Prologue...

A shadow cuts across his vision; the Raven.  The bird settles from the air, talons scattering a little sand on impact.  It cocks its head at the man, bright eye catching the first sharp rays of sun.  It mutters low in its throat, ruffles and resettles its wings.

The man reaches out to his familiar and the large bird climbs onto his hand; carefully, just pinching the skin with deadly talons.  The Raven crewles in its throat again, tongues its beak.  The man holds his familiar close by his face.  The bird leans down and kisses it's beak to his dark lips, sharing the taste of wind and starlight, and all that has happened in the night.  'the night is cold,' the kiss says, 'and there is a wind from the north.  a great shadow passes Sha-rahn in the darkest hour.  a fell wolf, two, a pack cross over the hill a mile from here.  just before the dawn the wind changes a little, settles and falls still.  the pack goes down into the cleft of the hills to den.  the fell deer gather to huddle in the cliffs.  the stars fade, the sun rises ...'

The Gunslinger kisses his bird in thanks.  The Raven half flutters to the ground again and stabs at a snake in the sand.  The man sits up, shakes the dust out of his hair and pulls his heavy coat on over bare shoulders.  He is a lean man, tall, and pale though he has spent forever in the desert.  His long, tangled hair is pure black, tied up at the crown of his head in a ragged plume.  This leaves his sharp angled face open and clear for all to see.  He is not a man who smiles often.  He is not kind.  His eyes are cold.

He climbs to his feet, buckles the two wide, black-leather gunbelts at his narrow waist, straps each holster to his thigh so they will not hamper his draw.  The twin pistols, matte black, slip into his palms almost like live things.  Under his familiar touch they are precise and deadly.  He checks them for sand, checks that each holds a fresh new clip, first round already chambered.  He clicks the safeties off, returns the weapons to their holsters.  The Raven flips its dark head toward the sky and swallows the snake head first.

The Gunslinger ponders what his bird has told him of the night's doings.  The shadow, crossing Sha-rahn's constellation; what could it be but a pit dragon?  But so far north?  It is unusual and probably a sign of ill things to come.  He puts it out of his mind, for now.  But he will not forget.

He glances over to the huddled form on the sand a few yards away.  The boy sleeps like a dead man.  Last to sleep, last to rise.  The Gunslinger thinks little of his companion's discipline.  He does not want this tag-a-long, but the boy insisted on coming.  It has been a week now since the gunslinger left the destroyed refugee camp.  This boy is the only survivor.




He had only been passing through when he came upon the ruin. Haphazard  shanty town, like all the camps, but damaged and dead, he could tell even from a distance.  Renegades had come upon them one full moon night and pillaged and burned and raped and murdered until none were left alive.  But he was wrong, there was one still breathing in this place.

The boy had made the mistake of coming up on him suddenly, without warning and had nearly gotten a bullet through the brain for it.  The tall man stalled the shot at the last possible instant, freezing his finger just short of the hair trigger.  His weapon was dead centered on the child's forehead, unwavering, and the look on his face was totally serene.  He might have shot the boy and felt no guilt for it, for such a man was he.

The child too froze, seeing the gun leveled at him, he held up his empty hands, and smiled.  "Don't shoot me.  I'm not gonna hurt you."

The man said nothing and put up his pistol with the uncanny speed born of long practice and familiarity.  He turned and began walking again, ignoring the child.  But the boy was not finished.  "Who are you?" he asked, falling in beside the taller man.  The man ignored him, setting his gaze on the far horizon.  "Okay, I don't need to know," the boy decided.  "Are you a Ranger, are you gonna catch the Renegades and hang 'em?"

For a refugee and the only survivor of a Renegade attack this boy was in quite a good mood.  The man offered a simple "No."  Any child who had handled hardship so well, who had smiled into his gun, deserved some aknowledgement.

"Good, you talk.  So you're not a Ranger.  Why are you out here in the desert?  But that's not my business," he repremanded himself.  "Are you going to Lapis?  Can I come?"

"No."

"No you're not going to Lapis?  Or no I can't come?"  The man ignored the questions and kept walking.  "Please, let me go with you.  I don't care where, as long as it's not here.  I'm strong, I'll keep up, I won't slow you down, I promise."

