KRUSHITA WOKE TO THE shrill keening of a shvan and was instantly alert. The shvan was warning all within range that there was danger approaching.
The call came from far away, too far for anyone else in the caravan to hear. Beside her, Vor stirred and raised his head, ears prickling and fur bristling. Girl and shvan exchanged a look and shared the awareness of imminent threat.
Krushita sat up and looked over at her mother. Aqreen was fast asleep.
Krushita watched her mother sleeping for a moment. She always thought at such times that this was what her mother must have looked like when she was younger, when all her life was still waiting to be explored, her heart filled with the infinite possibilities that lay ahead. In sleep, all her lines and creases eased away, her face smoothing back into the innocence of youth. Aqreen never looked like that by waking light: the past five years had been hard on her, harder by far than on seven-year-old Krushita.
In the early days on the trail, Krushita had often woken to the sound of her mother suppressing muffled sobs as she cried herself to sleep. She had gone to Aqreen and comforted her as best as she could, but pain had a way of working itself through the heart and mind, taking its own winding course. In time, Aqreen had recovered, but a part of her still bore the scars of the betrayal and loss she had suffered. Those were the lines of care that marked her face, like the lines on the well-worn maps carried by the wagon masters, marking the years as surely as those lines marked where people had died in the past. Her mother’s face was a map of all the times parts of her had been killed.
Vor had waited patiently. Now, as she started to rise, the shvan rose too, shaking the sleep out of his long, sleek body. The fire had died out sometime in the night, and the air lay cool and still upon the campsite. Krushita rolled up her bedding, knowing she would not find sleep again till she knew why the shvan had cried out. She stepped carefully past her mother to their wagon. Vor was a dark grey shadow beside her in the predawn gloam. The camp was still mostly asleep. The shvan owned by the other drivers were sent out every night to roam free through the desert, traveling in packs and keeping lookout against any dangers. To the best of her knowledge, Vor was the only one who slept in camp.
They stood before the wagon, gazing out into the dark desert. Krushita placed her palm against the side of the wagon. The wood was worn smooth from the gritty desert winds. It had been almost new when Aqreen bought it from a merchant in the traders’ market in Western Aquila, exchanging one of her jeweled rings and their two fine horses for it.
Krushita remembered crying at being parted from her horse, which had been barely a foal when her grandfather had surprised her on her first birthday, but the wagon and the team of uks that drew it had become as familiar to her now. This pile of wood had been home to her and her mother these past five years.
The wagon was one of a circle of a hundred other similar vehicles. There were seventy-one such wagon circles in the train. In the five years they had been on the trail, the drivers had fallen into predictable patterns. Those foolish or reckless enough to disregard the rules had been culled out in the first few months. Krushita had witnessed more deaths than she could count. They had left Aquila with over one hundred twenty circles of a hundred wagons each, over twelve thousand wagons in all. After almost two thousand split off to go northward along the eastern coast of the White Desert, they had been left with over ten thousand wagons, all headed for Reygar. Almost a third of that number had been lost en route.
“A train that arrives with half its original number is one that had a good trail,” Train Master Bulan had said, turning their two heads to spit twin streams of purple baccan out onto the red sand. They were master of this circle and master of the entire wagon train. Aqreen had paid extra to be in Bulan’s circle. The master had a reputation for being honest to a fault, tough on drivers but fair, and for bringing their trains home with minimum loss.
Bulan had insisted on the nightly talks with their circle, and after a few weeks, the other drivers in the circle grew accustomed to them; some, like Krushita, even looked forward to hearing Bulan’s nightly trail stories. They had quite a few to tell, and nearly all of them involved fighting and death, both of which Krushita knew a great deal about by now. Some of the other masters delivered the perfunctory cautions required by law, then permitted their circles to feast and party as they wished, even joining in the debauchery themselves. Bulan was always at pains to remind their drivers that the trail was not an adventure, that it was a journey between points, the most perilous journey most of them would ever make in their lives, and they would have the rest of their lives left to feast and party when they reached their destination.
“A little nip at the bottle to help ease the aches of the trail, a few shenanigans from time to time, those are understandable,” Bulan had said in their dual voices, each head addressing one half of the circle. “We’re all only mortal, after all. To drink yourself into a stupor, or to roll in the back of a wagon with someone else’s partner, those are things that might just be indulgences or vices back home in Aquila. But out here on the trail, fifteen thousand miles from Reygar, with all manner of beasts and natural phenomena hungry to do us in, it’s plain suicidal. You need food, you need rest, you need some relaxation, within reason. Anything more than that, and the desert does you in.”
When some of the drivers had asked, somewhat skeptically, how a single master could expect to maintain such discipline on their own, far away from the laws and enforcers of Aquila, Bulan had offered two separate grins.
“The magisters back in Aquila may convict or forgive, the prisons will feed, clothe, and shelter you, the marshals may be fair or harsh. But out here, the desert never forgives, never relents, never fails to punish. It isn’t Bulan you need to fear, me dearies, it’s that.”
They jerked both their heads, indicating the endless darkness beyond the spill of the campfires. “The trail is hungry, ever hungry. It feeds on your urges, encourages them, and when you give in, it reaches out and snatches you up, dragging you out into the darkest part of the desert, where even the shvan fear to go. There is no appealing to the king, or posting bond, or second chances. Just cold, hard death.”
