CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RACE!
From the way he said it, I was expecting his “private chamber” to be some kind of pervy pleasure room, and it was—at least part of it was. It was behind a secret door, just like it was supposed to be, and there were paintings of beautiful purple naked boys all over the place, and books of porny drawings open to the good parts on podiums. There was also a bed and a wardrobe filled with naughty costumes, but another part of the room was more like a professor’s office. There were scrolls on the desk, and thick leather-bound books with titles like The First Angao Dynasty and Heresies of the Khat Rebellion in piles on the floor, maps on the walls, and ink quills and notebooks and scribbled-on scraps of paper everywhere, which Rian-Gi was digging through like a dog looking for a bone.
I laughed and held up a book called History and the Nature of Divinity. “You have to hide history books too?”
He looked up from his search and pointed to the porn. “They might shun me for owning that.” His finger swung around to the history books. “They will kill me for owning that.”
He was dead serious. I didn’t get it. “What? Why?”
“You truly are from another world, aren’t you? History is the most dangerous thing in Ora. The truth about the Seven and the One? The truth about the Wargod? The church has guarded those for centuries. Men have disappeared for only wondering aloud about their true origins. Professors, men of great learning, they all tread carefully around those subjects, choosing, for the sake of their own skin, to concentrate on the succession of kings and the wars between them. Those who do not? Gone. They fall out of windows, they die in tavern brawls, robberies, of strange sicknesses, of accidental poisonings.”
I looked around at all the books again, shaking my head. He’d had all these in his house when the priests had come asking questions. “Damn. You’re braver than I thought.”
He shrugged. “Lhan and I and… others, are part of a loose circle of truth seekers, determined to learn the real story of our past, and we spent much of our youth hunting for forbidden books and digging in old dead cities.” He smiled, and his eyes went all far away. “Those are some of the fondest memories of a sad and profligate life. Lhan and I, alone together, full of youth and curiosity and appetite.”
Alone? Together? Appetite? I blinked. “Wait a minute. You and Lhan…?”
Rian-Gi smirked. “Surely, my dear, you knew he slept on both sides of the bed?”
“Well, yeah, but… but….” I couldn’t help it, my eyes dropped to his gut.
He looked down, shrugging. “Well, I was more svelte then, and Lhan more beautiful, if you can imagine. Ah, here we are.”
He pulled a map from the bottom of a pile and laid it across a desk. “It isn’t shown as Toaga here, but it is marked nonetheless. This is a poor copy of an ancient map of the old kingdoms I made for one of our expeditions. You may have it. It shows the route from Ormolu…” He pointed to a big dot on the upper left side of the map, then trailed his finger down to a smaller dot near the bottom edge of the map. “To Udbec the Impregnable.”
“The—the what?” I was still trying wrap my head around the idea of him and Lhan being together and was only hearing every other word.
“A great tower of rock rising from the forest—well, there is no forest now, but there was then. It was so high and so inaccessible that it was thought to be unconquerable, and the King of the Udar built his castle upon it. That, of course, was before the Seven granted us the gift of levitating air. After that it fell to the first Oran Emperor in a day. It has been abandoned since then, but for the pirates.”
I squinted at the map. There wasn’t much to it. I didn’t see any lakes or oceans or roads, and it was hard to tell what the scale was. “How far is this? How long is it going to take to get there?”
Rian-Gi pursed his lips. “Hmmm. Riding a krae, four perhaps five days.”
“And a ship?”
“Two days? Perhaps less.”
I cursed to myself. Brother Aln had said the church had sent a ship after them days ago. That meant whatever they’d gone to do, they’d already done it, and I’d be getting there almost a week too late. Goddamn it! There was no way Lhan was still alive. But I couldn’t give up. I had to go and see for myself. I had to.
I looked up at Rian-Gi as he started to roll up the map. “Thanks for this. I owe you, big time, but I gotta get going. I—I’d kill myself if I didn’t….”
“My dear girl, there are tears in your eyes. You love him that much?”
I don’t know why, but I snapped at him. Maybe I didn’t like him seeing me cry. “What’s it to you? You jealous?”
He looked miffed for a second, then shook his head. “No, not at all. I would not deny you your future with him. I hope you will not deny me our past.”
I shrugged, uncomfortable. “Everybody’s got a past. I got more past than most. No worries. And thanks again.” I took the map from him and turned to the window, then stopped. I was still in my bag-lady outfit, and all of a sudden I was starving. Not the best way to hit the road. I turned back to him. “Uh, I don’t suppose you can hook me up with some water and some chow? And… and if you had any old clothes, maybe a spare sword, I’d really appreciate getting out of this bed sheet.”
He smiled. “I can give you better than spares. Wait here.”
I studied the map while he left the room, trying to figure out if any of the places I’d already been were on it, and what cities and towns I was going to have to avoid on my way to Toaga or Udbec or whatever it was called. Before I’d made much sense of it, Rian was back, carrying something big and bulky and wrapped in a blanket that he had a hard time getting through the door.
