Descent

The sun set over the Galkha Desert, scorching day turning to cool night in the glow cast by a half-full Turquoise Throne. Yet, Yuya's flesh still burned.

His wrists burned where the rope held them. Ankles, too, and his heels where he desperately tried to balance as much weight as he could on a single loose strand that dangled under his feet. Even though that also made his glutes and hamstrings burn, as long as he could do that, the burning in his chest was generally bearable. Pectorals and lungs both throbbed dully. Occasionally, he came desperately to need relief from that burn, but the burning his arms had to endure to get it, he could no longer stand for more than a second or two at a time.

He could take in the sights around him only in snippets, between the sharp throbs that wracked his head. The Turquoise Throne, the planet Nod orbited, cast much more light than Earth's moon just after dusk and before dawn, waning and then waxing visibly as it wore on. Now, it showed a crescent about as bright as a full moon on Earth, meaning the night was about a quarter of the way done. From over his right shoulder, it illuminated the village of Lish-Zadir in a small valley below, which was still dotted also with the glow of a few hearthfires and rush lanterns flickering in windows.

Yuya had moments of fury at the people of that village, who could clearly see him up here, but in his more level-headed moments, he acknowledged he probably wouldn’t go to the risk of interfering in an execution, either.

In what seemed at once an eternity and no time at all, the crescent of the Turquoise Throne was fading to near-nothingness. At their darkest hour, nights on Nod were darker than new moons on Earth. Even with its much lower light pollution than just about any place in Japan, Yuya could see fewer stars here than on some nights he had spent in the countryside not all that far from Osaka or Kyoto, with one glaring exception which the Turquoise Throne sometimes hid. While on Earth, the Milky Way galaxy appeared as a band across the whole sky, viewed from within, here the stars grew denser approaching a focal point that had the clear shape of a four-armed spiral galaxy, viewed from far enough above its galactic plane for the shape to be clearly apparent.

So I'm going to die on a moon way out at the ass end of its galaxy, for all I know a galaxy way out at the ass end of whatever universe this is. Well, if this is the last thing I see before I die, that's at least one thing that didn't go as badly as it possibly could.

Though his extremities were mostly numb by this point, Yuya suddenly felt a sharp, stinging pain in his left foot. He had some inkling what sort of sight he might see if he looked down, and for a moment wished could avoid it, but the pain rose to demand his attention on a reflexive level.

What he saw might have been a relation of the emperor scorpion, or of the camel spider, or the descendant of a chimera between the two, created by a half-mad alchemist somewhere in the dark reaches of Nod’s history. Its carapace might have been black, or just cast in shadow, but its six eyespots cast a faint dull-red reflection in the starlight. It had two things like pincers or sets of jaws set vertically on either side of its face, with which it clamped to Yuya's foot, gnawing and drawing blood. It held the side of the cross with eight legs, the rearmost two nearly twice as long and thick as those in front, with a body about of a size with a housecat's.

Yuya jerked his foot back and forth as far as it would go, trying to push it away. Instead, a long tail came out of the darkness, and from the end of a flat fin like a cobra's fan, it drove a stinger into his calf. He cried out with a hoarse croak as he quickly lost feeling below the knee.

A round length of wood came out of the darkness, and struck the jumping scorpion’s head level with its top jaws, knocking the creature loose and sending it skittering into the rocks downhill.

“Yuya? Are you still alive?”

“Ashset?”

“Nightmares take your soul, man, why did you leave this as the only favor I could do for you? Was it too hard to just ask me to refer you for a job plucking melons?”

“I can't… I can't feel my leg, Ashset…”

“That will pass. Listen carefully, Yuya: I will get you down from there, but I need to make it look like an accident. A man who escapes his sentence by the acts of the gods is pardoned by Heaven, but a man who helps another down from his cross will share it with him.”

Yuya nodded weakly. Ashset crossed in front of him, probing the dust around the cross with a small shovel. He wore a blue-gray cloak, but Yuya could just make out his searching eyes, a deep violet. Not an uncommon color among Jalabartans, so far as Yuya could tell; it occurred to him, though seeming a wildly inappropriate thought for this moment, that every unnatural-seeming eye color he had noticed among them was some shade of either purple or dark brownish-orange. Did some of them have a gene Earth-humans lacked, that blended a little red pigment into their retinas? If anybody in Ak-Toum had pure red eyes, he hadn't noticed.

Yuya felt his cross shake as Ashset dug out some earth from behind its main post. The whole thing tilted slightly, and the little bit of support the sloping cross now provided his back sent a wave of relief through his limbs.

Then he felt Ashset’s hands loop a length of rope around the cross behind the small of his back. “Brace yourself.”

“Brace… myself for…”

A donkey brayed in the darkness, then the cross tilted back aggressively. Yuya's inner ear swam for a moment, then pain jolted from the base of his spine to the back of his head. He moaned pitifully.

Ashset loosened Yuya's right hand-bond ever so slightly, just barely enough for him to slip that hand out, then untied the rest fully. He helped Yuya to sit up, gave him water from a clay jug and a cloak around his shoulders, then examined the bite on his foot.

“It isn't broken, thank Heaven. Before I dress it, Yuya, I need some of that blood.”

Ashset held an old rag under the wound, which bled more now that the ankle above was unbound, then smeared Yuya’s blood across the top of the cross, near where his right shoulder had sat. “That way, it looks like it was a mixture of the guards getting lazy digging the hole, and the jumping scorpions getting overzealous leaping for your eyeballs.” he explained, then bound the wound up with a sleeve cut from an old shirt.

