I.
For the seventh day in a row, Ohtli picked his way between sad, spare patches of waxgrass, his blade and instrument strapped to his back combining with his height to cut an impressive silhouette against the cloudless sky. His powerful shoulders swayed fluidly in time with his stride, and the uncannily-straight silver markings up and down his bronze carapace glistened in the incandescent sunlight. Though he had been traveling for some time, that unrelenting light of the great sun Taá still took him aback. He was struck with a forlorn wish that he had been given the opportunity to find or fashion a hat to shade his sensitive eyes, but his departure from home had happened too abruptly for such niceties. Something stirred inside him, and he stopped and looked behind him, at the trail of wide sand-shoe prints he had left in his wake, stretching out and distant, the Salt Sea shimmering with reflected sunlight and with radiant heat. It was the first time he had turned over his shoulder in all the time since he left home and something inside him sank — a grinding feeling in his thorax, unsettling and sick. It tugged at him, urged him to spin on his feet and retrace his steps. He knew it was impossible.
He continued on. If he could make it to the low hills on the horizon, bent low like worshipers at the feet of the sky islands behind them, he could find the dry chaparral there, find shade, perhaps food. He had provisions, to be sure, but he would run out, and out on the flats nothing good grew. Even more pressing than the food was water, for many things which grew from the ground could be eaten, and though the tzic needed less water than some of the other people of the Desert, Ohtli was acutely aware that “less” was not “none.” Already his waterskins were growing lighter than he would like, and as their weight decreased Ohtli’s burden of survival rose.
He thought back to the pod of wala-wuno that he spotted — and heard — a few days before in the distance, their salt-plumes rising like smoke from their backs. The creatures following them, drinking from the channels of freshwater they leave behind, will be more trouble than the water is worth, he thought to himself, and me, alone. Short-sighted. Perhaps even foolish. Perhaps, though, not entirely wrong, for there were things which crawled on four legs or six or which writhed and wriggled through the Salt Sea which would kill even a strong, practiced tzic such as himself as surely as thirst. He ran his mandibles along his foreleg anxiously. The salt clung to his chitin. It was foul in his mouth.
He walked. The salt-crust of the soil was brittle and it shattered under every step, cracking and splintering into searing powder. The noonday sun was fiery and relentless, but almost worse than the heat itself was the salt-flats’ wind, which tore constantly, furiously, along the salty soil, bringing with it stinging dust and grit and operating by convection to bake Ohtli’s lungs and dry his eyes and throat. More than once he had to blindfold his eyes entirely to keep them from becoming scratched and cracked, sweeping out in front of him with his scabbard low to the ground to prod at the soil and be sure of his steps.
He trudged onward through the salt and sand until late in the day when he crossed a small ridge out of the salt crusts and found himself in a tangled, ancient stand of goldenspray trees, rising from the dust like the gnarled fist of some impossibly slow-moving sand creature. Shade, he thought, and immediately took shelter underneath one, removing his weapon, his instrument, and his pack, setting them on the ground at the foot of the tree. Of course it was too far into the dry season for any hope of seed pods, and there was no water nearby — the taproots of the trees ran deep, deeper than Ohtli could dig in a day or two or five — but the shade was a welcome respite. He allowed himself to sit, leaning against one of the old trunks, running a claw along it and feeling the ridged, grooved bark.
A thought struck him, and he lifted his sword and held the pith-bone haft along the tang, choking up to the night-sky-dark blade, and he ran it down the bark of the tree, which peeled away effortlessly in wide, flat strips. These he lashed together with some twine from his pack to form a crude bark hat, with a wide, crinkling brim. With his mandibles, he punched two holes in the hat and ran twine between them. Perching the hat on his head, he looped the twine under his mandibles and his chin. It was rough, but serviceable, and far kinder to his eyes than being beholden to the whims of Taá as he had been for days.
He knew that this was likely the best place to sleep for many miles, the trial of the wind being eased by the low ridge encircling him, so he rummaged in his pack for dinner. Taá was low and glimmering in the sky, its light aquiver through the haze of the dusty atmosphere, and in opposition sat the mighty planet Shimreth, the big sister of their world, purple and ringed, serene and silent. To Ohtli, it always seemed as though Taá was a cruel and uncaring mistress, giving her life to plants but snuffing it from animals caught without ways of knowing how to survive or simply in an unlucky moment, and that Shimreth was devoted, keeping all those alive on their world close to her in an eternal embrace, her rings a benevolent smile arcing through the sky.
Ohtli pulled three beautiful, fist-sized pith-bone fruits that he had sequestered in his pack. The first real shade since his departure was a fine enough occasion to eat them, he thought. The fruits had made their way into his hometown, Ehecatlepec, from scouts who had interacted with the Caravan as it passed near to the Salt Sea. He recalled the day the scouts had returned; tall, powerful Scithi warriors, unrolling carpets they had won in trades with the Caravan, each of which was filled to bursting with fruits and grains and nuts and seeds and trinkets and jewelry and toys and knives with handles made of bamboo or pith-bone and spices and silk. Bowls and utensils fashioned of animal bone. Plump redheart truffles, and bundles of dullweed to ease the pain of the ill or dying.
He would be lying to claim he had never seen such riches before — they were found every time the Caravan passed by. Each year, perhaps six weeks after the monsoon rains abated, the Caravan was there, and the scouts brought back their riches. But Ohtli had never seen the Caravan itself. He had always been jealous of the Scithi who went to trade, always deeply wished he could join them.
“It is not for you to do,” Tzeltzin, his caretaker, would say, matter-of-factly. “Your place is here.” And she was right, of course — Tzeltzin had never been wrong — but she had brought Ohtli half a dozen pith-bone fruits from the piles, because she knew they were his favorites.
Ohtli stood back and surveyed the copse of goldenspray. One of the trees had been rent in two, probably by the violent winds of the monsoons. A fresh, sap-covered stump lay bare as the tree itself formed a twisted right angle along the ground. He took one of the fruits in his claw and set it gently down on the stump, then lifted his sword, running his claws along the smooth, strong pith-bone haft. Turning his arm, he brought the blade back, up, and over his head in a wide arc, the dark metal blade hissing as it cut through the air, and then he brought it down onto the fruit, splitting it neatly in two. He crouched down, carefully observing the halves of the fruit. They were exactly the same size.
He took one half in each of his top claws and bit down, savoring the sweet, sticky pulp of the fruit, the tiny myriad seeds crunching between his mandibles in the way that only pith-bone seeds could, and in his bottom claws he began to tie a length of twine around the second fruit. He reached up and tied the end of the twine to a low-hanging branch just overhead and stood away from it. He finished the first fruit, discarding the scaled peel, then lifted his sword in his top claws and spun, holding it out and away from his body, the blade hissing a gorgeous circuit as it connected with the hanging fruit, and in the same motion he slid the blade into the strap on his back and caught the half of the fruit as it fell, one in each of his bottom claws.
They were exactly the same size.
He stretched, reaching up towards the sky, then forward towards the setting sun, leaning over each leg, taking bites of the sweet and sour fruit as he did, careful not to miss even a drop of the juice. The juice was water and water was life and the fruit was completely perfect.
Finally, after discarding the peels once more, he picked up the last fruit, giving it a gentle squeeze. Pith-bone was a true blessing on the land, he thought to himself. He reached up and lightly touched the haft of his sword, made from the rib of the same cactus, lightweight and strong. One plant with so many gifts to the people of the Desert.
In one swift motion he tossed the fruit high in the air, drew his sword from behind him, brought it singing down over his head, and sliced the fruit in two as it fell back to the ground. The two halves lay cut-side-up in the sand. He picked them up.
The left piece was slightly larger than the right.
His antennae twitched anxiously. Just means more work to do. Even better to become, he thought.
“Little Sannling,” Tzeltzin had once begun, as she so often began when he was small. “In this world and in this life you have a job as we all have jobs. You are a part of the turning of the world and the birth and rebirth of our people as we all are. Your time will be shorter than mine but no less beautiful. Never forget how much you matter.” Ohtli remembered her taking his head into her claws, stroking his face and his antennae affectionately. “Someday you won’t have me anymore and you will need to play your part, and in so doing, become the greatest possible version of yourself.”
The stars began to appear in the sky, a carpet of glittering gems, and as he laid himself down under the goldenspray and looked up at them, he had never felt so close yet so far from home in his life.
Sleep eluded him, of course, despite the long marching hours of each day. It had eluded him every night since he began his journey. Ohtli was accustomed to the cool, dark underground creche, its gently echoing passages and the scent of damp and fungus in the air. Up here it was almost unbearably warm until the sun went down, whereupon the temperature plunged in an instant, the sand giving up the heat it had collected readily, willingly, almost urgently, divesting itself of the sun’s warmth and becoming icy and forbidding, hard and stony. It was better here and certainly safer than it had been in the Salt Sea, where he had to take special precaution to disguise himself from predators and prevent himself from sinking into the muck, but it still felt foreign and uncomfortable, and the bright glow of Shimreth in the sky didn’t help matters much. He had heard stories of people — the yaka, the kah-rehm, the spider-people, and others — who slept up here, aboveground, all the time. It was something he knew he would need to grow accustomed to.
One thing which always calmed his nerves was playing his uzam, the stringed instrument that Tzeltzin had taught him in secret in the creche. The uzam was a yaka invention, a plucked instrument with two conjoined wooden bodies each with its own neck and strung with gut. The smaller treble body was played with the upper arms and the larger bass body with the lower.
Ohtli had taken to the uzam rapidly, despite the general belief that drones were not cut out for creative pursuits. “It just isn’t becoming,” Ohtli had overheard one of Tzeltzin’s friends saying to her one evening, voice hushed, as he plucked away at the instrument in the rear of the creche. “I don’t know why you insist on it with each crop of Sannlings you bring up.”
“They understand more than you think, Mehcatl,” Tzeltzin had replied. “And they deserve more than you believe, too.”
It had taken him a few years, but eventually there came a day when Tzeltzin told him that he had surpassed her on the uzam, that she could listen and give advice but could not teach him further. She seemed surprised, when she said it, and also something else Ohtli couldn’t place. “So you’ll just have to practice with what time you have left, before you grow up and leave the creche,” she said, tilting her head, her antennae lowered. “I’ll enjoy hearing you play until that day.”
Ohtli picked up the uzam from where he had laid it against the tree, covered in a light blanket to protect the sound holes from dust and grit. He sat back against the twisted trunk of the goldenspray and began to play.
Back at home, when he had needed to play like this — to help settle his mind — Tzeltzin would tell him a spirit of music had possessed him. He never used to believe in that. There were wind spirits and dust spirits and mountain spirits and stream spirits and many more, but music spirits were surely made up. But as he reached up to twist the tuning pegs on the uzam, feeling the waves of drowsiness begin to wash over him, he wondered if she had been right after all.
The next day, Ohtli woke and traveled onward, and it was not long after he crossed the ridge on the far side that he saw a telltale stripe of green foliage in the distance, running parallel to the horizon: a stream. It was only a few hours away, and his heart sang with the prospect of filling his water skins and drinking his fill.
When Ohtli arrived at the banks of the stream — perhaps only two spans wide, scarcely more than a trickle at this point in its course — he bent down and drank directly from it, the warm, crystal-clear, sand-filtered water a balm for his sore and parched throat. He looked up to the east, where the looming sky islands rose. The stream’s headwaters must be up there, he thought. He took another long, luxurious drink and then splashed the water up and over his head and shoulders, delighting in his good fortune. He looked upstream, at the sky islands licking the sparse and wispy clouds high overhead. They seemed somehow ominous, somehow forbidding, their faces pocked with sheer granite cliffs, and so he resolved to head west, downstream, staying with the water all the while.
Ohtli followed the stream for two days, sleeping away from the water for safety and making his way back to the line of trees along its banks to travel during sunlit hours. It felt so easy, traveling along a source of water. Where his first week away from home was torture, this was glorious. He was grateful for the lessons Tzeltzin had given him on botany, because there were thousands, millions of goldenspray seed pods littering the soil of the bank, in excellent condition, which he ground between stones and made into a sort of paste or dough with river water and ate, and broad-leafed rootmeat plants which he dug up with his claws and devoured. Small fish darted under the water’s surface, tiny glittering rubies with fins. Every so often he would catch a glimpse of a small bird with violet plumage flitting in the low branches of the goldenspray on the far side of the stream. He would get in the water and wade through it, splashing it up onto himself, and though the water was warm, as the breeze blew past him its evaporation cooled him tremendously.
It was almost idyllic until he came to the charred, burnt-out wreck of a homestead in a crook of the stream.
He smelled the acrid, lingering scent of smoke against his antennae long before he saw it, of course, and knew something had gone wrong. It didn’t smell of wildfires — he had smelled that smell, drifting across the Salt Sea, many seasons, in the distance. There was a foul sweetness to this scent, and something chemical, and something of roasted food, and something still more of rot and death. Coming around a little bend and down a slight hill where the stream formed a small waterfall he saw it — the cindered remains of a wooden house, blighting the landscape with an inky, sooty void, with one upright log standing implausibly, almost comically in its center untouched by the flames. A smaller shadow of a building scourged the soil nearby, perhaps a shed or outhouse. Maybe lightning had struck during the monsoon storms, and the dry goldenspray-wood had simply raged out of control. He scurried down the hill, trying to maintain his footing in the scree, and after steadying himself he hopped stones across the stream and made his way to the ashes.