"No."

"Is that all you can say?"

The man drew up short and faced the child.  "You will meet death."  In a level flat tone, like lead.

"I won't die.  I've lived in the desert all my life, and it ain't killed me yet.  And I can fight."  The boy was little more than skin and bones, dressed in a torn once-white shirt, and cut off blue jeans.  His bright blond hair was ragged shoulder length, giving him a girlish look; his face was dirty, and his hands were big, thick fingered, strong, filthy.  He was probly about ten.  "So can I come?"

"No."

"I'll follow you, if you don't let me come."

The man ignored the child and once again resumed walking.  The child let him go, and for a time he allowed himself to imagine maybe he had succeded in discouraging the youth.  Two hours later he saw the movement against the dunes behind him.  The boy, and, of all things, a goat.  The goat was a great sturdy red buck of good breeding, and suprizingly good temper, and strapped to its back was a machine gun.  The Gunslinger thought he had never seen anything so ludicrous.  The boy trotted along at the goat's head, leading it by a halter.  His lean frame was drapped in a sand-colored poncho, and three or four belts of ammunition for his goat-mounted weapon.  Across his shoulders was slung a bulky package which the man assumed to be provisions.

He resigned himself.  He waited a half hour or so while boy and goat caught up to him.  Breathlessly the boy grinned as they came up over the last rise.  "I told you.  I'm coming anyway."

The man hadn't answered, only set off again, down the back of the dune, and the boy followed, leading his goat.




So now, a week later; the boy, sound asleep in the sand, the goat methodically browsing a spiky ground cover.  The man taps the boy in the ribs with one booted foot, and is rewarded with a sleepy grunt.  The blond head emerges from the poncho cocoon.  "Why does it have to be so cold at night?"

"Time to move."  The boy hops to at this simple statement, delivered in its usual flat tone.  In next to no time he has his gear bundled and the machine-gun remounted on its animal transport.

"Ready."

The man is already in motion.  He moves across the sand like a desert creature himself, easy, quick, silent.  The boy keeps up, as he said he would, but he cannot go as long as the man he follows.  The man would move all day without rest if he were on his own.  Now he must stop periodically for his tag-a-long.  Already he is judging distances, terrain, time, to see when and where will be the best place.  The Raven takes two running hops and beats its way up into the morning sky, a live scrap of shadow in this bright land.

The morning warms gradually from the fatal night chill; creeping toward the equally deadly blaze of afternoon.  Heat the man does not mind, nor cold.  He has suffered and survived extremes of both.  He crosses the sand steadily, gaze far ahead, never still, watching.  His hands swing free, unhampered by the heavy leather coat, ready to leap at an instant's notice to the weapons at his hips.  His nails are grown long, shiny black, amost claws.

He lifts one hand briefly to touch the necklace, heavy against his chest; it's pendent, the skull of a young Raven.  This bird should be his companion now -- forever until it bred and provided him its heir.  But that bird was cut down, shot, right off his shoulder before it was even full grown; killed by the same man who left the Gunslinger a puckered bullet scar to remember him by.  He wears the skull in tribute to his murdered familiar, strung on a leather band with the green-blue desert stones that match his eyes.  He wears it to remember, he wears it because he will avenge that murder.




He remembers the whistle of the shot, the bright, hot bird blood that spattered the side of his face.  His bird hung on for a moment, giving a wet, rasping caw as the strength of its talons failed and it fluttered dying from his shoulder, landing with an ugly thump in the dust.  It lay on its side,wings splayed awkwardly, panting, eyes glazed.  He knelt and lifted the striken bird in one hand, cradling it at his chest, careless of the blood.  His familiar curdled a faint noise in its throat, grasped one of his fingers weakly in its beak.  Then it died.

He stood, still holding the dead bird and faced its killer, as the blood ran and dripped along his face, falling in full dark drops into the dust.  The man did not see or did not understand the cold look in the blue-green eyes, the silent, deadly promise.  He laughed, and leveled his gun a second time and put a bullet in the Gunslinger that knocked him back a step and dropped him to his knees.  The murderer laughed again and left him kneeling in the sand, his blood mingling with his Raven's.

