Black Jade

wanted to see it again. He returned with a wad of cotton: he pressed it down into Maram's newly excavated wound and wrapped a long strip of cotton around Maram's chest and back to hold it in place. By way of explanation, he said to us, 'Never again. I nearly killed Maram, and the Lord of Lies nearly made me into a ghul.'

I stood near Atara, who remained motionless. I help up my sword toward the east as if to reflect back any illusions or evil visions that might emanate from that direction. I had no sense that my efforts aided Atara at all. But at last, the spell that had seized her, too, was broken.

Atara put away her scryer's crystal and called out, 'Is Maram all right?'

'Yes,' I told her, although this wasn't quite true. I grasped her arm, and wished that I could look into her eyes. 'Are you all right?'

She made no reply to this, directly. All she would say was: 'The world … is more than it seems. There are worse things than anything I ever imagined.'

Sunji and Maidro stepped closer then. Maidro looked from Master Juwain to Maram and said, 'If that wasn't sorcery, then I never hope to see such.'

Master Juwain explained more about the making and wielding of the gelstei crystals: what little had been passed down through the ages. Then he said, 'What once was called art is now wrongly called sorcery. Though if you wish to call the evil usage of these crystals sorcery, I won't dispute you.'

Liljana came over with a cloth soaked in an infusion made from kokun leaves, which was the only thing that eased the pain of Maram's flesh, at least for a time. She washed his body and tended his wounds with a gentleness that surprised me.

I expected that having suffered this new outrage that had nearly killed him, Maram might call for us to return to the Avari's hadrah. Instead he called for brandy.

'Ah, Master Juwain,' he said, tapping his hand lightly over his chest, 'it was you who drilled this hole in me, and so it is upon you to fill it in the only way that will truly help.'

So great was Master Juwain's guilt that he did not gainsay Maram's request. None of us did. Master Juwain poured much more than a few drams of brandy into Maram's cup, then watched as Maram drank it slowly.

'Thank you, sir,' Maram said. He sat up and ran his finger around the bowl of his cup, then licked it. 'You've made a new man of me.'

He held out his cup and gazed at the bottle of brandy that Master Juwain held in his gnarled hand.

'No, no more,' Master Juwain told him. 'At least not now. If you need a little at the end of the day, you shall have it.'

'Do you promise?'

'Yes, I suppose if I have to, I do promise.'

Maram's eyes gleamed, and a new strength flowed into him. I watched with amazement as he suddenly stood up to begin dressing. Our gelstei might hold undreamed-of powers I but so it seemed did a bottle of brandy.

We waited out the worst heat of the day there at the well, trying to sleep inside our stifling tents. When the killing sun had dropped much lower in the sky, we set out again to the west. We journeyed long past dusk and deep into a new series of hills, whose sharp ridgelines ran north and south. Maram counted out the miles like a miser adding coins to a vault. But we all knew that at the day's end, like a spendthrift, he would exchange them all in return for what had become his nightly libation.

Late that evening, we pitched our tent in a narrow valley between two of these lines of hills. Master Juwain noted that many of the stones in the valley seemed rounded, as of river stones. He worried that if a storm came up, the walls of rock around us might funnel the rain into a flashflood that could drown us.

'If it stormed, we would be swept away,' Maidro said to him. 'And if we had wings, we could simply fly out of here; indeed, we could fly clear across the desert.'

Arthayn and Nuradayn laughed at this as if they thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. Sunji looked up at the glittering sky, unmarred by even a single cloud. And Maidro, taking pity on Master Juwain, added, 'In Segadar and Yaradar it rains here, torrents and rivers. But never in Soldru for as long as the Avari have lived in the desert. So sleep in peace, Master Healer.'

That night, after Master Juwain had rewarded Maram as promised, we all slept in relative peace, if not in comfort. The rocks sticking out of the ground bruised us, even beneath our thick furs, and the air fell almost icy cold. Maram stirred in his sleep and awakened more than once, moaning at the new pain in his chest. In the hills around us, the hyenas let loose their eerie cries.

Maram, when it came time to ride again, surprised me by saddling his horse without grumbling. As he told me in the dark of the morning before true morning: 'Forty miles we'll cover today, if it's a good day, and the sooner they are behind us, the sooner I shall have my brandy.'

For a few hours, as we worked our way across the highlands, we rode through near-darkness. Then the sun's first rays lit the hills with a golden-red lire. The rocks about us seemed to glow. Sunji, following an ancient route, led us up through a cleft between two hills as stark and barren as the moon. They were, he said, the last of this high country, and they marked the westernmost reaches of the Avari's realm.

'Now you will see,' he told me, turning on his horse toward me, 'what few men have seen.'

We came out on top of the cleft to behold the vast reaches of desert that opened out to the north, south and west. The wind, over the ages, had swept up the sand into mountains. Some of it shone white as the fine, shell- ground sand along a beach; some of it gleamed as red as the sandstone pinnacles and castle-like formations that stood even higher than the great dunes. In places, to the north, the sun fell upon swirls of red sand embedded in white and caused the dunes to glow with a lovely pink hue unlike anything I had ever seen. The sky framed this magnificent landscape with a blue so rich and deep it seemed almost like water. It was all so impossibly beautiful that I wanted |u» weep.

'The Tar Harath,', Sunji said to me. 'The womb of the desert.' 'It is … so lovely,' I said.

'It won't seem so in another three hours.' He pointed his finger out at the endless sweeps of sand. 'Not once we're out on the Hell's Anvil.'

'Ah, how far did you say it was across this?' Maram asked. 'No one really knows,' Sunji told him. 'It would be far, even if we were to ride as straight as an eagle flies. But if we must turn north or south in search of water, then. .'

He did not finish his sentence. And so Maram could not calculate how many forty-mile segments he must complete in order to earn his rations of brandy. In any case, as Maidro explained, we couldn't always count on making forty miles in a day.

'There might be sandstorms that we'll have to wait out,' he said. 'and that will eat up the hours — and eat the flesh off our bones if we're impatient. There are quicksands, too, that we must avoid. The sand itself will tire the horses' legs, ours too when we walk, and so the journey will go more slowly.'

He said nothing about the sun, which made its way up the great arc of the sky like a white-hot iron cinder. But Master Juwain had already explained to us that in the desert the air held too little moisture to shield against the sun. And here, in the deep desert, the air was so thin and dry that the sun's fierce rays burned through it like starfire through the great nothingness of space.

For a while, as we worked down into the Tar Harath, the hills at our back blocked out the sun. But then we rode out onto the sand, and the sun rose higher. It streaked down upon us like a rain of flaming arrows. The sand threw it back into the air so that it seemed that we rode through a wall of flame. The air here was indeed thin — but not so thin that we couldn't feel it searing us through our coverings of wool. We rode past mid-morning, and it grew even hotter. And still the sun rose higher and brighter and hotter. It flared so hellishly hot that we stopped to pitch our tents. Climbing inside them provided protection from the sun, but did nothing to help us escape from the terrible heat.

'It is like breathing fire!' Maram gasped out a couple of hours past noon. He lay sweating on top of his furs, unable to sleep. 'It is like being cooked inside an oven!'

Master Juwain, Daj, Kane and I sprawled out on our furs near him. My robes were a sodden mass of wool smothering me.

'I can't stop sweating,' Maram complained. 'It seems I'm taking a bath with all my clothes on.'

'Do you see this?' Kane said, kneeling over him. He ran his finger through the sweat pooling on Maram's forehead. 'This is all that is keeping you from cooking. Your body is no different than other kinds of meat. Heat it up