"Yeah," Kieran agreed.
"But -- that -- you mean the one --"
"Yeah. That one."
"You mean an actual, literal -- you mean a real --"
"A god."
"But. That would. But. Kai, that --"
Kieran looped a hand in the air angrily. "Yeah, I know! I don't believe in them either! Who knows what it really is? Who gives a fuck? The thing's riding piggyback on my brain, and it's getting stronger! It wants things I don't want! It doesn't care what I want!"
"Like what? What does it want?"
"I don't even remember. I know it recognized you, though. There's something in you -- I told you about it, that thing I saw knotted up in you, I thought it was maybe another Talent, like you've got healing too, or something. But this -- Ka'an -- he recognized it."
Scalp crawling, Ash had to make a couple tries before he got the words out: "Do, do, do you remember saying -- do you remember talking --"
"No."
"You looked at me and you said, 'So that's where you went.'"
"Shit." Kieran shoved his hands up his face, took handfuls of his wet hair, shook his head and growled. Then he dropped his hands with a sigh. "Whatever. We should've expected weirdness; nobody ever told us anything about our magic, right? For all I know, I was just seeing my Talent or something. Putting a face on it, getting paranoid. Anyway, freaking out now is useless. We can talk about it in the morning."
"I guess you're right. We're too tired to make sense."
"Yeah. But... ah..." Glancing up at the painted walls, Kieran scooped up their blankets. "Let's sleep in the other hallway."
"I was hoping you'd say that."
--==*==--
The storm calmed later, subsiding to steady rain. Having stripped off their wet clothing, they were soon warm enough to sleep, and weariness conquered the nervous feeling that whatever had been playing with Kieran's mind would return any moment. They dreamed in unison again. This time it was Kieran's dream they occupied; a sickly-sweet vision of opium and incense in a scarlet-veiled pavilion.
In the dream, they fed each other from cups of mixed wine and blood, watching uncaring as floodwaters climbed the hill where the pavilion stood. Soon the flood lapped around their feet.
The colors of rugs and gold-threaded cushions under water fascinated them. Then the embroidered veils of the tent walls were lifting and swirling in the flood, and they realized there was nowhere to go. Their hill would be drowned, and them with it. Already, bowls of fruit were drifting away out of the pavilion, like little boats, onto the lake that now stretched all the way to the distant mountains. With a creak and a flapping sound, the tent began to lean. It fell around them and pressed them down into the water.
Ash woke thrashing, fighting free of wet cloth. Beside him, Kieran started up, teeth chattering.
They lay in an inch of cold water. Not the brilliantly clear lake of the dream, but mud-milky water scummed with leaves and drowned insects.
"The fuck?" Kieran looked around disbelievingly. He lifted a hand and watched it drip. "What the fuck is this?"
Clutching his arms around him to contain his shivering, Ash got up and splashed out of the short hallway. There he stood -- naked, wet, and confused -- for so long that Kieran gave up asking him questions and came to join him. When Kieran saw what Ash had been looking at, he let out a low whistle.
"Well. That's gonna suck."
It was still raining. But now, instead of veiling a green valley with a stream down the middle, the rain furred the surface of a muddy, swirling lake whose waters were lapping over the top step of the temple and pouring back into it in widening rivulets. The channel down the middle of the temple was brimful and overflowing. The spring no longer sheeted calmly down the wall; now it poured in an arcing stream, chattering and splashing. Outside, debris swirled slowly in currents of inflow. Trees poked up out of the new lake, and in their branches things were caught. Things like the drowned carcass of the bay mare who'd so faithfully brought them here.
Ash made a faint sound of pity for the poor animal, wishing he'd gone and brought her in when the rain started. Not that he would've been able to find her. Besides, they had bigger problems.
"Our supplies."
"Our clothes," Kieran retorted. He stomped back into the dead-end where they'd slept, searching with his feet. After a moment he snatched up his pants with a cry of dismay. "You're not supposed to do this to leather! Where's my coat? Where's your coat, Ashes, you're turning blue!
Aw, hell. This stinks."
"We have to get out of here."
"No shit."
"Where are we going to go?"
Kieran waved that off as unimportant. "Wherever. Up. First order of business is to not drown."
"Yeah, I'm with you there."
Grumbling and swearing, they dressed in their wet clothes and gathered the dripping blankets.
Ash found a stretch of floor that was still dry and used it to fold the blankets lengthwise and roll them up, pressing streams of water out of them. While he did this, Kieran was hauling their supplies into a different area of dry floor, giving a running commentary.
"Flour's all right. Coffee's all right. Sugar's gone to sludge. Salt's all right, it was on top. Meat's kinda crappy, it's been soaking. What's this? Was this rice? It's everywhere. Aw, shit, half the matches are wrecked. And -- oh, this is great. This is brilliant. Fuck."
Ash turned to see what was the matter. Kieran held out his gun, and with a grimace tipped it so water poured out of the barrel.
"That's not so good," Ash said.