The skeptics quieted after that. A few who had still looked arrogantly unconvinced were long gone by now.
That had been sometime in the first few weeks on the trail. Krushita was still just a baby, then, barely two, and everything was still new and foreign to her. She had sat in her mother’s lap and, along with the drivers of the one hundred other wagons in their circle, listened to the train master’s nightly talk.
Bulan had told the people of their circle that in times past, entire wagon trains were known to have been lost on the trail. Of course, that had been back in the days when the Red and White Deserts hadn’t been mapped as thoroughly and the most treacherous regions were still unknown.
The train master had poked a finger of one of their four hands at the map that they had nailed to the side of their wagon. “Back in olden times, they din’t have no modern maps like this, all water sources and whatnot marked out so nice and properlike.” They gestured. “Oh, they had maps, mind you. But they was barely sketches, showing only the biggest landmarks and cities. You could travel years without knowing if you were headed in the right direction or not. Olden times maps, if you could call ’em that, would just have the word BEWARE written across them. Whether that meant savage beasts, firestorms, or desert dragons . . . that was for you to find out.”
Krushita recalled those nightly lectures by the trail master with fondness. Tough and overbearing as they had seemed in those early weeks to her wide-eyed, more innocent younger self, she knew now that Bulan was only trying to keep them safe and alive. The months and then the years that followed had proven the master’s nightly advice, rulings, and warnings to be invaluable. Those who had ignored Bulan—or worse, scoffed—had paid the price. The Reygistan Trail was littered with their remains. Others who had listened only halfheartedly, failing to follow their rules or panicking when the moment of danger came, were long gone too.
The trail claims its price, as Bulan often said. The Red Desert forgets but never forgives.
The train master was also awake. Krushita had sensed their presence but had given them time to make their own assessment. She knew they had sensed, rather than heard, the distant warning cry of the shvan that had awoken her.
Now she moved toward their wagon.
Bulan was standing outside the circle, facing outward. Krushita ducked under the interlocked swingletrees of two wagons, both the property of the train master, and stepped outside the circle to join him.
One head swiveled on the master’s knotted neck to look at her. The mouth grunted by way of greeting. One enormous hand reached out to greet Vor as the shvan sidled up to the master’s trunk-sized legs, sniffing with interest. Another hand patted the beast’s head. Shvan allowed only a few select individuals to touch them, something most people were loath to do: that plush fur could transform into needle sharp spikes in an instant. Bulan was one of the accepted ones, like Krushita. They were pack.
In a third enormous gnarled hand, Bulan held a battered bowl, which steamed lightly in the chill morning. Krushita wrinkled her nose at the awful smell. She had grown accustomed to the unusual eating habits of the myriad species and cultures that traveled in the train by now, but she would never be able to understand how some dishes and concoctions could be consumed by anyone.
“Won’t offer ye some,” Bulan said as one of their mouths took a sip, “but you know you’re welcome to help yeself.”
Krushita resisted the impulse to shudder at the thought of actually drinking that vile-smelling fluid. “Thanks,” she said.
They stood together for a moment in companionable silence.
“Trouble’s coming,” she said at last.
Bulan nodded. “Dunno what it is, though,” they said. “Can’t be folk, or the pack would have taken up the cry.”
Krushita had noted this as well. Usually, when a shvan smelled, heard, or sensed something unusual out in the desert and sent up a cry, the pack would instantly join in. With over fifty thousand of the creatures roving together, that made for a powerful clamor.
She stared out into the faint gloaming that heralded the coming dawn, her eyes losing focus as she allowed herself to slip into a half-awake, half-dreaming state. She knew that Bulan or anyone else watching her body would see her pupils shrink to pinpoints, while her mind traveled outward, seeking the minds of any sentient beings around.
After a moment’s questing, she found a buzzard drifting on air currents high above, satiated from having fed only the night before. The buzzard was a carrion bird dedicated to only two things: flying and feeding. It was an easy one to ride, and she slipped into its head without any resistance, just a brief moment of adjustment and a lurch in her belly as she stared out of its eyes, looking down from a height of almost two thousand feet.
The desert sprang alive through the buzzard’s dark-adapted vision, and she could see as clearly as in daylight.
The wagon train lay directly below her, a pattern of circles overlapping to form one large circle. She grew aware of hundreds of other buzzards riding the high currents around her, stacked at varying heights depending on who was hungriest. She had ridden buzzards before and knew that the birds, while loners, often flew in apparent flocks when following a sufficiently large food source. The wagon train was a rich one by desert standards; all the buzzards around were fat and lazy from feasting for the past five years.
She overrode the initial surprise and resistance from the buzzard, forcing it to flap its wings and fly northward, away from its bountiful traveling larder. The other buzzards paid it no heed; more feasting for them.
The wagon train fell behind almost instantly, lost in the vast, seemingly infinite expanse of red sand. Then there was nothing but emptiness for as far as she could see, even with razor-sharp buzzard eyes. But she could smell life everywhere: buzzards were among the only birds that had a highly developed sense of smell.