It was perhaps eight by eight armspans, a cottage more than anything else, and nearly everything inside had been utterly consumed by the flames, other than three charred and blackened yaka corpses, their legs twisted at strange and uncanny angles. One was large, an adult, but the other two were small. Children. One clutched a flame-licked rattle made of bone. Ohtli felt something in his thorax sink, deeper even than he had felt it when he looked behind him and really understood he could not return home. This was a pit he had never before known.
So distracted was Ohtli by the sight of the burnt cottage and its inhabitants that at first he did not see the corpse lying nearby. Another grown yaka, with bow and arrow drawn, shot through with three arrows herself. No lightning strike was a fletcher. The worms had already begun their foul but necessary work upon her and her body was swollen and bloated with the byproducts of her decomposition. Ohtli was used to corpses in the Salt Sea becoming brined and mummified, not decaying — he supposed there was enough moisture in the air and soil around the stream to promote the natural processes at play. The sight and scent made him ill. It ran like hideous, rotten lightning along his antennae and he leaned against the upright trunk in the center of the house to steady himself.
After a moment he resolved to give them all a proper end. At first he walked a distance from the stream he felt was safe so as not to befoul the water with corpse-rot and began to dig with his claws, but here the soil was baked hard and dry like brick, and even once he had made it a few feet the shattering soil gave way to a calcified, impenetrable mass of pebbles, compacted clay, and grit so durable he was sure even a shovel would not budge it. Instead he heaved and shoved and pushed over the remaining log, thick around as the tail of a dune drake, and collected the driest sticks and leaves he could find for kindling and tinder. He laid the three charred bodies atop the pile, but the rotting yaka gave him pause. He could scarcely bring himself to approach her, but after a moment he regained his composure, reached down, hooked his claws under her shoulders, and pulled.
The body began to shift, the worms and other rot-creatures disturbed in a shifting, shadowy mass that hung around it like a writhing halo, and he was halfway to the pyre before the right limb escaped its socket.
The odor was unbelievable. There was a torrent of black-green fluid that poured unbidden from both sides of the separated limb, all of which squirmed with a teeming mass of death-birthed creatures. The sight in his eyes and smell on his antennae overwhelmed Ohtli, and he lost consciousness.
When he awoke, the shadows were shorter. He stared up at Shimreth, her rings arcing into the sky above him. “Please give me strength,” he said aloud, voice weak and cracking from disuse and the assault on his constitution, and he found he was stronger, just a little. He took a sip from one of his water skins at his side and rose from the dust and ash. He took hold again of the body of the yaka, his right claw inevitably becoming stained with the corpse-fluid which had begun to congeal in the sun, but he knew now he could do this. He pulled again and heaved the body the remainder of the way to the pyre, laying her across the lattice of kindling he had built over the log.
“I’m not sure what to say,” he said, “except that I am sorry.”
He knelt low, his flint and steel from his pack in his claws. He struck the steel against the flint once, twice, three times, until the telltale white-hot sparks leapt from it and onto his nest of kindling. Ohtli removed his hat and held it to his thorax. In time the flames grew to overtake the tinder, and then to consume the log, and then they leapt up to devour the corpses atop them.
Ohtli became aware that he was not alone.
He felt it first over his left shoulder, the shuddering, eerie feeling of being watched. Who could it be, here, in the middle of nowhere, but the bandits that had raided this homestead, slain one of the parents in cold blood, stolen all the food, and then burned the rest of the family alive? He froze, then slowly replaced his bark-hat atop his head and turned.
Leaning against one of the goldenspray trees by the river was a spider-person. Its two largest eyes bulged from the front of its head, glittering like black diamonds in the sunlight, while the other six ringed around its head in two clusters of three. It was reared up on its four hind legs, its bulbous and hairy abdomen hanging like a tapered pendulum just above the ground, with two of its front limbs casually bent against the tree trunk and the other two resting calmly at its sides. In one of these, it held a small bamboo cup with a handle attached by silk to a black wooden ball, which it flicked up and out before catching it in the cup, over and over, never missing or fumbling, never even giving it attention. Tonk. Tonk. Tonk. Its gaze, Ohtli thought, was fixed directly on him, although it was difficult to tell when it could see in so many directions at once.
Ohtli reached up and laid a claw on the haft of his sword. “What brings you here?” he asked warily.
The spider raised its limbs and delivered a response in the trademark half-spoken, half-signed manner of its kind: “I come <past> to this place to collect <important>.”
Ohtli’s grip tightened. “Did you kill these people?”
“No <casual>.”
Tonk. Tonk.
Ohtli reached up with another claw to pull the brim of his hat forward, the better to shade his eyes. “Then what do you mean, collect?”
The spider stood straight upright, and with a slight bow and limbs to the sides in an expression of non-aggression, replied, “I have what I come <past> for already. You know <past> them?” It gestured at the corpses atop the pyre, slowly reducing to cinders.
“No,” Ohtli said.
“Yet you help <past> them. Give <past> them a proper dying <ceremony, ritual>. <Curiosity>.”
Tonk. Tonk.
“I think they deserve that much,” Ohtli said.
“Many people deserve many things <observational>,” the spider said, assuming the posture of a shrug.
Tonk.
Ohtli peered at it. “Who are you?” he asked.
The spider tapped two pairs of tarsi together. Laughter. “A good jest. A jest of questions <mirth>.”
Tonk.
There was a moment of silence. “Well?” Ohtli said. “Are you going to answer me?”
The spider suddenly dropped its casual posture, taking one rigid, swift step towards Ohtli. “You will keep asking questions you know the answers to <question>?”
“What do you-”
“Not now. We meet <future> again,” the spider said with a shake of its head, and then hoisted itself into the tree and somehow, despite the goldenspray’s sparse structure, leapt from its branches to the next. Ohtli broke into a sprint to pursue it, but it continued its agile flight from treetop to treetop until it was far out of sight.
Ohtli was completely mystified by the encounter, but he too knew he had to continue on. He scribed the words “peaceful journeys” in the ash next to the pyre with a claw, hoisted his sack and uzam, and took his leave.
They had seized his arms and dragged him to a small cell, where they dumped him on the ground and locked the door, and he spent the most uncomfortable night there that he ever had, and in the morning they appeared again — well, they were different, with different colors and patterns, different scents, but Scithi nonetheless — and hauled him to stand before the Suyyu.
In the Great Suyyu Pyramid a tribunal had assembled to determine his fate. Ohtli knew of them but had never met them; what cause would he have had to mingle with the Pale Priestesses? A lowly male, a drone, a Sann, nothing but his genetic material to contribute to society, no thoughts, no will or self-determination, barely even a flicker of sentience. These were among the holiest tzic in all of Ehecatlepec. Their communion with the queen, the Sathymena of the city, was the unwavering guiding claw of their entire society, and their word was absolute law.
“Ohtli,” the eldest of them said. She was even paler than the other two, with dull grey blind eyes instead of the milk-white of the others, frail and ancient. “You stand before us accused of caste subversion. A crime most grave, a crime which threatens the social order of all tzic across the Desert and all of our family in Ehecatlepec. We gather here to determine your fate. Do you understand?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” the second Suyyu spat. “He may look Scithi, but he’s a Sann. I can smell it all over him and I know you can too. He understands nothing.”
“Eztli,” the eldest said, raising a claw to silence her. “I asked you a question, boy.”
“Yes, I understand,” Ohtli said.
The youngest of the three tilted her head slightly, inquisitively. “You’re certain?” she asked.
Ohtli was irritated. “Yes, I understand. You’re here to decide if you’re going to kill me. For being big. For these.” He gestured down at his markings, straight as pith-bone ribs, silver and gleaming along his bronzed carapace.
The youngest tilted her head further. “He seems certain,” she said. “Have you ever heard of a Sann understanding death?”
“He’s saying what that Sottei down in the creche coached him to say, I’m sure,” Eztli said venomously. “I’ll grant her this. She’s trained him very well. But it’s puppetry delayed in time and nothing more. Atl,” and with this she turned in the direction of the eldest, “I believe the erosion of social order this… creature represents is a grave danger to us all. He must be put to death.”
The eldest was silent for a moment. “Itzel?” she asked, finally.
“If he poses such a grave risk to our social order, why not simply remove him from the social order?” the youngest replied. “Death is an ending and an ending alone. Could we not give him — and us — a new beginning?”
“Your formal suggestion, please,” Atl asked.
“Exile. Never to return here, or to another city of the tzic. Here he is a danger. Far from here, he can —”
“Learn the ways of all the people of the Desert?” Eztli interrupted. “Learn of the ways of the brutish yaka and kah-rehm? Return for his revenge upon us for casting him out? And what of the friends he makes? Surely they would have no interest in using his ability to navigate our tunnels and passageways and his strength and size to plunder our—”
“Enough, Eztli!” Atl said, cutting her off. “Enough. It is clear to me that you and Itzel will never meet antennae on this. Our queen is unmoving. Therefore, it is up to us to make the decision and it is my belief that further deliberation is unhelpful and unwise. What makes either of you believe that there could be something germane raised today that the past two weeks of deliberation would not have unearthed?”
The younger two were silent. Ohtli was in shock. They had known about him for two weeks?
“We must vote, and the options are death or exile,” Atl said gravely. “This is the purpose of the tribunal and why there are always three. Itzel.”
“Exile,” she said, almost gently.
“Eztli.”
“Death,” Eztli spat through clenched mandibles.
“And my vote.” Atl stepped forward until she was in antennae distance. She let the tips of hers flick across Ohtli’s chest and face, drinking in his scent. He stood, quivering. Two other Scithi guards with long blades at their hips stood at the ready, their claws resting on the pommels, prepared to perform summary execution at the matriarch’s word. Ohtli stared into her eyes: featureless, swirling grey pools. From here he could smell her, the scent of the Suyyu priestess caste almost overwhelming, almost intoxicating. Yes, surely he would do anything she asked. And if she sentenced him to death he knew it would be a righteous and correct death. He would die for her without a second thought.
The pheromones hung in the air between them agonizingly. Nobody else in the chamber moved an inch.
“Exile,” she said at last.
Eztli, the second, pounded her clenched claw against the wall. Ohtli saw the youngest, Itzel, visibly relax, nodding gently.
“You will leave in two hours. You may gather all of your personal possessions and we will provide you with water and provisions,” Atl said.
“We’re feeding and watering the deviant now? Sathymena save us,” Eztli groaned.
“You are to leave, make your way past the Salt Sea, and never return to tzic lands,” Atl continued. “Do you understand?”
Ohtli nodded. His entire body felt like stone.
“Good.” Atl turned from him. “Take him back to the creche so he can say his goodbyes and collect his things and then escort him outside.”
II.
He continued west, for days more. Every so often he would pass a homestead or small village, clinging to life along the stream’s edge, but when their inhabitants — mostly yaka — laid eyes on him, the span-and-a-half-tall tzic with the unbending silver markings, they would quickly sequester themselves in their homes and lock their doors. Ohtli could not blame them. He knew his people had a reputation for being unapproachable, and particularly Scithi warriors were often feared or at least mistrusted when scouting out alone to find resources for their cities. He carried a weapon and cut an imposing figure. How could the people he passed know he was any different?
Still, he grew lonelier. The almost-contact with others was worse than the raw isolation because it was both just out of reach and a comment on what others believed to be his truth. It was evident to Ohtli that the door-lockers believed they possessed some sort of brilliant divination about the nature of others, a cruel employment of a social heuristic spun into and justified by sensible precaution. Ohtli had known his own people, once, known them ever only to kill to subsist or defend their families or the safety of their society, never for whim, sport, or fun. That one of the Pale Priestesses suggested his execution was still almost unfathomable to him and had he not stood in the room and heard her bitter voice echoing off the polished stone of the chamber by his own senses, he would likely not believe himself in the telling. In the end, Ohtli could not say if the heuristic in question was correct or not, only that he knew himself and that he meant none of them harm. He began to despair that nobody might ever speak to him again, until one day his life was forever altered by an inexorable force of nature — the true constant of change, the beating heart of the Desert, the very passage of time itself.
The Caravan.
It was far in the shimmering distance that Ohtli saw it, at first. A stretch of black figures, almost like a smudge of charcoal against the cream-colored backdrop of the Desert sand. He stood stock-still as his mind put together everything he had ever heard of the phenomenon and he kept coming to the same conclusion.
The Caravan itself was in his sight.
“It’s a river, little Sannling. A river three miles long that waxes and wanes with the people it gathers and deposits as it winds through the Desert,” Tzeltzin had said, stretching her arms out wide to the sides for emphasis. “Colors, sounds, and scents that you would never believe. Great beasts of burden piled high with all manner of goods, and people of all shapes and sizes.”