His breath came blood-tainted in his throat, painful.  He felt weak, sick, stunned, and it was not something he had felt before, something he never wanted to feel again.  After a long time, perhaps hours, perhaps longer, he forced himself to his feet.  His wound was cold, his dead familiar stiffening against his hand, blood drying sticky on skin and torn feathers.

He walked for a long time, bleeding, and weak.  He barely remembered the kind voices of the people who had taken him in, outlandish and fierce as he was, a wounded stranger with a dead bird all but frozen in his hand.  He had been faint with blood loss and shock and he might have died if not for them.

Those people were nothing in his mind, they had no faces, no names.  He had never spoken to them, though he was ill for days while the wound healed.  He remembered only the daughter, thin and quiet almost as he was, her long, pale hair braided severely against her scalp in uncounted tiny plaits.  She sat by him most often as he lay sick.  When he was healed she brought him the necklace.  She had taken his bird from him on the second night -- he would not let it go until then -- and stripped the flesh and bleached the bone.  She collected the stones that mirrored his eyes and strung them all on a thin strip of leather.  He fingered the slick little skull as she held it before him.  She had laquered it against decay and discolor.  He sat facing her and bowed his head, lost in his own thoughts, and memories, promises to himself.  She reached back and tied the leather at the base of his skull.  Then she left him to his own devices.  He  rose swiftly and left them, without a word, without thanks of any kind, only taking with him his health and the necklace, and the memory of her ...




He lets his hand drop again to his side, scans the trail of a fell wolf in the sand; fresh, or the wind last night would have swept it away.  Further on the track is joined by two more, then another three.  Here is the pack his Raven spoke of; denning in the cleft between the hills.  That will make them fierce, worse than usual.  He has no fear of the fell wolves, but the smell of goat is sure to tempt them.

He considers killing the beast, taking its blood for moisture and leaving its corpse to draw the wolves off them.  But he thinks the boy will not leave the machine-gun.  If he insisted on carrying it, it would slow their progress miserably.  He lets the goat live.

Ahead sunlight strikes off an outcropping of blue stone, a lapis lazuli monument on the pale grey-dun sea of sand.  The sun is coming on hot, approaching noon.  Behind him he senses the boy tiring.    They will rest under the monolith.

Coming into the brief shade of the stone the man settles croslegged to the sand, putting his lean back to the rock, letting its sharp edges threaten the leather.  He ignores the boy, who sits near him and drinks from the canteen he has carried since he left the camp.  The man accepts the water when it is offered, silently, swallows a little, letting his throat gather its ache again after the coolness passes.  From an inner pocket of his coat he pulls out a flat, paper-wraped package of biscuit; all he ever eats in the desert.  He has eaten nothing since last evening.  The hunger coils tightly in his stomach, but he tames it.  He takes enough to kill the edge.

The boy feeds himself out of his own provisions.  "You want some fruit?"  He offers the dried slivers, tough and sweet.  The man shakes his head fractionally.  Above, the Raven slices in from its flight, talons catching crevices in the stone.  Black wings flare, splash the sky with shadow, throw back highlights -- green, blue, violet -- and settle.

The boy studies the face of his companion, perfectly smooth.  "You don't grow a beard, do you?  Maybe you're really a girl."  He makes the taunt, hoping for some reaction, anything.  The man has never spoken more than three words together to him, except at their first meting, in the ruins.  The response he gets now is a level stare, calm and icy.  "I'm just kidding."  The goat bleats, grumbles deeply.  It shoves its red muzzle into the boy's shoulder.  The boy gives it a slice of fruit which the animal devours readily, licking its split lip with a thick tongue.

The man checks his weapons again, assuring himself no grit has worked into the mechanisms during he day.  The weapons are clean.  He watches the boy, sees the fatigue still present, decides they can stay a little longer.  He leans back against the stone and closes his bright eyes against the glare.  Sleep comes easily, leaves easily.  The catnaps let him use the time he looses for the boy.  For fifteen minutes he sleeps soundly, without dreams.  Then he rises and sets off again.  The boy follows quickly.

