The Tsaazaar had proved harsher than their preparations. Even in winter, the sun ravaged the landscape, bleeding the very air of moisture and the soil of life. It left their lips stale and arid as the desert dunes and scorched whatever skin showed from under the gray cloaks Brother William had given as parting gifts. They were a boon during the day, and at night, a godsend; for when the white sun plunged and the yellow moon hung high in the firmament, the warmth went with the northern winds, and the yawn of Hell froze over the wasteland. It was a wonder anyone could live in such conditions, enough to make even a pastor’s son skeptical. Their rations—another parting gift—were two days gone, and the days before their exhaustion were nothing but gnawing on hard rice to save what little water was left to their skins. Now that, too, was depleted, so they shambled like skeletons carrying their empty packs, and Adam with Magdalynn withered thin as tumble-grass.
The monks, with all their mystic herbalism, had been unable to cure her of the disease. “The Black Devil,” Brother William had called it, a rare pestilence foreign to the Gautaman mainland but found in abundance among the Mephistine trade ships. It was fever and sweats, “Pox, rash, and death,” William warned. No apothecary in Gautama had ever made a medicine to stave off its awful end. Only in Mephisto was there said to be a cure, “And perhaps in the outposts scattered throughout the Tsaazaar.” That was the final gift from the apostate monk, the last hope that kept Adam going north and north-east, staring eternally into the heat warped horizon. Then it appeared before him.
“Oh God,” the Messah whispered, unsure if he should believe his eyes. It was still early morning, too cool for a mirage. “God,” he uttered again.
Ba’al snorted and swallowed—to spit would be wasteful. “What? What are you babbling about now?”
“Oh God, is that truly…is that real?”
Adnihilo lifted his hanging head and squinted into the distance. His lips cracked and split as he smiled.
“About damn time,” answered the bishop, gruff, yet he too was grinning at the beige blur taking shape as they approached. It bloomed before their eyes, a hundred bright and lively pavilions, a thousand thronging caravanners and their camels, and a dozen high-rising structures: watchtowers, barracks, taverns, hostels, and brothels imagined the pastor’s son—baskets of bread and fruit and barrels of water—a remedy for the Black Devil.
It was more than the Messah dreamed. They arrived by midday and followed a stream of merchants into the outpost, mouths salivating at the sloshing sounds of their cargo. Water, enough to make a king’s fortune there in the desert, and the wealth didn’t end. Adam and his companions passed between a pair of limewashed spires smooth as ivory, peppered with arrow slits, and crowned with twisted, burnished bronze domes. Four sets were visible in all, a pair for each of the cardinal directions. They framed the outpost’s borders, and within lay the maze of canvas canopies—merchants’ tents packed as densely as a Gautaman street and painted so many shades as to put to shame a rainbow. It seemed to the pastor’s son as he traversed the labyrinthine market that there was nothing absent being sold or traded. Gold, jewels, marble and timber, food stuffs and clothing fit for every station, arms, armour, and all manner of carnal escorts advertising their services; it was enough to make his head spin till he entered the heart of the colony.
Four permanent structures made up the whole of the outpost’s center. The largest was the most mundane. Adam guessed it a warehouse by its scarce, barred windows and titanic, iron gates—open as he gazed upon them, guards inspecting each and every of an endless line of caravanners waiting their turn to store their wares. Beside that was a stable, or at least what served as one, though it would have put to shame what was once the south-east of Babylon. It was vaster by half and with as many inhabitants, and from what Adam saw, better conditions than those familiar slums—and better protected. For every ten men securing their animals was a wary patrolman donned in dyed linen coat reinforced by iron plates; long, broad, and flat-pointed sword; and pointed half-helm with a veil of maille hanging over his face. And even more of these Tsaazaari guardsmen crowded around the next edifice. The barracks: limewashed like the watchtowers and dressed with bronze merlons, three floors tall, and adjoined to their own stable outfitted not with camels but lean, white-haired horses.
From the last of the grand structures, Adam averted his eyes. He’d caught a glimpse on his way in of its pink marble walls, and scarlet curtains and banners, and its window display cages and the naked girls within. Girls they were, some of them no older than Magdalynn, and others not women at all but boys or men or aberrations in between. It made Amsah’s brothel back in Babylon look like a Religious Sisters’ abbey.
A sudden tug on the Messah’s arm brought his eyes from the ground littered with feet. It was Adnihilo following Ba’al leading them onto a less congested side street. He stopped in front of a weapons merchant and what looked to be a crowd of patron mercenaries. Under the shade of the
