.
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The King in Aredia
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"To He whose life was sacrificed for us," murmured Bronze, "blessed be He."
He said this before the small craft slammed into the deceptively slow-boiling wall of dust. They appeared to glide into a slow clouding of a sandstorm that grew heavier and heavier until it blotted out the desert and the moon. The aircraft became a long, horizontal whisper of darkness lighted only by the green luminosity of the instrument panel.
Through Bronze's mind flashed all the warnings about such storms, that they cut metal like butter, etched flesh to bone and ate away the bones. He felt the buffeting of the dust-blanketed wind. It twisted them as he fought the controls. Wakeing up, Tess saw him chop the power, felt the ship buck. The metal around them hissed and trembled. They were going headlong into the storm front that Yellow had warned about.
"Sand!" cried Tess.
She saw the negative shake of his head in the light from the panel. "Not much sand this high. Mostly dust and some rain from the clouds."
But she could feel them sinking deeper into the maelstrom. Bronze sent the wings to their full soaring length, heard them creak with the strain. He kept his eyes fixed on the instruments, gliding by instinct, fighting for altitude. He was no longer on autopoilit: his instinctive skill and swiftness were now their only hopes.
The sound of their passage diminished. The skycoper began rolling off to the left. Bronze focused on the glowing globe within the attitude curve and fought his craft back to level flight. Tess had the eerie feeling that they were standing still, that all motion was external. A vague tan flowing against the windows and a rumbling hiss reminded her of the powers around them.
"We have the tiger by the tail," whispered Bronze. "We can't go down, can't land, and I don't think I can lift us out of this. We'll have to ride it out."
As Bronze fought the copter's controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces on the basis of factional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex. The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.
"I must find the right vortex," he thought.
For a long time now he had sensed the storm's power diminishing, but still it shook them. He waited out another turbulence. The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Bronze defied all fear to bank the skycopter left.
Tess saw the maneuver on the altitude globe. She screamed.
The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the copter like a chip on a geyser, and spewed them up and out: a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the moon. Bronze looked down, and saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert, moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.
"We're out of it," he whispered.
Bronze turned their craft away from the dust in a swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky. "We've given them the slip," he said. "No Eclipse probe that happened to tail us could have gotten through that."
Tess felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense, dulled by sleep, said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn in two ways. She had faced both he storm and Arceus, and she did not resist. The storm and Arceus's will passed through her and around her. The storm was gone, but Arceus remained.
"I don't like the sound of our wing motion," said Bronze. "We suffered some damage in there."
He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his Plan. Yet, they had escaped from Anthien to the northern deserts, and Bronze sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.
He shivered. The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the thrilling realization that the war was no longer a spiritual, shadowy conflict: it would become a real fight with real casualties. It was no longer a frustrating, furtive mind game; his adversaries were soon to become real men that he could hate with a wonderful hatred. And he could kill them, not as one lonely criminal, but as part of the wider apparatus of a state at war. But he thought part of it could be cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt poised on a brink of self-awareness that could not have been without Dialga and Palkia's influence.
Where had the gods gone? It seemed like a dream. They were nothing like the Dialga and Palkia that he had ever heard of, even in the ancient tales. But then the words of the Hisuian Coda came to him and rang through his memory: "What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us? Things in Deep Heaven are done differently, and the spirits have many forms, revealed and unrevealed to Men."
"There's rock all around," said Tess, looking out the window.
Bronze focused on the skycopter's launching after shaking his head to clear it. He looked where Tess pointed and saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm's doing. "Better to set us down on sand," he said. "The wings might not take to full braking."
He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. "I'll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness."
She obeyed, thinking: "We've got Pokemon and rations. We could hide in the desert for a while till everything is clear."
"Run for those rocks the instant we're stopped," said Bronze. "The Pokemon will take the supply packs."
"Run for what?"
"Wild Cacturne and Cacnea, mostly," he said. "The wild Pokemon will get this skycopter and break it to pieces. They'll be no evidence of where we landed."
They glided lower and lower. There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage-blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The skycopter touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, and touched another dune.
"He's killing our speed against the sand," thought Tess, and permitted herself to admire his competence.
"Brace yourself!" warned Bronze.
He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them cup the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings' leaves. Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the side of the skycopter. The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.
Bronze jerked off his safety harness and hurled himself upward across Tess, wrenching the door open. Sand poured around them into the cabin, bringing a dry smell of burned flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear and undid Tess's harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the skycopter's metal skin. Bronze followed with Electabuzz, who was carrying a pack by its straps.
"Run!" he ordered. He pointed up the dune face and beyond it where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.
...
Tess leaped off the skycopter and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Bronze's panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away toward the rocks. "Follow the ridge," ordered Bronze. "It'll be faster."
They slogged toward the rocks, sand gripping their feet. A new sound began to impress itself on them: a muted whisper, a hissing, an abrasive slithering.
"Wild Seviper," said Bronze.