It always amazed her at such times how much life there was even out here, in this seemingly sterile wasteland. There were small and large creatures of numerous species living upon, above, and below the sand. There was even water to be found in the forbiddingly armored, fat fronds of the dull magenta sabbar plants that grew low and wide in patches. Almost invisible to most species, they were easily detectable to shvan and other desert fauna like the buzzards.
About thirty miles from the train camp, she glimpsed the shvan pack, a large furry mass that resembled a living, moving carpet. It undulated slowly, moving in a large circle centered around the train. Smaller splinter groups dotted the circumference of the circle, communicating through smell and occasional hoots and cries as they formed an irregular perimeter guarding over their owners and their belongings. She probed the mind of the shvan pack, a hive awareness that shared emotions in a manner not unlike a human crowd.
The pack was uneasy but unsure of the cause.
They sensed that something was out there, something threatening and imminent, but could not make sense of what it was exactly.
This in itself didn’t mean much: shvan, for all their fierce loyalty and ability to ape human behavior, weren’t particularly intelligent. They saw the world in fairly simplistic terms. Anything unknown was a potential threat and to be feared until it proved itself to be benign or friendly. They might be responding to almost anything. There was no real sense of alarm or emergency in their shared consciousness.
Krushita probed further outward, seeking the individual shvan who had raised the first alarm.
She was surprised to find it much farther away, almost a dozen miles from the pack or even the splinter groups. It was unusual for shvan to roam individually. Even shvan who had been exiled from the pack for one reason or another usually tagged behind the pack, hoping against all odds for forgiveness. Eventually these loners gave up, lay down, and waited to die.
This shvan was no outcast or exile.
If anything, she was a prima, one of the group of alphas that dominated and controlled the pack.
The prima was running a scouting mission, on the orders of the other primas. Krushita could feel her pride in being selected for such an important task, as well as her fear and unease at being on her own. She could still feel and sense the pack, and they her, but physically, she was on her own, cut off from immediate help, and she was terrified.
Krushita remained in the shvan’s head, looking out through her feral eyes as she scoured the desert, seeking out a clue to the strange presence she had sensed only a short while earlier. It had been that presence that had prompted her to cry out the warning. The pack had not taken it up, only because they could make no sense of her call. She had not signaled any of the usual sounds that indicated a predator or even strangers. She had simply cried out once, saying roughly the equivalent of I don’t know what, and I’m not sure, but there may be something here that scares me!
Krushita then tried something she had never attempted before: she remained in the mind of the shvan while also maintaining her hold on the mind of the buzzard high above. She always established this dual tether when switching minds, but that was only for the brief time it took to take hold of the new mind. This was the first time she was riding two hosts at the same time.
A sensation of nausea passed over her as the contrasting viewpoints and minds of human, bird, and beast collided, the shared views from three different sets of eyes disorienting enough to cause all three some discomfort.
She sensed Bulan putting out one hand to steady her human body as she swayed backward, keeping her from falling back against the master’s wagon wheel, which was taller than her seven-year-old self. She made a note to sit down before attempting this again in future.
Then she exerted her will and took the shvan’s and bird’s minds, melding them together by sheer force.
One final moment of startlement, then she was viewing two points of view simultaneously, sharing sensations, sights, smells, knowledge, processing it all through two animal and one human consciousness.
Yes.
Something was out there.
It was close, and it was big and very strange.
And it was waiting.
Biding its time.
But what was it?
The shvan prima sensed a change in the air temperature, the fur on the right side of her haunches bristling instantly to point northeastward, the direction from which the temperature change had been detected.
Krushita turned the buzzard’s bald head in that direction, gazing miles farther than the desert-bound shvan could see.
Dawn was creeping across the world, the eastern sky lightening faintly. Sunrise was only a short while away.
A speck caught the buzzard’s keen sight.
She flew in that direction, beating the large wings slowly to move against the current, which was attempting to blow her sideways.
The speck vanished for a moment, then reappeared as she flew a mile, then two miles closer.
Almost fifteen miles away from the wagon camp, she finally glimpsed something.
An object was moving roughly southwestward.
Roughly, because the object wasn’t making a beeline for the camp, but appeared to be undulating in a zigzag course that seemed insane in an environment where even a bit of wasted energy was precious. Whatever the thing was, it was not concerned with conserving energy like most desert denizens. It was more concerned about subterfuge.
The pattern of movement was one of the things that had confused the shvan prima. No predator she had ever encountered moved in such a pattern in the desert. The deadliest ones either lay in wait, then pounced on their prey, or ran hell for broke and chased them down.
What was this thing doing?
More importantly, what was this thing?
Krushita forced the buzzard to fly lower, dropping from current to current until she was just a few hundred feet high.
The thing had disappeared again.
She drifted over the place where she had last glimpsed it, feeling her own face frowning in irritation at losing sight of it.
The shvan prima shivered even as it bounded across the sand, drawn by Krushita’s determination to identify the approaching thing. She had never been so far from the pack before: she felt isolated and afraid.
The buzzard hung in the still dawn air, scrawny neck craned as its eyes scanned the desert below.
The shvan slowed as she arrived only a hundred feet below, glancing up nervously.
Both bird and beast experienced a strange sensation as their eyes met briefly: they were linked by the powerful mind that shared their consciousness, and it was unsettling. Krushita comforted them with fuzzy thoughts of food, shelter, warmth, mating, and offspring.