"Both the short guns were lying in a puddle. The rifles were stood up, so they're okay, 'cept all their ammo's under water."
"Modern ammunition's supposed to be watertight, isn't it?"
"Sure, it's okay if it gets rained on, or dunked real quick, but this stuff's been stewing. I bet half of it's gone dud. And there's no way to tell which half, until you try to fire it. Shit."
With a sigh of resignation, Ash went to tie the blankets onto the packs. "Nothing we can do about it now. Let's just worry about getting to higher ground. Even if the rain stopped now the water would still keep getting deeper for a while. And that rain's not stopping."
As if to illustrate his point, a gust of wind sent a wave across the lake toward them, spilling into the temple in a flat sheet that quickly eliminated what little dry ground was left. Ash finished lacing his boots, wincing at the disgusting way they squelched. Kieran, oddly enough, laughed as he got his own boots on. "What's so damn funny?" Ash growled.
"My boots are dry."
"Well, nice for you."
That made Kieran laugh harder. "I'd let you wear 'em, but you know, I've got these gigantic feet.
Or was it humongous?"
"I'm glad you can see the humor of the situation." Then Ash heard his own words, and smiled halfway. "Actually, I mean that. I think we need to have a sense of humor today."
"I'd rather have a boat." Grinning, Kieran hefted his pack; Ash noticed he'd picked the heavier one. "You know, this is so weird I can't even be mad about it. Ten minutes from now we might be drowned or something, but I don't believe it because it's just -- I mean, I've seen flash floods before, but I've never seen standing water like this. I've never seen it rain like this before."
"Got your guns?"
"Yeah. You? Stick the rifle through the pack flap, keep it out of your way."
"Oh, that works. Okay."
"Ready?"
"Guess I'd better be."
They stood in the temple's open mouth, ankle-deep, examining their options. The only way to get out of the valley would be up the least steep slope, the one on the north side where the deer had come down yesterday. To get there, they'd have to wade, and possibly swim. Then they'd have to toil up among the slicked-down grasses and soupy mud to get to the top. That hill was cut by a number of new streams, which implied that the land above was awash. And there was no end to the rain; the sky was thickly gray as far as the eye could see.
/> Kieran gave Ash an encouraging smile, kissed him lightly. "Think of it like this: there's no way the Watch is going to be tracking us today."
Steadying themselves against each other's shoulders, they forged into the flood.
Ash's glasses were immediately splattered to near uselessness. Following the cliff wall, half climbing and half swimming, they inched around the head of the valley. It would have been easier if this had been normal desert, but here there were clutching branches and swirling grass to snarl their legs, sinks of deep mud to suck at their feet. At one point Ash reached out for a cracked boulder to work his way across a deep place, when his hand jerked back of its own accord, his stranger senses telling him something wasn't right. A closer examination showed him thousands of light-brown scorpions clinging in the crack. He warned Kieran about it, used a nail-wrenching grip on the outside of the rock to get across, and somehow kept from falling into the rising flood.
Their work wasn't over when they reached the place where the valley's wall wasn't vertical. Here, tumbled slabs of stone were set in ground rapidly going to mud, and they shifted underfoot in dangerous ways. Their Talent sense was no use in telling which ground was solid and which treacherous; the water made everything a blank. Ash found himself thinking that if Kieran hadn't had magical healing -- from whatever source -- neither of them would have made it. Nevertheless he saw Kieran wincing more than once when he had to use his right arm for something. He didn't have the option of favoring that side. This was a two-handed job.
At last they reached the top. Uniformly yellow-brown with sticky mud, scratched and bruised, they stood bent-over and panting for several minutes.
Ash was the first to straighten up and look around. Kieran had had a much harder time of it, not only because he was still weakened from his injury, but because he was bigger. There was more of him to move, which mattered on a climb like that. Ash set a hand on his shoulder to let him know he could rest as long as he wanted. There was no danger up here, that he could see.
To the west, he could just make out that the land dropped off in a lacework of cuts and furrows.
East, and out to north and south, the high ground stretched in shallow ripples and low hills for what looked like forever. It was hard to make out distant features accurately, because of the rain streaking his glasses, but he thought he saw something that might be a taller rock, off to the northeast. Not more than two miles, he guessed, probably a lot less.
He pointed it out to Kieran, got a nod in reply, and they struck out for it.
The going was a lot tougher than it looked like it should have been. Water was everywhere, pouring, seeping, cutting, pooling. Uphill areas were slippery with mud or uneven with broken rock, and the lower places between hills were choked with thorny brush and debris, when they weren't impassably flooded.
What should have been a matter of half an hour's walking turned into a three-hour nightmare of climbing and slipping. But they got closer, bit by bit, to the looming rock that Ash prayed would have an overhang they could shelter under. His teeth were chattering now, as much with fatigue as with cold.
Finally they were skirting the slope of debris that had fallen from the rock. It was a squat spire that stood maybe thirty feet taller than the land around it, convoluted and crumbly from aeons of weathering. There wasn't anything that looked like shelter on this side, but they hadn't seen the whole thing yet.