It grew louder and louder. The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten yards ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them. Bronze shifted his backpack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took Tess's with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-littered surface through a twisted, wind-carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.
"I can't run any farther," panted Tess.
Bronze stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island: moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Bronze's eyes at a distance of about a league. The flattened dunes of its track curved once, a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they had abandoned their wrecked skycopter.
Where the Seviper had been there was no sign of the aircraft. The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across its own path, questing.
"It must be five times as large as normal," said Bronze. "I heard that Seviper grew big in the desert, but I didn't realize how big."
"Nor I," said Tess.
Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curving track toward the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings around them. Bronze took a deep breath, looked up at the moon-frosted escarpment, and quoted the Logarian ranger Targon from the Legends of Arceus: "Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day." He looked at Tess. "We still have a few hours of night. Can you go on to Aredia City?"
"In a moment."
Bronze stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps. He stood a moment with a compass in his hands and the Logarian dagger at his belt. "Whenever you're ready," he said.
She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. "Which direction?"
"Where this ridge leads." He pointed.
"Deep into the desert," she said.
"To the River Sereghir and Aredia City," he said.
"How do you know that?"
"Quite simple, Tess. The Legends of Arceus has a good part that takes place in this very desert. The lands have not changed so much as to be unrecognizable."
And he paused, shaken by the remembered high-relief imagery of a storied tapestry he had seen once in a museum. He had seen this desert in a painting. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.
The Golden Company had been crossing the desert in that vision. But now the Golden Company was gone forever.
"Do you see a way to go?" asked Tess, mistaking his hesitation.
"No," he said, "But we'll go anyway. The harder route, the unexpected one, will not be watched. If only Charmeleon or your Gabite would evolve! Then we could really fly around."
He settled his shoulders more firmly in the pack and struck out up a sand-carved channel in the rock. The channel opened onto a moonlit floor of rock with benched ledges climbing away to the south. Bronze headed for the first ledge and clambered onto it. Tess followed.
She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and particular, the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the wind-carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstruction that forced a choice: Go over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms. They spoke only when necessary and then with the hoarse voices of their exertion. The immense spiritual concerns of the battle at Anthien had been partially superseded by the desert's brutal practicality.
"Careful here. This ledge is slippery with sand."
"Watch you don't hit your head against this overhang."
"Stay below this ridge; the moon's at our backs and it'd show our movement to anyone out there."
Bronze stopped in a bight of rock and leaned the pack against a narrow ledge. Tess leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Bronze drinking from a water pack he had found in the copter. Her own rations tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Rosecove: a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it had not been noticed for itself, only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.
To stop, she thought. To rest, truly rest.
It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.
Bronze pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping surface. Tess followed with a sigh. They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face. Again, they fell into the disjointed rhythm of movement across this broken land. Tess felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands, boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder. The powder clogged the nose and had to be blown out. Pea sand and pea gravel rolled on a hard surface and could spill the unwary. Rock flakes cut. And the omnipresent sand patches dragged against their feet.
Bronze stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadying Tess as she stumbled into him. He was pointing left and she looked along his arm to see that they stood atop a cliff with the desert stretched out like a static ocean some two hundred meters below. It lay there full of moon-silvered waves, shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.
So they had come to the great waste in the rain-shadow of the Frostveil Mountains, the desert that lay between the northern eaves of the Great Forest and the fertile fiefs of ancient Logaria on its upper border. Doubtless it was the same that Cypress had been taken by his dark master. It was the largest of its kind in all the southern world, save the desolate ice-wracks of Dor Bendor at the southern pole, and the hot land of Orre north beyond the Girdle of Earth. The king of Aredia still ruled under the Association, surviving the Fall of Logaria, making the desert and the fertile coastlands his dominion ever since.
"Open desert," she said.
"A wide place to cross," Bronze said, and his voice was muffled by the cloth he had tied across his face. "We have to get to the River Sereghir. It's our only hope." Tess glanced left and right: nothing but sand below. But then she saw it: far away, a winding ribbon clove its wave through the dunes, dimly shining red against the cloak of night. It was straight across from them over the wide sand sea.
Bronze stared straight ahead across the open dunes, watching the movement of shadows in the moon's passage. "About three or four kilometers across," he said. "There are sure to be more Seviper."
She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses. "Should we rest and eat?"
Bronze slipped out of the pack, sat down, and leaned against it. Tess supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him. She felt Bronze turn as she settled herself, heard him scrabbling in the pack.
"Here," he said. His hand felt dry against hers as he pressed two energy capsules into her palm. She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her own canteen.
She thought, as her energy returned, then how peaceful it was here in this moment of their tiredness, and she recalled once hearing the minstrel-warrior Adaman Lionheart say in one of Bronze's stories, "Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife."
She repeated the words to Bronze.
"That was Adaman," he said, surprised. "You have been paying attention?"
"I also have become an Arcean," she said.
"Really?" said Bronze, lying down on his back. "That's good. Glory to God. I have been hoping for this for a long while." Then he laughed, with that loud, assured, bachelor laughter that had often infuriated her on other lips.
