Who am I fooling?
I’m dying, too, trapped in Kaal Baran with an almost-dried up well and barely any food. Well I know that the trip to the nearest settlement is over a week long. Sera expected to be supplied through her portal in Highwind, but that portal is now gone. Flutter and I have looked at the consoles Sera set up in the Chamber of Secrets. We’ve pressed buttons, tugged wires, kicked at the blasted boxes.
All right. I kicked the boxes.
Nothing.
There’s weaponry in other rooms, and a very little store of food. Canned meat for the eerie men and tins of worms for the cobble crunchers. Bags of white crystals for the cloaks—I dump handfuls of it in a trough in the courtyard, then fill it, awkwardly, left-handedly, with water from the well. There’s mud in the water, but the cloaks don’t care. They float in from cracks and mist up out of wall, put their pale faces into the water and feed.
I don’t watch them.
But there is one place I haven’t yet looked at. One place that I never told even Sera about, never mentioned to Flutter, would never go to with an entourage of Highwind creatures dogging my steps and peering over my shoulders—or in the case of cobble crunchers, from behind my legs.
It’s the thought of curious eyes that hold me back from that chamber, I tell myself. Coward, I think a moment later.
No, that place is not meant for failures and blasphemers like me.
Instead, I look for Flutter. She’s not inside the courtyard, of course. No, she’s out in the valley.
The gates of Kaal Baran are open, and I walk down the ramp into the narrow valley. The ground between me and the bronze Gates of Tau Marai, small in the distance, is scuffed and stained from the recent battle. We buried the dead bodies, but the broken bits of golems are still there. I don’t like leaving them, but we haven’t the strength to move them.
We know so little about golems, even after all these years of fighting them. Why shouldn’t they reassemble themselves out of the parts strewn across the battlefield and walk off it?
I pass what looks to be a small grove of bare trees. Night walkers, rooted in the shadow of the canyon wall. They haven’t moved in days. They’re the only part of Sera’s army—now my responsibility—that haven’t tried to kill me, either intentionally or not, nor complained about being hungry or tried to steal my shoes or take over. No, they’ve just stood there and that’s earned them a bucketful of water around their ankles every evening.
Highwind is a place of water. The Salera Desert is not.
Flutter’s a shadow at the foot of the ramp, thin and insubstantial in the hot brightness. I stumble over a stone, and reach out for the wall with my right arm.
Right. I don’t have a hand there anymore.
The stump bangs against the wall, and I lean my shoulder in as I catch my balance. The missing hand weighs down my right arm. Why does absence have so much mass? It almost matches the dark pit in my soul, constantly threatening to drag me down.
I kick pebbles down the ramp as I continue on my way. They skip and skitter almost down to Flutter’s feet, but she pays no mind, intent as she is on a small cloud hovering above the ground.
Bringing back yet another cloak.
I stop behind Flutter, giving her space. The cloud of dust shudders, and slowly forms itself into the shape of a woman.
Her face and body are the color of sand, her features crude and exaggerated, her body a suggestion with no details. She looks like one of those old statues of women dug out of the desert from time to time, ones that are all stylized lines and curves.
She gathers in on herself for one breath. One inhalation, one heartbeat, and she’s a cloak again, pale-faced and dark-eyed, a shiver of dark membranous cloak-wing behind her.
And then she shatters.
I lunge for Flutter—left hand!—grab her shoulder (for a moment my fingers hold cool air), and spin her around and down.
I screw my eyes shut, and a crackle of power surges around us. Particles sting my cheek, burn against my neck. The darkness behind my eyelids turns a dull red which bleeds itself out into blackness.
I peek out through a half-open eye.
The other cloak’s gone.
Flutter flows out of my grasp, and to the place where the other cloak had been. There’s a grey tinge to her white skin, and her eyes look like the holes of masks, showing nothingness. I think I see light glimmering through her, as if she were full of minute holes, and then I don’t look closely any more.
“You should eat,” I tell her roughly. “Or else you’ll disappear, too. Come on.”
Flutter doesn’t answer. She’s still looking at that damn patch of earth.
“I didn’t even know her name,” she says, soft as mist. “But we hatched at about the same time and slept in cells next to each other. She smelled like those purple wildflowers that grow above Highwind in the spring.”
I make a frustrated sound behind my closed lips. “Why do you torture yourself like this? Why bring them back—to all this?” My gesture encompasses city, valley, and fort. “To a place they don’t belong, to the knowledge that memory and identity has been taken from them.”
“Not forever,” says Flutter. “Things that have been taken can be returned. What is lost is found again.”
She sounds more and more eilendi-like every day. Spouting enigmatic proverbs and truisms.
Doesn’t she realize that