He set it down with a clunk, then opened it. I almost cried. It was all the gear I’d had with me the night I was kidnapped—the heavy duty loincloth-bikini and the made-to-measure sleeve and chest armor I’d got when I was a gladiator in Doshaan, the riding boots and clothes Lhan’s servants had made for me, and best of all, my custom-made six-foot-long Aarurrh-style sword, weighted and balanced just for me. And Lhan’s clothes were there too.
“Fantastic! How do you still have these?”
He looked down, sad. “The priests left them behind on the night, so I kept them, hoping, though I had betrayed him, that Lhan would someday return, and need them. And you too, of course.” He turned toward the door. “Dress yourself. I will ask my majordomo to prepare some food for your journey.”
“Excellent. Thanks.”
He paused at the secret door. “Mistress Jae-En. I hope that if—nay—when you find Lhan alive, you explain to him why I—why I did what I did, and ask him to forgive me.”
I gave him a hard look. “I’ll tell him what happened, but if you think I’m gonna plead your case for you, you got another think coming.”
He turned a pinker shade of purple. “No no, of course not. It was cowardly of me to ask. I will ask him myself if—that is when you bring him back alive.”
He bowed himself out, and I stared down at Lhan’s clothes, looking very empty and forlorn without Lhan in them. “No, pal. I think you had it right the first time. If. If I bring him back alive.”
***
Running on Waar was better than sex, maybe even better than riding a Harley. How could I hate bounding across the landscape with big twenty-foot strides like the kind you have in dreams, like the ones you see antelopes doing on nature shows? I coulda run like that forever and never got tired of it. I felt like Wonder Woman.
Of course I coulda had a nicer landscape to run through, not that it was all that bad at the beginning. The farmland around Ormolu was the same lush and neon-colored candy-land I remembered from before, with fields full of purple plants, pastures full of six-legged orange sheep-pig things, red shrubs with blue fruit, and little villages of hexagonal houses sprinkled all around, but the next day, as I got away from the center of the country, things started to get a lot drier and dustier. The fields were nothing but bare stalks and dead plants, and the pastures were filled with dead sheep-pigs and sick-looking maku, which were Waar’s answer to buffalo—big shaggy six-legged bastards with heads like fists with eyes—only these all looked like they had the mange, and I could see their ribs through their hides. Dust devils whirled across the red dirt roads, and a whole lot of farms and villages were just plain empty. Half the time there wasn’t anybody around to be scared of me as I ran through the town square.
And the further I went, the worse it got. By the third day, the fields were full of six-legged skeletons, baking white in the sun, and the villages looked like they’d been abandoned for years. I didn’t understand it. I knew rain was rare in Ora. I knew they had to import a lot of wood from down south because there wasn’t enough rainfall up north to grow forests. Lhan and Sai had told me all about it. But why wasn’t there enough water for farming? Hadn’t I seen a whole aquarium full of water back in the Temple of Ormolu? Why weren’t they irrigating these fields? It made no sense.
On the fourth day the farms disappeared completely, and I was out on the plains—the same kind of area I’d showed up in the first time I came to Waar. That had changed too. The endless carpet of blue-stalked plants with little match-head flowers that I remembered from before had all wilted to a dry charcoal grey, and every now and then I’d see the dried corpse of a wild krae lying on the side of an empty creek bed.
I saw a few live animals too, and ran away from a few more. I surprised a pack of shikes, which are scary, screeching four-armed spider monkeys, tearing apart the corpse of a dead vurlak, which is like a fur-covered econo-van with teeth, and they chased me for a good half mile, and there was a run-in with a live vurlak later that day, but I jumped up on a jumble of rocks and hid from him and he gave up after a while.
At noon on the fourth day, I saw a tribe of Arrurrh, the four-armed cen-tiger guys I’d been captured by once, off in the distance. They were hunting wild krae, and I was tempted to go see if it was Queenie’s tribe. Fortunately, I’m not insane, so I didn’t. If it wasn’t her tribe, they’d have eaten me for lunch or taken me as a slave. If it was her tribe, the bulls woulda probably killed me as soon as they saw me. Her chief had tried to have me killed once before. He’d probably think I was back for revenge. Instead I looped wide around ’em and kept going.
Still made me wonder how Queenie’s daughter Kitten and her sweetheart Handsome were doing. Probably had a litter of little four-armed, tiger-striped kids running around by now. I hoped they were alright. Them and Queenie had been better to me than just about anybody on Waar—except Lhan, of course. I wished ’em well.
Finally, later that day, just as the sun was touching the horizon, I saw through the heat shimmer what I first thought was another giant rocketship temple in the distance, and I wondered what the hell it was doing way out in the middle of East Bumfuck. As I got closer though, I saw that it wasn’t a rocket ship, or a building, or anything man-made. It was a mesa, a wide, straight up shaft of rock, all red and majestic in the setting sun like something out of Monument Valley back home, only way taller, and all by itself. There weren’t any others like it for as far as the eye could see. I also saw that there were ruins on top of it—a bunch of crumbling walls and towers so old they almost blended in with the natural rock.
And I saw one other thing too, an airship, endlessly circling the top of the mesa, and every now and then firing an artillery bolt into the ruins.