"Well done!" he said. "You have agreed with your adversary quickly. I'm afraid there's no niche in the world for people who won't be either Pagan or Arcean. Just imagine a man who was too dainty to eat with his fingers and yet wouldn't use forks!"
His laughter rather than his words had reddened Tess's cheeks, and she was staring at him open-mouthed. Assuredly, Bronze was nothing like Arceus, be he also, though he did not belong to that hot-colored, archaic world of the Unseen, stood somehow in good diplomatic relations with it, from which she had been excluded, struck her like a blow. Some old female dream of finding a man who "really understood" was being insulted. She took it for granted, half-unconsciously, that Bronze was the most virginal of his sex; but she had not realized that this would leave his masculinity still on the other side of the stream from herself and even steeper, more emphatic, than that of common men.
"The Legends always has the right quotation," said Bronze. "I can hear Arceus now: 'And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked; and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.' "
"Dawn is coming soon," said Tess.
"There's a way to get safely across that open sand," said Bronze. "The Aredian nomads do it. I just don't know what it is."
"Nomads? They still live in these parts?"
"Yes. They are the most ancient of the Rorian races. They were here before the Logarians and are still wandering, long after. They are a fierce people. In the ancient days they wrote poems to their knives and sacrificed children to the Seviper, though the Association has made them stop. Now they write poems to their guns."
Tess shuddered. "I hope we never run into any of them."
"I hope we do. They are cruel but they are also courteous. I think I could deal with them respectfully. They alone know the secret roads of the sands and can lead us through many perils.
She found it odd that all she sensed was a pervasive terror at the thought of the nomads. She knew as though it lay just at the edge of her awareness that the nomads were to be respected and not feared, if she just could...
The sky grew lighter and an elder wind fluttered on their faces. No time to make the crossing now. Bronze and Electabuzz set up a tent in the middle of a crevasse, buried in deep shadow. Folds upon folds of dune, utterly flat, spread beyond their little rocky shelter. Tess's mind searched for something tall and tree-like in that landscape and found none. There was no persuading boldness of a cliff in the addled air and in that horizon, no bloom or gently shaped thing to mark the passage of a breeze, only dunes and that distant sky at the eastern horizon of burnished silver-blue.
The sun rose in a fiery arc about the margin of the world. It began to get hotter and soon the high noon was on. Bronze spoke without turning to face her. "I am finding that I enjoy the quiet here. It might be a good life."
She tried to see the desert through a hunted man's eyes, seeking to encompass the rigors of this place that were accepted as common. One could be alone out here without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.
"Old Quentin would be having a fit if he saw where we were right now," said Tess. "Danger behind danger in front, and on both sides. We might be lost forever in this hellish place, with no one left to know."
"I'm sure he would understand," said Bronze.
"Understand?" a harsh voice called from above them. "Understand what?"
...
They stood and ran out the tent, swiveling their heads to see where the call had come from. Bronze had fought down his fear and glanced at his Pokemon. He saw the tense position of their muscles, the readiness for battle. "Who are you?" he said.
"It would be regrettable should we have to destroy you out of hand," the voice above them said.
"There are two of them," whispered Bronze to Tess. "One at our upper left and one at our upper right."
"Degar rooz bardasht lashkar ze jay khorooshidan amad ze pardeh saray!"
It was the man to their right calling out across the ravine. To Tess the words were gibberish, but Bronze recognized the speech. It was Old Aredian, one of the ancient desert languages, and the man above them was saying that perhaps these were the strangers they sought.
In the sudden silence that followed the calling voice, scrambling sounds came from the rocks, above and to both sides dark motions in the shade. Many figures flowed through the shadows.
"A whole troop!" thought Bronze with a sudden pang.
A tall man in a mottled burnoose leaped down with a puff of falling sand and stepped in front of Tess. His mouth baffle was thrown aside for clear speech, revealing a heavy beard in the sidelight of the sun, but face and eyes were hidden in the overhang of his hood.
"What have we here? Demons or human?" he asked. "It might soon become hard to know."
Tess heard the banter in his voice, she allowed herself a faint hope. This was the voice of command, the voice that had first shocked them with its intrusion from above.
"Human, I warrant," the man said.
Bronze sensed rather than saw the knife hidden in a fold of the man's robe.
"Do you also speak?" the man asked.
Bronze put all the royal arrogance and divine right at his command into his manner and voice. A reply was urgent, but he had not heard enough of this man to be certain he had a register of his culture and weaknesses.
"Who comes on us like criminals out of the night?" he demanded. Again Tess saw the faint flickering of a white crown at his brow.
The burnoose-hooded head showed tension in a sudden twist, then slow relaxation that revealed much. The man had good control. Bronze shifted away from his Pokemon to separate them as targets and give each of them a clearer arena of action.