The sun, high in its bone-china sky, paints the sand with brutal heat.  Wild things shun the sand at this hour, seeking the cool crevices of the cliffs or burowing away from the light.  Even the man feels the effects.  Sweat gathers under his hair, sliding down his neck, his face, trickling down his chest and back between the coat and the skin.  He pauses once to clear his eyes.  A tug at his sleeve gets his attention.  The boy offers water again.  The man tips his head back to drink deep.  He knows where, between the hills, the water gathers.  By tomorrow they will be there.

Two hours before dark they enter the hills.  The cleft where the fell wolves den is the only passage through.  The range runs like a spine across the desert, and beyond the cleft, either way, it rises to sheer blue cliffs, accessable only to deer and birds.  The Raven dives and there is a dull thud as it takes a smaller bird in mid air, breaking the spine.  It lands with its kill, a cliff dove, and feeds.  When it has finished, the black bird comes to share with the man the rush and shock of the kill, the taste of hot blood and flesh.

Under the shadow of the hills, the goat becomes restless.  If fell wolves can scent a kill a mile away, then the goat can surely smell wolf this close to the dens.  The man watches the cliffs above, the tracks in the sand.  He sees evidence of seven individuals, three heavy adult dogs -- judging by the depth of the tracks, and their musky stink -- an adult bitch, lighter than the dogs; two yearling bitches and their brother.  A healthy pack, and he guesses a litter to each bitch this time of year.

As the shadows fall longer he thinks of pushing on after dark to the reservoir, it's more sheltered.  But the fell packs dislike being cut off from water, better that they come there in daylight, when the pack is sleepy and full from a night's hunting.

Under a shelf of blue slate they take shelter for the night.  The boy unburdens his goat, easing the huge machine gun to the earth.  The goat tosses its head, glad to be free of the weight. The boy hobbles his animal, hoof to hoof.  The man sits watching the evening shadow-play.  The Raven backwings and lands easily on his upraized fist.  It has nothing noteworthy to report but kisses the man in affection.  He returns the gesture and strokes the sleek black head, then releases his familiar back to the air.

Soaring high the bird watches, wavers and hesitates, dives, taking another dove with crushing force.  The smaller bird hangs limp from the heavy black talons.  The Raven gifts its kill to the man.  He slashes the dove's throat with his belt knife and drinks the blood that pours forth, salt and moisture to replace what he lost today in the heat.  It's not much, but plenty until they come to the resivoir tomorrow.  He lets his bird do what it will with the bloodless corpse.  The boy has seen this vampiric ritual before and makes no comment.

The sun sinks below the ridge of hills.  The sky is gold with the last light.  Already it is colder.  The man sits cross-legged on the sand, checking his weapons again, putting them aside for the night, but never out of reach.  He sheds his coat, spreading it over the dust.  Lying down on his back he stretches out to watch the constellations come out, Sha-rahn first and brightest; Saphi, the blue heron; Zyon, the tower; Marduch; Bel'greis, the war horse; Fae; and Opa, the unicorn.  Then the countless millions of farther stars come out behind them.  He falls asleep as a whisper and rush of wings tells him his Raven is taking off for it's reconnaissance flight ...




Flames blue hot on the hearth, painting the room in shifting shadow.  Great, high-backed leather chairs, a heavy fur rug for the coldest nights.  Someone is speaking softly, maybe in the next room.  A woman's voice, a matriarch's; soothing, and mature.  Now singing, a low haphazard rhythm, rising, falling like the wind.  The fire comforts, the song comforts.  Something is passing in the wild beyond this place but it never touches here.  A huge black dog sleeps by the heat of the hearth, totally at ease.  There is breath and there is song ...




The howling wakes him toward the darkest hours before dawn.  The pack is on the cliffs behind them, prowling, gathering for the hunt.  He has heard them howl before, that's not what woke him.  A huge shape pads across the open space before their shelter.  One of the adult dogs, heavy and dark, sleek back and cunning eyes highlighted by the stars.  The man already has the pistol in his hand, safety off, finger on the trigger.  He hears the male panting, breath hot and heavy in its chest; hears the near silent puff as wide paws strike the sand.  There is no doubt that the dog smells them, hears them breathe in their sleep, smells the goat, an easy meal, but it makes no move to attack, it passes on, without checking, and ascends by its own paths to the cliffs where its family waits.  The man waits, silent, five minutes, ten, fifteen, then he lies back and returns to sleep.