“I want to see it,” he had said to her.
“It is not for you to do. Your place is here,” she had replied, as she helped him clean up his toys. The other young Sann had been milling about around them and she had redirected one, who had been scooped up by another Sottei who had worked in the creche with them.
“Forever and ever?” he had asked.
There had been a distant look in her eyes. “It is impossible to tell all of what the future might bring, child,” she had said. “Even the great wind of destiny, strong as it blows in one direction for a great many years, might one day shift.”
Shift it had, to say the least. The Caravan was before him, moving vaguely, though not wholly, in his direction. He had never felt more sure of anything than he had about his desire to catch it before it veered in some unexpected way, so he broke from the path of the stream and cut across the dust towards it.
It was nearly nightfall before he could hear the voices and sounds of animals over the breeze. The Caravan had stopped some time before and as if it were a massive bioluminescent caterpillar, all along its length campfires and bonfires began to spring from the dusk. There were songs being sung, the snorts and hoofclacks of great beasts of burden, children running and playing, the scent of roasted vegetables and meats. It smelled like chaos, completely unlike the clean, strong singular scents and pheromones of his youth, and yet Ohtli felt himself being drawn inexorably toward it as though pulled by a thread. He shuffled his legs one past the other until the sun had fully set and he was nearly in the ring of light around one of the campfires. Half a dozen yaka sat around the fire, howling with laughter, as one of their brethren stood, wooden tankard swaying and overflowing in hand, and recounted a story about a misplaced tentpole. Ohtli moved on, slipping between the mighty adaraak, long necks craned low, legs locked in standing sleep, laden with silks and textiles.
He came upon another campfire where four kah-rehm women were roasting some variety of seeds in a cast-iron pan and talking in low voices. The scent of the seeds was so enticing to Ohtli’s antennae that he nearly stepped forward right then and implored them to share, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He tiptoed away cautiously, intimidated, and he glanced over his shoulder at them for just a moment when he collided with a yaka.
They tumbled over one another in the dark and dust, the strings on Ohtli’s uzam twanging comically as he landed face-first in the dirt over the yaka’s shoulders, and their legs tangled together awkwardly.
“Augh, mate, watch yourself!” the yaka howled, trying to extricate himself from Ohtli’s legs.
“Oh, oh no,” Ohtli said. “I’m so sorry, I-”
The yaka had succeeded in his efforts and leaned back on the flats of his paws. “Hey, you’re a tzic! Well, would you look at that.” He stood up, hooked a leather strap he had been holding around a nearby adaraak, tethering her to a post that had been hammered in the ground, and unhitched the animal from the ramshackle cart she had been pulling. “And all by your lonesome, too? What a sight, what a sight.” He reached down with a paw to help Ohtli stand.
Ohtli, frozen in surprise, staring at the extended limb, managed to say, “Um.”
“Well ain’t you gonna take it?” The yaka raised and lowered his paw impatiently.
Ohtli reached out and gently hooked his claw around the yaka’s wrist, and the yaka pulled Ohtli to his feet. He was surprised at how strong the yaka was. They were nearly eye to eye — if Ohtli had to guess, he might have been slightly taller than the stranger — and in the dim residual firelight and the smiling reflection of Shimreth in the night sky he could see a hint of a smile on the yaka’s face, a rakish swatch of white teeth set back in a halo of hallmark silver fur. “Thanks,” said Ohtli.
“Sure thing, stranger. Say, I make it a point not to get mixed up with anyone who doesn’t know my name and we’ve already violated that uh, how might you say it. Core tenet of mine. Inzrin.” The yaka paused to cough into his elbow, then held his paw out again, this time for a handshake.
Ohtli took the paw again, with less hesitation this time. “Ohtli,” he replied.
“Ain’t seen you around here before, Ohtli,” Inzrin said. “Not that I know everyone on the Caravan of course. Who could? But a gal like you stands out — I think I would have noticed!”
The casual conversation was so dizzying to Ohtli that he barely registered the implication he was female. After days and days of silent, lonely travel, here was this loud, quick-talking… explosion of friendliness. “I — I’m sure you would have.”
“Say,” Inzrin began, his eyes flicking to the uzam strapped to Ohtli’s back. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Y — Yes. I mean, if what you think it is is an uzam,” Ohtli said.
Inzrin rolled his eyes, breaking out into a grin. “Turns out that’s exactly what I think it is. Do you play, is it for sale, or are you carryin’ it around for sport?”
“I play some.”
“Never heard of a tzic who plays the uzam before. My whole world’s expandin’ by the second. Y’know, come to think of it…” Inzrin paused, tapping his paw against his chin. “There’s a few of us getting together in a bit around my campfire about a hundred paces north.”
“A few of us?” Ohtli said.
“Sure, me and a couple friends. And since you’re new to the ‘van I’d like to invite you. What do you say?”
Ohtli paused. It was hard to make heads or tails of this yaka. He seemed so friendly, but all Ohtli had ever heard was that the yaka and kah-rehm were brutish and unrefined. He was also nervous about meeting Inzrin’s friends. Inzrin himself seemed trustworthy, if excitable, but there were no guarantees about his acquaintances. And what would they do? Ohtli had no idea about their customs, their manners, their preferred ways of interacting, their —
“You sure need a lot of thinkin’ time, ma’am.” Inzrin tilted his head quizzically. “C’mon, it ain’t that hard. We got some kelp oil and I’ll be fryin’ up some koolu eggs in it if that helps you make up your mind.”
Ohtli had never heard of koolu eggs before, but he was hungry. Hungry for a hot-cooked meal, and even hungrier for the company. “Sure. That sounds nice.”
“Well, great!” Inzrin clapped his upper paws together. “Lookin’ forward to it. Meet us there in about thirty minutes.”
“And by the way, I’m not a ma’am. I’m a sir. I mean, I’m a man.”
Inzrin squinted at Ohtli for a moment, then broke out into a smile. “Well, sure you are. You’d know a heck of a lot better’n me.”
Half an hour later, Ohtli’s concerns evaporated quickly upon meeting Inzrin’s friends — one a yaka, a young woman named Astrus, and one a kah-rehm named Moydran — who seemed just as welcoming as Inzrin himself. Inzrin tended to the fire, cracking eggs half the size of Ohtli’s head into a wide, flat iron pan. The pink yolks danced and quivered in the head.
“So when did you join up with the ‘van?” Astrus asked, as she carved a small statue out of a hunk of goldenspray wood. Her paws were dextrous and the detail on the tiny totem was very fine and intricate. Every so often she stopped to puff the wood shavings off with a quick breath before starting at it again.
“Today,” Ohtli said.
There was a pause, and all three of them turned their heads to look at them. “There’s not a town for miles,” Moydran said.
Inzrin flipped one of the eggs in the pan. “Well, there’s little homesteads along the stream down south.” He coughed softly into an elbow.
Moydran shook his head, the decorations on his horns clacking softly. “Not tzic,” he said, and for some reason, Ohtli was nervous.
“Where did you come from, Ohtli?” Astrus said.
Ohtli shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well… I…”
Inzrin raised a paw. “He doesn’t have to say if he doesn’t wanna. What matters is he’s here now — on the Caravan, best place in the world. Where anyone can go and become a part of something bigger. Become someone new.”
Moydran and Astrus both nodded, each shooting Ohtli a smile.
“Hungry?” Inzrin asked, sliding a wooden tray under one of the eggs. Its whites had solidifed, and these Inzrin folded inward to create the appearance of flower petals, the glistening wet pink yolk like a giant floret in the center. He handed it to Ohtli with a wooden fork. “Guests first. You’ll have to — pardon me.” He leaned forward and coughed again, harder this time, into his elbow. Astrus stood up and gently patted his back.
Ohtli set his tray down with concern. “Are you all right?”
Inzrin’s coughing slowed, then ceased. “I’m okay. Had a bout of dust-cough last year and it ain’t fixin’ to quit, that’s all.”
“Sure,” Ohtli said. He tried to think back to his health lessons with Tzeltzin. Was it typical for dust-cough to linger for months? He couldn’t remember. Tzic were not susceptible to the condition.
The eggs were delicious — among the best things Ohtli had ever eaten, and he told Inzrin so. After they were all fed, Inzrin gestured toward the uzam.
“Do you know ‘When the Caravan Comes?’” he asked.
Of course Ohtli knew it; the song was one of the first things Tzeltzin had ever taught him on the instrument. “This is what we call a standard,” she had said, helping him to coordinate his upper and lower claws on the necks of the uzam. “That means most people who know you play will expect you to know how to play this song. Up there, if you cut the Desert, the Caravan would bleed from it. Here too, though at times we might be loath to admit it.”
Ohtli had fumbled through the opening section once or twice. “Why are you teaching me if I won’t ever see the Caravan?” he had asked.
“There’s a big world out there, and you deserve to know of it. You are born of it. Taá and Shimreth dancing in the sky built the crucible in which you were formed, brother of the soil as you are. Until your dying days you can and must carry that with you.”
Ohtli lifted the uzam from the dust with a nod toward Inzrin. “I know it,” he said, running his antennae along the body of the instrument as he twisted the tuning pegs.
Inzrin smiled, his pearly teeth glinting in the firelight and the light of Shimreth above. “Let’s have it then.”
And Ohtli leaned forward and tilted his hat down and played, and Inzrin sang, and in those moments everything else evaporated, and nothing mattered but the music.
There were a few moments of silence after Ohtli played the final chord and then applause around them — in the focus of performance he had not even seen that a small crowd of kah-rehm and yaka and even a spider-person had gathered around the fire. They laughed and clapped and several patted Ohtli and Inzrin on the back. One yaka said “thank you” with four palms pressed together. They gradually dispersed, until only the memory of their shadows remained.
Astrus wiped a tear from her eye. “I haven’t heard you sing in… well, since…”
Inrzin chuckled softly, which gave way to a cough. “Still, my voice ain’t what it used to be,” he said. They hugged one another tightly. “It felt good to sing, anyway.” He turned to Ohtli. “Beautiful playin', friend.”
Ohtli nodded. “It was a joy to make music with you.” He saw Inzrin smile, and though Ohtli wasn’t sure, he thought perhaps the yaka was blushing.
After that night, the Caravan had continued on, as it had since the birth of the world, and Ohtli had gone with it. It was two months later when he heard the cry that made his body freeze and his breath catch in his thorax.
The time had been no small wonder for him. Being with Inzrin and the others, living on his feet, picking his way through the Desert with the hundreds or thousands of others (Ohtli could not be sure and could never begin to hope to count them all), all on a path of providence, tracks directed in the only way they could or knew how to go, walking or riding by day and camping in the windswept Desert around roaring campfires, singing and playing each night, eating fresh and dried fruit and drinking from massive barrels strapped to the backs of the adaraak, each only taking their share and no more, passing through towns and homesteads and giving as much as they received, all one great, glorious organism in the light of Taá — in truth, Ohtli could scarcely believe he was living this life.
One day Inzrin had told him he had a surprise for him and the two of them scurried off like packmice to a location out of the way of the footsteps of the rest. Inzrin was grinning from ear to ear, his silvery fur whipping in the furious breeze, and he undid his pack and opened it and produced a beautiful wide-brimmed hat made of felt. Wrapped around the crown of the hat in the fashion of a band was a braided cord of three different colored twines — a rich brown, a bright white, and a blue-violet — and affixed to the cord were two soft-pink feathers.
“For you,” Inzrin said. “I thought of you as soon as I saw it.”
Ohtli reached up and touched his hat he had fashioned of bark so many weeks ago. It had served him well enough, but it scratched, and it was certainly not the height of fashion. He took it off his head and let it go into the wind, where it blew away until it was a speck against the sand, and then not even that. Inzrin stepped forward and lowered the hat onto Ohtli’s head. Inzrin’s grey eyes twinkled in the sunlight. With a touch so gentle Ohtli barely even felt it at all, Inzrin lowered the strap around Ohtli’s chin and pulled it tight. Ohtli’s antennae brushed against Inzrin’s face, so close were they — and Inzrin smelled warm and smoky and salty, like campfire and sea-spray. Just a little bit like home.
“It’s perfect,” Ohtli said. “Thank you.” And this time, Ohtli had been sure Inzrin had blushed.
It was days later still when Ohtli heard the cry. The Caravan was well-versed in navigating the Desert’s many hazards and its numbers were safety — and even more than that, nothing had ever, since the dawn of time, stopped its tireless march across the sands. This much everyone knew. Still there were things which threatened individual parts of the inexorable whole, and one of the most frightening, the most voracious and imposing, brought out that shrill cry which struck cold stone into the hearts of all who heard it:
“Duuuuuune draaaaake!“
Ohtli scurried atop the adaraak which Inzrin rode, a great cow which he called Ness, and leaned on Inzrin’s shoulders to get a better look towards the rear of the Caravan. Sure enough, cutting through the ergs behind them was a sail, perhaps four span long, slicing through the sand like his sword through the pith-fruits. Ohtli tensed. “Inzrin… I think I have to go help the stragglers.”