Please, please let there be a cave or something, Ash prayed as they trudged through the rain.
Suddenly Kieran's hand knotted in his collar, yanking him to a halt. Puzzled, Ash glanced back at him, then followed his stare up to the foot of the spire.
Where a man in a white oilcloth rain cape stood staring back at them.
Kieran had his gun out before Ash quite registered what he was looking at, but the weapon only produced a sad click. Ash reached behind him to tug his rifle free of his pack, but two more men in white were coming around a buttress of rock, and Kieran grabbed Ash's wrist to haul him back.
"Just run," Kieran said through his teeth.
They turned and bolted. Behind him, Ash heard a shout, then multiple voices yelling. Just ahead of him, the ground bulged and spattered with a whump sound, spraying mud out of a crater a yard across. He glanced back, trying to make sense of the scene behind him, but Kieran yanked him onward.
"Dodge. They've got a breaker."
"There's six of them!" Ash yelled back. "With horses!"
They skidded down a slope and pelted across rock-strewn sand. With a frantic look over his shoulder, Kieran shrugged his pack from his shoulders and dropped it. Ash did the same, reaching back in the process to catch out his rifle before letting the pack fall. Kieran was pulling ahead; Ash stumbled as he looped the rifle over his shoulder, then ducked his head and put on a burst of speed to catch up.
Voices were shouting behind. It sounded like they were calling out to the fugitives to stop, most likely making dire threats of what would happen if they didn't. It was impossible to hear words over the sounds of running, and it didn't matter. Magics were cutting the air now, hooves were thudding, gaining.
Ash had no time to dwell on how stupidly unfair it was, to run into the Watch by pure chance on a day when rain would have made them invisible to magical senses. There was no time even to be afraid, for himself or for Kieran. Sound and time went strange, took on an eerie clarity. He heard the flat crack of rifle fire, knew by the sound that it had been a warning shot, not meant to hit. Now they'd be trying to wing him. All around, sudden potholes appeared, as the Watch group's entropist broke apart the earth. There was at least one pyro among them as well, and a kinetic or two, from the way mud kept bursting into blasts of scalding steam and flying across the path to obscure it.
Ash ran zigzags across the plain, dodging rocks and leaping potholes. Didn't bother wondering how long he could go on doing it. Tried to keep Kieran in sight. Tried to probe the ground ahead for solidity, but was repeatedly thwarted by the complexity of water. Maybe that was why the Watchmen kept missing. Followed Kieran down another slope and through a stream, into more rippled terrain. A horse screamed, somewhere, and he began to think they might have a chance of escaping.
His pulse beat painfully in his temples, his sinuses, his eardrums. His breath rasped his throat raw. Tan water sprayed in arcing sheets from every footstep, squelched in his boots, weighed his legs.
Kieran led him into a maze of tiny hills, strangely rounded and no taller than a house, where the sand-and-clay earth shed water well enough for their senses to work on it. Unfortunately, it also made a heavier mud, which sucked at their boots and slowed them down. Ash guessed that Kieran was hoping it would break the legs of their pursuers' horses. He was trying not to think of how the Watchmen could simply dismount and chase them on foot. The men in white were better rested, better fed, and had dry ammunition. The small hills suddenly gave way to a steep slope, leading to a drop into a gully full of braided water.
Digging in with their heels and hands, they tried to keep from sliding into it. For a moment it looked like it would work. Then, just as they reached the edge, the ground gave way. Ash yelped as the crumbled mud hauled him down. Kieran reached out to him, but missed. The Iavaian was slowed by his long coat, which dragged above him, catching on rocks; Ash had no such impediment, and had barely time to start to be afraid before he was slammed against the bottom of the gully.
He thrashed and swam to be free of the mud. The runoff stream helped, cutting through the piled mudslide and whisking it away. For a moment his glasses were totally opaque, before the downpour started to wash them clean. But as he tried to stand, he felt that his left foot was caught in something, just before a nauseating pain jolted up his leg.
Kieran landed beside him, having had a more controlled slide down the slope. He reached for Ash's arm, but Ash pulled away. "Wait! Ow!"
"Come on!" Kieran grabbed at him again, glancing fearfully up to where their pursuers would appear any second.
"I c
an't! My -- it's broken --"
"Broken? What is?"
"Foot or ankle." Ash wrapped his hands around his calf and hauled his foot out of the obstruction, letting out a screech like a stepped-on cat as it came free. Then he fell forward on his elbows and retched.
"Broken," Kieran said distantly. "Holy shit, Ash. We're fucked."
Ash drew a ragged breath. "No. Just me. You run. Go."
"Like hell I will!"
"Run, I said." He was surprised how level his voice sounded, even if it was forced through clenched teeth.
"I'll carry you."
"Then we'll both get caught." Ash pulled his rifle around and shook a clump of mud off it.
"Listen, damn you! Let them catch me. You get free. Then you can come rescue me. You know where they'll take me."