The hooded head turned at Bronze's movement, opening a wedge of face to the light. Tess saw a sharp nose, one glinting eye (dark, so dark the eye, without any white in it), and a heavy brown and upturned mustache. "A likely cub," the man said. "If you're fugitives from the attack on Anthien, maybe you're welcome among us. What is it, boy?"
The possibilities flashed through Bronze's mind: A trick? A fact? An immediate decision was needed. "Why should you welcome fugitives?" he demanded.
"A child who thinks and speaks like a man," said the tall man. "Well, now, to answer your question, my young master, I am one who does not pay the tax, the money tribute, to the Association, which has allied itself with the Eclipse Alliance. They serve the Djinn. That is why I might welcome a fugitive."
"He knows who we are," thought Bronze. "There's concealment in his voice."
"I am Antarah the Aredian," said the tall man. "Does that speed your tongue, boy?"
"I know you and hoped to meet you, Antarah," said Bronze. "Yellow sent us from the battle at Anthien through the storm."
"And Yellow abandoned us to return to the Association," said Antarah with disgust.
The voice from the rocks above them called: "We waste time here, An."
"This is Bronze Tercano, the heir to Logaria," barked Antarah. "Prince Ryan will want to speak to him at the barrows. He's certainly the one Yellow told us to seek."
"But...a child, An!"
"Robert Tercano was a man and this lad flew a skycopter," said Antarah. "That was a brave crossing he made in the path of the storm. We saw its landing last night."
"But the girl?"
"Yes, the girl," said Antarah. "And her being here."
"You know the law," said the voice from the rocks. "Ones who cannot live with the desert..."
"Be quiet," said Antarah. "Times change. The Djinn has returned and the lost king walks among us. Not all eras are the same. The prophecy among us must be fulfilled and I have no time for your cub-talk."
"Did Ryan command this?" asked the voice from the rocks.
"You heard the voice of the king," said Antarah. "Why do you press me?"
"I but remind you of your duties, friend Antarah," said the voice above them.
"My duty is the strength of the king," said Antarah. "That is my only duty. I need no one to remind me of it. This child-man interests me. He is full-fleshed. He has lived on much water. He has lived away from the father sun. He has the soft skin of the water-rich plains. Yet he does not speak or act like a weakling of the south or north. Nor, Yellow told me, would his father. How can this be, unless all the old tales are true and legends have come spring up from the sand."
"We cannot stay out here all night arguing," said the voice from the rocks.
"I will not tell you again to be quiet," said Antarah.
The man above them remained silent, but Tess heard him moving, crossing by a leap over the defile they were in and working his way down to the desert floor on their left.
"Yellow suggested there'd be value to us in saving you two," said Antarah. "I can see possibility in this strong boy-man: he is young and can learn. Also we have been waiting for the return of the king for a very long time. Ryan will judge him on that account. But what of yourself, girl?" He stared at Tess. "Are you his mistress or something else?"
"I am no such thing," she cried.
"Are you trained in the ways of the desert?"
"No, but many consider my training valuable."
"We make our own judgments on value," said Antarah.
"Every man has the right to his own judgments," said Bronze.
"It is well that you see the reason," said Antarah. "We cannot dally here to test you, girl Do you understand? We'd not want your shade to plague us. I will take the boy-man, your old friend, and he shall have my countenance, sanctuary in my tribe. But for you, girl you understand there is nothing personal in this? It is the rule, girl, in the general interest. Is that not enough?"
Bronze took a half-step forward. "What are you talking about?"
Antarah flicked a glance across Bronze, but kept his attention on "Unless you've been deep-trained from childhood to live here, you could bring destruction onto an entire tribe. It is the law, and we cannot carry useless baggage to the sacred barrows."
Charmeleon's motion started as a slumping, deceptive faint to the ground. It was the obvious thing for a weak Pokemon to do, and the obvious slows an opponent's reactions. It takes an instant to interpret a known thing when that thing is exposed as something unknown. Tess shifted as she saw Antarah's right shoulder drop to bring a weapon within the folds of his robe to bear on her new position. A turn, a slash of the Pokemon's arm, a whirling of mingled robes, and Charmelon was against the rocks with the man helpless in front of it.
At his Pokemon's first movement, Bronze backed two steps. As it attacked, he dove for shadows. A bearded man rose up in his path, half-crouched, lunging forward with a weapon in one hand. Bronze took the man beneath the sternum with a straight-hand jab, sidestepped and chopped the base of his neck, relieving him of the weapon as he fell.
Then Bronze was into the shadows, scrambling upward among the rocks, the weapon tucked into his waist. He had recognized it in spite of its unfamiliar shape: a projectile weapon, and that said many things about this place, another clue that Pokemon were not used often here.
There came a chorus of sharp spring-clicks from the basin. Projectiles whined off the rocks around him. One of them flicked his pack. He squeezed around a corner in the rocks, found himself in a narrow vertical crack, and began inching upward-his back against one side, his feet against the other, slowly, as silently as he could.
The roar of Antarah's voice echoed up to him: "Get back, you wormheaded lice! It'll break my neck if you come near!"
