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Douxie leads the way up the final hill, Archie and Nari trailing in his wake.
He’s at the head of their little party because he’s the only one who can operate the GPS in his phone, and also because he’s the slowest: the air this far up in the Andes is thin, and his physiology is the most human, however well-kept by magic. Ever since they ditched the magitech skiff he’s been constantly out of breath, and Nari and Archie have been pacing themselves against him, letting him be the anchor. Fatigue drags at his steps, and he really, really hopes that the map he downloaded back at La Paz is right, and they really are almost there.
He crests the hill, and finds the salar unrolling below.
The sight stops him in his tracks. It’s breathtaking, the fact that he has to catch his breath anyway notwithstanding. Below them the flooded salt flat stretches into the distance, a vast mirror upturned, and it’s only by the jagged blue line of the mountains arcing away to either side that he knows there’s a horizon out there at all. Ahead lies only sky, heaven above and below, white cloud cover reflected flawlessly in the still water.
A cold gust of wind bites through his jacket, snapping Douxie out of his awe. Sulfur whiffs from below.
“Come on,” he huffs, and starts his skidding descent towards the lake.
On this side the hill is sandy enough that he finds himself sliding down it at an alarming rate, forced to brace himself on his hands. He scrapes the shit out of his palms, struggling to maintain his balance; Nari follows rather more lithely behind him, and Archie swoops by overhead, circling back to act as a spotter. Twice the dragon’s timely dive-bomb is all that keeps Douxie from somersaulting headfirst down the slope, and it’s sure sign of the seriousness of the situation that this doesn’t elicit any acerbic remarks.
Half-way down his left hand catches on something sharp, and Douxie swears, feeling whatever-it-is gouge deep into his palm. Of course he can’t stop to look, eyes fixed on the slope.
Even at the speed they’re going, it takes a while to reach the bottom. When they finally do he stumbles onto the stinking flat with one hand clutched in the other, and pauses at the water’s edge, inspecting the damage.
Blood wells out of his palm, gemstone vivid amid the grime.
Douxie exhales a hiss. Nasty luck—sure, the magic in his veins will keep the gash from becoming infected, but his hand will still take time to heal, and hurt like the devil if they have to do any more climbing. He presses his other thumb against the cut, trying to push it closed; the blood makes a rivulet along the heart-line crease in his palm, falls in bright drops to land on the dried crest of salt at his feet.
He looks at it, aortic red stark across the white, and thinks: maybe that’s no accident, either. Maybe it’s the salar, telling him what to do.
Of course he’ll need blood. All the old rituals do.
Nari catches up to him, reporting tensely, “Skrael is almost here.” She steps up beside him on his right, her elfin face pinched with worry. “We have mere minutes.”
Archie lands on his left. “What now?” Both of them give him identical looks of expectation.
Douxie swallows, throat dry from more than the stifling stench of sulfur. He’s the one who led them here, striking out across the Altiplano after Skrael sniffed out their hideaway in La Paz. They’d had to ditch the magitech skiff three days back, and Skrael is so close behind that Douxie can smell the coming snow on the desert wind, and if this doesn’t work . . .
He pushes the thought away. “Now,” he says firmly, “we pray.”
There is, after all, nothing else left to do.
Attempting this from the lake’s edge strikes him as wrong, so he steps carefully out over the mirrored surface, surprised to find the water only an inch or so deep. Salt deposits crunch underfoot, and he sloshes forward until the edge of the lake vanishes from his peripheral vision, the sky enveloping him on all sides. There he stops, takes a breath—the air is cold enough to burn inside his nose, and he tastes the salt in the air even over the overpowering reek of the sulfur—and prepares to pray.
In the ten months they’ve been on the run he’s spent a great deal of time suppressing his fear, doing his best to crumple it up and shove it deep in the wastebasket of his soul, well out of the way. Now he takes it back out, and lets it unfurl inside him, because a prayer of desperation only means anything if it’s true. And he certainly doesn’t have to lie about this: they’re out of options, and even before Skrael had caught up with them at La Paz Douxie had felt the creeping dread of disaster, heart-stopping inevitability dogging his steps. If he fails at this he’ll be failing not just Nari and Merlin but the entire planet, and this is his last shot, his last chance, his last stupid mistake.
Of course he’s desperate. He wouldn’t be trying this, were he anything but.
That’s the first part that counts. As for the second . . .