Then all of a sudden, they forgot about each other, as new movement caught their attention.
Krushita flew further out, seeking the source of the disturbance.
A strange odor rose from somewhere below: to the buzzard it was the stench of carnage, of violent death, mayhem, the putrid odor of rotting flesh and offal. But she could see nothing in sight. For miles in every direction there was not a creature to be seen, apart from the lone shvan prima, who had finally stopped a few miles back, refusing to go any farther from her pack.
The buzzard’s sharp eyes caught several smaller desert denizens—geckos, stone ants, even the leavings of a desert dragon several miles north, a withered koytee foraging for sand rats or snakes burrowed beneath the sand, of which there were several hundred all around if only one knew where to look—but nothing that accounted for the stench. This was not the stench from a single body. To the buzzard’s mind, this much foul odor could only be from a battlefield littered with thousands of corpses, or perhaps a large wagon train after a mass slaughter.
But even through the bird’s keen gaze, she could spy no sign of any such thing. Only miles upon endless miles of crimson dunes. The first rays of sunlight were sparking over the horizon now, and she could see even farther and clearer. There was nothing out there that didn’t belong in the Red Desert.
The shrieking of the shvan prima startled Krushita. She flapped her wings, staying in place momentarily, then turning around and starting to fly back.
The shvan was going berserk with fear. Her panic and terror filled Krushita’s mind and senses, flooding her own body. She felt herself cringe and sensed Bulan watching her. The master was squatting down near the wagon wheel against which they had propped her head, staring at her with frank curiosity.
Now the pack had picked up the prima’s call and were echoing it. Their ululation of terror resounded across the desert all the way back to the campsite. Even miles away, she could hear it through the buzzard’s ears.
She made the bird fly faster.
The prima was in sight now, galloping back toward the pack. A long trail of pinkish sand dust rose in her wake, leading back toward . . . toward . . .
What was that?
At first, she mistook it for a firestorm.
The crimson sand which earned the Red Desert its name was for the most part not very different from ordinary yellow or white sand. But in some parts, it contained fosfors, a brownish-blackish mineral that could conflagrate at the slightest provocation. In these regions, the very sand itself might catch fire, the resulting blaze often rising a hundred feet or higher, and traveling almost as fast as a racing dromad or horse. An uks team pulling a laden wagon stood no chance of outracing such a firestorm, which was why early warning from the shvan was vital when one was sighted.
But what she was looking at now was no firestorm. It was like nothing Krushita had seen in the five years on the trail, or heard of in the hundreds of tales recited by Bulan and other drivers around the nightly camp-fires.
She forced the buzzard to fly lower, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
The sand itself seemed to be rippling.
It undulated in irregular bumps and dimples, like a carpet under which a nest of insects was swarming.
The writhing, shivering motion covered a very large area—miles and miles. At first sight, she thought it must be an earthquake. She had never actually experienced an earthquake but had learned enough to wonder if this might be one. Surely no earthquake could be happening in only one area—or could it? What else could be causing the sand to bulge and ripple like that?
She stared down at it, baffled.
One thing was certain: whatever this thing was, it was definitely the source of the stench. The odors she had sensed through the buzzard’s keen sense of smell were emanating from those disturbances in the sand. Whatever was down there under the surface of the sand, it smelled awful. Ew!
The buzzard shivered and called out, responding to the unnatural phenomenon and the stench.
Miles away, still circling over the camp, its fellow buzzards heard the cry. Krushita sensed their awareness with the strange affinity that animals seemed to have, an almost preternatural link of consciousness. With that cry alone, the other buzzards could feel what this one was feeling: stark, raving terror.
The buzzard needed no further urging to fly faster. It was going as fast as its leathery wings and the air currents would carry them.
As the camp came into view in the distance, Krushita saw the shvan pack below.
The prima had caught up with them and was sharing her terror at what she had seen out there alone. They were echoing her sense of horror and passing on the warning to their masters, the drivers of the wagon train.
The buzzard passed over and overtook the pack, catching a hot current and zooming ahead toward its fellows. The other buzzards were scattering already, taking wing and flying away from the camp.
That was not normal buzzard behavior. The camp represented years of feeding, a veritable lifetime supply to the carrion birds. For them to abandon it and flee as fast as their wings would carry them was testament to their own fear.
After all, the possibility of death alone was something that drew buzzards, not scared them away. If danger was about to befall the wagon train, then they should be watching for it to strike. Death was their business. The more drivers and uks that were killed, the richer the pickings. Whatever that thing was beneath the sand, it had spooked even the death birds.
The buzzard cried out one final time as it chased after them, and Krushita could almost read its meaning in its own language.
Fly, brethren, fly for your lives. This time death comes for us all.
Krushita decided she had seen and heard enough.
It was time to pass on the warning to her own kind.
She had pulled out of the shvan prima some time earlier, focusing on the buzzard’s point of view. The poor frightened shvan was too panicked to be of much further use as a scout. All she was thinking and feeling was pure, blind panic. Something bad was coming. Something that smelled bad and that no shvan had ever encountered before. Krushita knew all that already.
