AQREEN WAS AT THE end of her strength. She had backed herself against a wagon wheel, holding the swords by her sides. Deadwalkers threw themselves on the blades to get to her. She barely had to move the tips to catch their throats, the softest, most yielding point at which to enter the brain. The swords passed up and through their skulls and out the tops of their heads. All she had to do was aim and brace her elbows against the spokes of the wheel to take the impact, then turn the blades to let the corpses slip off before angling the swords up again to meet the next attackers.
Even in this position, she could not last long. She was beyond exhaustion, her body and mind functioning purely on survival instinct, and even this was giving out. After all, even the most determined creature eventually decided that survival was simply too hard to struggle for anymore, then lay down and surrendered to the inevitable, craving the blissful numbness of eternal rest.
Then, all of a sudden, everything stopped.
The rushing deadwalkers slowed their forward momentum and came to a halt. They raised their heads as if listening to unheard music from some distant source.
Aqreen felt her weary face muscles attempt a frown. A nerve jumped in her cheek, misfiring from fatigue. She could hear nothing at all. Except . . . well, except silence. There were no wounded crying out as would be usual at any ordinary battle. Those who were wounded had succumbed to the deadwalkers, who tore their vocal cords from their throats in a flash, while those that had been bitten turned into deadwalkers themselves and no longer felt the pain and agony that mortals were subject to.
Then she heard it.
Faint, distant, but growing closer rapidly.
A deep, rumbling vibration so low that she felt it in the bones of her chest rather than heard it.
She thought that Bulan must have heard it first, along with the other Vanjhani. Their own voices and guttural sounds were so low-pitched, they could hear things that other humans never caught.
Earthquake?
That was the only natural event she could think of.
What else could make such a sound, on such a scale?
It was not just in her chest now. It was in all her bones, even her skull.
Everything vibrated.
Thrummed.
Like the lowest string on a bass sitraal. She had heard an orchestra from the Mountain Kingdoms play once, on her travels with her father. At a crucial point in the symphony, the rest of the orchestra had been silenced by the conductor and only the bass sitraals played on. They had begun with a single string on a single instrument. Then, still vibrating, it was joined by a second, then a third, and so on until a score were playing their lowest strings. The resulting wave of bass sound had reverberated so deep, Aqreen’s teeth had ached for an hour after the performance—she had been an adolescent girl, and her wisdom teeth had been cutting through—but the sheer wonder and epic beauty of the effect had been like nothing else she had heard before or since. It was a profound experience.
This sound was deeper, and louder.
Much, much louder.
It carried with it a sense of immense power, a vast untameable force of nature. An avalanche. A volcanic eruption. An earthquake. A tsunami. Or all of the above.
Even the deadwalkers had stopped attacking.
They stood, heads raised and tilted, as if listening to the sky.
She saw ravaged faces with flesh hanging in rags look upward, the harsh sunlight doing them no favors.
She relaxed her arms slowly, not because she no longer feared attack, but because her muscles were simply exhausted. They screamed with relief as she lowered them to her sides, the swords hanging limply from her fingers. She was tempted to let the weapons drop to the sand, to let herself tumble and fall face-down, letting whatever was to happen happen. But she resisted the urge, forcing herself to stay awake and alert, ready to fight again. She was a mother. She had Krushita to think of. Her life was not just her own to do with as she pleased.
She glanced around, using the reprieve to look properly at the circle, at what remained of the militia. She was not surprised to see familiar faces lying dead or turned into deadwalkers themselves, but she was shocked all the same.
Nothing could have prepared her for the sight of a friendly face, now with blood-filled eyes and mouth snarling open, dribbling saliva, turning and moving like a badly strung marionette. Those were people she had known, traveled with, laughed with, sung with, drunk with, eaten with, shared personal stories and insights with, made emotional connections with, for five hard years on the trail. They were the closest thing to real friends and family she had now. It was heart-rending to see them lying savaged on the sand, or staring with that maddened hunger, no longer mortal.