Sun filtered through green leaves; tall corn; warm, moist black earth.  A black beetle crawling in the furrow, irridescent.  Between the stalks a silken masterpiece catches the light in crystal drops of dew.  The pale artist, white spider, gains the center of the web and waits.  A field of gold, deep grasses, clustered shade trees, a clear, quiet stream.  Horses, huge and powerful, heavy warm bodies, secure in the nearness of their mates.  Broad teeth crop the grass.  Thick warm scent of sun-hot horse mingles with the green the gold, the turned earth, the wind...




Dawn breaks cold and late over the hills.  The man is already well awake when the Raven flaps down to his shoulder, swiping his cheek with stiff flight feathers.  They kiss and share the news of the night.  'the pack hunts long, but catches little.  there is fighting, squabbles over the blue hare, the rock snake, three dove's eggs.'  They will be hungry and ill tempered today.  'the wind changes, to the west.  the night is colder.  doves wake and coo in the dark, stars fade.  light comes, but sun is late.'

The man checks his weapons again.  This is perhaps the chief occupation of his life, beyond walking the desert.  But the guns are his life, his protection, his past and his future.  His wellbeing may depend on their upkeep.  It is a familiar methodical process that comforts him.  The Raven feeds, and dozes, perched on the gunslinger's knee, head tucked under one sleek wing.

The boy's goat wakes soon after the man, clambering awkwardly to its feet, still hobbled.  It snorts, and snuffs in the dust, ears flashing back and forward.  It smells fell dogs; but hunger comes first.  It crunches a fleshy thistle, imune to the thorns.  The plants grow only here in the hills where moisture stays longer.

A fell deer comes cautiously down from the cliff across the way, its dull, blue-gray coat making it almost invisable.  It's a doe, a little smaller than the goat.  Three more behind it, then a stag, almost twice the size of the does, with many-pronged antlers, coiled and recoiled about its skull  Behind the stag, another three does follow quietly.  They cross the open space quickly and go up by their impossible routes on the near side.

The sun slides its lazy eye down into the cleft.  The man stands ready, resettles his coat like a bird resettles its wings.  The boy is still sound asleep, dead to the world.  The man nudges him with a boot, as always, and the youth stirrs, wakes, and hurries to gear up while the man waits, silent.  He never shows any sign of impatience, but the boy senses how the older man feels about losing time.  He knows he's on this trip by the gunman's good grace alone, and he doesn't want to push his luck.  He's gotten loading the machine gun down to three minutes.  His other gear takes no time next to that.  Then they're off again.

Here, in this funnel of the hills, the wind rarely stops blowing.  As a result, any tracks the pack might have left in the night are blurred or completely gone by the time the travelers pass by.  The wolf stink is harder to blow away.  He smells them, the stench thick in the cool air, already warming with the sun.  The dogs are musky, hot, rank, the bitches not much better but with the undertone of their milk.  They were restless last night.  Their scent crosses and recrosses the valley several times.

Beyond a narrow place in the pass something startles a covey of doves.  The rattle of wings is almost deafening after the quiet of their march.  The Raven swoops and dives among them, playing havoc with their fear, but harming none.  The flock seeks refuge in the cliffs and the travelers pass by.  The Raven circles, caws hoarsly, then wings swiftly ahead to play scout.

Ahead on a cliff overlooking the narrow valley a fell deer stands out for a moment against the sky.  Here in the valley can be seen the sparse desert vegitation that keeps them alive.  Short coarse grass and thorny ground cover, a few thistles which the goat crops in passing.

The stink of the fell pack is almost sickening in the back of the man's throat.  The dens are close.  Soon they will come to the reservoir.  The boy is speaking softly to his nervous goat.  The red buck smells the wolf reek and hates it instinctively.  The thistles are forgotten.  The man keeps one hand at least close to the guns at all times.  He has scars to match a fell wolf's bite.