Now, with a disorienting wrench, she pulled herself out of the buzzard as well, falling back three hundred feet into her own body, still propped against Bulan’s wagon wheel.
Krushita bent over and vomited out the contents of her stomach, which were only acid bile.
Bulan’s huge hand supported her, two of their fingers holding her hair back, while the others cradled her skull.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her rough cloth sleeve.
“Move. We have to move now.”
The master looked down at her. “The shvan are calling. What did they see?”
She shook her head, struggling to her feet with their help. Her head swam briefly, then the world settled. “Nothing that makes any sense.”
The Vanjhani looked at her calmly. “Few things do. Try me.”
She summarized what she had seen and heard—and smelled.
They frowned down at her. “Moving sand?”
“Not just moving, it was . . .” She tried to think of a suitable analogy. “Like the surface of a lake when things are swarming below the surface. You can see the ripples but not what’s causing them.”
Bulan still looked skeptical. “A lake, sure. The ocean, a river, a creek, sure. But the desert? Nothing lives below the sand except vermin and insects. Even the desert dragons live in the buttes and mesas and only fly out to hunt. And there isn’t a dragon within flying range of this part of the trail.”
“I don’t know what it is, Bulan,” she said urgently, placing her small hand on the wrist of one of their huge forearms. “But whatever it is, it’s bad, and it’s headed this way. I think we should get moving.”
Bulan thought for a moment.
The early morning was filled with the screams of the shvan from all around and the cries of the buzzards up above. The camp was fully awake now, drivers and journeyfolk all standing around, looking mostly in Bulan’s direction. A small crowd had gathered around Bulan and Krushita, listening to their conversation as they tried to understand what had excited the shvan. Everyone who had survived this long knew that whatever the crisis, the best person to go to for advice or leadership was the train master. Several of the circle masters were here too, with more joining them at every minute, wanting to be the first to know Bulan’s orders so they could pass them on to their own circles and neighboring ones.
“No,” they said.
“No?” Krushita heard her voice rise in panic. “But we have to!”
Bulan placed a hand gently on her shoulder. The palm alone spanned her back. “Krush,” they said softly, using the nickname they had adopted almost from the first, “remember the Three Rules When Attacked on the Trail?”
She forced herself to swallow a deep breath, containing her impatience. “When chased, press on. When surrounded, stand and fight. When uncertain, circle the wagons and wait.”
“Exactly. This is no firestorm, no dragon or bandit attack. We don’t know what it is. Listen to those shvan; I’ve never heard of shvan acting like this in my life. Whatever’s out there is coming for us, and until we know what it is, how fast or slow, and what kind of danger it’s carrying, we stay put. We’re already in the Perfect Circle, so here we stay until I say otherwise. Okay?”
Krushita released a long breath. “Okay, Bul.”
They straightened up to their full height, raising both their voices to make themself heard as far as possible, which was several circles away. “Stand and defend!”
The gathered crowd and other circle masters all nodded, looking relieved at being given a clear command, and passed on the order. “Stand and defend. Train master’s orders.”
Since they were already in the Perfect Circle formation, that only left arming everyone and taking up defensive posts. The entire camp became a flurry of activity as masters shouted follow-up orders to their circles and uks bosses took charge of the herds, making sure they were all securely penned in the center of each wagon circle and had enough food and water. Each wagon’s driver passed out weapons to their passengers, who took up their allotted positions.
Desert wagons were thrice the size of ordinary city or country wagons. Including the tongue, each ripcloth-covered wagon was fifty-four feet long, thirty-four feet high, and twelve feet in width, could carry up to thirty-four thousand pounds of cargo and passengers, and was drawn by a team of eight uks, with at least another eight for relief and rotation.
The uks themselves were massive beasts, around ten feet high at the withers and weighing some eighteen hundred pounds each. Four alone could draw a full wagon all the way across the Red Trail, but at their own leisurely pace. The excess numbers were to allow for the inevitable sicknesses, leg breaks, deaths by mishap, and speed. Horses or dromads could also be used and could run much faster, but they weren’t half as strong or enduring as uks. The placid, sluggish beasts could trudge along at their leisurely pace for days without rest on little food and water, without complaining or collapsing. It was only when threatened by one of their natural predators that they became agitated and tried to stampede. Since firestorms, desert dragons, and of course, vicious mortals, were among that number, this was often an advantage. They didn’t need to be prodded, poked, cajoled, or whipped to get them running from such dangers.
The bosses were expert veterans bonded with the uks teams, and their chief task was to care for them and protect them at times of danger. They were also responsible for providing, maintaining, and guarding the precious stores of water which the train depended upon to survive the seven-year journey. There were only a handful of fresh water sources on the Red Trail, and every drop was jealously guarded. Every wagon had a water filtration barrel, but after a year or so of drinking your own bodily fluids, reprocessed, fresh water was worth killing and dying for. The bosses were journey-hardened veterans who had the right to use violence against anyone who broke the water laws on the trail, and were often called upon to do so. There was a reason why they were mostly Urug, the only race on Arthaloka capable of dividing themselves into two or more parts, each capable of independent thought and action. As composite beings, they were formidable, even more so than Vanjhani like Bulan.