“Oh, please be safe,” Inzrin said, eyes full of concern as he laid one paw on Ohtli’s shoulder. “Go wake Astrus off her wagon. She’ll want to help.”
Ohtli nodded, then clambered down and did as he was bidden. Astrus kept an erratic sleep schedule and was often called on to keep evening watch. “I just feel more comfortable at night,” she explained — as did they all, but the adaraak were diurnal and thus so was the Caravan, for the most part.
When Ohtli arrived at her wagon she was curled in a ball in one corner, and damp blankets were draped across the breeze-gap between the wood and the canvas. The wagon interior was quite cool and Ohtli was jealous. The cool, humid darkness reminded him of home. But there was no time to reminisce. He took Astrus by the shoulders and shook her. “Astrus, dune drake. Wake up.”
Astrus rubbed her eyes but for her part was attentive almost instantly. “Dune drake? We don’t have much time. We’ll have to ride out together. Have you ever ridden a dongo before?” She spoke with a sense of urgency, gathering supplies, strapping her staff to her back and clipping her sling to her belt at her side.
“Um —” Ohtli began.
“That’s a no.” Astrus hefted a coil of thick rope. “I’ll have to tie us together or you’ll be eating grit today and only soup for a week.” She exited the wagon and Ohtli followed. The blast of heat, radiating down from the sky and up from the sand, was shocking after even the scarce moments in the cool wagon. Ohtli saw Astrus grit her teeth. She hopped down and unhitched her small wagon from her pack animal, a creature Ohtli knew was a dongo. Its two multi-jointed, lanky legs stomped anxiously at the ground and its four eyes flicked their focus back and forth anxiously between the two of them. Astrus had hung a pair of blinders from each of the dongo’s curling horns to keep it moving forward, and she had explained it was only through rigorous training that she was able to let the creature pull her wagon of its own accord.
“Shhhh, shh shh shhhhh,” she hissed softly through her teeth. “That’s it, Cobry. That’s it. Good boy, Cobrion.” As she petted its side, the creature relaxed, its long wide tongue lolling out of its mouth. Ohtli could see that its teeth had been filed down slightly, forming wide, flat pucks with razor-sharp sides, each the size of his claw. “Ohtli, you’re climbing up first.”
Ohtli nervously planted one leg into the stirrup, then pulled himself up onto the dongo’s saddle. Astrus followed shortly behind him, threading the rope through two loops on the dongo’s harness, playing it out so that it formed a tight coil around their two bodies, and then tying it off at the horn of the saddle. “You’re tied in, but you still better hold on tight,” Astrus said, and then she flipped the dongo’s blinders down, kicked her legs into its body, and shouted, “Hyah!”
The dongo launched like a stone from a sling. Astrus’s paws gripped the double reins around Ohtli’s shoulders and he could hear her breathing heavily behind him. Ohtli was thrown back and was only barely able to find purchase for his claws on the saddle-horn before him. The dongo’s stride was chaotic and uneven, lurching to and fro as Astrus wheeled the beast around and towards the rear of the Caravan. As the dongo leapt and bounded towards the billowing cloud of sand which trailed the impending sail of the dune drake, the only part of the mighty creature visible above the surface of the dunes, Ohtli was jostled like a pebble in a box.
Astrus tugged on the reins almost imperceptibly and the dongo slowed as they approached. A dozen other dongo riders with bows and slings formed a swarm in front of the drake, riding between it and the Caravan, keeping pace with the behemoth’s impressive speed as it carved its way across the erg toward them. “It’s only a young one! We’re lucky!” Astrus hollered behind him. They matched the pace of the pack of dongos and Astrus waved at another rider. The other yaka gave her a sharp salute and then launched an arrow toward the drake’s fin, but it fell short.
Ohtli could feel the pounding of the feet of the dongos all around him and the grinding chug of the dune drake as it swam effortlessly through the sand just behind them, perhaps thirty paces away. It was the sound of an earthquake in a thunderstorm. He shivered despite the sweltering waves of heat from Taá and her reflections from the sand, despite the warmth of Astrus’s fur against his carapace. He looked ahead of them, away from the drake, and saw the stragglers of the Caravan — old and young and sick and wounded and a thousand other reasons for falling just a little behind — desperately trying to keep ahead of the pack of dongos and the cloud of drake-sand.
In that moment the drake breached. Ohtli whipped his head around and the sand seemed to open into a cavern in an instant, a cavern into which the sand of the ergs poured like water into a pitcher and lined with teeth as long as Ohtli’s legs. The eyes of the drake glistened like silver, and in that instant as the drake leapt from the sand three span into the air and Ohtli locked eyes with it he knew that in that mind there was a soul. There was cunning. There was a depth and profundity. This was no mean beast — this was a thinker, something that cared. Something beautiful and terrible.
The dune drake arced toward the last dongo rider in the pack, its jaws open wide enough to swallow dongo and rider in one bite. Ohtli gripped the saddle fiercely, unable to look away — and at the last second the dongo swerved and the drake collided with the sand face and claws first, diving down into it and vanishing. The dongo was knocked far aside with the force of the collision and its rider was flung further still into one of the dunes and lay still.
Astrus doubled back, falling to the back of the group. “Can you see that rider? Are they okay?” she asked.
Ohtli turned his head around and peered as best he could over Astrus’s shoulder and saw the rider pick themself up in the distance, a tiny dark stick figure silhouette cut from the dune, and nodded with relief. “I think they’ll be all right. The sand blunted the landing.”
The low rumbling of the drake’s motion began again. Ohtli quaked as the group picked up the pace. He felt frozen, like stone, barely able to move, until Astrus jammed the reins into his claws. “Take these!” she shouted, drawing her sling from her side and loading a stone.
From just twenty span away from them in the next dune over the dune drake erupted from the ground directly toward them, a hellish maelstrom of blinding sand, pitch-dark mouth, and glinting, serrated teeth.
Astrus loosed the stone.
Ohtli followed its track, holding his breath desperately.
The stone collided with the monster’s left eye with a crack. The drake howled and Ohtli jerked the reins back to stop the dongo short in its tracks. Astrus screamed, “Down!” and the dongo dropped to its knees, skidding into the sand as the drake sailed over their heads, close enough that Ohtli could have reached up and run a claw along its pebbled belly.
Ohtli moved in a flash — he knew the dongo would roll over and crush them as it crashed into the sand if he did not — and drew his sword and severed the rope that kept them tied to the saddle. He threw his sword clear, and as the dune drake collided with the sand behind them they were thrown free from the dongo’s back, Astrus gripping Ohtli’s shoulders tightly as they went head over feet over head together in the scalding sand and the dongo rolled over and over as it tumbled down the face of the dune.
There was another howl of pain and rage as the dune drake burrowed itself into the sand, its sail carving a path which arced away from the Caravan, in search of easier, more willing prey, and the people of the Caravan in the distance and the dongo riders nearby cheered and whooped with relief.
Ohtli stood first and helped Astrus up, and he retrieved his sword and sheathed it, and they checked on her dongo Cobrion, and finding him to be scraped and bruised but otherwise well they endeavored to walk back to the Caravan.
There they were treated to a hero’s welcome. There they were showered in appreciation. There they ate and drank till their hearts and bellies were full, and there Inzrin told Ohtli that he hoped he would stay with the Caravan forever.
Ohtli and Astrus sparred regularly after that day, in the evenings when Taá gave the Desert the gift of shade. They would draw circles in the dust close enough to the campfire to see, but far enough to be safe. Ohtli realized quickly that Astrus was his match, though she wielded her staff against his training sword, which they had fashioned from bamboo. The staff gave her reach and power, but when Ohtli was able to close the gap his agility and and speed gave him the upper hand. They left each combat bruised but flush with the excitement of a meeting of equals, with that thrill of adrenaline that comes from knowing each victory or loss happened on the edge of a knife.
“I care about this Caravan more than my life,” she told Ohtli one evening.
They were sitting around the fire, Inzrin’s paw gently resting on Ohtli’s claw as he turned hunks of roasting rootmeat over the flames. “I can tell,” Ohtli said. “You rode out to face that dune drake like nothing else in the world mattered.”
“Because it didn’t.” Astrus shrugged and looked up at the stars above them. “Imagine that up there is another world like this one, with people on it like us. Maybe another and another. Maybe a hundred. So many worlds we couldn’t name them all.”
Moydran sighed, folding his arms across his broad chest. “There probably aren’t,” he said with a shrug. “No Shimreth to grant the seed of life to take root upon them.”
Astrus shook her head. “I’m just saying imagine that there are. And if there are, on all those uncountable worlds, with all their Deserts and all their strange and wonderful creatures, even with as many as the mind could possibly hold, there would not be anything so wondrous on any of them as the Caravan.”
They were all quiet for a while.
“I think there are,” Inzrin said finally, looking up. “Other worlds. Hard to believe we’re all alone. Maybe one of those twinklin’ stars is another Taá or another Shimreth. What if they’ve got a long-lost brother, and in that brother’s arms is also life?”
“Stars are just stars,” Moydran said. “Taá isn’t a star and neither is her sister… and there are people who would take your imaginings for disrespect.”
“But not you?” Ohtli asked.
“Not me. People.” Moydran toyed idly with a violet crystal dangling from one of his horns.
They spent the rest of the evening quiet, looking up at the stars, thinking, eating the rootmeat, until one by one they retired.
Inzrin’s coughing in the tent nearby kept Ohtli awake most of the night, and when he finally slept, Ohtli dreamt of the burnt homestead, the dead yaka, and the spider-person.
The next day, Inzrin, dark circles under his eyes, approached Ohtli with a request.
“I want to cook a stew from mine and Astrus’s hometown,” he said. “I think it might help us both feel a little better.”
“How can I help?” Ohtli asked, because there was nothing he wanted to do more.
Inzrin smiled and coughed into his wrist. “It’s thickened with a special ingredient — marrowwood. We’ll be passing near to the sky islands but it’s about a day out of our path.” He pointed to the mountains to the north. “The marrowwood grows up there.”
Ohtli thought back to his botany lessons, about how to identify the edible plants of the Desert. “Dark brown bark which turns to powder at touch. Trifoliate leaves. Ten armspans high, or sometimes more,” he recalled Tzeltzin saying, as she sketched out a drawing of the tree in clay for him to see. “Crack open the narrow branches and scrape the pith.”
“I can find it,” Ohtli said to Inzrin. “I can get it. We’re two days off but I should be back in three altogether since the Caravan will follow me.”
Inzrin reached out to touch Ohtli’s arm. “Please don’t go alone.”
“Will Astrus come?”
“No,” said Inzrin. “She never strays far from the ‘van. Ask Moydran.”
Ohtli thought back to the conversation the previous evening. The kah-rehm intimidated him. Moydran was built large and generally quiet. Stoic, even. At times he was confrontational. “Moydran? Really?”
“The cooler mountain temperatures would do him some good. He’s from up there, after all.” Inzrin grinned. “Give him this.” He opened the flap of his belt pouch and fumbled about inside it and produced a small bauble, a smooth stone shot through with striations of brown, tan, and grey.
Ohtli took it. “What is it?”
“A reminder of our friendship,” Inzrin said. “He wouldn’t refuse you even without it, but it might soften his demeanor.”
Moydran had indeed smiled when Ohtli handed him the stone. He wrapped some thin copper wire around it, first one way, then at a right angle, and then affixed the stone to one tightly curled horn. “Many thanks, friend.”
“From Inzrin, mind,” Ohtli said.
“By way of you and thereby carrying a part of you. It is your gift, too, nearly as much as his.”
The two of them set out shortly thereafter and Ohtli soon discovered that while Moydran tended to be quiet, inside he contained a wealth of knowledge and opinion.
“Sleekslider tracks, headed that way,” Moydran said on the first day as he pointed down at the sand at coiling impressions Ohtli could barely make out, and then into the distance. “We’ll want to give it a wide berth. Let’s cut west.”
“Green-kidneys under the soil here — they’re a kind of tuber. You can tell because of the star pattern in the thalo grass, where they’ve crowded out the roots,” Moydran said on the second day, in the foothills, when the sand gave way to scrub and chaparral, and he retrieved a small trowel and unearthed five green, glistening vegetables from underground, which they sliced and ate with sips of water for lunch.
“Rain tomorrow, maybe tonight,” Moydran said as they approached the stand of marrowwood high in the mountains, where it was cool and the birds were thick in the brush and trees around them. The marrowwood itself was atop a cliff before them, growing tall, twisted, and angular.
“Rain? In the dry season like this?” Ohtli adjusted his hat skeptically.
“I’d bet on it.” Moydran pointed into the sky. “There’s a shimmer-ring halfway between the Sisters in the sky and that means it’s cold up there.” Ohtli’s eyes followed Moydran’s arm and he saw a faint silvery shimmer, almost a mirror of Shimreth’s rings, circling Taá in the sky.
“And that means rain?”
Moydran nodded, but Ohtli was still unsure.
“Can you climb?” Moydran asked. He looked up at the face of the cliff.
