Desert World Allegiances Page 9

  Shan had thrown all his weight backward to get the last bit of traction out of his dying engine, and now he instinctively pushed back from certain death, scrambling to throw himself off the back before the cycle crashed to the bottom of the valley. Something blindingly hot touched his leg, and the pain flashed through his whole body, so he could only see the whiteness of agony for a half second, and then his fingers brushed rock, and Shan clutched the ground. His legs went over the cliff with the bike, and for a half second, Shan almost followed it.

  Instead, he twisted so that his stomach was to the ground and he could grab a half-embedded boulder. It held, and Shan slowly pulled himself back up onto the cliff top until he could hug the boulder. He honestly never thought he would let go of the blessed thing. In fact, he’d be happy to kneel in the dirt and hold the boulder for the rest of his life. Shan might have done just that except the sound of another engine was approaching. The sand hunter had slowed to a crawl, the engine rumbling as the driver carefully approached the rocks Shan had so recklessly crashed into.

  Shan pushed himself up onto shaky legs and hissed when his left leg nearly collapsed under him. Looking down, Shan could see a hole in his pants, with black edges. Underneath, his calf had a raw, red burn that was already weeping that clear fluid that would gather under blisters. This time, his skin had stuck to the cycle, so the leg wept openly.

  “God, I appreciate the help, but I wouldn’t mind a little more right now,” Shan said softly before he limped south, searching for somewhere to hide himself. If he got shot now, after all this, he was going to show up in heaven and accuse God of having a very nasty sense of humor. About fifty feet down from the opening, Shan found a small hollow where two boulders met, and he pressed himself into the shadowed space and tried to breathe very, very quietly.

  The engine stopped, and Shan could hear footsteps against the rock.

  “He went over.”

  “I noticed.” The second male didn’t sound amused. He also didn’t sound drunk, so that destroyed the theory that this was some mistake, made by a couple of hunters with too much pipe juice in their blood. “We should check the body.”

  “Do you see a way down?” For a minute, there was only silence. No one willingly wandered the desert, not even in a sand hunter, and Shan sent up a quick prayer that these two would consider the danger too great.

  “We could drive to the end of the valley and backtrack,” the second voice suggested.

  “Which would take a whole day.” The first male clearly considered the matter closed, and Shan could only offer a prayer and a promise to God that he would spend more time reading his Bible if the first guy won this argument. If they backtracked and didn’t find his body, he’d be in trouble.

  Footsteps came closer, and Shan stopped breathing altogether. “Should we call Landing?” the second voice wondered. Shan blinked. Landing? Someone at Landing had wanted him dead? Okay, so he had angered a few people in his day, but he’d never done anything to inspire this level of hatred. Actually, other than accidents and drunken fights, Shan couldn’t remember the last murder around Landing, although Hope Valley had had one about six years past. For the most part, people on Livre were too busy to get up to nonsense like murder. They left the inner worlds to play that game, and they focused on bringing in crops and feeding the children and not getting blown away in the afternoon winds.

  “Yeah, let’s see what he says. He’ll be able to tell us if the priest shows up, but the chances are that he’s dead as a rat in a pipe trap.”

  The voice grew softer as the person walked away. Shan started breathing again. His leg throbbed in time with his heart, he had no water and no cycle, and someone in Landing wanted him dead—someone with enough connections to know if he showed up in town again. Things were not looking good.

  Shan looked up at the endless blue sky. “God, do you remember how I said last week that the priesthood didn’t have challenges enough for me? That I missed the puzzle that an engine could provide? God, you do know that I lied, right? I could do with far less mystery and challenge in my life right now.” Shan looked up at the blue sky. His sand veil dimmed the brightness of the sun, but other than that, it was only sky above him. God rarely gave such direct answers. This time, Shan figured he would have to get himself out of this mess.