Krushita watched the boss of her own circle, an Urug named Shamsss (Urug names and speech used a lot of s sounds and were as sibilant as you might expect from a reptilian-derived race), secure the circular pen containing their uks, then check on the fresh water supply. This was stored in squat wooden barrels in the boss’s own wagon.
Shamsss raised one hand to his shoulder and peeled off what seemed to be a section of his own arm, about a meter long. He placed the slim length of flesh onto the front of the wagon, and it instantly came alive, coiling sinuously and raising one end in a menacing hood. Two tiny black eyes appeared on the top of the hood, as did a slash-thin mouth. A triforked tongue slipped in and out of the mouth between sharp white fangs as the serpent hissed.
Anyone foolish enough to try to lay a hand on the freshwater now would receive a sharp jab and a drop of venom potent enough to kill within moments. Shamsss peeled off two more such snakes from his body to guard the wagon, then turned to arming himself for the coming conflict. He saw Krushita watching and raised a hand to wave at her, smiling and showing his own triforked tongue.
“Sssstay ssssafe, little one!” he hissed.
Krushita nodded and waved back.
She heard her name being called and went to her wagon.
Aqreen was armed and ready, a crossbow slung on one shoulder and a quiver bristling with arrows strapped to her back. She handed down a smaller crossbow to her daughter.
It had been built especially for her by old Fuashmat, their circle’s bowyer, fletcher, and smith. The side of the barrel had her nickname, Krush, engraved into the wood. Aqreen’s had Fauzi’al, her trail name. Krushita had been allowed to keep her name because any number of young girls born after her had been given the same name, a common practice in any kingdom. After five years on the trail, it attracted no attention at all.
Aqreen had also stopped wearing her veil and hibij. The rumors that Queen Aqreen and her daughter had been assassinated by agents of the Burnt Empire were accepted fact by almost everyone, especially since the burnt bodies of a mother and girl child around their ages had been found wearing Aqreen’s jewelry, including the signet ring that marked her right to rule.
Krushita often felt a pang of deep sorrow for that poor nameless woman and girl; they’d had to be killed, by a White Marshal loyal to her late grandfather King Aqron, in order that she and her mother could live without fear of recognition and capture. But in the end, the one person who really threatened their existence had not been fooled by the deception, and even now, she knew that whatever that foul thing was out in the desert, it had been sent or summoned by her father. Jarsun was not susceptible to subterfuge.
But he—and the creatures that served him—was susceptible to the right weapon.
Which was why Krushita took the crossbow from her mother, reluctantly.
“I hate weapons,” she said plaintively.
Aqreen handed down a quiver filled with arrows made to fit the smaller crossbow. “You don’t have to love a crossbow, you just have to point it and shoot.”
Krushita strapped the quiver to her back, the weight of the arrows feeling like a punishment. “I rode a buzzard and a shvan, that’s how I spotted the danger.”
Aqreen’s brow creased.
Krushita still recalled a time when her mother’s handsome face had been smooth and her hair pitch-black. Perhaps it was the relentless desert sun, the ravages of the trail, and the constant fear of Krushita’s father’s vengeance, but she looked like she had aged far more than five years. There were grey hairs sprinkled with the black now and creases that marked her frowns and squints more than smiles and laughter, both of which were increasingly infrequent.
Still, she was beautiful, and even in her trail garb, a shapeless sacklike thing that made it difficult at times to tell genders or even races apart, she carried herself with a certain bearing and grace.
She leaped down from the wagon and bowed from the waist, cupping Krushita’s heart-shaped face in her palms.
“You should have waited for me to wake, Krush.”
Krushita rolled her eyes, the movement limited by her mother’s hands. “You hardly sleep at all most nights. For once, you were snoring away to your heart’s content. I didn’t want to spoil your sleep. Besides, it might have turned out to be nothing but a raggedy koytee or something, and I would have ruined your rest for nothing.”
“But it wasn’t nothing, was it?”
Krushita tried to shake her head.
She pulled her mother’s hands away and repeated the action properly. “It’s him. I can feel it. He’s found us again at last, and this time he’s sending something really bad.”
Aqreen’s face crumpled into that about-to-cry expression Krushita knew all too well. Her eyes turned inward. Krushita knew she was picking at the scabs of her old wounds or, rather, that one wound that had never truly healed, and perhaps never would. “Just when I had begun to hope that he had forgotten us, that he was going to leave us alone . . .”
Krushita put her hand up to her mother’s sleeve, tugging to make her look down at her again. “I was able to ride the buzzard and the shvan both at once!”
Aqreen nodded, dabbing at the corner of her eyes. “That’s good, sweetheart.”
“Do you know what means?” Krushita asked, wanting something more than a perfunctory word of praise. “It means I can ride different kinds of animals at the same time. I was never able to do that before. Either a shvan or a buzzard or a sand rat or something or other, but never both together.”
Aqreen attempted a weak smile. “That’s wonderful. Your powers are growing. We knew that would happen.”
“But, Ma!” Krushita persisted. “If I can do the same thing during an attack—”
“No!” Aqreen’s voice was sharp and loud enough to distract the other people around from their own preparations. It was rare to hear Aqreen’s voice raised in anger against her daughter, unlike most other parents in the circle.
