Pyrebound - 10.1

Ten: A Hunter on the Trail – Pyrebound
The Dominion of Man sustains itself on the remnants of an earlier Ki. Virtually all of its plant and animal life belongs to a time before the white sun rose in the sky, and cannot survive away from the holy fire. In the outer desert, new forms of life have appeared and adapted themselves to a harsher mode of existence. Animals burrow to escape the deadly light; plants like the ubiquitous shroud find costly ways of resisting its effects. In places, nature has taught itself to prey on what crumbs of nourishment the pyres release by chance.

The humans of the wastes have found different, but no less desperate, ways to survive.

Moonbrutes, Ram thought, weren’t any more pleasant by day. They were technically illegal to own, but the Damadzus had arranged to purchase eight of them from someone on a few hours’ notice. Their smell was just as bad as the ones he’d run into last night, and if this particular set wasn’t feeling aggressive at the moment, the better light wasn’t doing their humped backs and goaty faces any favors. They were an even mix of equally drab black, brown, and grey tones. “Do we really have to take these things along?”

“The general idea is that they’re the ones taking us,” Imbri replied. “And yes, we do. Camels are a little tougher heatwise, but almost as obnoxious, and they can’t handle white day for anything.”

“I can’t stand either of them,” Darun added, as she chucked a bag up onto a sloping grey back. The creature’s hump was over its shoulders, its rear end noticeably lower than its front. Naturally, Darun’s bag tumbled off. “Tch!”

“Haven’t you handled them before?” Ram said, as he picked the sack back up.

“As little as possible. Nasty animals. They were always Bal’s problem, or Ushna’s.”

Bal had already saddled three of the creatures, and was tying packs to a fourth. Piridur stood next to Bal, trying to copy his example. He’d joined them ten minutes ago, and hadn’t said a word to Ram yet. There were two other men with him—Ram couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were the council guards from yesterday. They had the same common swords as before, and stared at Ram in lieu of offering to help with prep.

All in all, it was a rather pathetic beginning for a mission to save a pyre. There was nobody there to see them head out, not even the Lugal. Only six men, two women, and as many brutes gathered outside a nondescript stable on the west bank of the Teshalun in the late afternoon. Across the river, the pyre was winding down its start-of-tetrad business, and nobody would be looking at their tiny gathering.

Shazru had been rummaging through his medicine pack for some time. He might have been making sure everything was fully stocked, but he’d had plenty of time for that, and Ram entertained a dark suspicion that the old man just wanted an excuse to avoid eye contact. At last he bundled the whole thing back up, strapped it expertly onto a brute, and looked to Piridur.

Piridur finished around the same time. “Miss Imbri. I assume our quarry is still northwest of here.” Ram had told the Damadzus as much that morning.

“As far as I know,” Imbri said.

“Then lead the way,” Piridur commanded, clambering onto a brute. His two men mounted as well, more smoothly than their master; they’d strapped crossbows and quivers to their flanks, in easily accessible positions. Bal took another beast alone, but Shazru and Imbri shared a mount, and Darun got on behind Ram. The last two moonbrutes were pack beasts and replacements.

Imbri and Shazru took point, leading them out through the pyre’s pastureland. Piridur seemed to take it as a matter of course that he would be second, with one of his two bodyguards behind him. Bal was next, minding the two spares. Ram and Darun would have been last, given Ram’s skill at riding, except the second tough hung back to claim the spot for himself. Keeping an eye on Ram? Let him. Ram still had Beshi.

His brute was a bigger worry. The creature’s gait felt like it was actively trying to throw its riders; its deceptively low carriage came from resting with its legs slightly bent. Every step took it springing up and forward with the powerful tendons in its lower legs, then sinking down again to build more recoil momentum. He’d fall off for sure if it ever tried to gallop. He got the hang of it—enough that he stopped nearly falling off with every lurch, and could clutch the pommel of his saddle with only one hand—around the same time the pyre vanished behind them.

By then Darun had gotten tired of giggling at him, and the brutes stopped straining to get ahead of each other and settled into a steady, sullen lope forward over the sand. They were headed in very roughly the right direction, perhaps a touch too far west, but as far as he could tell they navigated purely by the sun. He’d have asked, only it seemed wiser to shut up and lay low for the time being.