  Chapter 9

  SHAN measured the drop with his eyes before easing himself over the edge of the rock ledge. Getting out was going to be far harder than climbing down, but he needed some supplies, or he wouldn’t last a day on the open desert.

  The desert lied. The dunes looked like gentle slopes, and the sand gave a golden haze to the world that made Livre look like an inviting jewel. In reality, the dunes were mountains of sand that would slip under your feet, and the shimmering sands offered very little in the way of food and water. Pipe traps settled wherever the barchan dunes didn’t follow their migrations. They preferred stable sand. Chokeweed moved with the sand dunes, their long roots and stems getting pushed around like seaweed in the oceans of Earth. One offered poisonous water and food. The other offered very little at all, except for long lines of sand burrs that would cripple a man. Shan needed the cycle, or even the parts he could scavenge from the cycle, or he’d die out here as surely as if the attackers had shot him.

  He dropped down, and his injured leg gave way, sending Shan crashing to the ground. By the time he got himself out of this, he was going to be one giant bruise. He was going to be one giant, thirsty bruise, and the way his leg kept leaking clear fluids wasn’t making him feel better about his situation. A burn might not kill him, but losing body fluids sure as hell could.

  He tried to stand, and the pain in his leg made him curse colorfully. “I’ll make that up to you later,” he promised God as he walked to the edge of this new ledge and searched for a path down. He was so close to the bottom that he could see the twisted remains of his cycle, so he knew it was a lost cause, but he might be able to activate the emergency beacon, and the emergency kit on the back held water.

  A sharp wind raced down the center of the narrow valley, and Shan turned to the side to shield the burned leg. It stung like battery acid anyway. When the wind died down, he considered his choices and picked the next drop. Unfortunately, the physical demands of the climb weren’t enough to keep his mind out of trouble. Thoughts crashed through his brain. Who would want him dead?

  Okay, so his father probably had a few thoughts about killing both him and Naite. After all, the two sons that he had groomed so carefully had both turned on him. Naite had been condemned to three years of slavery, and Shan had walked away from his apprenticeship with a mechanic to go into the church. Yep, his father had their lives all planned. Naite would follow him as a landowner, and Shan would get all the training required to run the farm machines, and the two boys would make their father the envy of the Spence Valley. It hadn’t exactly worked that way. Their land had been sold to pay his father’s debts, Naite was an unskilled worker, and Shan… he wasn’t sure who he was anymore.

  The next drop was farther, and Shan braced himself for the pain when he fell. Yep, it hurt. He limped through a low ridge of broken rocks and fallen debris.

  Whoever wanted him dead, the two hired killers thought that he would know the second Shan got back to town. That definitely wouldn’t be his father, not unless someone had dug up the old man and found some magic potion for bringing the dead back to life. In terms of alibis, death was a fairly solid one.

  Shan stopped and leaned against a warm, copper-stained rock for a second. White spikes of borax crystals stuck up from the surface like an embedded crown, and Shan studied the tiny shadows formed by the rock, focusing on the stark beauty rather than his pain. Everything ached, and his leg stung with a vengeance, and a little part of him wanted to just lie down until the pain passed. However, he wasn’t about to participate in his own murder. That meant he needed to force his body to keep moving, and he needed to force his mind to solve this puzzle. Naite was the next to come
to mind. When Shan’s cycle went missing, Naite and Div would both be called, and if Shan showed up, they’d be the first to hear. True, as children, Naite and Shan had enjoyed a hate-hate relationship, but would his brother truly want him dead?

  Naite had always been their father’s favorite, and he got all the gifts and the attention and the praise. As a child, Shan hadn’t understood the price his brother paid for that favoritism. In fact, Shan had been devoured by jealousy, and he’d hated his brother with a passion born of loneliness and need. So, when Naite had started acting out, Shan had gone out of his way to get his brother in trouble.