A voice out of the basin said: "The boy got away, An. What are we..."
"Of course he got away, you sand-brained fool! Ugh! Easy, girl!"
"Tell them to stop hunting Bronze," he heard Tess say."
"They've stopped, woman-girl. He got away as you intended him to. Great Rayquaza above! Why didn't you say you were a trained girl and a fighter?"
"Tell your men to fall back," said Tess. "Tell them to go out into the basin where I can see them, and you'd better believe that I know how many of them there are!"
Bronze inched his way upward, found a narrow ledge on which he could rest and look down into the basin. Antarah's voice came up to him. "And if I refuse? How can you...ah! Leave be, Pokemon! We mean no harm to you, now. Great gods! If this Gabite can do this to the strongest of us, you're worth ten times your worth in looks."
"You ask if Bronze is the Emperor," said Tess. "How do you know about that?"
"You could be the folk of the ancient legends," he said, "but I'll believe that when it's been tested by the king-to-be. All I know now is that you came here with those crooked Eclipse men, Djinn's men, on your tail! You may be honorable and brave, but you are stupid to have put yourself in the way of the Eclipse fist now that the Djinn is back!"
Presently, Tess said: "We had no choice, but we won't argue about it. Now, tell that man of yours behind the rock over there to stop trying to bring his weapon to bear on me, or I'll have Gabite rid the universe of you and take him next."
"You there!" roared Antarah. "Do as she says!"
"But, An..."
"Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd! Do it or I'll help the Gabite dismember you! Can't you see the worth of this Pokemon and its trainer?"
The man at the rock straightened from his partial concealment, lowered his weapon.
"He has obeyed," said Antarah.
"Now," said Tess, "explain clearly to your people what it is you wish of me and Bronze. I want no young hothead to make a foolish mistake."
"When we slip into the villages and towns of the coasts we must mask our origin, blend with the simple, civilized folk," said Antarah. "We carry no weapons, for the Aredian knives passed down are sacred. But you, girl, have a way with this Pokemon that I have not yet seen. We seldom train Pokemon for battle here in the desert. It takes too much water. We'd only heard of it and many doubted, (we have lived here a very long time) but one cannot doubt what he sees with his own eyes. It mastered an armed desert-dweller. This is a weapon no search could expose."
There was a stirring in the basin as Antarah's words sank home. "If you agree not to harm us, we will not harm you."
"How can I know if you're lying or not?"
Antarah's voice lost some of its subtle undertone of reasoning and took on an edge of bitterness. "Out here, girl, we carry no paper for contracts. We make no evening promises to be broken at dawn. When a man says a thing, that's the contract. As leader of my people, I've put them in bond to my word. Be courteous and you will have sanctuary with us as long as you wish. You and the lost emperor shall mingle with us till Ryan decides what to do with you."
"Can you speak for all of you?" asked Tess.
"In time, that may be. But only my brother, Ryan, speaks for all of the Aredians. Here, I promise only secrecy. My people will not speak of you to any other nation. The Djinn has returned to Earth in force and the good Chairman is dead, sp secrecy is in order."
"How do you know all that?"
"Many tidings reach our ears in the desert. The great dark has made the hearts of our people grow heavy. We even know of Cypress and the Djinn's man he has become. Now, will you release me?"
"It is the legend," someone said.
"It was said that Yellow gave this good report on you," said Antarah, easing away from Gabite. "But a thing so important must be tested. If Bronze is the returning emperor of legend who will lead us to paradise..." He shrugged.
Bronze spoke at last from where he had been hiding. "The loremasters who brought you the legend, he gave it under the binding of the kindreds of Logaria and Aredia, the miracle and the inimitability of the prophecy. This I know. Do you wish a sign?"
Antarah's nostrils flared in the desert light. "We cannot tarry for the rites," he whispered, shifting uneasily. "We must go now to the River."
He looked up at the cliff almost directly at the rock ledge where Bronze crouched. "You there, lad: you may come down now." He returned his attention to Tess, and spoke with an apologetic tone: "He made an incredible amount of noise climbing. He has much to learn lest he endanger us all, but he's young."
"No doubt we have much to teach each other," said Bronze. "Meanwhile, you'd best see to your companion out there. I was a bit rough in disarming him."
Antarah whirled, his hood flapping. "Where?"
"Beyond those bushes." He pointed.
Antarah touched two of his men. "See to it." He glanced at his companions, identifying them. "Harban is missing." He turned to Tess. "He knows the fighting-way."
A companion pressed two squares of gauze into Antarah's hand. Antarah ran them through his fingers, fixed one around Tess's neck beneath her hat, and fitted the other around Bronze's neck in the same way. "Now you wear the kerchief of the Aredians," he said. "If we become separated, you will be recognized as belonging to Ryan's royal company. We will talk of weapons and the war another time. There remains much to be told."