As the ride went on, Darun progressively loosened her grip, sitting farther back to put space between them. Her breath came heavier as well, to the point where he was about to ask if she was all right by the time Imbri and Shazru called a halt. Only then, when they dismounted, did he see the sweat on her face, under the thick white travel wrap. “Out of shape,” she gasped as she tore it off, and tugged a waterskin out of a pack. The others weren’t much better; Ram, on the other hand, had been enjoying the sun, and was disappointed that it was starting to go down.

Imbri seemed to be doing the best of the normal humans in their group, if you could call her normal. She took a quick swig from her own skin, then sat on the ground with a familiar-looking bowl and poured it half-full of water. Once it had settled from pouring, she pulled something out of her robe—it was about half a foot long, and glinted in the setting sun—and placed it delicately on the surface, laying a finger on top of it.

Ram drew closer to watch. Whatever she’d put in the bowl, it looked bazu-made, a long metallic stick, and it floated easily. Imbri bent down and whispered something to it; the stick quivered, and very slowly started to turn under her finger until its end pointed to their right. “We’ll need to veer north,” she said, then snatched the stick up and tucked it away, pouring the bowl’s contents expertly back into the waterskin.

“To reach what?” Ram asked her. If that little stick could find the Ensi …

“Those of us who aren’t indwelt will need somewhere to go on white day. The moonchildren have places set up for that.”

“Where we’re going?”

She shrugged. “Or close enough. Everywhere moonchildren might want to go, they’ve set up shelters along the way. Hundreds or thousands in all, less than three days apart. I don’t know all the routes, but with my little toy, I can find the closest.” She stood up. “Back on the trail. Bal, point us.”

They’d stopped in the middle of a perfectly bare expanse of desert, dry sand studded with the odd rock and a few weeds. But Bal, who had been watching her bowl trick closely, still confidently hauled the brutes around until they were facing twenty degrees to the right of their previous direction.

“Is this how you used to get around?”

“It’s how everyone gets around,” Imbri said, “if there isn’t a river going where they want.”

“Seems kind of dangerous,” Ram said. Less so for him; if he were caught out on white day, he’d feel a bit bad, but probably suffer no long-term harm. The rest of them would be lucky to see the next tetrad.

“We’re earning fifteen gold apiece for a reason,” Imbri answered curtly, and pulled herself up behind Shazru.

They rode on into the night, in a more or less straight line. As the temperature dropped, Darun clung tightly to his back once more, and Ram was glad to have her. He felt his mind drift, and his eyes droop; only the need to stay balanced against the brute’s back kept him from nodding off. At intervals Imbri ordered another halt to recalculate their direction, and Ram soon learned to stay on the brute for these stops. Getting down made it too tempting to sit or lie down as well.

At last, as Ram fancied the sky was starting to lighten somewhat behind them, they passed by a spot where the wind had carved a hollow into a long, low rocky cliff, forming something like half a cave. There they stopped at last, and after some minutes of bleary-eyed groaning erected four two-man tents.

Ram spent the night huddled up to Darun, more for warmth than intimacy, and did not wake until the sun was high in the sky, leaving only a fringe of shade hanging over the tents. The rest of the world was monotonously brown, with no green life in sight. Shazru was already up, rummaging through their packs for breakfast, or whatever the next meal would be. “Good afternoon, Rammash.”

“Morning. How long are we staying here?”

The old man smiled. “Until evening. The first night out is always hardest; over time, you will shift your sleep times, and become as nocturnal as them.” He gestured to the distance, where their mounts were wandering about with their noses in the sand. Haranduluz only knew what they could find to eat out here. “It is easier, for one my age. When you are as—“ He stopped, with a pained expression.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ram told him. Did Shazru really think exaggerated tiptoeing around Ram’s mortality would make him feel better about it?

Another tent rustled, and Piridur stumbled out rubbing his back. Ram took this as his cue to answer nature, and by the time he got back the flamekeeper was deep in conversation with the elderly doctor. Ram sidled closer to listen in.

“If he’s northwest of here, he’s likely settled in around Dul Jatu,” Piridur was saying. “I’d imagine he’s established himself at the periphery, where he can hide and poach. Cleverer than I’d expected; someone is giving him good advice. Can we make it that far without resupply?”

“I believe so,” Shazru said. “Though we seldom traveled this way before—our business was in the mountains, as you know—this general area is well-traveled. Hence our confidence that there will be regular gates.” He glanced at Ram. “In a few months, the winter caravans—”

“I know about the Jatu trade,” Piridur said, cutting him off with a dour look for Ram. “We can’t leave him loose that long.”