  Once, Naite tried to slip out to steal some fruit from a neighbor’s field. Shan broke into one of the panel boxes and hit the water alarm, raising everyone in the valley, so his brother got caught. After Naite had finished a week of labor for a neighbor in return for fire damage to the man’s barn, their father had ordered him to stay in his room. The old man had gone as far as to set nails in the shutters to imprison Naite. But Shan had hated the fact that their father still spent long hours in with his precious firstborn. It was like he loved Naite more, no matter how much Shan tried to be the perfect son. So, Shan had gone and pulled all the nails out of the shutters, knowing that their father would blame Naite.

  Now that Shan was old enough to understand exactly why their father had favored Naite, Shan suspected that Naite had a whole lot of reasons to hate both their father and him. Their father had made Naite’s early life miserable, and Shan had been an unwitting accomplice to that torture. However, Shan just couldn’t imagine his brother trying to kill him. Their hate was a more familial sort of hate.

  Shan reached the twisted cycle and pushed those thoughts and memories aside in favor of checking his resources. The emergency beacon in the yoke was a total loss, but the survival kit was in one piece. However, the water container had only a few milliliters in the bottom of the warm, plastic container. Pulling the container out, Shan felt along the smooth plastic, looking for the crack that had allowed the leak. He found it near the neck of the bottle, where the side curved into the lid.

  “God, I wouldn’t mind things being a little less of a challenge,” Shan told the sky. He really didn’t like the choices this left him. He drank the tiny bit of remaining water and then turned to the medical supplies. A spray derm kit covered the burn, but Shan didn’t want to take any pain medicine—not with the ordeal he had ahead of him. If he slipped and put a foot into a pipe trap plant, he could break an ankle and be dead before morning. Sandcats weren’t particularly aggressive, but they would go for the injured. And sandrats were twice as dangerous when they gathered in numbers.

  People had come to this world and assigned names to native plants and animals, deciding to call the small, nearly hairless hunters that burrowed under the sand “sandrats” and their larger, more furred cousins “cats.” However, the truth was that the two species were closely related. Both were ferocious omnivores that would eat anything organic, and they had no problem waiting until a larger animal was lying helpless on the ground before attacking in mass swarms that gave the victim little to no hope of survival.

  Turning to the cycle, Shan salvaged what he could. Lengths of plastic tubing and metal washers and long pipes—he slipped them all into pockets. A corner of a fender had been torn and bent out of shape, and Shan wrapped his shirt around his hand to protect himself from the sharp edge, and then he pulled the hunk of metal loose. It would have to serve as a knife.

  Shan missed the days when, as a mechanic in training, he’d gone everywhere with a full toolkit on his belt. The weight of it had made him feel important. After all, Holmes, a man famous for making machines sing, had chosen him as apprentice. His father’s apprenticeship fees had also helped Shan get in with the master mechanic, but Holmes never took on an apprentice who wasn’t good with the work, no matter what fee was offered.

  He missed that tool belt right now. A half dozen tools, and he could have converted parts of the cycle and his thermal blanket into a wind glider, but now it looked like he was going to have to walk out.

  Since he couldn’t climb up and out, he followed the bottom of the valley south and just hoped that the end sloped up to the desert floor. Otherwise, he was going to have to retrace his steps and try and find a north end escape from this long gash in the face of Livre.

  He had walked almost an hour, and the sweat had made the inside of his sand veil misty with perspiration, before he found a pipe trap large enough for his needs. Going stiffly to his knees, Shan used his hands to scoop the sand away from the top of the plant. The leaves shivered in the wind, and the sand swirled around him, but eventually, he uncovered the pipe of the plant.

  It was a large, circular ring of hollow stem. The tufts of leaves would attract insects to the pipe, which promised moisture and food. In fact, the pipe trap smelled fresh and clean, like a field after a particularly heavy watering. However, the insect would fall down one of the funnels hidden within the leaves and into the hollow pipe. It would drown in the poison the plant hid inside its buried base. This pipe trap was large enough that it would digest sandrats and sandcat pups without difficulty. Shan carefully slit the top of the pipe trap and then leaned back to avoid the stench that rose. Why people drank diluted pipe trap juice for pleasure, Shan would never understand.