Pulling Yuya up with one hand, he unfastened his rope from the cross with the other and, leading Yuya in a slow hobble, placed both on the donkey.

“Now, I would not be able to see a man’s life-shine from that village, but we should get off this hill in haste all the same.”

“Ashset,” Yuya said between sharp breaths, “I'm still hanging on by a thread here. You can't start talking about life-shines and expect me to figure out what that means.”

Ashset looked him closely in the eyes. “You would not see it at all, I think. For people with eyes like Cain, most living things glow faintly in the dark.”

“And who is Cain? One of your gods?”

“I thought I… nevermind. You will find out on the plains, sooner or later. Hold on to the ass.”

Ashset wiped away his and the donkey’s footprints with an uprooted bush, then led Yuya away, urging him and his mount along with the waxing Turquoise Throne at their backs until sunrise. As its first rays shown, Ashset turned and surveyed the landscape. Sometime in the night, unnoticed by Yuya through the growing fog of weariness, they had gone up onto a high plateau, the top of which was a grassland cooler but even more featureless than the desert below.

“You can rest for a few hours now, Yuya, I do not think anyone will come looking for you up here. Wait, before you nod off… sign this tablet for me, please. It will make it easy for me to deny helping you down from the cross, if I am found helping you now.”

He showed Yuya a half-dried clay tablet, the cheapest medium they had in Jalabarta for the written word, and handed him a wedge-tipped stylus. His head was in no state to make sense of the words on it, and he had just barely enough strength to stamp out YMMT YY in the Jalabartan script, before he sank into sleep amid the grasses of the northern steppes.

The next two days were all pain, sun and grass. Even riding Ashset's donkey most of the way, Yuya felt fire in his back every time it took a step and cried out whenever his wrists or ankles abraded against its coarse hairs. His sunburns never faded completely in the night, before his skin was punished again, and he and Ashset both probed his foot thoroughly each night for any sign of gangrene. They sparingly ate stale barley bread, olives, and cheese from a sack Ashset had loaded on the donkey with his rope and shovel. They slept between their cloaks and a blanket that also served as the ass's saddle.

By dusk on the third day since Yuya had been condemned to death, they arrived at some other outcrop of civilization. Fields of grain, as he had come to expect, were the first sign, then a palisade of vertically-set logs enclosing a small space with a crenellated wooden tower rising from the far end. They approached a narrow gate, and found it open, with a sentry in rust-touched mail watching from a raised platform. “Where do you come from, friends?” His casual tone, like his stooped posture, did not smack of well-drilled military discipline.

“Ak-Toum, sir.” Ashset called back.

“And do you intend to stay?”

“I will be on my way around sunrise tomorrow, but my friend will stay awhile longer, I think. We can discuss that with the master of the house, whenever he is ready.”

“He will see you now, I think. Go ask at the keep. Heaven bless you.”

They tied off their ass near the gate, and proceeded into the complex, past silos, long low cabins, and a windmill placed to catch gusts deflecting off of the log tower set into the north wall. Ashset led Yuya, limping, into that tower. In a smoky room beyond, a man with a wild gray beard and a clay pipe in his mouth waved them forward to a long table, where he sat pouring over tablets and papyri by the sunlight beaming through an arrow-slit in the wall behind him. The smoke smelled mostly of tobacco, with a faint skunky edge of something Yuya had smelled far more rarely on the streets of Osaka.

“Heaven bless you, strangers. You have business with the House of Akbel?”

Ashset bowed deeply, and presented the old patriarch with a clay tablet. He held it to the light, reading carefully, then glanced Yuya up and down before turning back to Ashset. “You mean to sell this contract?”

“I do. Would a full bar of silver be too much to ask for it?”

“It would, boy, and you don't look quite stupid enough to have believed otherwise. Half a bar.”

“Five-eighths. There are other outposts that need workers.”

“Fine.” The old man pulled an ingot of silver from under a pile of tablets, along with a heavy knife like a meat cleaver. The bar was square in profile, about the length and width of the wooden box wallets most Jalabartans carried, with thirty-one ridges carved around its circumference at short, even intervals, and each end marked with an impression like the face of a coin. Yuya only got a good look at one, marked with the king of Jalabarta's likeness, or perhaps that of the emperor of Lugo, as the old man split the bar along the twentieth ridge and tossed the wider portion to Ashset. “Pleasure doing business. My servant is welcome to claim any bunk in the fieldhands’ quarters he likes.”

Yuya blinked hard. “Ashset, did you just sell me into slavery?”

Ashset smiled, but the expression didn't go all the way up to his eyes. “Slavery, Yuya? This is not Lugo.” The smile faded. “Indentured servitude, for a year and a season.”

“I thought you saved my life to return a favor.”

“That debt was paid the night before you signed. This is your repayment for leading you out of the desert and nursing you back to health. Seeing as you are not at full strength yet, that second obligation has been transferred along with the right to your labor. I would have helped you all the way here out of the kindness of my heart, but now I have another favor to pay back. And for that, I need enough money for a bride-price. Her father may take offense to this sum, at first, but I think I can bring him around.”

Yuya's arms trembled, but even now they felt too weak to strike or choke with any real violence. “I hope you choke and die at the wedding banquet.”

“I think you'll be glad I did this, by the time you're free again. You needed a kick in the backside. Now, if you will excuse me, a certain pawnbroker let me borrow his ass, on the condition I deliver some used Bekhite swords to him from this outpost. I must go meet his business partner. Heaven bless you, Yuya.”