Kneeling in icy water is unappealing in the extreme, but he only has one chance to get this right. Douxie drops to his knees in the shallow lake, grimacing as the cold water soaks through his jeans. Then he bites the bullet, and submerges his sliced-open hand, gritting his teeth against the saltwater sting. It hurts like hell, but he ignores it, and raises his mind in prayer.
There’s a form for this sort of thing, so he sticks to it, trying to keep it simple. Please, spirit of the salar, help us in our hour of need. Grant us safe passage across your playa, and withhold it from the enemy of our back. Be merciful, guardian of the salt, and if there is any service I can render upon you in return, I give you my word that it will be done. Please, help us now.
The vast silence of the salar presses down upon him, utterly devoid of response. Out here the wind makes no sound, and Douxie strains to listen, hoping for anything at all. His legs and most of his left hand are going numb, and the cut on his palm burns in the salt water, but he waits—and waits, and waits, struggling to keep his head clear.
Nothing continues to happen. A sick fear starts to rise inside him. That he was wrong; that the power in this place is gone, and there’s nothing left out here to hear him, or at least nothing that cares enough to respond.
This time he prays aloud. Not because it might matter, not because of any thought-out thaumaturgical reason, but because the tide of despair he’s been holding back ever since Skrael found them suddenly wells up inside him, and forces its way out of his throat.
“Please,” he prays, “please, guardian of the salar, help us in our hour of need. Whatever service we can render you, I swear on the source of my power that it will be done. Please, show us mercy.” He squeezes his eyes shut, and bends low over the water.
The desert speaks.
Not in words, as he’d expected, nor even sound, though something about the sensation makes him think of a great gong being struck in the distance. The knowledge is simply there inside his head, and Douxie opens his eyes to a woman standing over him, giving him an appraising look.
She’s naked but unbothered by the cold, her brown skin unafflicted with goosebumps. The expression on her face is haughty, and when her dark eyes meet his he glances away at once, because no human eyes plunge so deep. His brain can’t seem to decide how tall she is, either: at first brush she seems of human dimensions, but every time he blinks he gets the impression of something far more immense looming over him, lingering like an afterimage against his eyelids.
Looming, he thinks, just like the great volcano off to his right—and as soon as he has that thought he knows her name, and her title. The words burst breathlessly from his lips: “Tunupa, Mother of the Salar.” He stares up at her in fascination, nearly forgetting the pain in his palm. He’s never met the god of a volcano before, nor any other genius loci so old. “Thank you for hearing me, Lonely Mother.” The name must be Aymara, but the very fact that she speaks without words tells him that she’s older than that, older than any human tongue. She’s been here since before anyone who might walk her slopes even existed, and Douxie kneels at her feet with a wholly appropriate level of awe, a man at the foot of a mile-high volcanic peak.
He wonders why they call her lonely, and discovers that he knows this, too, like a memory abruptly recalled. The salar—Tunupa tells him—is the tears from her eyes and the milk from her breasts, spilled when her child-volcano was stolen away. She herself became tapped, unable to move or find Colchani, and has remained this way since the dawn of the world. Of course she is lonely; she will never see her child again, nor anything else besides the salar, unchanging for millions of years at a time.
Maybe it isn’t true—it can’t be, with such obviously human components—but the feeling behind it is, and Douxie feels the depth of that sorrow like a hole in his breast, more intense than any human emotion could be. The sense of isolation that seizes him is on a scale his human mind shrinks away from, and the waves of loneliness and betrayal have him curling in on himself, unable to bear the heartbreak. Beneath all that he feels Tunupa’s rage, her fury at the injustice of her own fate, as old and hot as the magma that flows below her feet; dormant, but never gone.
(Retroactive uptake of story, he thinks later. The humans who first walked the mountain’s slopes felt her pain, and wove it into a tale, as humans are wont to do. Now it’s always been true.)
The press of her volcanic emotions pulls sharply back, and Douxie finds himself down on both hands in the salar, his face wet with tears. His breath comes in harsh gasps, and it’s a struggle to pull his thoughts back together, to remember what this conversation was supposed to be about.
Fortunately, Tunupa hasn’t forgotten. She asks him, in that way where he knows her intent without hearing it said: Why should I aid you? You are not one of mine. What could you give that I, mother of this place, could possibly want?
Douxie doesn’t have to think about that one for very long. He pulls his right hand out of the water, fingers curling against the cold, and starts, “I—”
Only to be interrupted by a shout from behind. “Casperan!”