Antarah gave both of them loose-fitting robes of white linen to wear over their bodies and heads. He moved out through his band now, inspecting them, giving Bronze's pack to one of his men to carry. "There's much we don't know of each other," said Antarah. "But we tarry overlong. Day-sun mustn't find us in the open, but we have no choice but to leg it up double-quick." He crossed to the man Bronze had struck down and said, "Harban, can you travel?"
A grunt answered him. "Surprised me, he did. 'Twas an accident. I can travel."
"No accident," said Antarah. "But not your fault. Logarian boys are as strong as Aredian men. We have too little of the blood of Southernesse in us."
Antarah flicked a testing glance across the group and motioned two men out.
"Larus and Farrukh, you are to hide our tracks. See that we leave no trace for the Djinn's men. Extra care: we have two with us who've not been trained." He turned, hand upheld and aimed across the basin to the River Sereghir. "In squad line with flankers: move out. We must be at the Pillars of the Kings before the next dawn.
Bronze fell into step beside Antarah counting heads. There were forty desert-men; he and Tess made it forty-two. And he thought: "They travel as a military company."
"Watch where you go," hissed Antarah. "Do not brush against a bush lest you leave a thread to show our passage to the Seviper."
Tess listened to the sounds of the troop, hearing her own footsteps and Paul's, marveling at the way the Aredians moved. They were forty people crossing the basin with only the sounds natural to the place, ghostly creatures, their robes flitting through the sand. Their destination was the Pillars of the Kings, which seemed to hold some significance for Bronze but not for her.
She turned the words over in her mind. What could it mean?
...
They approached the River at sunset, moving through a depression in the sand through hills so narrow that they sometimes had to move sideways to negotiate it. Tess saw Antarah detach guards in the thinning sunlight, saw them for a moment as they began their scrambling climb up the cliff.
Bronze turned his head upward as he walked, seeing the tapestry of the desert where the blue-grey sky touched.
"The men who climbed above us, where are they going?" whispered Bronze to Antarah.
"The first nightwatch," he said. "Hurry now!"
"A guard left outside," thought Bronze. "Wise. But it would've been wiser still for us to approach this place in separate bands. Less chance of losing the whole troop." He paused in the thought, realizing that this was guerrilla thinking, and he remembered his fear that the heir to Logaria might become an outlaw.
"Faster," said Antarah.
Bronze sped his steps, hearing the swish of robes behind. And he thought of the words of the writer from the Hisuian Coda: "Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind." He rolled the quotation in his mind.
They climbed a hill where they could see the length of the river and how it cut through bastions of sandy hills, covered in thrawn, tan weeds. The water lapped and burbled amid the stones. Antarah stood at one bank amid the reeds, and Bronze saw a long boat without a motor nestled in the mud. Tess looking ahead beyond the hills saw in the distance two huge pillars approaching, standing tall and dreadful on each side of the stream.
"Here are the Pillars of the Kings, Tess," said Bronze. "In ancient days they showed the southernmost border of Logaria, made by the men of Southernesse in years long gone. They mark the entrance to my old kingdom."
"We will pass under them," said Antarah. "The king in exile shall return to his own lands under the eyes of the great standing stones, as was once prophecized by Ferdowosi the Seer."
Tess walked by the bank with the company while Antarah took Bronze in the book along with six other solemn men, rowing upstream against the current. She saw that the statues were partially ruined, but their shape was still visible, for the power of old had made them, and still they preserved through the suns and sands the shapes of the two faces that had been carved upon them. Upon great pedestals built in the deep gravel stood two kings of stone. The left arm of each was stretched in a raised palm outwards to the north, in a gesture of command and warding, though the hand of the statue on the right had fallen off and rested in the sand by its base. On each head were the remains on a head and crown. She felt frail and small under the everlasting shadow of the sentinels. And so they passed through the southern border of Old Logaria.
Bronze and the men in the boat passed beyond the two and came back to the shore. Tess came to meet Bronze, and yet not Bronze; for the boy was no longer there. In the longship sat a Lord of Logaria, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skillful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land, or so it seemed.
"Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses of Tar-Elrosi and his son, my sires of old," said he. "Under their shadow Bronze Tercano, the chosen son of Robert Tercano of the House of Logaria, the heir of the South-kingdom, has naught to dread!"
...
The march went on up the Serehgir, and Bronze found that, in the absence of anything to do but monotonous walking and speaking through the desert dusk, he did indeed have much to dread. Some thoughts absorbed all his attention for the next couple of hours and were making concerted attacks on his faith.
For one, Jake was gone and certainly dead, or even worse. Why had the gods rescued him and the others but not Jake? Why had he not been at the Black Council? When thinking of days long past there came over him then a longing for a rainbow in this place that would never see rain.
"I must suppress such longings," he thought. "They're a weakness. I no longer can afford weaknesses."
The desert had the quality of reducing him to a cipher in a different way than the sea. The sea was the enforced absence of knowledge, the necessary annihilation of useful perspectives in the absence of light, while the desert was the overabundance of perception. It was too large, too hot, and too alien. Feebly he realized an abstraction: there had once been sea in the desert. The white seashells that wanderers sometimes found proved that it was so. A waste left behind once the disorder of the ocean left. He felt that the great sea should come in and cleanse the desert forever, but then it would be only more of the same, more inscrutable bigness.