Ram thought back to his aborted geography lessons with Master Tu. Dul Jatu was an oddball, stuck in between the Teshalun and Agamenti rivers at their point of closest approach before they met at Pilupura. It was a valuable trade link, an overland shortcut to the western half of the Dominion, as well as hopelessly remote. Why didn’t Piridur want Shimrun loose there? If he was poaching, Ram supposed, the Ensi could get killed, or cause an incident. Except Piridur had felt anxious about leaving him free before he learned his location …

Ram felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see Imbri standing over him. “You wanted to learn, didn’t you? We’ve got some downtime now.”

“Sure,” he said, and followed her off to the far side of their makeshift camp.

“You’ll want to give Piridur more room for the time being,” she said as they sat down. “He hasn’t exactly forgiven you for threatening to kill him.”

“I know, but we still need to work together here.” Ram couldn’t say he was terribly proud of it himself, anymore. Whether that was because of the dead bondservants, or because the haranu had lost influence, he couldn’t say. Perhaps he’d still blame Piridur for all of it, if they were still at Dul Karagi. It was more than a little disconcerting to think he didn’t know the source of his own feelings. So he didn’t think about it, when he could. “What about magic?”

“Most of what I know on the subject is what moonchildren teach. Moonchildren, and bazuu, which works out to much the same thing.”

“What, because moonchildren were made by bazuu?”

“No. A lot of you say that, but I don’t think we were, exactly. It’s more complicated than that. Anyway, the moonchildren don’t work with spirits directly. My inductor,” she said, whipping out the baton she’d used last night, “is all bazu. Made for moonchild use, obviously, since it responds to our language, but bazu-made. A moonchild would never dream of getting indwelt. Spirits are dangerous.”

“What makes the stick work, though? It’s got a spirit in it?”

“You could think of it as indwelt with a bazu’s soul. Bonded, like a shab. The place we’re going has something similar in it, and the two can find each other.”

“The bazuu sell each other to humans?”

“Why not? Humans sell each other to them all the time. But we were talking about pyre magic—or I was headed there, anyway. The first thing you’ve got to understand, Ram, is that a spirit without a body, without a brain, can’t really think. It can want, and it can act, but it can’t connect the two together. It needs a living vessel to do that.”

“Beshi—my sword—sure seems to think for himself.”

“I doubt it. It’s more likely that the sword … ngh, putting this in Flametongue is hard. Let’s just say the spirit in the sword has goals, and it can tell those to you clearly because you’ve got a similar spirit inside you. Your own brain is making up the rest. Same story for when yours gets uppity; technically, it’s got some share of your brain, and the part it’s got argues with your part.”

“All right, I can get that.” Mostly. “What are you trying to tell me here?”

“A spirit is a will and a power. You know the power pretty well. What’s the will? What does your haranu want out of you? That’s the first thing we need to work out.”

What did it want out of him? “Well, you know it’s aggressive. It hates being disrespected, and thinks I need to be in charge more. I think. Could some of that be my wanting to be in charge more? Are the two parts of me that sharply divided?”

Imbri scrunched up the third of her face he could see. “Maybe not. Good question, but I don’t know the answer. Moonchildren think there’s something obscene about indwelling a human, and I think it’s just because it raises questions like that one. Putting two riders on one animal is fine, if it’s a moonbrute. Anything else it’s after?”

“It’s protective about women. Very protective. It’s kept me from slapping or yelling at Darun at least a couple of times.”

“Pfft. A slapping would do her some good. But the spirit doesn’t know that. They don’t think, only want.” She leaned back against the tent behind them. “So, it wants authority, it wants to punish people who challenge it, and it protects women. What does that add up to?”

“Honestly, I don’t plan to do what it wants just because it wants it. Especially because you just said it’s brainless!”

“You’re not getting it, Ram. Piridur’s not in charge here. Neither’s his dad, or Shimrun, or you. That should be obvious; when Piridur met you at the Gods’ Creche, he kept mentioning all these annoying things they had to work around. Can’t stop the Ensi because this, can’t replace him because that. If the system is so annoying, so frustrating, so obnoxious, why don’t they change it?”

“They can’t,” Ram said. “That’s not how it works.”

