Assail (Malazan Empire, #6)(96)

He decided, then, what he would do in the morning.

When Lyan mounted, Dorrin held in her arms before her, Kyle did not mount as well. Instead, he stood next to her leg looking up at them. She drew breath to tell him to hurry, then realized what was going on and swallowed.

‘Take the horses,’ he told her.

She shook her head.

‘Take the horses and buy healing for the lad.’

She continued shaking her head, only now looking away, blinking.

‘Go.’

She nodded then, curtly, and lowered her head. He sought her mouth and found it hot and wet with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, half choked.

‘As am I,’ he answered just as faintly.

She twisted away, kneed her mount gently forward. The two other horses followed. Kyle watched them go then turned to face the north. He had already looped the straps of a few waterskins over his shoulders, and now he set off at a jog.

*

After two days he imagined he had entered the region of desert plains that his people’s stories named the Vanishing Lands, or the Lands of Dust. It was a broad northern desert of dwarf trees, lichens and brittle brush, with a scattering of clumped grasses and tiny wild flowers. Clouds did pass overhead, occluding the sun, but none released any of their life-sustaining rains here. The air was frigid and painfully dry. His lips chapped and split. He was ruthless with his limited supply of water; one mouthful in the morning, and one at noon. The heights of the Salt range, a deep aqua-blue in the distance, taunted him with their gleaming shoulders of snow and icefield.

He passed the remains of people, and even of horses. Most lay half buried in clumps of meagre soil. Wild flowers surrounded them like burial wreaths. The bones were very old, or at least appeared so, wind-gnawed down to stumps where exposed to the gusting dry air.

The nights were the worst. There was no cover to be found anywhere. He lay wrapped in a blanket, exposed to the buffeting winds. At times these rose to storms that lashed him with tossed sand and gravel. All the warmth would be sucked from him and only uncontrollable shivering kept heat in his bones. He would wake with dunes of blown dirt gathered up his sheltered side.

One night something large banged into him, tossed by the wind. He reflexively lashed out to snatch it. It took him some time peering at the thing in the starlight to identify it, but eventually he realized that what he held was an eroded, battered, wind-tumbled human skull.

He kept it with him as he walked the next day, turning it in his hands. It wasn’t old, that much he was certain of; bones yellowed or greyed with age. This skull still held that bright whiteness of bone picked clean. Bones also roughened with age, became more porous, and lost mass. This skull still held heft, and was smooth where not abraded through rolling and bumping.

While he paced along studying the skull, something bright caught his eye on the ground and he stopped. His arms slowly fell and he let the skull thump hollowly to the bare rock beneath his feet. He had wandered into a field of bones. The remains lay as far as he could see in every direction. They gleamed whitely, humped together in small depressions where the winds had swept them up. Ribs lay snug in natural cracks of the exposed granite bedrock. Wide scapulae lay flat where the winds could not budge them. The round dome of a skull was caught up against a knot of rock.

Kyle reached for the grip of the blade snug at his side to reassure himself, and continued on. None of the bones that he passed showed any signs of violence: no shattering, or gashes or cuts. They had not even been gnawed by scavengers. Fat femurs had not been cracked open for the rich marrow.

Equipment too lay scattered about: corroded armour, metal fittings, wind-smoothed coins, and naked rusted blades. But no leather, cloth, padding, or even wood. How could it have rotted away so quickly?

That night the winds returned with redoubled violence. It was as if they wished to pick him up and send him tumbling back down to the prairie of the Silent People. They seemed to punch him from all directions and sent needle-sharp lances of sand that stung and burned any patch of exposed skin. He tucked himself entirely under his blanket in a desperate effort to escape their constant lashing and hissing.

In the morning, when he shook out the blanket, he found it full of holes. Patches of it had been eaten away entirely. Something about this troubled him far back in his mind: memories from the ancient stories he’d heard in his youth. The Land of Dust … the Land of Winds. He shook his head; surely the winds alone couldn’t kill a man. But perhaps they could scour the padding from discarded armour.

He rolled up the blanket, took a sip of water, and moved on. The silver heights of the Salt range beckoned. The distant peaks shimmered suspended over a layer of haze, or clouds, like ships at sea.

Towards noon a dust storm struck. It swept down from the north. A swirling churning mass of solid yellow that engulfed the entire plain ahead. Kyle tore off a strip of cloth and tied it over his face leaving only his eyes exposed. He ducked his head, raised a hand to shelter his eyes.

The wall struck like a blow of rage. Sand and grit blasted at him. It gnawed the flesh of his hand, bit at his scalp. The noise was a howling and a grinding avalanche combined. Kyle walked blind, a hand extended into the murky haze of gusting blankets of dust. There was no cover anywhere at all. If it became unendurable, he supposed he would have no option but to lie down and curl into a self-protecting ball.

And the thought came: As so many others had done before him …