She avoided looking at them, trying to take in the scale of the slaughter, the sheer quantum of loss.
How many in the camp had died already? The ones who had turned were as good as dead, if not worse. How many had fallen this terrible, unspeakable day? And it was not even noon yet. Only high morning. Had it really only been a few hours? During the last attack—bandits—the train had held its own in the Perfect Circle for nearly two weeks, ultimately costing the bandits more lives than they were able to claim. That process of steady attrition and their excellent defenses had finally dissuaded the band. On the twelfth day, the survivors had ridden their dromads away into the desert, cutting their losses.
Bulan ran the train like a military operation, and in full strength, it was a formidable force. She had heard stories of epic battles in the distant past, not led by Bulan themself, who was barely five hundred years old, but other Vanjhani train masters. Back in the olden days when trains had numbered as many as a hundred thousand wagons. A train was nothing less than an armed force in its own right. A traveling fortress of sorts.
The fortress had fallen.
The army was against the wall.
The battle, if it could be called that, was lost.
But now something was happening.
Something that thrummed and vibrated with the ominous warning tones of a major natural event.
And it seemed to be originating from the sky.
Was it thunder?
Aqreen squinted up, using the overhang of the wagon roof to shield her eyes from the morning sun, already high in the east.
The sky above the Red Desert was as spotless green as always.
Green, not blue like the sky above Aqron and the White Desert, because the Red Desert was so vast, its hue was reflected in the blue expanse above, resulting in a color that varied from aqua to turquoise through the course of the long desert day.
She had grown accustomed to the shade, even though she had spent all her earlier life under cerulean skies.
There was not a cloud in sight.
Yet there was something.
It began more as a shimmering, a kind of wavy disturbance in the light above the camp.
It resembled a heat mirage, the flowing waves of heat over the desert on a hot day, often tricking the ignorant into thinking it was water.
The Reygistani word expressed it best: galtanazarun. False sight.
It was their term for an optical illusion or mirage. But it also meant a delusion, hallucination, trick of the light, and a number of similar illusions caused by the shifting heat waves, air currents, and strange reflections of the red sands.
But how could a galtanazarun appear in the sky?
She had never heard of such a thing before.
Yet whatever she was seeing now, it was up there.
The sky seemed to tremble, shivering like the placid surface of a pond into which a stone had been dropped slowly.
The deadwalkers were all staring up now, transfixed.
She looked down at the ones nearest to her.
They were close enough to reach out and grab hold of her limbs. Her swords were dangling by her sides. If they came at her with their frenzied suddenness, she didn’t know if she would be able to bring the blades up in time. She was just too damn tired. But they weren’t interested in her any longer. They were hypnotized by that phenomenon in the sky.
The deep bass sound changed.
Now it was almost like an avalanche coupled with thunder at the same time.
She looked around wildly, convinced she would see a mountain somewhere nearby, with snow and boulders rolling down its side. Or a volcano sprouting lava.
But there was only the camp and the Red Desert.
She was forced to raise her hands as the rumbling grew louder, deeper, more ominous.
It was like the baying of war horns now, those enormous yellow ones used by the Mountain Kingdoms to announce the declaration and cessation of wars, the sound designed to carry across vast distances, penetrating into valleys and caves and city fortresses within the mountains themselves.
Out here in the wide open wasteland, the sound was terrible, inescapable.
She felt the sand beneath her feet shivering.
The wagon she was leaning against shuddering.
Her teeth chattering in her mouth.
She tried to hold her jaws shut. The pressure was so intense, she was afraid her teeth would shatter. She opened her mouth again, keeping her teeth far enough apart that they would not clatter.
Her head began to fill with the sound now.
She was forced to block her ears to shield them from the sound. The sword hilts came in the way and she sheathed them quickly so she could press her palms to her ears. Even with her hands against her ears, her mouth wide open, she could still feel the rumbling shaking her.
Everything was shaking now.
The wagons.
The sand.
The deadwalkers.
The corpses.
The world was shuddering.
The deadwalkers began to moan, still staring up at the sky.