“Why not? Every magical system is going to have limits—everything has limits—but who set it up with these complicated and cumbersome rules in the first place? This isn’t like pebbles falling when you let go of them; magic isn’t nature, and those rules aren’t like natural laws. Somebody wrote them. Somebody made the system work this way on purpose. Who?”

“Haranduluz, I guess.”

“That’s another way of saying you don’t know. And you’ll never find out; if it’s a god, he won’t prove it, and if it’s a human, he’s long dead. The bazuu say they didn’t do it, and I believe them. They couldn’t. But somebody set up the pyres to achieve a specific goal. Magic is about making your intentions real, and damn the limits. The spirits, the whole system they make, they’re just … ghosts of a dead intention. They steer the ensis, when they can, and the ensis steer the Dominion, when they can. The only reason they don’t is because lugals everywhere have gone to a lot of effort to subvert the whole thing.

“So you have two big questions to answer, Ram, in order: the goal the spirits have, the world they’re trying to build, what does it look like? And is it a world you want to live in?”

“I don’t know. I’m more concerned with staying free.”

“But that’s just it: you can’t be free. That spirit is still growing, and it’s already proven it can control you to some extent. It might be stronger later. We might meet this Shimrun and find out he didn’t want to do any of the things he did; it might have been the spirit controlling him all along.”

“He didn’t act that way when I met him,” Ram protested. “He talked like … like … “ Like a very sick man. Which, according to Piridur, he might have been. Or maybe all that gasping was him fighting a spirit’s control?

“How the hell would you know how someone acts when that happens? You’ve had a spirit in you for less than a full season now.”

Ram abruptly realized he was breathing very quickly. He had to close his eyes for a moment, taking deep breaths, before he could talk again. “You said it’s growing. What does that mean, magic-wise? Does the spirit in your stick grow?”

“No. The bazuu don’t work like that. My inductor’s sub-animate. I think when your spirit grows, it’s staking a bigger claim of your brain to think with. It might not be permanent, since it gets stronger and weaker. It might get a bigger share when you’re closer to the pyre, and shrink when you go away. I’m sorry, but I just don’t know.”

“That can’t be right,” Ram said, then paused so he could figure out why. It took him a moment to find a reason. “They have to control the ensis. If the spirit was boss all the time, they wouldn’t be able to restrain him at all. He’d be totally berserk.”

“That only shows the spirit’s not ‘boss all the time.’ I imagine they don’t get that strong in a kindling. Beyond that, who knows?”

But the word ‘berserk,’ had suggested something to Ram. “Hold on. You said Bal was indwelt with something, didn’t you? It’s not haranu, but his gets stronger and weaker too. How’s that work?”

“His spirit’s nothing like yours. I don’t know what it is he’s got in there, but I suspect it’s a dead resh.”

Ram looked at her mouth for a long time, but she didn’t smile. “You’re serious.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of Sul-worship?”

“What, like resh cults? There were stories. There’s supposed to be a house somewhere in Dul Karagi, where they have cannibal orgies on white day. Nobody ever said which house, or named names, so we assumed it was bullshit.”

“It probably was. But they take that kind of thing more seriously out here. Bal’s a Jackal, from the deep desert. He probably never went near a pyre until the moonchildren caught him. For all we know, he might have been a very important man. Something like an ensi, even.”

“But why would you want that? It makes him crazy and mute! Darun said he was magicked somehow, but I assumed his old owner did it to him.”

“It might not be what mutes him. He’s been through a lot, after all, and he might have been like that his whole life. But I think it’s what makes him so handy in a fight. He’s fast, he doesn’t get scared, and he can sense hostility like a dog smells meat.”

“So, he did that to himself on purpose?”

“Maybe. I don’t know what all goes on out here. Some Jackals go wormhead, becoming bazu tools to survive. A few hide under the shroud, or in caves. A bunch really are cannibals. If getting a dead resh is all you need to get the edge of being a war god, I’d imagine the difficulty of getting a dead resh without going kurtushi is the only reason there aren’t a lot more of them.”

Ram shuddered. “Is there anything about that we can use? You know, for my situation?”

“Not really. His spirit doesn’t seem to want anything except murder. It’s only a resh, after all.” She stood up, and brushed the sand off her coat. “I think we’d better leave it at that for now. I’m hungry. But think it over, and we’ll talk more at the next camp, okay?” She walked off before he could stir himself to answer. She’d given him a lot to think about.