking her head, she whispered, “I don’t even have enough water for tears. In the end, I’m not even allowed that.”

She debated going farther but knew she had reached her limit if she was going to return to her friends.

“If I’m going to die,” she finally said, “there’s no finer company to be in.”

She started to rise wearily to her feet when some movement to her right caught her eye. Several speckled lizards darted in and out of a cluster of stones. Almost as though mocking her, one sat on a small boulder and defiantly licked at the moisture on its own eyeball. Tazi toyed with the idea of trying to catch some of them, but tossed the thought aside.

“Even if I could snare you little demons,” she muttered, “all of you put together wouldn’t make a meal worth the effort.”

Something about their numbers puzzled her, though. Nowhere else in this little haven had she seen any wildlife.

“Just what makes that pile of rocks so special,” she wondered aloud, “that you all have to hide there?”

She moved over to investigate, and the moment her shadow passed over the lizards they scattered in every direction on their spindly legs. She didn’t bother worrying about whether they might be poisonous or not, if any still remained. She simply thrust her hands into the clutch of stones and started moving them around.