"It must have irked you to run from Anthien," said Antarah, "or even from the fell thing you name the Un-Cypress, even though you were among the last to leave."
"Maybe," said Bronze, grateful to speak again. "But tell me now of your own fortunes. For I would learn more of Aredia the long-enduring, and this King and his Prince Ryan that leads you. What hope have you for yourselves in this war? What has happened in the world outside? Why did the Association ships come to Anthien? I do not believe the Djinn risked that venture. He was foiled, but not by any earthly means."
"What hope have we?" said Antarah. "It is long since we had any hope. The king of Logaria, if he returns indeed, may rekindle it, but I do not think that it will do more than put off the evil day, unless other help unlooked for also comes, from Arceus. For now the Enemy increases and we decrease. The men of Aredia who keep the old rites are a failing people.
"The Men of Logaria were settled far and wide on the shores and seaward regions of the Great Lands," said Antarah in the old fashion, "but for the most part they fell into evils and follies. Many became enamored of the Darkness and the black arts; some were given over wholly to idleness and ease, and some fought among themselves, until they were conquered in their weakness by the wild men. It is not said that evil arts were ever practiced in Aredia, or that the Nameless One was ever named in honor there, and the old wisdom and beauty brought out of the North from Hisui remained long in the realm of the sons of King Anshan the first lord of Aredia, and they linger here still.
"Yet even so it was Aredia that brought about its own decay, falling by degrees into dotage, and thinking that the Enemy was asleep, who was only banished not destroyed. Death was ever present, because the good Logaria still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the scrolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And at last the line of the Emperors disappeared into the wilderness.
"But the Aredians were wiser and more fortunate. Wiser, for they recruited the strength of our people from the sturdy folk of the seacoast, and from the hardy mountaineers of the Frostveil Mountains, and the brave men of the desert. We now love war and valor as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts. Such is the need of our days.
"The Association came, and now our prince lives as a wild rider in the desert, harassing the men that come to tame us. Word comes to us of the Djinn's doings from Cobalion, one of our few friends and allies. But now the dark is too strong to bear. We will stand, yes, but then we will fall. The end approaches."
"I am not yet sure if the end days are upon us," said Bronze. "But they are coming soon. Regardless of your fears, I will go to Aredia and show your king that the Emperor has returned."
...
As night came on, Tess found herself looking out across the wide river to a cliff, looking out across another basin about ten or twelve kilometers wide. The basin was shielded by high rock walls. Sparse clumps of plant growth were scattered around it. As she looked at the dawn-gray basin, the moon lifted over the far escarpment illuminating a biscuit-colored landscape of rocks and sand. And she noted that in the desert the moon seemed to leap over the horizon like the sun. She saw a cave in the cliff, fifteen feet high, through which passed a gravel road, wide enough for many men abreast. Carven work resembling a gate had been made around the cavern mouth in the manner of Old Aredia, but it had become worn and splintered and blackened.
Antarah gripped her arm, and pointed across the basin. "There! There you see the old capital of Aredia, which in our tongue is named Ussukannu."
She looked where he pointed, and saw movement: people on the basin floor before the great gate scattering at the moonlight into the shadows of the opposite cliffwall. In spite of the distance, their movements were plain in the clear air. Kerchiefs fluttered like a flight of multicolored butterflies.
"That is home for us desert-folk," said Antarah. "We will be there this night." He stared across the basin, tugging at his mustache. "My people stayed out overlate in the day working. That means there are no patrols about during the first night watch. I'll signal them later and they'll prepare for us."
"Your people show good discipline," said Bronze.
"They obey the preservation of the tribe," he said. "It is the way we choose among us for a leader. The leader is the one who is strongest, the one who brings water and security. That may be you." He lifted his attention to Bronze's face.
He returned his stare, noted the whiteless eyes, the stained eyepits, the dust-rimmed beard and mustache. "Have I compromised your leadership by returning as a king, Antarah?"
"You did not call me out," he said.
"It's important that a leader keep the respect of his troop," said Bronze.
"Isn't a one of those sandlice I cannot handle," said Antarah. "If you best me, you best us all. Some are curious to see if you intend to call me out."
Bronze weighed the implications. "By besting you in formal battle?"
He nodded. "I'd advise you against this because they'd not follow you. You're not of the sand. They saw this in our day's passage."
"Practical people," he said.
"True enough." He glanced at the basin. "We know our needs. But not many are thinking deep thoughts now this close to home. We've been out overlong arranging our campaign in the east. We hope to drive the Djinn's men out of their strongholds that they took from the Association."
"When did they do that?"
"Ryan will have to explain more. You really do not know how the war has been going?"
"I had thought there was a lull in which both sides were preparing their next moves."