They see the first as they come down into the hollow that cradles the reservoir.  It's the adult bitch, the alpha.  She lounges panting on an outcropping of slate that juts out across the valley.  As they appraoach she gets lazily to her feet.  Her teats are swollen for her litter.  She stretches, slowly, yawning, showing all her predator's teeth; shakes her whole body roughly and pads away, making sure they know she's moving on her own whim and not because of them.

The reservoir is a pool of clear water gathered from a spring in the cliffs above.  Blue rock forms a jagged dish in the valley floor where the life giving fluid collects.  The man stretches out on his stomach to drink.  The boy and his goat also take their fill greedily.

Now the man takes a moment to study the tracks in the damp silt at the edge of the pool.  The pack of course have left their wide paw prints all over the area.  Sharp deer hooves are in evidence as well, and possibly the shadow of an older trail, the shod hoof of a horse, a muted boot print.  He crouches low, head hunched between his shoulders, giving him the look of a geat black bird come to rest in the dust.  The civilized traces are old, but recent enough, within the last three days he guesses.  Sand however damp, does not hold tracks long, but this hollow is mostly sheltered from the wind.

A faint sound brings his head up instantly.  The semi-distant grumble of a fell wolf.  He spots her on the ledge again, that predator's mocking grin and lolling tongue.  The pistol is in his hand.

The pack are on them in a split second, the three big dogs and a young bitch.  The first dog dies mid-leap with a bullet in its brain.  The boy proves his skill by holding off a dog's bite with the leather strap of the canteen, working it far back in the huge mouth.  The dog fights, its mouth forced open unnaturally, tongue spasming in the throat.  The two plunge and circle in a lethal dance.  The man has shot a second dog off the goat, and taken the third through the shoulder.  The dog slumps to the ground lifeless, but the gun has already swung on and taken the last dog, still under the boy's hold.

It goes down, and the boy backs off, but the dog is up again, charging, straight into the pistol, mad with pain now.  It lunges, takes the man down under its awesome weight, and he fires round after round methodically into its hairy throat, until it's eyes finally roll back and it goes limp on top of him.  He pushes against the heavy body, it weighs as much as a lion.  Thick blood pulses from the ruined throat, the long skull hangs over at a broken angle.  The boy hurries to help drag the corpse off.  The man rolls to one knee, reloads, and aims for the bitch, all in one blinding instant, but her place on the ledge is empty.

He scans for more trouble, finds none.  Four wolves dead.  The three huge ugly dogs bloody tongues drooling into the dust.  The yearling bitch, the one that went for the goat.  Her body too shows evidence of her litter.  With young to feed she naturally went for what seemed an easy kill, the red goat weighed down with its heavy weapon.  Her eyes are still open, unseeing.  The man drags the bodies away from the reservoir to keep the blood out of the water.  He uses a handful of sand to scrub away most of the blood from his hands, rinses the very last in the pool.  Then he cleans his guns.

That last dog.  One round should have been enough, had been plenty for the other three.  Almost two full clips to kill the thing.  That was unnatural.  Vicious as the fell wolves are proven to be, that was not the behavior of a hungry pack, or even a pack defending its territory.  Something else is working here.

The Raven senses it too.  It settles heavily to the man's shoulder, rattling its beak.  It shares with the kiss a sense of foreign magic at work on the pack; faint but there.  The rider.  It must have been.  magic does not hold long, no matter what the prophets say.  Who would use the fell packs against travelers?

It is a problem that will take some time to play out.  He lets it pass, out of mind into shadow, with the pit dragon, to surface later.  When the guns are clean, and reloaded he holsters them again.

The boy's goat is still panicked, prancing and bleating, despite the boy's best efforts to calm it.  The man scans the row of wolf corpses.  Stooping with his belt knife he skins them deftly, riping the hides back with swift power.  He drapes the four bloody pelts over the goat's neck, without a word, and sets off again down the valley.  The boy has to fight to keep his goat from bolting at the stench of wolf and blood and the strange weight at its neck.  Even under machine-gun and pelts, the goat is strong and spirited.

As they pass by the dens, the bitch shows herself briefly at a cave mouth, high on the hill.  The man draws, aims, and fires in one ungodly swift motion, but the bitch dodges and only loses half an ear as she vanishes into her den.  Man and boy pass on, unchallenged.