Krushita glanced at their neighbors, showing them that it wasn’t anything to worry about. They nodded and resumed arranging their arrows and crossbows and other gear for the coming attack.
Aqreen also shot them a quick, friendly glance, then lowered her voice, while keeping it firm and uncompromising. “No, Krushita. You will not ride any creature during an attack. We’ve discussed this before. It’s too dangerous. Remember what happened the last time?”
Krushita pursed her lips and blew out an impatient breath. “Last time was a long time ago. I’m older now.”
Aqreen’s mouth twitched in a semblance of a grin. “Barely five months. You were six years old. Now you’re seven.”
“You said it yourself, I’m stronger now. My powers are stronger. I can do it. I did it already this morning. I controlled them both at the same time and could see and think through both bodies at once. It was amazing!”
Aqreen cocked a dark eyebrow. “And how did you feel when you broke the tether and returned to your own body?”
Krushita hesitated.
Aqreen pointed a finger. “See?”
“It wasn’t that bad! It was like . . . well, like feeling dizzy for a second, that’s all.”
Aqreen looked unconvinced. “Bulan told me you puked your guts out. And for a moment there, he thought you might have passed out. That worries me, Krush.”
Aqreen was striding over to the train master’s wagon as she said this, Krushita hopping and jumping alongside her.
“It was just for a moment!” Krushita argued, determined to convince Aqreen. “I always feel tired after riding anything.” She lowered her voice. “Or anyone.”
While Krushita’s powers were an open secret in the circle and across the train, they had been careful not to let anyone know she could actually ride people. Her mother had warned her that might not be well received. For all their camaraderie on the trail, many of these travelers had their own secrets and agendas, some very dark indeed. They wouldn’t take kindly to a seven-year-old girl—or anyone, for that matter—being privy to their innermost thoughts and feelings.
There would be more than a few who might think it would be easier to simply kill Krushita and Aqreen rather than risk their secrets getting out. Aqreen had explained that they had challenges enough to face without having to worry about their fellow travelers turning against them.
Jarsun’s reign of terror in Aqron was already legendary for its excesses. Some of the trail marshals and stray riders who had passed the train in the past five years had brought increasingly horrific tales of the things he had done or was rumored to be doing. And of course, Jarsun’s power stemmed from his Krushan blood and the power of stonefire. Krushita shared the same blood and the same power, and if the full extent of her nascent talents and budding abilities were known, it would quickly become obvious that she had Krushan blood too.
Even if no one guessed that Aqreen and Krushita might be Jarsun’s wife and daughter, just the stigma of being labeled Krushan would be enough to bring them instant ostracization. At the very least, they would be forced out of the train, left to fend for themselves on the Red Trail, which would be nothing less than a death sentence. At worst . . . there were some things even Aqreen did not say aloud to her child, but Krushita had seen enough bloodshed and mayhem in her short life to be able to hazard a guess.
Aqreen shot her a sharp sideways glance as they approached Bulan’s wagon.
“Enough,” she said quietly. “We will not discuss this in public.”
Krushita subsided but felt her lips pout. She wasn’t finished with the discussion, by any means. But she would revisit it at a better time, and she was confident she would convince her mother eventually.
They stood, waiting patiently for Bulan to finish what they were doing. The train master was giving a last set of orders in crisp, terse Vanjhani to their compatriots from the Fallen Kingdoms. They were a motley bunch: Vanjhani, Urugs, Pishaks, Ngyas, Vettels, and several other races whose names Krushita found unpronounceable or who used glottal or other impossible-to-imitate sounds and tonal combinations in place of names.
The Vanjhani and Urugs were the largest of them, but what the others lacked in size and bulk, they made up for in speed, ferocity, and organic defenses. The Vettels, for instance, could metamorphose into any creature they confronted, shocking the attacker while retaining the Vettel ability to inject a tiny bit of saliva through two curved fangs, which disabled their opponent while turning them into instant slaves compelled to do the Vettel’s bidding. Each of the others had similarly exotic defenses, some quite hair-raising.
Their racial differences as well as physical appearances, eating habits, and other lifestyle differences made them not very well-liked by the other travelers in the train. But almost everyone accepted them because of their value in a fight.
This last, of course, was something that Krushita had deduced by reading between the lines of what people said—or, more often, didn’t say—in the presence of her and the other children in the train, but also by occasionally peeking into the minds of some of the adult travelers. Just peeking, not actually riding; she didn’t want them to know she could slip into their heads as easily as a boss rode an uks bareback. Some of those images had been quite gross, she thought.
Bulan finished and dismissed the group, all of whom hustled back to their respective positions around the circle, a few leaping over or wriggling under the interlocked swingletrees to their own circles.
“Me favorite matron and child,” they said, turning to Aqreen and Krushita.
Bulan winked at Krushita.
She smiled back up at them. Bulan was as different on the outside as she was from everyone else on the inside. In that sense, they were both alike, and the shared knowledge of that made her feel more comfortable in their presence.
“What can I do you for?” they asked Aqreen.
“I want to fight,” Krushita’s mother replied.
“Everyone fight. Is trail law.”
“I meant with the militia,” Aqreen said. She held up her crossbow. “I’ve been practicing. You’ve seen me and praised me yourself. And on the last attack, I replaced our neighbor Liml when she fell in battle. I’m ready, Bulan.”
