“When you find her, please tell her to come home. The council will meet with her.”
Thad rose, and with a deep sense of failure and depression Arevin understood that they had been dismissed.
They went back outside, leaving the workrooms and their strange machines, their strange light, their strange smells. The sun was setting, joining the long shadows together into darkness.
“Where shall I look?” Arevin said suddenly.
“What?”
“I came here because I believed Snake was coming home. Now I don’t know where she might be. It’s nearly winter. If the storms have started…”
“She knows better than to get stuck out on the desert in winter,” Thad said. “No, what must have happened is somebody needed help and she had to go off the route home. Maybe her patient was even in the central mountains. She’ll be somewhere south of here, in Middlepass or New Tibet or Mountainside.”
“All right,” Arevin said, grateful for any possibility. “I will go south.” But he wondered if Thad were speaking with the unquestioning self-confidence of extreme youth.
Thad opened the front door of a long low house. Inside, rooms opened off a central living-space. Thad threw himself down on a deep couch. Putting aside careful manners, Arevin sat on the floor.
“Dinner’s in a while,” Thad said. “The room next to mine is free right now, you can use it.”
“Perhaps I should go on,” Arevin said.
“Tonight? It’s crazy to ride at night around here. We’d find you at the bottom of a cliff in the morning. At least stay till tomorrow.”
“If that is your advice.” In fact, he felt a great heavy lethargy. He followed Thad into the spare room.
“I’ll get your pack,” Thad said. “You take a rest. You look like you need it.”
Arevin sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.
At the door, Thad turned back. “Listen, I’d like to help. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No,” Arevin said. “Thank you. I am very comfortable.”
Thad shrugged. “Okay.”
The black-sand desert stretched to the horizon, flat and empty, unmarred by any sign that it had ever been crossed. Heat waves rose like smoke. There was no steady wind yet, but all the marks and detritus of the traders’ route had already been obliterated: erased or covered by the shifting breezes that preceded winter. At the crest of the central mountains’ eastern range, Snake and Melissa looked out toward their invisible destination. They dismounted to rest the horses. Melissa adjusted a strap on Squirrel’s new riding saddle, then glanced back the way they had come, down into the high valley that had been her home. The town clung to the steep mountain slope, above the fertile valley floor. Windows and black glass panels glittered in the noon sun.
“I’ve never been this far from there before,” Melissa said with wonder. “Not in my whole life.” She turned away from the valley, toward Snake. “Thank you, Snake,” she said.
“You’re welcome, Melissa.”
Melissa dropped her gaze. Her right cheek, the unscarred one, flushed scarlet beneath her tan. “I should tell you something about that.”
“About what?”
“My name. It’s true, what Ras said, that it isn’t really—”
“Never mind. Melissa is your name as far as I’m concerned. I had a different child-name, too.”
“But they gave you your name. It’s an honor. You didn’t just take it like I did mine.”
They remounted and started down the well-used switchback trail.
“But I could have turned down the name they offered me,” Snake said. “If I’d done that, I would have picked my own adult name like the rest of the healers do.”
“You could have turned it down?”
“Yes.”
“But they hardly ever give it! That’s what I heard.”
“That’s true.”
“Has anybody ever said they didn’t want it?”
“Not as far as I know. I’m only the fourth one, though, so not very many people have had the chance. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t accepted it.”
“But why?”
“Because of the responsibility.” Her hand rested on the corner of the serpent case. Since the crazy’s attack she had begun to touch it more often. She drew her hand away from the smooth leather. Healers tended to die fairly young or live to a very old age. The Snake immediately preceding her had been only forty-three when he died, but the other two had each outlasted a century. Snake had a tremendous body of achievement to live up to, and so far she had failed.
The trail led downward through forever trees, among the gnarled brown trunks and dark needles of the trees legend said never bore seeds and never died. Their resin sharpened the air with a piny tang.
“Snake…” Melissa said.
“Yes?”
“Are you… are you my mother?”