Another afternoon and evening are consumed with travel.  The man watches constantly for the bitch and the remainder of her pack, but not even a whisper of their presence follows them.  Dusk falls again, stripping warmth and light away from the world.  Night, gentle and unstoppable, spreads over the desert ...




A rider, a black horse, loping, pacing, fast as a gallop, but a two-beat gait; one-two-one-two-one-two, the heartbeat of the journey.  A rhythm on the sands, hooves in sand, the only sound to mark a passage.  The rider's cloak spread out on the speed, black nimbus against glaring desert sand.  A rain cloud that billows and spreads, rises and expands across the aching sky, rolling steady and dark.  Inner flickerings of light, red and silver, and a jagged tooth that stabs the space between earth and sky, lancing white-hot illumination through the storm dark.  The smell of ozone, of static rock, of rain, and it comes in sheets, blasting across the waste, the force enough to break up the most stubborn knot of tension.  Cool, swift, sweet, pounding, the rain washes the night.  Thunder, lightening, rain.  Life-giving water floods the dead plain, pooling in the gullies, streaming down the raw blue-black peaks, dripping, spattering, hissing in the dust, splashing puddles of itself, filling and covering and drowning.  A feeling of floating, washed by the tide in this desert-turned-water-world.  Free, weightless, calm, only the rhythm of the storm, everywhere and nowhere, relentless, soothing.  The rain comes fast and hard and fades into the one-two-one-two heartbeat of pacing hooves...




The dream is surreal.  It is something he has never had before.  It means something.  A great flooding rain.  Never in this country.  He has been to such places, where the rain falls in torrents for days on end, until surely the world must fill up and drown.  But here the balance is completed, rain falls little, if ever, and always on the far side of the range, the peaks a backstop for the weather, filling the plains near Lapis with life and green, but hedging the desert against all but the barest moisture.

In the dim before dawn the man shrugs into his coat, and relaxes against the night chill, letting it seep away.  His fierce gaze eases a moment as the Raven appears, stenciled against the growing light.  Stiff wingtips graze his forearm as the great bird alights on his fist.  The kiss and the night's report pass in an instant; 'there is thunder on the far side of the ridge.  away, miles to the north.  all is quiet, all is well.  resting places are close, close.  the pack lies low, well behind.  doves sleep in cliff nests.  the stars wheel, and carve out our future.  all is quiet.'

Next comes the maintainence of the guns, swift and precise as it should be after so long, so many years ... How long?  Who can remember?  He barely can, the rite of passage that gave him his weapons and his life ...  He does not dwell on it, it is past.  He survived, and he moves on.

The boy wakes again to the traditional nudge, gears up his goat.  The man sets an easier pace today.  He knows how close they are to Lapis.  The Raven has sensed it and so he has too.  There is no rush.  The city will still be there in the morning.

The sun creeps up the sky and crystalizes the night into the late crescent moon, the faintest shadow in a corner of the bleached blue.  The man watches the sand, scanning in any sheltered place for hoofprints that might speak of the rider ahead of them.  He finds nothing before midday when they halt at the edge of the hills and rest within sight of the fertile lands beyond.

The man sleeps while the goat crops the more succulent plants that begin to sprout here.  The greener valley ahead widens further into the plain.  From a height it would be possible to see the shining ribbon of the mountain river that feeds the plain and the city of Lapis.  It would be possible to see the towers themselves.  Down here the spires are lost in hazy distance.  It is enough to be able to make out the deepening green where vegitation thickens nearer the river.

The later half of the day takes them down though the growing valley, ever deeper into the green; near the hills the grass is short, tough, sparse.  Further along it grows longer, brighter, and thicker.  The Raven gambols in the air, reveling in the smell of green life that has begun to premeate the atmosphere.  A veritable feast of insects, small rodents, and grass snakes becomes readily available here.  The bird is not overly hungry but still strikes here and there at the largest beetles and moths.

Another nightfall sees them in sight of the city.  The last light is enough to reveal the blue towers deepening to black against the failing sun.  The man spreads his coat against a swell in the earth.  They are close enough to the river that topsoil has taken over from the sand.  A scraggled little tree huddles a little lower down and here the boy tethers his goat, and unloads the machine gun.