It cracks across the salar like the snap of a tree branch in the dead of winter, and even if Douxie didn’t recognize the voice he’d know its owner by that. Panic knifes through him, and he almost turns back to look—but something tells him that tearing his gaze away from the goddess now would be a mistake, and so he keeps his eyes forward. He has Tunupa’s attention, and that means he owes her his.
Splashing footsteps approach from behind, and he feels Archie’s billowing heat arrive on his left, followed a moment later by Nari’s hand pressing against his right shoulder. She says, “Finish it, Douxie,” her tone very level. “We are watching your back.”
“Give up this foolishness!” howls Skrael, the words accompanied by a gust of icy wind that needles mercilessly though Douxie’s jacket. “No one can outrun the wind, Casperan.” An echoing snicker, like trees breaking in the path of an avalanche. “Certainly not as ragged as I’ve run you now.”
Douxie talks fast. “I will sing for you, Lonely Mother. If you lend us your aid, then I swear on the salt in my blood that I will walk the path that you lay and sing to you of the wonders I’ve seen, so that you may know what lies beyond your salar.” He’d felt the yearning for the outside world in that earlier rush of emotion, and this, at least, he can do. “Please, Lonely Mother. With my breath, I will show you the world. I swear on the salt in my blood.”
Tunupa considers this. A flurry of snow swirls past from behind; Nari’s hand grows tense on his shoulder. Beside him Archie says urgently, “I hope she’s listening to you, old boy, because I think we’re out of time”—and still Douxie waits, holding his breath.
At last Tunupa asks: On the salt in your blood?
“On the salt in my blood,” Douxie repeats, fervently. He forces himself to meet her eyes. The pain there is an awful thing, all the worse now that he’s felt some fragment of it for himself, but some things are too important to flinch away from. “Please, Lonely Mother, help me.”
Tunupa smiles.
It’s such an unexpected expression on her grim face that Douxie blinks, briefly uncertain whether his imagination is playing tricks. But the expression remains, and the reassurance that slots itself into his thoughts is clear enough. Relief floods through him. “Thank you,” he says, breathlessly. “Thank you, Lonely Mother. By the salt in my blood, I will repay this gift.”
He scrambles up to his feet—
Or tries to, because it turns out his legs are so numb and locked up from the cold that he nearly pitches face-first into the salt. Nari catches his arm, and Archie splashes over to help, the two of them levering him up together.
By the time he’s finally upright Tunupa’s image is gone, and the ambient magic of the salar is gathering like an invisible thunderstorm all around them, readying for some great divine working. The shape of it is too complex for Douxie to make sense of, but the expectation that settles into his mind makes him think they have at least a minute or two before whatever it is comes to pass. He wipes his left hand on his jacket, uncaring about the blood, and shoves it deep in his pocket. His right he holds out from himself, and conjures his staff, having to concentrate to materialize it in his off hand.
Once he has it in his grasp he turns, and looks at Skrael.
The North Wind drifts eerily at the edge of the water, the wind rippling his tattered cloak. His half-moon staff is in his hand, a localized snowstorm swirling around him, and Douxie doesn’t need to be within discerning distance to know the baleful look aimed in his direction. Skrael is angry, his power held at the ready—but he, too, must feel the magic Tunupa is working, and plainly doesn’t dare cross the edge of the lake.
The realization makes Douxie grin, wide and shit-eating and totally impossible to suppress.
He props his staff against the salt, and calls, “Not this time, Skrael!” Euphoria bubbles up in his chest. They’re going to make it out of this; they’re going to get away, and just now nothing else matters. Not the cold, not the pain in his hand, not even the loss of the skiff—his last-ditch plan worked, and he’s going to keep Nari and the planet safe, at least for a while longer. “Not this time. You haven’t run me ragged enough yet!”
“Is it really a good idea to taunt him,” complains Archie. “I don’t think this constitutes a safe distance.” The freezing wind howls past them, snow catching in Archie’s fur.
Douxie laughs. “Arch,” he says, “can’t you feel that?”
Sunlight flares across the water. Douxie turns, shielding his eyes from the glare.
When he’d looked this way before the sky had been a flat white, the whole of the salar overcast. Now the clouds have gathered into a narrow string: a path, reflected in the lake below. The rest of the sky is windswept-clear, crystalline blue and spread like a tablecloth to either side. The sun gleams blindingly across the water, the way the reflected path meets the real thing makes it look like a walkway into the sky, the curvature of the earth falling away.
The nearer end of the path terminates at Douxie’s feet, inches away from his boots.