"That is not how things have gone. The first days aren't going well for the Association. The Alliance has taken their strong places and killed many of their people. The Djinn is angry that some prize was denied to him and he is lashing out with all his strength. The Association is in havoc as things that they thought secure are revealed to be nothing in the face of the hideous strength."
"Will the Alliance win a plain battle?" said Bronze. "I had heard that they were growing very big and dangerous."
"They grow," he said, "but when their leaders were wiser and still human men, they saw that the slow way is the safe way. I think they will die in the end as their own revealed strength turns on them. But the Djinn is clever."
He watched his men load boats for portage. "We must be getting back to the others," said Antarah. "Or else, Bronze, my people may suspect you dally with the girl. Some already are jealous that your hands tasted her loveliness when you traveled together last night in Vahram Ravine."
"That will be enough of that!" snapped Tess.
"No offense," said Antarah, and his voice was mild. "Women among us are not taken against their will, though with you, I don't think even that convention will be needed. But it is time we crossed the River to the old barrow. My people need to rest in comfort this night. Their families will give them little rest on the morrow."
"I do not necessarily think that Tess ought to be offered to me as a mate," said Bronze, addressing some of Tess's concerns. "This is nothing personal, for she is beautiful and desirable. But should she become one of my women, that might lead some of your young men to believe that I'm too much concerned with pleasures of the flesh and not enough concerned with the tribe's needs, like any king should. Even now they listen to us and watch us, to see how the new emperor behaves. Most of them cannot believe that I am he of the legend."
"A boy-man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences," thought Tess. And why should most of the Aredians believe that Bronze was the emperor to be? When the king comes back: a term used for far-off things that should never happened. It had been over a thousand and five hundred years since a king sat on the throne of Atun-Kaah, the City of Caves. This was the first time Bronze was interacting with any of his subjects and it had to be handled with care.
"There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits," said Antarah. "They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob."
"The law that determines the choosing of your tribe's ruler is a just law," said Bronze. "But it does not follow that justice is always the thing a people needs. What we truly need now is time to grow and prosper, to spread the word that the king has returned over more land. The free peoples, the few that have not been corrupted by the hideous strength, must come to our banners."
"We do not have that power," said Antarah.
"Soon every eye will see me and every ear will hear me," said Bronze. "It is your duty and the duty of your people to come to my aid, if I should so call. You are servants of the king of Aredia, you say. But in the order of old the king of Aredia was a vassal and friend to the Emperor of Logaria."
"Such was my suspicion," he said. "I admit that I first underestimated you."
"And I underestimated your callousness," said Tess sharply.
"I should like an end to this," said Bronze to Tess. "I should like friendship with you, and trust. I should like that respect for each other which grows in the breast without demand for the huddlings of sex."
"I understand," she said.
"Do you trust me?"
"I hear your sincerity."
"Among us," said Antarah, "the women, when they are not the formal leaders, hold a special place of honor. They teach. They maintain the strength of Arceus-Rabu-Mazdam here." He touched his breast and sang:
...
"Mine enemies are like green blades eaten down
That did stand in the path of the tempest.
Hast thou not seen what our Lord did?
He sent the pestilence among them
That did lay schemes against us.
They are like birds scattered by the huntsman.
Their schemes are like pellets of poison
That every mouth rejects."
...
Back to Antarah from the river came a whispered response of many voices: "Their works have been overturned."
"The fire of God mount over thy heart," said Antarah.
"The fire of God set alight," came the response.
Bronze nodded. "Thine enemies shall fall," he said.
"May it be so," they answered.
"The tannen from the Coda," said Bronze. "I had thought you were Arceans."
"We are fellow people of the book," said Antarah. "All the Arceus-followers must now stand together as the thunder comes, lest each be singly destroyed."
They boarded the boats and made the midnight river crossing, moving again into the shadows of the foothills of the Frostveil Mountains. "This place will last long if it is ever besieged by the Djinn's men," said Bronze. "This country has an old soul. I like it. In better days, I could summon stone-wrights from the north to return the gate of Aredia to its former glory."
"Doubtless you have that art," said Antarah, tying their boat to an iron peg. "But there is no time for such things. Your safety rests in secrecy. But perhaps we will return here together, one day, when all the many waters of the Enemy do not lie between us."
They passed through the gate and into cool blackness. Bronze saw turbaned sentries nested among the fallen rocks around the gate, armed with chandler pistols. It was dark inside, in the sense of cave darkness, lit only with orange glowglobes. He felt the stir of Aredians around him and smelt the acrid odor of rubber fires burning. The cave remained in blackness, shielded from the desert by plastic seals that trapped their body moisture during the hot day and their body warmth in the night.
Antarah made them pass through the hall and into a place where pillars of tan rock, intertwined with serpent designs, held up a vast roof. Sitting upon a throne built from the rock of the mountains was a young man. In his hand was a golden rod and upon his brow was the plumed crown of Old Aredia.
"We beg the King of Kings of Aredia and non-Aredia to hear our address," said Antarah. "The Emperor of Logaria has returned and he seeks counsel."
