In Thy Name

Chapter 3 - Awakening

Teshem hadn't come back to the castle.

The sky was streaked with the red of sunset and the top of the mesa glowed burnished copper when Sareb returned to the cave. He collected some herbs he'd left out to dry and then went down into the ravine, softly calling Teshem's name, but hearing only his own echo.

The mouth of the cave was a hole of darkness. He called up a flare, and its light shone on bare rock. When he'd left, he'd packed everything, just in case: his folding cooking pot, his father's herbarium, all his canteens, empty and full. Without these few things, the cave looked like just a cave, instead of a home, the arrangement of rocks for sitting and working and the designs he'd smudged on the wall the only traces that someone had lived here. Although Teshem had been using the cave long before Sareb, he didn't leave any of his things here.

Teshem.

Sareb set the flare down on a jutting rock and rummaged through his packs for something edible. The Patra of Caran had invited him to stay for supper, but his skin crawled at the thought. Besides, he had wondered if Teshem might have gone straight to the cave.

He had not.

The worst possibility flashed into Sareb's mind-lost, collapsed somewhere to dry out in the sun tomorrow...

The dream of fire-

No, that was impossible. Teshem had even saved Sareb from the desert before, and he had a horse and a companion with him now. And yet, if he had gotten it into his head to press his luck searching for the lost centarchos...

Sareb shook his head, and a hammer pounded in his temples. He sat back against the wall with some burban tubers and pricklies-fruit-both tough to eat raw and bound to cause some discomfort, but he didn't have the energy to collect fuel for a fire.

Teshem probably despised him now anyway for allowing him to go off into the midday heat, unaided, on a nearly impossible mission. How was he supposed to have known that the Northerner had gone insane, and was as good as dead as far as the Gladiari were concerned?

One way or the other, he tried to reassure himself, she's dead now, or will soon be, and would have been anyway if I hadn't come across her and the beast. So what I did doesn't really matter anyway.

Except maybe to his friend.

He snuffed the flare and closed his eyes, but the headache still echoed in his head.

He opened his eyes again and searched his pack for his pouch of hazaiel flowers. Most shamans would save them for journeys to the spirit world, but Sareb did not need to go there, much less know how. Instead he used them simply to wander away from this world, into dreams that were meaningless and thus painless.

So he dug out his pipe and the flowers, and settled against the cave wall to lose himself in the smoke.

***

He awoke when the chilly dark crept under his capewrap, staring up at the rock ceiling, palpably looming above him. The cave was dark and still. Teshem had not come back.

His headache had faded, eased by the hazaiel, but heartache still stung quietly in his chest. Teshem.

The dream of fire came back more vividly. What if fire meant the heat of the desert?

But then what of the sword?

Just a dumb dream. It doesn't mean that-it doesn't mean anything.

But he sat up and drew his beacon rock out of his sash. The round, flattened stone fit comfortably in his palm. He rubbed his thumb over the initials T.A. carved into the rock, and felt the answering hum of the other beacon rock, far away to the southwest, half obscured by barriers of stone. He closed his eyes, and the darkness lightened with the glow of a flare. He was ringed by the same night chill as in his own cave. Time was one long moment, steady and unchanging as the flare's constant light. For the thousandth time, he swallowed painfully, his tongue thick with thirst.