Their open maws released a disturbingly mortal sound, a kind of groaning complaint, like a sick man might make when in too much pain.
She looked up again at the sky.
The shimmering had darkened.
Now she could see that it wasn’t the sky itself that was shimmering.
It was the air above the camp.
Some hundreds of yards above her head, a strange disturbance had formed, a roughly drawn circle almost as large as the Perfect Circle formation of the train itself.
This patch of air was sparking and flashing, not with lightning, but with a blackish light like nothing she had ever seen.
Black lightning? There’s no such thing!
Yet she could see it up there, jagged black slashes across the aquamarine sky.
One, two, three, four of them.
They spread from north to south, as if the cloth of a green tent were being rent by the claws of a jaegura, the pitch-black feline beasts that roamed the hills and forests of her motherland.
A wind rose from nowhere, blowing sand up into the air. She blinked, then quickly clawed at her throat, pulling at the musl scarf she wore around her neck. She tugged it up to cover her mouth and nostrils. After five years on the trail, she was accustomed to sudden sand flurries, even sand dervishes spinning like pirouetting Regyari dancers. She debated whether to pull it all the way up to cover her face, but decided to wait a moment to see if it continued.
It did.
Growing steadily, the wind rose in moments to a howling banshee frenzy. Sand rose everywhere, seeming to drift upward rather than sideways. She had never seen that before. How could a wind come from the ground and rise up?
As she pulled the musl scarf over her face, protecting her eyes from the grit, she saw four black slashes joined by four more, these going across the length of the anomaly from east to west. It made a crisscross pattern. More slashes now appeared at a faster rate, at random, ripping at the still visible sky. Had this actually been a tent and the cause a jaegura, the creature could easily have stepped through the rent canvas, to feast on the sleeping campers.
Instead, the sky burst open.
No, she corrected herself, squinting against the storm of sand that was rising up now, not the sky, just that big patch overhead. The anomaly.
The black slashes became an enormous black hole. Not a storm cloud, but a void. An absence of light.
The sand was rushing upward in a torrent now, the wind a deafening roar.
And with the sand, the deadwalkers were rising too.
She saw the ones closest to her shriek as they were lifted off their feet, their ragged flesh and even more ragged garments flapping furiously, and rose up through the air at an increasing speed.
All around the camp, or at least as far as she could see, the deadwalkers were being dragged upward.
The ear-shattering shriek that rose with them could have been the wind and the sand, or a million deadwalkers screaming.
Aqreen couldn’t tell which.
She shut her eyes, holding on to the side of the wagon with all her strength. She wondered if she would feel her feet leave the ground too at any moment. The wagons? The entire camp? Everyone in it?
But for some reason, the wind and whatever force was pulling the deadwalkers upward asked nothing of her. Nor did the wagon she was clinging to budge even an inch.
How was that possible?
How was any of this possible?
She didn’t know and didn’t care.
All she could think about was Krushita. Her baby. Is she safe? Is she well? Is she . . . alive?
It came to her then.
A touch out of nowhere.
Ma.
She started. “Krush?”
She looked around.
But there was nothing there except the wagons and the billowing sand.
The voice was in her mind.
Krushita had been inside her, just for an instant, touching her mind to let her know she was well, she was safe.
“You’re doing this, aren’t you, Krushita?” she said in wonder.
She tried to look up. Even with her scarf over her eyes, the sand stung, blasting her eyeballs through the thin cloth. She was forced to shut her eyes to protect them, but in the brief instant she had looked up, she had seen something.
It looked like two gigantic hands holding open the ends of the rent in the sky.
Two hands that were enormous in scale but were very much like her seven-year-old daughter’s tiny little hands.
Krushita was doing this.
“A portal,” Aqreen whispered in amazement.
Krushita had opened a portal to another place, or time, or wherever it was that black hole led to.
And she was forcing all the deadwalkers through to that other place.
Far, far away from the train, and Aqreen, and Krushita’s physical body.
Her little baby had saved them.