Ohtli tilted his head back to peer at the marrowwood at the top. He couldn’t even make out reasonable claw-holds in the exposed, weathered granite. “This? Surely not.”
Almost before Ohtli could finish the thought, Moydran was halfway up the cliff, his cloven hooves finding the absolute scarcest purchases, his body weight leaned against the stone. “I’ll tie down a rope,” he called down. It was true what they said about the kah-rehm — it seemed to Ohtli that the climb was as easy to Moydran as breathing.
After Ohtli had navigated the cliff with help from Moydran’s rope, they stood below the marrowwood. “We’re meant to harvest the thin branches,” Ohtli said, gesturing up near the crowns of the trees. “I suppose we should have prepared for this…”
Moydran sighed. “I did.” He produced a folding bamboo pole with thick rope running down its middle, which he unfolded piece by piece, socketing each end into the next. “Your sword is the sharpest thing we carry. Can I lash it to the end? We should make quick work of the branches with it.”
Ohtli hesitated for a moment. His sword was special; it was a lifeline to home, one of the few possessions that Tzeltzin had been able to spirit away for him during his last few moments in the creche. She had saved for it for years. It was the make of a tzic blacksmith named Tlachinolli, who was renowned for her prowess at the forge and who achieved a level of recognition in tzic culture that rivaled even some Scithi, despite being a worker-caste Sottei, and whose blades were all dark as the night sky specked with stars. “Now you must take it,” Tzeltzin had told him as she carefully wrapped it in cloth to disguise it as a walking-stick. “The world out there can be dangerous and cruel.”
The sheer irony of her words, fixed in the cushion of Ohtli’s upbringing and exile, still turned his stomach. He slowly drew the sword from its scabbard on his back and held it, flat in his claws and handle away from his body, to Moydran, who accepted it carefully and with a reverent nod. The kah-rehm quickly set to work lashing the blade to the end of the pole and when he was done the effect was of a glaive: long, thin, flexible, with the sky-dark steel glinting at its apex. He handed the implement to Ohtli and together they cut and hoisted half a dozen branches of the marrowwood onto Moydran’s strong back.
On their way down the mountain, the clouds rolled in and the storm hit. They took shelter under a lean-to Moydran had constructed from an oiled canvas tarp and his folding pole. “I’ll be damned,” Ohtli said, as the rain came down in sheets around them.
Moydran was silent, but Ohtli saw a hint of a smile on his lips.
“I’m curious, Moydran. What was so disrespectful the other night about Astrus imagining other worlds besides our own?” Ohtli asked.
“Lots of people of the Desert worship the Sisters. Like how lots of people worship the spirits, but for most it’s something much more than that. Legend says that the first life on our world was the seed of a plant, in the form of one of great Shimreth’s shooting stars.” Moydran gestured up at the mighty rings arcing through the sky with both arms. “After it fell, it landed by chance, or perhaps Shimreth’s design, in the most fertile soil in all the Desert, and from there it took root and grew and grew in the light of Taá into the Oldest Tree, and when it died, from its body sprang every other living thing that ever walked or crawled or creeped or slithered or grew upon our world. And so if that legend is true — and I think it is, and so do most people I have spoken with, at least the people who spend a lot of time in thought about such things — then our mothers are Shimreth the nurturer and Taá the brilliant, two sisters who joined hands in their dance in our sky and shone their lights upon us and blessed us all with life itself, and only here, in our sky, do they make their home. Those little specks of light out there, the fixed-stars? They are not like Shimreth and not like Taá, for nothing could be as special as they. That is what I meant.” He reached out from under the lean-to and brought in two tin cups which he had set on a flat stone just outside to collect the rainwater, and he handed one to Ohtli.
It was the sweetest water Ohtli had ever tasted.
There was much to do on their return to make the marrowstew. There was chopping and dicing and slicing and grinding and splitting the marrowwood down the middle and scraping out the moist pith. Inzrin had set out a large rug on the Desert soil by the campfire, along with a dozen wooden bowls which held each of the ingredients as they prepared them.
“I can understand why you might want a bowl of stew in this heat,” Ohtli said to Inzrin as they worked, “but why for Astrus?”
“She talks a big talk about the ‘van and how it’s all that matters,” Inzrin replied as he whisked marrowwood pith into a bowl of water. “Thing is, I know she misses home. I’ve heard her call for her pa and her sister before. In her sleep and such.”
“How long has it been since the two of you left?”
Inzrin held up four fingers of his left paw. “Four years. Well, near on to five. We’re about a week out of Yearhome now. Shim, the circuits do fly. They always told us that, the other ‘vanners, I mean, but you don’t really know it until you live it, I suppose.”
“Why did you leave in the first place?” Ohtli asked.
“Same reason as anyone ever leaves home,” Inzrin said. “You just feel the walls closin’ in.”
The stew was delicious, thickened with the marrowwood pith and chock full of chopped gourds and bright purple beans. Inzrin ate two bowls, and Ohtli and Moydran three, but Astrus ate five, and her eyes were distant when Inzrin told her they were out. “Well, I’ll do the washing up, since you all cooked it.” She loaded all the bowls and spoons into the heavy pot and carried it off to the barrels for washing, and Moydran trundled after her.
“Thank you,” Inzrin said, leaning his head on Ohtli’s shoulder.
“For helping with the soup?” Ohtli said, taking Inzrin’s hand.
Inzrin squeezed Ohtli’s claw. “For bein’ here.”
There was nothing more that needed saying.
It was always warm with Inzrin. Not Desert-warm, but heart-warm, realizing that he was there to return to. His easy smile, his gentle voice, the way the sunlight played through his fur and the way he was always glad to see Ohtli, the way he believed in Ohtli for who he was immediately, on sight and on hearing. There were many days when Ohtli would ride on Ness’s back with Inzrin and the two would talk, in low and soothing tones, about whatever came their way or whatever they imagined. Knowing Inzrin was like meeting an old friend, except that before the Caravan they had never met. It felt to Ohtli like picking up a piece of his own body and slotting it right inside to find it was always meant to fit right there, in its own, bespoke space, a space that he never knew was there but that was glaringly obvious, almost painful, once it was filled.
Nobody on the Caravan even looked askance at them as they walked, arms linked, during the evenings when they were stopped at villages with wares unrolled, traders and soothsayers and acrobats and jugglers and musicians and animal tamers and magicians and spirit-speakers and artisans all arrayed like so many cards spread in the tableau of some fabulous otherworldy game. No, the people of the Caravan gave them smiles, gave them reinforcement, that the power of these two caring for one another, spending their time together, was a thing of beauty and not scorn.
So it all was for that magical week before the new year, all sweltering days spent in conversation, all warm and breezy evenings walking the wares and curling up to sleep dreaming of waking together. So it was when the the city of Yearhome appeared around the bend.
Ohtli had heard tales of Yearhome. The city sprang forth from the Desert at the northernmost apex of the Caravan’s journey and at the exact point where the Caravan met each new year. “On that day, the stars fall from Shimreth herself and the sky sparkles with her love for her creations,” Tzeltzin had said. “No words I could tell you could do this thing justice.”
On the evening the Caravan approached the gate of Yearhome, Ohtli was riding along with Inzrin as always and Taá glowed red-blue low on the horizon. The Caravan had made its tireless way along the arroyos — still swollen with rain from storm — rolling up the low hills and canyonsides, and as the two of them laughed on adaraak-back as they had done each evening for weeks they rounded a corner and looked down the hill and the city of Yearhome came into view.
It sprawled in a way that Ohtli saw farmers do in their travels, at the end of their days in the shade of their trees, muscles aching down to their souls, bottles of ale or canteens of water in hand, melding and becoming one with the soil — so did Yearhome, such that Ohtli could not tell if the city rose from or collapsed into the dust. In contrast to his hometown’s meticulous limestone constructions, Yearhome felt haphazard and foreign, the farms splayed out along the river delta of the Torrent in any way they could fit without flooding, the homes clustered together in tight knots near the marketplaces.
“Just came about organically,” Inzrin said with a shrug when Ohtli asked him why the city was built the way it was. “Don’t think there was a lot of plannin’ in it.”
As they drew nearer Taá dipped lower and lower into the horizon, until the Caravan was nearly at the great square gateway standing sentinel over the main road through the city and finally the great sun plunged fully below the horizon and the sky lit up with a thousand shooting stars.
It was as if they were afraid of Taá’s unrelenting gaze how rapidly they made themselves apparent once her light was doused. Some were mere cinders, fleeting flashes of something like the memory of flame. Others were mighty columns of sparks and fire, arcing through the air with reckless abandon, before terminating at some distant point only Shimreth herself could know. Ohtli was so overcome with the wonder of it all that he almost failed to notice the spectacle that was Yearhome itself, welcoming the Caravan with open arms.
From nearly every surface and across the roadway at every accessible point hung streamers and strings of flags dyed richly in yellow, burnt orange, cerulean, dusky violet, grass-green, and magenta. Even at this sunset hour there were dozens of children in the streets, milling and playing and kicking balls about, and all of them, kah-rehm and yaka and spider and tzic alike, stopped to gaze up at the Caravan as it passed by. On every corner there were gaggles of performers and street musicians singing and enacting plays and puppet shows and dances in tribute of the cycle of the year and the Caravan’s arrival. Groups of people clustered at open-air food carts — Ohtli saw dried and fresh fruits, eggs and cheeses, grilled and smoked meats, candies and confections, all of it tantalizing — who ceased their jostling and bidding for more prompt service to turn and applaud when the Caravan approached. The scent in the air was thick with incense of more varieties than Ohtli had ever imagined and with the smell of roasting foods, which mingled chaotically in swirling currents of olfaction by which Ohtli’s antennae were nearly overwhelmed. The people of Yearhome gathered in throngs. Hundreds of them lined the streets. They threw dry grain and goldenspray flowers before the Caravan which were crushed and stained the soil of the road and the wheels of the wagons and the hooves of the adaraak and dongo bright golden-yellow, and all of it was cast in a warm orange-and-violet glow from torchlight and Shimreth above them.
The Caravan turned a corner and Ohtli saw their destination — a large open city-square which could accommodate the entire Caravan, condensed into one living, breathing entity at the city’s center. In the very middle of the square burned a mighty bonfire from which issued a tower of smoke and a ceaseless supply of burning, cracking, floating, ephemeral embers. A crowd of locals was gathered at the entrance to the city square and as the Caravan filtered past them they chanted in unison, “Welcome to Yearhome, City of a Thousand Dreams!”
The next three days were a blur. The finest, freshest, most interesting food Ohtli had ever tasted. The sweetest, most refreshing waters and juices. A neverending supply of attention and admiration. Dozens of trades and swaps and barters and exchanges happening all around him every minute of every day.
“How much for the Pyandor bear totem?” a kah-rehm had asked Astrus, and she held pointed at the small bales of rust-red yaka-kelp that the man was hauling behind him and held up two fingers. The kah-rehm looked at the totem for a moment. “One bale,” he said, and Astrus reluctantly handed the totem over. The kah-rehm affixed it immediately onto one of his mighty horns and tossed the bale to Astrus, who began parceling fistfuls out to her dongo.
“Why did you let him talk you down?” Ohtli said, struggling to make his voice heard over the crowd.
“Cobry was hungry, and I have more.” She gestured down at her blanket, which had thirty or forty tiny, intricately carved totems of different animals and people. “I’m not worried. We will all get all we need in Yearhome, and some of what we want, if we’re lucky.”
One of the carvings caught Ohtli’s eye. “Can I see that one?” he asked, gesturing toward it, and she handed it up to him. He brought it close to see all of its remarkable details. It was a portrait, an adaraak sized the same way as the other totems, all the way down to the fringe of fur around its hoof a remarkable replica of the actual beast, and atop it were two tiny figures — a tzic and a yaka, arms interlocked.
Ohtli looked down at Astrus. “When did you make this?” he asked.
“Two days ago. Once I saw you two up there and the way you were smiling and laughing, I couldn’t carve anything else.”
“It’s really lovely, Astrus.”
“It’s yours,” she said with finality.
“But I have nothing to trade,” Ohtli said.
“No need,” Astrus replied. “You have given us plenty already.”
The circuits did fly in the Caravan; that much was true. It was easiest to track how long Ohtli had been walking to the heartbeat of the Desert by the number of times he passed the gate of Yearhome. Once more, and in that year he acquired a dongo, which he named Tepin, and he learned to control her, then guide her, then move with her, practiced his riding each day for hours until he could weave between the pith-bone and never prick himself or his mount. Twice, and in that year he learned from Moydran all the ways to divine the weather, all the places to dig or plant, the tracks of the animals of the Desert, and ways of speaking with the spirits of the wind. Thrice, and in that year he and Astrus and the other assembled defenders of the Caravan fought off bandits, a swarm of giant predatory bats, and a pair of shuffling, hungry nandi bears — massive, brain-eating predators, who had shuffled down the arroyos in search of food and water during the dry season. Four times, and in that year he and Inzrin had purchased a small but cozy wagon, one that fit them both, pulled along by Ness, and they spent every evening together, Inzrin's head on Ohtli's shoulder, looking at the night sky.