"I've never been to Lapis."  The boy chews thoughtfully on a dried fruit.  "I saw pictures one time though.  This old man came through the camp with letter cards his daughter sent him.  He showed them to me, so I know how it looks.  But I've never been there."

The man doesn't answer.  He is checking his guns once again.  Here, away from the dust of the desert the urgency is somewhat less, but the habit is not.  He knows how important it can be to have well-kept weapons at his command.  He does not let himself slip, even within sight of Lapis, perhaps the one place in the world where he feels truly restful.

"You come here a lot?"  The boy pushes back long hair to watch his companion.

The man makes a noncommittal gesture.  He finishes with the guns and stretches out to sleep.  The Raven dozes in the low scrub tree, resting for its night flight.  In the grass night insects crackle and buzz.  A mouse scuttles along the ground, long toes pausing to grasp a seed and pack it into a cheek pouch.

The mouse is safely away and down its hole when the Raven stirrs.  The great black bird stretches it's wings, settles them again.  It makes a low purring, mewling sound, contented.  The man allows himself a faint smile, knowing the deepening night will hide it utterly.  His bird drops off it's perch into smooth flight without a whisper, and the man lets sleep block out his vision of the stars...




Her face, smooth and calm, white hair falling all around.  Her eyes, cool blue, a lake to drown in, pink lips smooth and warm in a kiss.  The little coil of her delicate ears, under the hair.  Her perfect small nose.  The line of her throat.  The subtle angle of one white shoulder.  Small hands, careful fingers, traveling gently, softly, noislessly ... caress.  Thin arms embrace, loving and soft, skin warm to the touch, pale, the brush of fine white hairs.  Her narrow waist, the curve of her lean back, her legs, her breast.  Electricity, cool and sure, frozen across an instant.  The smell of her, the pressure, the pressence, perfection.  Her energy, like pure light.  Her taste, her breath, her voice, still now but ever present like the memory of a single word just spoken.  Closeness, shared warmth, blood heat, sweat and tears, the image of laughter -- a lightening whisper of gold in a green-blue sea.  Rise and fall.  Touching, kissing, holding close and hard.  Something like orange on black, bold and soft at once, soothing, smoothing, blending and moving in tandem, and fading away.  Her kiss again, her taste, her smell, her breath, her body close and warm, her life and love aching in the dark...




He doesn't like to dream of her.  It brings out the ache in him that he has tried to kill and bury.  It wakes him up in the thin hours after midnight, with her name in the back of his throat.  He swallows it unspoken.  He has not seen her in two years, has not loved her in two years.  And now she creeps into his dreams unbidden, spoils his sleep, stirs up old feelings.




The one who gave him the neckalce so long ago, the girl with the tight white braids.  He had left her without a word, passing into and out of her life silently, but she had followed and caught him in Lapis twelve years ago, and told him she loved him.  She came to him, offering what girls her age offered best and she had told him her feeling.  He had stared at her.  She couldn't know ... But she did, she knew, she understood, and she still loved him.  And he couldn't turn her away.  For all the icy stone that was his being and his heart, he could not reject her.

So he had loved her, broken her to the adult world where he had already lived for four years.  And in the darkness in that supreme trust he had told her his name, and she had traded hers.  He wondered if in all the world there was another female who knew him by name.  He wondered if any other knew him so well as she.  None had ever come closer, none had ever touched him so deeply.  It was unsettling and put him hard on his guard against her.  But there was no malice in her.  She could be his solace from the hardships of the outside world.  He loved her, but in his heart she was like another enemy, more dangerous than any other because she knew him.

She never betrayed him, and she bore him a daughter.  He remembered that hard-edged revelation.  Ten years ago he had sought her out and found a two-year-old girl child in her arms.  She had  smiled at him, "I named her for you ..."

He had left her immediately and gone and been sick.  Even now his stomach turns at the thought.  It should not have been possible ... but it seemed it was.  He was a father, and so, to protect the child before the law, he married her mother, barely past girlhood herself.  A husband and a father.  He shuts his eyes against the memory.