Thoughtfully, he says, “I think you’d better both hold onto me.” Nari grabs hold of his jacket, and Archie alights not quite on his shoulder, scrabbling heavily up his back. “Watch the claws!”
Douxie waits until the dragon has steadied himself on his perch, and steps onto the path.
Reality wavers around them. One minute they’re on the salar, and the next—
Douxie steals a glance back over his shoulder. Skrael is gone. So are the mountains, including Tunupa herself. The hills they’d crossed to reach the salar have melted away, and the path of cloud on which they’d been standing has turned to a path of salt, vanishing into the horizon in both directions. The sky is clear but for that same arc of white, perfectly aligned with the salt, and the mirror-lake lies sunlit and still, undisturbed by even so much as a breeze.
Wherever they are, it’s not of their earth—though it is, Douxie thinks, somewhere near. Not a reflection, but a counterpoint; unique, yet still harmonically interdependent. Linked, in some way, with the place from which they came.
He lets out a breath. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
It’s enough to break all of them out of their stupor. Archie snorts, “You don’t say,” and jumps off of Douxie’s shoulder, shifting into a cat as he goes. He pads over to the edge of the path, and touches a curious paw to the water, only to jerk it sharply back. “Ooh, still cold.”
Nari, for her part, emits a sound of surprise. “I can no longer feel Skrael!” She lets go of Douxie’s jacket, and skips a ways down the path, pausing there to do several turns with arms outstretched. Finally she throws Douxie a wide-eyed look: “We lost him!” Her smile flashes at him. “You did it!”
Douxie grins helplessly back. Down by his feet, Archie asks, “Where do you think the path goes?”
“I don’t know,” Douxie says, giddy with joy. “But don’t you want to find out?” He uses a charm on his bracelet to dry out his jeans, and is about to work out a patch for his hand when he realizes that the cut has already healed. There’s a faint scar left on his palm, and turning his hand over proves that it lines up exactly with the one across the back, mirror image. He flexes his fingers, testing whether they’ve regained their dexterity, touching the tip of each finger to the tip of his thumb. When he’s assured himself that everything’s in working order he transfers his staff into his left hand, and flicks his fingers around the haft.
The glimmer that races up and down the length leaves him holding a six-course Renaissance lute, its body and neck outlined with ghostly blue flame. It’s not exactly a comfortable shape for the staff to take, but he’s made a promise to Tunupa, and he’ll need something a little more classic than his favored Strat to fulfill it. “Sorry, darling,” he murmurs, and silently vows to knock out some proper rock ’n’ roll standards once this is done.
The lute flickers gamely under his hand, so he figures it understands. It’s his staff, after all, and in his hands it’ll be whatever he needs it to be, even if it’s really a Fender Stratocaster at heart.
(He’s quite sure that it does have a preference, which might be a sign that he’s crazy. Certainly none of the other wizards’ staffs that he’s ever encountered have had personalities, not even Morgana or Merlin’s—but then, theirs hadn’t doubled as instruments, and every instrument has a soul. Maybe his staff is just a little more alive than most.)
The lute is already in tune—these days his staff is always in tune, whatever shape it might take—but Douxie goes through the motions anyway, reminding his fingers how to play something with courses instead of individual strings. It’s been a long time, but the muscle memory comes back swiftly, and he plays a few bright chords, pleased with the clarity of the sound.
Then he stills the strings with his hand, and says, “Go on,” to Nari and Archie. He nods towards the salt road. “I’ll be right with you.”
Nari gives him a curious look, but starts up the path alongside Archie. Douxie hangs back, thinking about what sort of tale he’ll tell.
He’s promised Tunupa the world, but he’ll still need a narrative structure, the better to adapt an old song or three. It’s been centuries since he last played the role of a proper bard, and he’s already going to have to compose the words on the fly; he’d rather not reinvent basic conventions, too. He keeps his palm pressed over the strings, and moves his fingers silently over the fretboard, testing a few chord progressions as he decides.
At last he says, “Lonely Mother. Let me tell you the story of where we came from, and how we came to be here.” They’ve seen rather a lot of the globe over the past few months, courtesy of being hunted; Tunupa ought to like that. He’ll cram it into the form of one of the old adventures, and tell her about São Paulo and Buenos Aires and Lima, and all their narrow escapes.
He brushes his fingers over the strings, a single introductory strum. Around him, the world holds its breath.
Douxie smiles, certain that Tunupa is listening.
Then he steps forward, and begins to sing.