  Erqu Gazer came to mind. After his wife had died and then his baby girl had followed, not more than a week later, he’d taken to drinking watered-down pipe trap juice with reckless abandon. In fact, Shan was a little surprised that he’d had the energy to abuse Temar, given how much he would drink.

  Shan’s father only started drinking it after Naite had been taken for his three-year sentence. After that, things changed. Their father had started paying attention to Shan, and the glass jars with cloudy juice from pipe traps started appearing on the windowsill of their house. Shan prayed for the nights that his father drank the pipe trap juice because it made him slow and lethargic. On those nights, Shan didn’t have to fight him. He only had to suggest that his father would rather just go to bed, and he would blearily agree, tottering off down the hall like one of those children’s toys that rocked from side to side without ever falling over. It was the nights when he hadn’t been drinking that Shan would have to flee out into the night, out to ride the sands through the dark, out to risk death on a cycle, flying downslope in the dark of the night. If he stayed home, things would get far more dangerous.

  When the wind had taken the worst of the stench away, Shan slipped a tube down into the pipe trap and uncoiled the full length. Bracing himself, Shan sucked on the end of the tube, just until he could taste the foul liquid, and then he quickly pinched off the tube and spat the poison out. Pure pipe trap was more likely to kill you than satisfy any thirst. Putting the end of the tube in the water bottle, Shan loosened his hold on it and let the yellowish fluid trickle down. When the bottle was almost full, Shan pulled the tubing out and shook it to get the poison off as much as he could before he tucked it away.

  “God, if it doesn’t interfere with your plans too much, do you think you could keep me from killing myself with this? I mean, I’ve had bad plans before, but this one is pretty stupid. I know you protect the simple hearted, and I’m hoping the simpleminded can slip in with that group.” Shan finished his prayer and considered the bottle in his hand. He’d heard stories of early explorers surviving this way after sandcat attacks and windstorms that separated them from their space ships. He just never thought he was going to get a chance to test such an idiotic contraption.

  Attaching the tube so that it was above the level of the poison and would capture only the water that evaporated out of the juice, he taped it carefully in place. Then he taped the bottle to his good leg. If it worked, he would get small amounts of water in drops that clung to the sides of the tube. If it didn’t, he was about to poison himself to death. Of course this way, if he was going to die, he’d die happy and lethargic. Looking down the length of the valley, Shan set his sights
on a distant spire of rock and started walking.

  The sand pulled at his feet, and his body was stiff with injuries, but all he focused on was moving one foot in front of the other. The leg with the pipe juice felt heavy, but his other leg ached, so it was about even. The sand sloped up toward the surface, so Shan thought he was probably going to be able to reach the top of the crevasse without backtracking, but as the cliffs grew shorter and the sun rose higher, the shade clung to the sides of the rock, leaving Shan exposed.

  Hour after hour, he walked slowly and sipped carefully of warm and foul-tasting water that gathered, drop by drop, in the tube that ran up his leg.

  “Pretty stupid. You’d have been better taking over my title,” his father said. Shan might be drunk enough on pipe to hallucinate, but he wasn’t drunk enough not to notice that his father was a hallucination. Of course, the way his father’s center kept wavering in and out of existence, making him looking almost donut like in the middle—that was a big clue.

  “I didn’t want to own land. Besides, I’m not going to be a replacement for Naite,” Shan told his father. He figured he didn’t have anything better to do than to talk to hallucinations. His father shimmered in the sun, the illusion of water washing him away so that Naite stood in his father’s place. Shan had never noticed just how much Naite looked like their father. They had the same olive tone to their skin, and the same sharp nose and imposing figure with wide shoulders.

  “Like you could replace me.” Naite’s words were sharp and sarcastic, but the tone was almost friendly.