Though the times were good, all the while, Inzrin’s cough grew worse, despite their best treatments, and Ohtli’s dreams were plagued by the spider-person he met at the burnt-out homestead. Over and over in his mind, he recalled that person’s words to him:
“I come <past> to this place to collect <important>.”
“We meet <future> again.”
One day in his fifth year with the Caravan, when the pith-bone fruits just off the path of the Caravan were swollen after a rainstorm, with another looming on the horizon, and Ohtli was harvesting them into a large wicker basket he had strapped to his back, he saw that person again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that spider-person resting in the shade, heard the Tonk. Tonk. Tonk. of its bamboo toy, clear as salt crystal, harsher than sunshine, colder than stone, but when he turned his head, they were gone.
There was a pounding of hooves behind him and Ohtli knew what had happened before he even heard Moydran’s voice calling, “Ohtli! Ohtli, come quick!”
His heart plunged into the depths of his thorax as he turned and Moydran’s eyes were soaked with tears. “No,” he said, because it was the only word he could manage.
Tonk.
The kah-rehm was out of breath and the two of them said nothing to one another as they raced back to the line of wagons and pack-beasts.
Tonk.
Ohtli turned to Moydran as they drew close. “Go. They need you now,” he said, and so Ohtli rushed ahead to one of the healer-wagons. The scent of herbal poultices and grain alcohol hung thick in the air. Fat raindrops began to come down all around him, each one kicking up a crown of dust as it plunged into the soil and ended its long journey.
Tonk.
Ohtli threw open the canvas tent flaps and looked down.
Tonk.
There was Inzrin. Ohtli’s head spun.
Tonk.
The yaka he loved knelt next to Astrus, who lay on a white canvas sheet. Her body was broken, bloodied, bruised, two of her arms bent backwards on themselves. She struggled to breathe and her eyes were unfocused.
Inzrin stood. “Ohtli… She doesn’t have long.”
“What happened? By Taá, what happened to her?”
Inzrin shook his head, tears welling in his eyes. “Somethin’ spooked Ness. I don’t know what, but she reared up and kicked. She’s never done that before. She’s so… she’s so even-tempered. The kick hit Astrus and sent her flyin’ into the side of another wagon and… and she didn’t get up, Ohtli, she can’t move. Her back is broken and…”
Ohtli looked down at the slow trickle of blood which ebbed and flowed from the corner of Astrus’s mouth in time with each labored breath.
Tonk.
Ohtli and Inzrin knelt down on either side of Astrus. Her eyelids fluttered and her breaths were ragged and short. They each took one of her paws and together they sat in silence, except for the sound of her breathing and Inzrin’s coughs. The rain began to beat down on the canvas cover of the wagon.
As they sat, Astrus’s breaths grew shallower and more infrequent, until they stopped altogether. Her head rolled back and her eyelids drooped open. Inzrin, sobbing, reached up with one paw and shut them. He leaned forward, and Ohtli pressed his forehead to Inzrin’s, and together they wept for the loss of their friend.
Tonk.
He hatched large, hatched strong. Though male, he hatched with a stinger.
“Hm. This will never do,” the creche overseer had said, and they held him upside down with restraints and heated a pair of shears over hot coals until they glowed red, then white, and they picked them up with heavy raak-leather gloves and they sheared right through his stinger, and as it clattered to the floor all young Ohtli could think was of fire, pain, burning, misery.
“Perhaps one in every thousand,” the creche overseer had said, when Tzeltzin had asked her how many Sann like him were born stinged.
As he grew, Tzeltzin saw something in him. She had cared for dozens — no, hundreds — of drones in the creche before, trying to leave each of them with as much life experience as she could. She truly loved them — truly loved each of them. She exposed them to music, to dance, to art, to literature and storytelling, to the sciences and to the ways of connecting with the spirits of the Desert. Though the males of her people lived short lives and their minds did not develop in the same way as the females, she had always believed they still deserved to know of the fine things in the world. With Ohtli, though, it was apparent there was a dialogue. He kept asking questions, kept being curious. He kept wondering about the future, kept wondering about the time after he served his purpose to the colony.
“Well, after that time happens, and you fly off to mate with the queen of a different colony, and you bring our colony’s seed to their fertile soil… then you will die,” she had said. “That will be the end of your arc of purpose.”
“But what if I’m not ready to die?” he had asked.
Tzeltzin was unsure what to say. She had never been asked that question before.
At eleven years of age the striations began to appear like perfect knife-cuts in Ohtli’s deep bronze carapace. Faint silver traces which grew clearer and clearer as the days went by. At first Tzeltzin had tried to hide them with clay-paint, tried to match the color of his carapace as exactly as she could, tried to mix and blend and coat evenly and strike the right gloss, but after a while it was no use. It was too obvious.
“Perhaps one in every hundred thousand,” the creche overseer had said, when Tzeltzin had asked her how many Sann like him grew patterns like the soldiers.
He grew and grew, bigger and stronger. A head taller than the other drones in the creche, then two. Tzeltzin first put a training blade in his claws when he was twelve and they sparred until he outmatched her. Then she pulled strings with her contacts in the Scithi training grounds and got him up-and-coming soldiers his age to spar with, in secret, until he outmatched them as well — he worked every day, all day, to improve. “You must strive to be the best possible version of yourself,” Tzeltzin had always told him, and those words lived in his mind each day. He always felt like he had something to prove, that he needed to carve out a life and a place for himself. Yet no matter how hard he tried, the only one who ever seemed to make space for him was Tzeltzin.
His skill on the uzam helped his coordination, helped him know how to unite the right and left sides of his body into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The training sword taught him strength, the uzam taught him precision. The grip on the hilt of the blade gave his wrists strength which he used to grip the necks of the uzam more firmly, more confidently, and the patterns of fingering along them helped him to hold the sword with grace and lightness. There was no division between them; the sword and the uzam were one and the same.
Three heads taller than his peers and built like a warrior. Broad-shouldered and strong. Forged out of a life somehow mislaid; this was Ohtli.
On the day his exile was handed down he was escorted back to the creche to collect whatever things he could and say his goodbyes and Tzeltzin was there, holding her head in pain. She stood up at once when he entered and wrapped her arms around his towering body and cried and said, “I am so glad you’re alive.”
“Me too, Tzeltzin. But this is goodbye.”
“I know, my Ohtling. I know. You will do so good. I know you, and I know you will do the best.” She squeezed him and then stepped away and over to the blade of dark-steel she kept hanging above the coal-stove and she wrapped it in cloth and bound it. She strapped it to his back, and she strapped on the uzam, and she handed him a pack with provisions. She leaned forward and their antennae touched, a tender expression, and though they were both born of the same mother, in that moment they were mother and child. Tzeltzin looked Ohtli in the eyes, standing up as straight as she could, and she said the last words of hers Ohtli would ever hear.
“I love you. You are one in millions.”III.
The day after they burnt Astrus on the pyre and scattered her ashes along the path of the Caravan, soaked in the summer storms — “It’s what she would have wanted,” Inzrin said, “to be a part of this journey forever,”and of course he was right — the two of them made up their minds that they would finally leave the Caravan.
“I worry about you,” Ohtli said, brushing the long locks of silver fur out of Inzrin’s eyes, which were sunken into the dark pools surrounding them. “I think these years of travel have never let you heal. I know the Caravan is your home, but I think it’s killing you.”
Inzrin was quiet for a long time, eyes downcast, until finally he nodded. “Besides, if we’re together, we can make a new home wherever we land.”
“I won’t go anywhere without you,” Ohtli said. “I promise.”
So it was that the two of them loaded their wagon and resolved that when next they passed a place they felt they could settle down, they would make their departure. They overheard of a farming village, off the beaten path, over some hills to the southeast of Yearhome, tucked away among the arroyos and in the shade of the foothills to the north.
On the morning they were to leave, Moydran caught them, as they hitched Ness to their wagon. “They say there isn’t one Caravan, but a thousand,” he said, eyes downcast.
Inzrin hugged him tightly. “This is what they mean, huh, old friend? ‘Not one, but a thousand. Each new traveler, a new trail.’ Sure there ain’t any talkin’ you into comin’ with us?”
The kah-rehm wrapped his powerful arms around Inzrin. “I just can’t. It isn’t the life for me.”
“I knew you’d say that,” Inzrin said. “Maybe visit someday. In a few circuits.”
Moydran nodded silently, tears welling in his dark eyes. He reached up and unhooked the violet stone, wrapped in copper wire, that Ohtli had seen hanging from his horn each day since he first arrived. “I want you two to take this,” he said.
“Moy — ” Inzrin began, but Moydran raised his hand.
“I won’t hear another word of it. If you won’t take it, I know Ohtli will.” He reached out and took Ohtli’s claw, pressing the stone into it. Up close, Ohtli could see it was a dozen shades, flecked and speckled, its gradient almost a mirror image of Shimreth above them.
“This is one of Shimreth’s Tears,” Moydran continued. “It’s good luck, especially for travelers. It’s brought me plenty in my time — after all, I got to know you both.”
Ohtli gripped the stone tightly. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then say ‘peaceful journeys,’ and until we meet again,” Moydran said.
“Peaceful journeys, Moydran,” said Ohtli.
“Peaceful journeys, old friend,” said Inzrin.
With that, they set off for the village, fixing it to their east by the rise of Taá, and leaving the march of the Caravan behind them.
It was a windy day, two days off the path of the Caravan, as Ohtli rode Tepin out and back to scout the area and Inzrin did his best to rest atop his adaraak, that the other riders appeared, across an arroyo, cutting along the top of the canyon. Ohtli craned his neck atop his dongo and peered to try to make out who they were — five riders, each atop a dongo, cutting foreboding silhouettes against the blue sky behind them. They have no business being here, Ohtli thought to himself as he spurred Tepin on, which means they’re here for me, or for Inzrin. He hoped they had not spotted him along the bed of the wash, though he could not say exactly why. The dongo took the other side of the canyon in long, loping, sure strides, almost like Moydran had done when they had climbed the cliff years before, and just before he ducked behind the dense stand of rainbrush that lined the canyon’s edge, he heard shouts behind him, borne upon the whipping wind. Damn.
He pressed his body flat against his dongo’s and leaned into the gallop, his mount leaping in mighty strides past the rainbrush and pith-bone, weaving in and out between rocky outcroppings which seemed to defy gravity, boulders hanging almost in midair, suspended above the world by the sparest of points. Behind him, two thousand paces by now, the riders were making their way up his side of the arroyo. He flew like a star along Shimreth’s smile, like a wildfire nipped his heels — for it could have been something worse, something more miserable and all-consuming even than a wildfire.
He caught up with Inzrin around the next outcropping, Tepin’s feet skidding in the dirt, and as fast as he could he tied the dongo off and jumped to the back of the adaraak. “Inzrin, we have to go.”
“I don’t understand,” Inzrin said, nonplussed. “We are goin’.”
“No, we need to go faster. We need to go from here. We’re being followed. We have to leave Ness and the wagon here, for now. Maybe we can come back for them.”
The wind intensified its relentless siege on the senses. The smallest bits of dust and grit borne upon it, though so minute as to be almost invisible, stung their eyes and bodies, clattering against the saddle and the wagon. Inzrin patted the great adaraak’s powerful, steadfast flank. “Be safe, girl. Ohtli, tell me what to do,” Inzrin said with a cough, and Ohtli helped him down onto the dongo and lashed him to the saddle just as Astrus had done on his first ride and held him close, as tight as he could, before he kicked his legs against Tepin’s sides and they jolted into the scrub.
Ohtli held the reins with two claws, gripping them so hard his forearms ached, and he wrapped his other pair of arms around Inzrin’s waist. There was a pounding in his head, a thrumming fright he could not place. He could not understand what frightened him about these travelers so deeply but he knew all he could do was to get Inzrin to safety. Then he could wheel about to meet them on his own terms.
There was a small cave they happened upon, almost imperceptible, less a cave than a minute gap between two tilted boulders, each polished smooth by millennia of sandpaper wind. He brought Tepin to a halt and helped Inzrin down and led him to a patch of soft sand between them. “Stay here. Don’t move, don’t make noise. I’ll be back for you,” he said.
Inzrin looked up into Ohtli’s eyes. “Swear you will.”
“I swear it. I could never leave you alone.” Ohtli touched his forehead to Inzrin’s, brushed his antennae along Inzrin’s beautiful face. “I have to do this.”
“What even is it you have to do?”
“I don’t know. But I know in my heart I need to meet it now.”
It was impossible to leave. Ohtli only managed it by not looking back, not even for a moment, not even when he heard Inzrin begin to cry. He knew if he looked over his shoulder he would be pulled like a magnet back to Inzrin, knew as sure as the stars turned to day that they might both be buried there under the boulders together. He climbed back aboard Tepin and rode back the direction he came.