Bulan glanced down at Krushita briefly before replying. “Militia fight offense, not just defense. Them that have to go outta the Perfect Circle, out there.” They raised one of their fingers and pointed out at the desert. “Not the same as defend your circle from the inside. Is a . . . a whole other thing.”
“Obviously,” Aqreen snapped. “And I’m ready for it. I’ve been five years on the trail, Bulan. I’ve fought a dozen battles and more smaller attacks than I can count on both hands—or on all your hands! I’ve drilled and practiced and trained. Let me fight.”
Bulan sighed with both mouths, then looked down at Aqreen. “Fauzi’al. What happen if you fight with militia and no survive? Who raise little Krush then, huh?”
Aqreen looked down at Krushita. Their eyes met. Krushita saw a flicker of uncertainty in her mother’s eyes.
“Krushita was raised a warrior from birth. She comes from a line of warriors. She knows the price. Ordinary folk have a choice when faced with war: fight or die. They can choose one or the other. Leave the fighting to the army, the marshals, the militia. Born warriors have only one path: fight and die. To die fighting in battle is the best end any warrior can hope for. Krushita knows that.”
Krushita felt a pain in her chest like when she had once been struck in the chest by a flung stone, a flaring heat behind her ribs. Yes, Krushita knew that her mother was a warrior and that warriors died fighting. But she didn’t want that to happen. Not yet, anyway. Not ever.
Bulan didn’t look down at Krushita.
They crossed all four of their massive arms across both their chests. They looked nowhere close to being convinced, but they also looked like they didn’t want to have this argument continue a moment longer.
“Put you in de reserve,” they said unhappily, then shot out an accusing finger at Aqreen. “Not pleased about it. Not one bit. But will put you in reserve. Ya won’t see action outside the Perfect Circle, stone gods willing, but ya get a shot to prove ya’s ready. Best I can do. Now, get the hell outta here and lemme do ma job.”
And with those terse words, the master turned their backs on mother and daughter and leaped up to the platform of their wagon, craning their heads and peering out first in one direction, then another. Krushita knew they were checking to be sure the Perfect Circle was ready for whatever was about to come.
“Did you need to do that right now?” Krushita asked, not bothering to hide her irritation as Aqreen and she walked back to their wagon.
Aqreen smiled sweetly at her. “You stay by our wagon. I’m going to join the reserve. You’re in the circle, you’ll be safe here.”
Krushita folded her own arms across her chest in imitation of Bulan and glared at her mother.
Aqreen glanced around to make sure no one else was within hearing distance.
Krushita knew they weren’t.
Dor and Niede, the Gulsinda couple who owned the wagon to their right, were busy saying their prayers to their god, the Staffbearer, to keep their children safe. The children were inside the wagon, too young to fight or even to fetch ammunition, water, food, or the other necessities that children carried back and forth to the adults during a long, drawn-out battle.
“You know why I have to do this,” Aqreen said softly.
Krushita continued to glare at her. She wasn’t going to make this easy. Good if Aqreen felt guilty about leaving her daughter alone and risking her life fighting in the militia. She should feel guilty.
“This is all happening because of me,” Aqreen went on. “Your da . . .” She faltered. She hadn’t used that word in years, and Krushita knew it had slipped out by mistake. “He is here because of me. All the other attacks until now have been the usual trail dangers. Bandits, the desert dragon, the wild shvan pack, even the firestorm we outran three years ago—those are all things that could happen to any train on the Red Trail. But what’s coming today—right now—is because of me. If I weren’t here, it wouldn’t come. Our presence is putting all these people in grave danger. And it’s no ordinary threat. It’s going to be bad, as you said. Maybe too terrible to survive. A lot of people could die today—will die, most likely. And that’ll be on me. I have to remember their screams and cries each night for the rest of my life. So the least I can do is fight with them, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. I owe them that much. That’s why I have to do this, Krushita.”
Krushita kept her arms folded and eyes glaring, but she felt her anger melt.
She did understand. She felt the guilt too, especially when a child died, like Dor and Niede’s little daughter, Afrinu, who was killed by a stray arrow in the battle against the bandits last year. Even though she knew that bandits attacked trains all the time on the Red Trail, she still felt guilty.
It was the reason her mother didn’t sleep well at night, knowing that Krushita’s da would come, sooner or later, and when he did, it would be bad. Very, very bad.
Today was that day.
Now was that time.
But she still couldn’t bring herself to say anything to her mother. She just glared and stood her ground.
Aqreen looked at her for a long minute. “I love you, little Krush.”
Then she bent down, kissed her daughter on the cheek, and strode away, leaping over the gap between two wagons.
Krushita glared at her mother’s back, almost wanting to slip into her mind and compel her to return. She could do it, she knew. Her mother was strong-willed, but she was an ordinary mortal, not Krushan.
Instead, Krushita sighed and opened her arms, shaking out her frustration. For all their complaining about children not behaving, grown-ups seemed to be just as impulsive and irresponsible at times. It was infuriating, but what was a girl to do?
She was still fuming and fretting—
When a shout rang out.
And when a sudden silence fell across the camp.
Krushita forgot her own troubles for the moment and turned her attention outward.
Trouble had finally found them.