Taken aback, Snake hesitated a moment. Her people did not form family groups quite the way others did. She herself had never called anyone “mother” or “father,” though all the older healers bore exactly that relationship to her. And Melissa’s tone was so wistful…
“All healers are your family now,” Snake said, “but I adopted you, and I think that makes me your mother.”
“I’m glad.”
“So am I.”
Below the narrow band of scraggly forest, almost nothing grew on the mountain’s flanks but lichen, and though the altitude was still high and the path steep, Snake and Melissa might as well have been on the desert floor already. Below the trees, the heat and the dryness of the air increased steadily. When they finally did reach the sand, they stopped for a moment to change, Snake into the robes Arevin’s people had given her, Melissa into desert clothes they had bought for her in Mountainside.
They saw no one all day. Snake glanced over her shoulder from time to time, and kept on guard whenever the horses passed through dunefields where someone could hide and ambush unsuspecting passersby. But there was no trace of the crazy. Snake began to wonder if the two attacks might have been coincidence, and her memories of other noises around her camp a dream. And if the crazy was a crazy, perhaps his vendetta against her had by now been diverted by some other irresistible concern.
She did not convince herself.
By evening the mountains lay far behind them, forming an abrupt wall. The horses’ hooves crunched in the sand, but the underlying silence was complete and unearthly. Snake and Melissa rode and talked as darkness fell. The heavy clouds obscured the moon; the constant glow of the lightcells in Snake’s lantern, relatively brighter now, provided just enough illumination for the travelers to continue. Hanging from the saddle, the lantern swung with Swift’s walk. The black sand reflected light like water. Squirrel and Swift moved closer together. Gradually, Snake and Melissa talked more and more softly, and finally they did not speak at all.
Snake’s compass, the nearly invisible moon, the direction of the wind, the shapes of sand dunes all helped them proceed in the right direction, but Snake could not put aside the pervasive wilderness fear that she was traveling in circles. Turning in the saddle, Snake watched the invisible trail behind them for several minutes, but no other light followed. They were alone; there was nothing but the darkness. Snake settled back.
“It’s spooky,” Melissa whispered.
“I know. I wish we could travel by day.”
“Maybe it’ll rain.”
“That would be nice.”
The desert received rain only once every year or two, but when it came, it usually arrived just before winter. Then the dormant seeds exploded into growth and reproduction and the sharp-grained desert softened with green and bits of color. In three days the delicate plants shriveled to brown lace and died, leaving hard-cased seeds to endure another year, or two, or three, until the rain roused them again. But tonight the air was dry and quiet and gave no hint of any change.
A light shimmered in the distance. Snake, dozing, woke abruptly from a dream in which the crazy was following and she saw his lantern moving closer and closer. Up until now she had not realized how sure she was that somehow he was still following her, still somewhere near, fired by incomprehensible motives.
But the light was not a carried lantern, it was steady and stationary and ahead of her. The sound of dry leaves drifted toward her on faint wind: they were nearing the first oasis on the route to Center.
It was not even dawn. Snake reached forward and patted Swift’s neck. “Not much farther now,” she said.
“What?” Melissa, too, started awake. “Where — ?”
“It’s all right,” Snake said. “We can stop soon.”
“Oh.” Melissa looked around, blinking. “I forgot where I was.”
They reached the summertrees ringing the oasis. Snake’s lantern illuminated leaves already split and frayed by windblown sand. Snake did not see any tents and she could not hear any sounds of people or animals. All the caravannaires, by now, had retreated to the safety of the mountains.
“Where’s that light?”
“I don’t know,” Snake said. She glanced at Melissa, for her voice sounded strange: it was muffled by the end of her headcloth, pulled across her face. When no one appeared, she let it drop as if unaware that she had been hiding herself.
Snake turned Swift around, worried about the light.
“Look,” Melissa said.
Swift’s body cut off the lantern’s light in one direction, and there against the darkness rose a streak of luminescence. Closer, Snake could see that it was a dead