Taá loomed low in the horizon when they met, across a flat stretch, at three hundred paces. There were five riders, four of whom were tzic. Three of those were powerful Scithi warriors, two with glaives strapped to their backs and one with a sword so long it could only possibly be wielded in two claws. Of these Ohtli knew none of them, which he could not say for the fourth.
The fourth was pale, hunched, riding behind one of the soldiers. Her eyes were milky white and her skin was nearly translucent. She appeared as a ghost in the sunlight and her body language was stiff and foreboding, just as it had been when she voted for Ohtli’s execution. “Death,” she had hissed, and the image of her form, her scent, her voice, her face, all were seared into Ohtli’s mind that day, for it was the Suyyu priestess Eztli who had found him. She was unmistakeable even wrapped as she was in white cloth with only her claws and her face visible, and even she was not as frightening as the fifth rider, perched atop an albino dongo, its skin whiter even than Eztli’s carapace and its eyes redder than rust or yaka-kelp paint or blood, for the fifth rider was the spider-person from the homestead, from his dreams, reins clutched in two claws and the toy in another, which Ohtli could hear clacking, impossibly, over the gale. Tonk.
“Ohtli,” Eztli called, her voice barely audible above the wind. “It’s no use trying to run. We know you brought your friend out here, and we wouldn’t want anything to happen to him.”
“Just leave us alone!” Ohtli said. “What business could you possibly have with me?”
Tonk.
Eztli dismounted and the three soldiers began to approach on their dongos. She spread her arms wide. “In the years you have been gone,” she called, “the stories of the Sann who left Ehecatlepec have made their way back to us. Your time on the Caravan has been spent in high profile. There have been whisperings of you in our city and, I am sure, in the other queendoms of the tzic all across the Salt Seas. Your rebellion against the order of our society cannot be allowed to continue.”
“Your sisters wanted me to live!” Ohtli shouted. “They wanted me to leave and make a new life for myself!”
“My sisters, unlike the queen, can err. They are fallible, and in my estimation, in this instance, they have done so. I am here to correct their error.”
Ohtli looked back and forth between the advancing soldiers, the Suyyu, the spider, who was perched on his dongo stock-still in the wind. Tonk.
He knew the soldiers would need to dismount. There was no melee combat to be had from dongo-back; the beasts were too erratic. Could he fight them? No, he thought, not three soldiers at once, not with polearms. He would have to flee. He would have only one chance to escape, as they dismounted, but to where? They knew his movements would be slowed by Inzrin. He turned his head, scanning for something, anything that could help him.
On the horizon behind him was a brown cloud of dust, a haboob, so incomprehensibly vast that as it encroached on the sanctity of the blue sky it threatened to blot out not just Taá, but Shimreth herself, and he knew what he had to do.
Tonk.
The instant the last soldier’s boots hit the dust before him he jammed his heels into Tepin’s sides and they shot past the Scithi, who drew javelins. He wheeled the dongo around and headed back toward the cave as one, two, four, six javelins clattered in the dust at the dongo’s heels. He could hear them mounting again but he rode the beast harder, faster, frantically, the scrub around him turning into a low blur, a noise in the background of his vision.
As he approached the cave he shouted, “Inzrin! Inzrin!” louder than he had ever shouted anything before, and the yaka came out of cave, confusion smeared across his lupine features. “Hold up your arms!”
Inzrin raised his arms above his head and Ohtli leaned down and grabbed them from the full gallop. The inertia was enough that the dongo stumbled, unbalanced, one leg skidding wildly. “Whoa, Tepin! Whoa!” Ohtli yelled. He pulled as hard as he could, focusing on Inzrin’s face, a mask of terror as his legs dangled a hand-span away from the ground at speed, and he hoisted him painstakingly up onto the back of the dongo and tied him again to the saddle.
From around the bend wheeled his pursuers, shouting, their dongos stamping furiously, their teeth gnashing and their horns swaying side to side.
They broke away from the outcroppings into a flat plain, the soldiers close at their heels, and Ohtli steered Tepin toward the impending wall of dust, directly into the haboob, and they thundered toward it and it roiled toward them, their two vectors pushing against one another to close the gap almost impossibly fast.
“Close your eyes,” he said as gently as he could to Inzrin, and then they were in it.
Their entire existence was dust. Choking, blinding. The winds were so powerful it forced the grit past Ohtli’s mandibles, into Inzrin’s shut eyelids, into their ears. The dongo howled and screeched beneath them in fright and discomfort. It was a field of brown, featureless and desolate. The wind was terror. It generated a noise so powerful that Ohtli’s own thoughts were shoved from his mind, a ceaseless and ever-present scream, from all directions and from within radiating outward. Tepin trudged into the wind, trying to obey Ohtli’s commands to continue, until at last she collapsed and Ohtli held Inzrin close and turned so his body would hit the ground first.
He rolled with Inzrin over and over until they collided with a wall of stone where there was only the slightest shelter from the wind. It was enough that Ohtli could make out Inzrin’s form, hunched and head low in Ohtli’s lap, inches away from his eyes. From here the dust swirled like a river, building up eddies and pools in midair, fleeting and insubstantial, before they were wiped clean by fresh gusts. “Are you hurt?” Ohtli shouted above the rage of the wind, and Inzrin shook his head, sobbing into his lap. He ran his claws along Inzrin’s back, tenderly, soothingly, as Inzrin’s body heaved with his cries.
It seemed interminable, while they were inside the haboob, as if not even the end of their world would bring an end to the choking dust and shrieking wind, and that when the Desert finally collapsed into the star-stuff and joined the smile of Shimreth in pieces for all eternity that the storm would continue to swirl away in the sky, in solemn nothingness.
For one brief moment, in the maelstrom, Ohtli saw a silhouette, out of the corner of his eye, of the spider person atop its ghostly dongo, and Ohtli clutched at his thorax before it evaporated — a trick of his eyes in the storm, surely?
Though it felt inconceivable, end the storm did; after many minutes of Inzrin and Ohtli simply holding one another and laboring to draw breath, the haboob passed. They were covered in a layer of fine grit which Ohtli brushed from Inzrin’s silver fur and which Inzrin brushed from Ohtli’s hard carapace. Twenty paces away lay Tepin, breathing heavily, her eyes and nose clogged with dust. Ohtli ran to her and began to clear away the sand from the dongo’s orifices but she bit and snapped at his claws, razor-sharp teeth gnashing the air. Eventually some progress was made and she began to settle and she stood, with much gentle patting and words from Ohtli, and thick mucus poured from her eyes and her snout as she rose. “Good girl,” Ohtli said tenderly, grabbing her reins and taking Inzrin’s hand.
He looked around. There was no sign anywhere of their pursuers. No priestess, no soldiers, no other dongos, and no spider-person. Nothing but a stretch of flat desert, eerily calm, with still air and shimmering with mirages from the reflected light of Taá.
In the distance glimmered a stream and sitting on its banks there was a town, and there were plots of farmland.
“We made it,” Ohtli said with a laugh. “We made it!” He and Inzrin embraced and saddled up and made for the town.
And, somehow, just a few hours after they arrived there, as if driven by the spirits themselves, Ness and their wagon trundled in behind them.
IV.
It was a town of yaka, mostly, and at first they were skeptical of these two vagabonds, swept into the village by the haboob, covered in dust and grime and blood and tears. To see a tzic alone this far north was strange enough, but a tzic with a yaka at his side, arm in arm? But Ohtli played his uzam and Inzrin sang and they gave the children fruits and toys that they had brought from the Caravan, and all in the village could see that the pair’s hearts were tender, and so before long they had a place to rest their heads, in a little barn where they kept a few milk-animals and beds of straw.
The village itself was nameless, but the locals called the stream Anzu. It ran seasonally, after rains, and provided enough water to grow crops during the summer monsoons and when the snowmelt high on the sky islands ran in the late winter. They grew grains and corn and gourds there, and what they could not grow they foraged. Ohtli impressed them quickly with his knowledge of local edible plants he had gleaned from Moydran, and he helped them repair their clay oven which had been damaged in the windstorm. By and by Ohtli began to build a house of adobe, made of bricks of hardened mud which he scooped from the banks of the Anzu, while Inzrin rested in the straw. As he worked, a little yaka girl named Linn inevitably joined him, sitting on the low wall he had built and swinging her legs back and forth.
“Where did you come from?” she asked one day. She was probably seven or eight but she had been acutely interested in all of the work Ohtli had done, and he had gladly explained his processes to her.
“That’s a complicated question with a long answer, young one.”
The yaka girl climbed up onto the wall, four arms extended out for balance as she walked along it. “I have time,” she said.
Ohtli laughed. “So you do. An abundance of it. I came from the Caravan.”
“No, before that,” Linn said. “You weren’t born on the Caravan.”
“How can you be so sure?” Ohtli put all four claws on his waist in mock skepticism.
“You just told me it was a complicated question with a long answer.”
Ohtli smacked the back of his claw between his eyes. “You got me there, little one. Well, settle in.” And he told her of Ehecatlepec and the creche, of Tzeltzin, of learning the sword and the uzam, of the cool limestone walls of his home. He omitted the tribunal — instead saying, “One day I outgrew my home and I knew I needed to find a new place to live. To make a place for myself.”
“Will I outgrow this town someday?” Linn asked, hopping down from the wall and gesturing around her.
“Maybe.” Ohtli crouched down until he was at her eye level. “You’ll need to figure out for yourself where you’re meant to be. Where you’re meant to take root and blossom, and nobody can take that away from you.”
In the evenings Ohtli and Inzrin were reunited, holding hands and looking up at the roof of the barn and chatting and wondering together. It was cozy and comfortable — not quite like anything Ohtli had ever known before. There was safety in it. Stability. Nobody expected him to be anyone but himself or anywhere but what he was.
“My legs feel restless,” Ohtli said, stretching them out in the straw and kicking them back and forth.
Inzrin chuckled. “How can that be? You’ve been workin’ them all day, every day, since we arrived.”
“It’s funny how fast you grow accustomed to being on the move,” Ohtli replied. “I’m surprised you aren’t scratching the door down.”
“On the contrary. It feels like my legs can finally do all the restin’ they’ve wanted to all this time.” He turned to embrace Ohtli, which is how they found sleep together each night, and this night was no exception.
In time Ohtli learned that Linn was an orphan. She had traveled here from the Caravan as an infant with her mother, who had passed away shortly thereafter from illness and exhaustion. The girl was a quick learner and was an endless fount of questions — so much so that Ohtli at times had difficulty keeping up with her rapid pace. She was an eager assistant, helping him slather wet mud onto each new layer of the adobe, helping him haul each brick over, stuffing the wet mud in Ohtli’s buckets with straw to help them hold together, to give them structure.
After two weeks, when the house was nearly finished, Inzrin was on the mend. His eyes were less sunken; the dark circles around them were less pronounced. His coat was glossier and his color improved. Linn was also very fond of Inzrin. She had brought him food and water as he convalesced and he told her stories each evening before she trotted off to bed.
“She spends time at each house here in town,” Ohtli told Inzrin one day. “The villagers have all taken on the responsibility of caring for her.”
“She can spend time at ours, too, when it’s finished.” Inzrin looped his fingers between Ohtli’s claws.
“I was hoping you would say that.”
Ohtli finished the next day, and the last layer needed another day after to cure and harden, and the day after that, he and Inzrin stood before the wooden door the villagers had carved to welcome them, which Ohtli had gratefully installed.
He opened the door and, in a moment of whimsy, lifted Inzrin off his feet. Inzrin laughed and whooped as Ohtli carried him into their home for the first time.
It was a small house — a little sitting area, a clay oven with a flat metal stove on top, and a goldenspray-wood bed — but it was home, and it was Ohtli’s. He took the totem Astrus had carved, of himself and Inzrin on Ness’s back, and he placed it, gently, on the shelf above the oven, adjusting it just so. Inzrin smiled and brushed a paw against his face, then began to work making lunch.
All at once, Ohtli heard worried voices outside. “Trouble,” he said. “I have to see what’s wrong.”
“I know,” Inzrin replied. “I love you for that.” He gave Ohtli a tender touch on the arm. “Be safe, whatever it is. I will see you soon.”
Ohtli strapped his sword to his back and hoisted his pack and went outside. A group of villagers were walking urgently through the village, every so often breaking into a trot. “Linn!” they shouted.
Ohtli’s heart sank and he waved his arms to the group. “Is Linn missing?” he called.
The leader of the search party nodded. “One of the other children saw her playing to the north this morning, but we haven’t seen her since.” She pointed to the sky. “Storm’s coming. We have to find her before it arrives.”
“I’m headed north, to the arroyo,” Ohtli said.
“Be careful, traveler,” the yaka replied. “The floods come down the canyon without warning.”
“I know.” Ohtli climbed into Tepin’s saddle. “That’s why I’m going there.”
As Ohtli traveled, it was difficult to believe there were such things as 'floods' at all. The storm was building swiftly up against the mountains to the east, far in the distance. A mighty cloud, the size of the mountains itself and shaped like a steel-grey anvil, had formed, and the bottom of it began to warp and twist and creep down the hills, the sky beneath it streaked with the shadow of rain — but all this was a faint tapestry, faraway and strange. What was real, what was imminent, was Taá, boiling the humid, lead-blanket air around him. What was real was the shockingly blue sky, the sounds of birds and bugs and all manner of other tiny, creeping creatures in a mad panic for shade and water, and the knot in Ohtli's thorax as the image of Linn swept away in a flash flood sprang unbidden to his mind.
When Ohtli arrived at the arroyo, a mighty furrow in the ground so deep and abrupt it looked like someone had brought down a titanic cleaver and rent the soil in two, he scanned up and down from dongo-back as quickly as he could. The arroyo was crowned with great patches of prickle-pads, forming a forbidding fence around its edge.
Tonk.
No. It was the sound of a thunderclap in the distance. A falling rock. A tree pushed over in the wind, a raindrop on a hollow log, a —
Tonk.
Ohtli leapt down from Tepin’s back, tied her up, and dashed to the edge of the arroyo, pushing past the prickle pads even as they scratched against his carapace.
Tonk.
Down in the bottom of the arroyo was Linn. Her eyes were wide as she stumbled and scrambled backwards. Before her, advancing on her, holding the two-handed sword Ohtli had seen the soldier wielding and Eztli’s white shroud torn into strips and wrapped around its body like some macabre gown, was the spider-person.
Tonk.
Ohtli scrambled down the edge of the arroyo, sliding most of the way, catching himself on a jutting branch of rainbrush. The aroma of the brush, verdant and moist, immediately spread across his antennae. Then he realized he was also smelling it on the wind, that despite sunshine and blue skies the scent of rain drifted in the very air. He leapt forward, putting himself between Linn and the advancing spider. “Stay behind me!” he shouted back to her.
Tonk.
Ohtli drew his sword.
In an instant the spider closed the gap between them, the mighty greatsword it held swooping down in a fell arc. Ohtli barely had time to react, bringing his sword up, and he clenched his mandibles together and planted his back foot in the soil to withstand the blow. He heard Linn scream behind him.
“I am here to collect <important>,” the spider said, peering at Ohtli under their locked blades.
Ohtli pushed up with all his might, sending the spider-person off-balance. “Run!” he shouted, and Linn turned and ran.
The spider recovered its stance. “Listen <command>. You hear it <question>. The flood. It comes <placid>.”
Ohtli did hear it. In the distance, soft. A rushing sound, like a stream in the distance.
The spider leapt forward, bring its blade whirring through the air in an underhand slash. Ohtli met its blade, the metallic clang echoing in the canyon walls. He stepped back as the spider thrusted forward with its sword, which Ohtli narrowly sidestepped. He leaned forward and swept one of the spider’s legs, causing it to stumble, and he turned and followed Linn down the arroyo.
“You delay the inevitable <casual>,” the spider called after them. “You shout at the wind to cease.”
The sound of the stream in the distance grew louder — now a rushing river.
“I won’t let you have her!” Ohtli said. He hoisted Linn up onto an outcropping on the canyon wall. “Climb!” he shouted to her. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the spider had nearly closed the gap, its mighty blade glinting in Taá’s light. He felt his sword-arm come up by reflex, catching the overhead blow again, and he staggered under its force. The spider reared back for another blow and at the last moment Ohtli ducked to the side. He felt air displaced by the blade a handspan from his antenna, and there was a thunk as it lodged into a gnarled, tenacious trunk of goldenspray, itself clutching the stony wall of the canyon for every possible inch of purchase. As the spider wrested its blade free from the wood, Ohtli began to climb, scrambling up the side of the canyon, and he reached up and boosted Linn higher.
“I’m scared!” she cried.
“I know!” Ohtli said. “You can do this! Keep climbing!”
The river-sound was almost as loud now as the wind in the haboob.
The spider recovered and sent a series of stabs at Ohtli’s legs. One-two-three, Ohtli parried each of them, the clanging of their blades now barely audible above the sound of the impending flood. Reaching up into the branches of the goldenspray, the spider leapt into the crown of the tree, above Ohtli’s head, sweeping its greatsword in from the left — Ohtli’s weak side, but he twisted and brought his sword up, halting the spider’s mighty blade three fingers away from his face. “I get my due <future>,” the spider said. “I always collect <certain.>” The spider locked its arm in place as it dropped its body down from the tree, landing next to Ohtli, and it drew its arms back for another strike. Ohtli quickly deflected the blow away and towards the open air in the arroyo. The spider’s arms carried through the momentum of the blow, but rather than being knocked off, it spun on its feet and used its rotation to kick Ohtli in the thorax. He stumbled backward, colliding with a boulder behind him, and he felt lightheaded and dizzy as he struggled to regain his breath.
The spider advanced steadily on to him. Ohtli turned and saw cracks in the rock behind him. He sheathed his sword to use all four claws, and he planted his foot in one and his upper claw in the other and pulled himself up, and just behind him was the spider. Above him, almost to the top of the canyon, was Linn. She leaned on her elbows and kicked her feet and pulled herself over the lip of the arroyo. As Ohtli hoisted himself to the top of the boulder he realized that etched into its face was an inky shadow — a line that continued all the way along the stones of the arroyo at the same height. The high-water mark, he thought.
Then he looked up the canyon and saw a wall of water sweeping toward them.
It was a hundred times faster than any dongo, a foaming bottle-glass green, roaring as if commanded by a thousand furious spirits, sparklingly surreal in the harsh sunshine. The spider whipped its head around, then leapt up, in one bound next to Ohtli atop the boulder, escaping the torrent of water by half a span or less as it tore past them. Then it leapt over Ohtli’s head and began crawling up the side of the canyon wall in a fury, making directly for Linn. It grabbed onto a goldenspray root just below her, twisted and knotted and jutting from the canyon wall in a gnarled loop.
Ohtli took a deep breath. In one swift motion he drew his sword from behind him, brought it singing down over his head, and sliced the root in two pieces.
They were exactly the same size.
The spider tumbled backward without a sound. It reached out as it collided with the boulder next to Ohtli, its tarsi scrabbling to gain purchase, and at the last second Ohtli reached down and grabbed the spider’s arm with his claw as its body tipped forward into the flood. Just an armspan away, the water seethed and swelled, the spray bouncing from the rocks and off the spider’s body misting Ohtli’s eyes and chest. “I have you!” Ohtli shouted to the spider, who looked up at him inscrutably. “I won’t let go!” But why not? It had tried to kill him, tried to kill Linn. Perhaps it did kill Astrus, and the people in the homestead, and even the priestess and her soldiers.
Ohtli could not let go.
“You cannot hold me from this <resigned>. You are not strong enough.”
“I won’t let you die.”
The spider clacked its palps together. Was that a laugh? “You cannot stop death <obvious>. There is something you must hear. Lean close <command>.”
Ohtli did — he leaned closer, because the spider was talking so softly and the flood roared so powerfully he could barely hear.
“I am the last thing you ever see <future>.”
Then the flood tore the spider from Ohtli’s grasp. Ohtli saw the spider’s head bob up, then under the water. A moment later, its head appeared again, and then it was sucked underneath and was gone.
“Ohtli!” Linn called from above him.
“Linn! Are you all right?” he asked her. Even now, the flood was beginning to subside, the water level slowly lowering.
“I’m okay. Thank you for coming for me,” she said.
“Of course.” Ohtli hoisted himself up over the mouth of the canyon. “Let’s get you home.”
Each night after the flash flood, Ohtli dreamed. He dreamed he was on a featureless white plain. The sun was sickly yellow — a twisted mockery of Taá, and there was no Shimreth gracing the sky. He began the dream in mid-stride and he ran and ran and ran until his legs began to tire. He never, ever looked over his shoulder, but he knew that behind him was a creeping shadow, encroaching on the land, like coils of smoke drifting toward him, and no matter how hard he ran, they drew closer and closer, until they snaked around one of his legs, and the instant they tightened — he would awaken.
Inzrin was always there, the thrashing of Ohtli’s legs waking him as well, and he dabbed cool moist cloths on Ohtli’s forehead and held him until he fell back asleep.
Linn was there too — in her cot they had set up for her, until Ohtli was able to finish her proper bed too. She slept straight through, never even stirring at Ohtli’s twitching and shouting.
During the daytime, Ohtli began working in the fields. He carried baskets, two great wicker caverns suspended by a pole which he ran across his shoulders, and he filled them with manure to fertilize fields on his way out to them and with the harvest on his way back. The climate let them grow something all year, rotating through beans, grains, gourds, and even brief windows of berries and tender herbs. The fields and their cycle of crops were a delicate dance, one whose steps fascinated him, and each day, he hung his hat on the wooden rack he had built, his body aflame with the beautiful ache of exchanging effort for the bounty of the soil.
Yet each night Ohtli dreamed.
He helped the villagers dig a new pit-well, down to the groundwater. The days of digging were long but comforting — there was something primal in him that stirred when he moved the soil, when he took the villagers’ tools to the hardened caliche and cracked through it to the damp aquifer below. He yearned for it, truly, and the village had a larger and deeper pit-well than ever before.
For his part, Inzrin developed a reputation as a chef and storyteller. His constitution improved day by day, month by month. He wove baskets and fired clay pots for storage. At these, he grew adept, mixing the different soils — the clay, the cream, the buff, and even adding charcoal for onyx — and he created intricate, detailed patterns, crosshatched and gorgeous.
Yet each night Ohtli dreamed.
Linn began to live with them all the time, and the other villagers knew it was right to let her. She did not have another place to go and the two of them were happy for her company. She learned basketweaving and cookery from Inzrin and she learned swordfighting and farm-labor from Ohtli and she learned music from them both, and they were, all three, very happy.
Yet each night Ohtli dreamed.
He dreamed of leaving, of running, of never stopping. Of living with one foot out the door, of always putting his present behind him. Of being pursued and never escaping that shadow.
One day, he was driving iron hooks into the wall above his stove. He lowered himself carefully from his step-stool, then stepped back to make sure the hooks lined up.
Tonk.
He froze.
Tonk.
There was a knock on his door. He dusted off his claws, took a deep breath, and opened it.
There stood the spider, catching the ball in the bamboo cup, unadorned with the linen Ohtli had seen it wearing when last they met. Tonk. They stared at one another for a minute, two, four. Tonk. Tonk. Tonk. Then Ohtli sighed and gently bowed with respect.
“Please come in,” he said. “Where are my manners? It won’t do to have you standing at my threshold, just waiting.”
The spider came inside. It set down the toy next to Astrus’s wood-carving. “Sit <permission>?”
“Please.” Ohtli drew back a chair for it, and it sat at his table. “Tea?”
The spider nodded. Ohtli poured it a cup, then poured one for himself and sat next to it.
“You let me in <factual>. Why?”
Ohtli took a sip of his tea. “Not sure, really. What else would I have done?”
“Try to kill me.”
“I had my chance for that,” Ohtli said.
“Then run.”
“I’m tired of running. This is where I want to be, with the people I want to be with — I don’t want to leave anything else behind.”
“Then you were right to let me in <simple>.”
They sat and drank their tea.
“I scare you <question>?”
“Of course. You’re frightening. I’ve only ever known you in terrifying or miserable circumstances. You have haunted my nightmares for years.”
“Then it’s the circumstances that scare you <question>?”
Ohtli set his tea down. “Not just the circumstances. You. You’ve tried to kill me — you’re stronger than me. You could have cut me in two in the arroyo.”
“No <simple>.”
Ohtli rubbed between his eyes. “I felt the power behind your blows — I know what you’re capable of.”
“It is not time <past>. It is not time <present>.”
“So one day it will be.”
“Not for cutting in two <cheerful>.”
“That’s some relief, I suppose.”
They drank their tea in silence.
“In all these years, nobody ever lets me in <past>.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Funny. You’re a perfectly pleasant house guest.”
The spider’s palps clacked together. Laughter, without a doubt.
“I’m sorry, but my love and our child will be home soon,” Ohtli said. “Thank you for coming. It has been a pleasure.”
The spider nodded. It stood up, bowed to Ohtli, then pushed in its chair. In an instant, it reached over, gripping a heavy cast iron pan on the stove, which it swung over its head and past Ohtli. In the same motion, it kicked over Linn’s bed, and from the bed fell a sleekslider, smooth and deadly and venomous, undulating along the floor — how had it gotten in, into Linn’s bed? — until the pan crushed its skull and dashed its brains across the floor and it lay still.
The spider pushed the pan into Ohtli’s claw, gave a salute with its tarsi, and took its leave.
Ohtli stared for a long while, too stunned to move or even think. Then he cleaned the mess from the floor and the pan.
After he was done, he lifted his sword. He pulled it, just slightly, from his sheath, and he saw his face reflected in the dark metal. Older now, but the bright silver lines that ran from his head to his feet still gleamed like the light of Shimreth. He slid the blade back into its sheath and set it up on the hooks.
When his family came home, they ate dinner. They laughed and played, they read stories, and they sang songs. And when Ohtli drifted off to sleep, tucked into Inzrin’s warm arms, he dreamed of the three of them dancing among Shimreth’s rings, for ever and ever.